Monique Ryan (Kooyong, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

In my electorate of Kooyong, more than 25 per cent of people are aged 65 or more. We have more than twice the nation's average proportion of residents aged more than 85. Aged care is a really important issue for this country. Our ageing population wants, deserves and needs high-quality aged-care services.

There are at least 27 aged-care facilities in my electorate alone. Last week, I was fortunate to have dinner at one of them, The Gables in Camberwell, with BlueCross CEO, Ingrid Harvey. The aged-care residents, my constituents, told me that in their residential facility, their home, they wanted to be cared for by people that they knew and that they felt comfortable with. They want to feel safe and secure. They also told me that they were very concerned about cost-of-living pressures and the effect of COVID on both themselves and their families.

The recent Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety highlighted the inadequacies of our aged-care system. It identified significant problems with the quality and safety of aged-care services across our country. It noted barriers to navigating and entering the aged-care system, including a lack of information to help people understand which aged-care services would best suit their needs; inadequate access to healthcare support amongst people who are receiving aged care; and, heartbreakingly, frequent instances of substandard care and abuse. We've heard a lot about that in the media in the last week alone.

The royal commission made a total of 148 recommendations proposing a detailed strategy to change and improve our aged-care system. This government has addressed 37 of those recommendations, but there is still much work to do. We still need, as a matter of urgency, to address food and nutrition, dementia care, the use of restrictive practices and best practice palliative care in our aged-care system. We also need to address the aged-care workforce as a matter of urgency.

Aged care is a gendered issue in Australia. About two out of three people accessing aged-care services in Australia are women. Almost nine out of 10 aged-care workers in Australia are women. One-third of them are culturally and linguistically diverse, and one-third of them were born outside this country.

In the recent budget, the government did deliver on its pre-election promise of a 15 per cent pay rise for aged-care workers. It's great to see that rolled out, but there are persisting issues with this workforce. Most of the 280,000 workers in our aged-care workforce are part-time—many of them, not out of choice. Residential providers in Kooyong tell me of the staffing shortages they face every day. The most recent CEDA report showed that 65,000 employees are leaving the aged-care sector every year, yet we need an additional 35,000 employees across the sector to meet care needs. Many aged-care workers are exhausted after working for three years to keep our community safe from COVID. In that context, it's disappointing to see the government cut the number of hours international students can work, given that student visa holders were crucial to the provision of aged care in this country during the pandemic.

There's no doubt that we have let down older Australians in recent years. By May 2021, three-quarters of the COVID-19 deaths in Australia were in aged-care residences. During the pandemic, many aged-care workers had to work in more than one facility because of issues with their rosters and work conditions. In doing so, they placed both themselves and aged-care residents at risk. Our government has now removed all workplace protections and paid-leave provisions for workers affected by COVID-19. This tells us that we have not yet learned the lessons of the pandemic.

There's still much to do to ensure that older people are supported to live self-determined and meaningful lives and that our educated, skilled and dedicated aged-care workers can provide best practice, compassionate care. I look forward to working with the government to that end.

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