Dai Le (Fowler, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on this Aged Care Bill 2024. In July this year, I had the Lansdowne Aged Care Facility organise some of its residents to visit our parliament. It was the first time ever that Lansdowne Aged Care Facility have brought their residents here. They wanted to expose the seniors to Canberra and to the workings of parliament. It was organised by their manager, Nam Pham. She reached out and said, 'Do you think you can make it happen?' I did. I brought four elderly ladies—a couple with their walking sticks and walking frames—up to the members' dining room and hosted them to a nice lunch. It took them three hours to drive from Cabramatta to parliament. We were hoping to get them into question time but that three-hour drive and the whole experience in parliament was just so overwhelming that, after lunch, they drove back home. But it was a great experience for them and a great experience for Lansdowne Aged Care Facility to really see Canberra and Parliament House.

Lansdowne Aged Care Facility caters to our culturally and linguistically diverse community, in particular, Southeast Asian residents who have cultural needs in their food and care, particularly their language. I engaged with the Lansdowne Aged Care Facility when the draft of this bill was released. I reached out to them and other community providers, workers, as well as nurses in the system to get their feedback on what is working and not working.

Nurses who came to the forum were visibly frustrated with the understaffing of aged care. A nurse who attended the forum said, 'There is a growth in aged-care residents from multicultural backgrounds yet there is a lack of nurses with the appropriate language skills to ensure the residents' needs are supported. This is a gap.' Another nurse said, 'I want to do my best so each resident receives the care that they need but there are only a few of us at a time. To be honest, the aged-care sector is not really that attractive.' Nurses are the cornerstone of a functional aged-care system, and any health system for that matter, but they do not feel sufficiently supported. While there are current incentives available, there must be further conversation on how to better support nurses and, in turn, effectively assist older people within aged care.

Overall, I heard from providers, nurses and children of individuals about where our aged-care system has gone wrong. It was a mixture of different pain points: aged-care residents not having their needs adequately addressed, the lack of nurses wanting to work in aged care, understaffing, juggling competing demands, certain aged-care providers not doing the right thing, the minimal resources, the lack of training to address the complex needs of aged-care individuals of culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, and compliance—the filling out of paperwork, the demand on providers to provide that rather than focusing on the individual care—and the list goes on.

In my doorknocking, I came across elderly people who chose to stay home because their children feared that the aged-care homes would fail their elderly parents. For example, I met Mrs Kwang, who is 104 and still living independently—

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