Rob Mitchell (McEwen, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's great to hear a member for Mackellar speak in a positive light! It's been a long time since we've had that, so I welcome that and appreciate the words that she said because I think she has actually got to the core of it. This Aged Care Amendment (Implementing Care Reform) Bill 2022 is about how we treat our older Australians.

I, for one, know that as I get older I have a closer look at aged-care facilities. Which ones are good, which ones are not so good? Which ones have the best opportunities! It's something that's so important to all of us—for our loved ones, for our friends, our families and our communities. I guess this goes back to how we as a nation stand up and say, 'The way you judge a nation is in the way it treats its most vulnerable.' People who are living in aged-care homes do deserve the respect and dignity that they've earned.

I think about the time of my journey in this place and of going to the different aged-care facilities across my electorate, where you see some amazing people doing amazing work and getting very little credit. I think about what we learnt through the royal commission report—and it had that awful title, Neglect. It's one simple word but it summed up everything that was happening. It was neglect of the people living there. As the member for Blair pointed out, we heard the horror stories of people with maggots in their rooms and people not getting fed. We'd see pictures of an aged-care resident getting a hotdog without bread and a little dob of potato, and that was their lunch. That's just not fair; it's not right and it's not what we should be about.

I think about the time I spent at Goonawarra during the pandemic—during the lockdown. They had 170 cases of COVID and 20 Australians lost their lives. And there was silence from the then government in supporting these people who were doing it extremely hard. Anyone who has spent time wearing full PPE knows just how uncomfortable it is and how difficult it is to work in—and how easy it is to make a mistake. I know I did it myself—I had to scratch my nose and bang! You have to go straight off and redo it. These aged care workers don't get paid a lot of money—and I'm also talking about the kitchen staff and the cleaners—but they're the ones who are out there, day in, day out, dealing with families. Many people who they deal with are from migrant backgrounds; they didn't have a lot of friends and family and didn't have an understanding of what was going on. Suddenly they were locked in their rooms 24/7, couldn't see their families and couldn't see their friends. But each and every day those aged-care workers turned up and did their jobs, and did them exceptionally well.

They put everything they had on the line. They were kept away from their own families; they went through and did that. And they copped the feigned praise from those opposite, calling them 'heroes'. But when it came to the crunch, when they needed help and support, the former government went missing. We know that that because we learned through the royal commission what was going on and the difficulties that were being faced, yet the former government still just stood there and kept kicking back against it, not wanting to support the royal commission and, in effect, not wanting to support our older Australians.

What this bill today is doing is putting in place three of the government's urgent election commitments. It will put security, dignity, quality and humanity back into aged care. I'm proud to rise and support that, because it's so important. There is more than a great urgency. This is an absolute need. It has to happen very quickly.

I am on the record in this place raising the issues of aged care and the issues that we were left with by the previous government. During the election campaign, we ran hard on the fact that Labor would reform the aged-care system, mainly focusing on the dignity and health of residents. I remember having the then shadow minister, now the Minister for Home Affairs, in my electorate to speak with residents and staff firsthand about what we had planned for aged care and what we were committed to do, and it was very well received. I think they appreciated that someone was listening.

We went to one place in Kilmore, a beautiful spot. We sat around and had a chat to the residents—no fanfare, no nothing. That's what the minister is like. She's just a wonderful, warm person. We got to meet a lady there. If you ever get the chance to go through an aged-care home, talk to the residents. You find wonderful stories about the things that people have done over their lives. I remember I went to one in Healesville back when that was in McEwen. One of President Eisenhower's secretaries was in that home. I just wish I'd had a tape recorder to record some of those stories. At the one in Kilmore, we met a lady who was related to someone who's probably a little bit less well known but in my circle was a bit of a legend. That was Burt Munro, who Anthony Hopkins played in the movie The World's Fastest Indian. When we sat there and listened to her stories, we could see her eyes light up because someone was talking to her about her history and what she'd been through. I asked her specifically, 'Was Burt as cheeky as what the movie portrayed?' She said they were very kind to Burt in the movie! He was a legend in New Zealand, a man who rode around the world. He rode a 1938 Indian and became the world's fastest on a motorbike of that class. It is an amazing story, and an amazing story by someone who is in our community, someone who came here and spent her life here.

These are people who have worked hard, paid taxes, helped build our communities and generally been the foundation of the great country that we have today. We should respect them and give them every ounce of dignity, because they have earned it. It's not something they are putting their hands out for as some sort of entitlement. They've actually earned it from the work they've done and the opportunities they have given us. We only have to think back to people like our war veterans and their families. We often talk about the men and women of our ADF over the years but also their families and what they went through. These people did it hard, they did it tough and they built what we've got. All of us should say, 'Aged care is so important, and we should make sure that people are looked after and given dignity.'

This bill is about delivering on what we promised. Think about having a registered nurse in an aged-care home 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Most of us would think that that should be in place. It's a no-brainer, really. Why hasn't it happened? Why did we go through years of cuts to aged-care budgets, cuts to staff and cuts to the treatment of the workforce there? From July next year the legislation will introduce a new responsibility for providers of residential aged care and specific kinds of flexible care to have a registered nurse on site and on duty at each home 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

You will hear cries from the leftover former government members about the cost. They always talk in terms of cost, but they never talk in terms of investment. What does having a nurse available 24/7 mean? It means less stress on our ambulance system, doctors, nurses, hospitals and emergency departments. We know that they are getting overrun at the moment right across the country. Despite what some newspapers say, Victoria's not alone in this. New South Wales, Western Australia, South Australia—everyone is dealing with the same thing. They're dealing with COVID and the effects of that. So emergency departments are being overrun. Having access to 24-hour nursing at an aged-care home means taking pressure off our ambulances and the emergency staff at our hospitals. This investment in putting nurses in place saves us money at the other end—at our emergency services. It saves our ambulances from being ramped. Victoria proudly—

Well, this is the idiocy of the argument that gets put by those opposite. I'll gladly take that interjection, because Victoria has the highest number of paramedics in the country. The whole issue that we're dealing with is the result of a pandemic. If you lot had invested money in aged care instead of cutting it in every budget, maybe we wouldn't have had a royal commission report that was simply titled, Neglect. You might be funny and cheeky and thinking, 'Ha ha! Look at me! I'm going stick my nose in and carry on,' but you're making a goose of yourself, because—

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