James Stevens (Sturt, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to support the motion. I thank the member for bringing this motion to the chamber and giving us the opportunity to talk about this important topic in a spirit of bipartisanship. Indeed, elder abuse is something of great concern to me and, I know, to all of us. As leaders in our community, I think we've got to be looking for every opportunity to identify new and developing elements and examples of elder abuse. Where we need to take action as a parliament, we should absolutely do so. But also, as community leaders we need to make sure we set a standard and at times, where it is warranted, call out the poor behaviour of people who are preying on older Australians. It's a very happy reality that we're living longer—we're all happy about that—but that brings about its own policy challenges for government, particularly around aged care and ensuring that governments are supporting people who are living longer. There's also, regrettably, a role for government and parliament in looking at where we need to tighten legislative frameworks and take action where there are areas of abuse and the taking advantage of older people—hopefully in anticipating them but even when they are developing.

I'm sure all members have had come to them older people who have been taken advantage of, perhaps by certain scams that older people are more vulnerable to be exploited by. I have to say that at times there has been poor behaviour from corporate Australia. The banks, the telecoms and others, frankly, have not been as reasonable as they should when people have been mistreated or misrepresented into undertaking contractual commitments around phone contracts or into signing up for credit cards or when their data has been stolen and people have acquired their information and exploited them financially. Our consumer laws should err very much on the side of being very reasonable to victims, particularly vulnerable victims. Elderly Australians have been a high proportion of victims of certain criminal activities, particularly around identity theft and online scams.

I was very pleased that the previous government undertook the royal commission into aged care and disability care. There were some awful examples in my home state of South Australia, particularly around government service provision. There was one awful aged-care facility in particular that was run by the state government in South Australia for the most vulnerable aged-care dementia patients. They were treated absolutely atrociously. The silver lining from that awful experience, which was absolutely harrowing to learn about, is the dramatic change we hope, assume and count on being put in place not only in the way the South Australian government operates facilities but in the standards and more-robust frameworks for accreditation and community visitation and the like.

COVID revealed further elements of support that is lacking for older Australians, particularly around some of the loneliness around COVID. Where elderly Australians are left in vulnerability, it tends to be associated with the fact they have not got the companionship and support in place to protect them and look after them. I'm a strong advocate for, and will support the government in, anything they're looking to do to enhance and improve services, particularly community based services for older Australians. We recognise the continuing growth in the need for services and that there are some difficult intergenerational decisions that will have to be made around how we meet the resourcing requirements. One thing we should all be committed to is giving older Australians the absolute highest standards of support and care they deserve. We all have members of our family who are going to avail themselves of a range of those services, as will we ourselves, probably, and we as a government and a parliament should do everything we can to support those services being of the highest standard possible.

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