Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party, Shadow Minister for Veterans' Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I'd like to thank the member for Hughes. I was listening out of the corner of my ear as she spoke. People around me kept annoying me, but I was listening to you and the story about how you went into the aged-care facility with your great-grandmother and there were four beds either side. It's powerful imagery. If it talks about one thing, it talks about how we have a duty to people. My view is you have a duty to people before they're born, after they're born and definitely when they're vulnerable before they die, to be quite frank.

When I was much younger I did a bit of charity work. There were two areas I really struggled in. I struggled when I worked in the Gladesville psychiatric home. I just couldn't do it. I wasn't up to it, because it was a problem I couldn't fix. The other one I really struggled with was when I worked in an aged-care facility. I was not getting paid; it was just charity work. I won't give its name away, but I remember it was so brutal. There was one poor lady there and she obviously hadn't paid her account. She was lying there with a sheet over her and there was nothing in the room and the windows were open so the cold air was blowing in. They were obviously wanting her to die. That's what the objective was on that one. I was 16 years old, so there was nothing much I could do about it, and I probably didn't know what was going on till I reflected on it later. That was no way to treat a human being, especially someone who was so vulnerable.

Building on that, I remember being out at Boulia. I did a little bit of work out at Boulia, and then, when I was in politics, I got to go back out there again. It's in the far west of Queensland. If you go to Longreach and you think that's far west, go further west and there's Winton. If you think that's far west, go even further west and you'll get to a T intersection where south is Birdsville and north is Mount Isa. That's called Boulia—well, actually, there's Bedourie and a couple of other places. At Boulia, this tiny town or big village with a pub—that's about it—the Australian Hotel, owned by John Tully and Tania Burns, when you talk to people and ask, 'What you want?' they say, 'Aged care.' That's because the people who have grown up in Boulia and have lived in Boulia do not want to go to what they think of as the big town, which was Longreach, which is not that big. They've lived their lives in Boulia and they want to die in Boulia.

Later on, I did a lot of work—I'm not trying to blow wind up my own backside—for St Vincent de Paul, and a big part of that was to go to aged-care facilities. What people wanted to do was have that connection to their lives. They didn't want to be isolated. I used to make an excuse to see them by selling them the newspaper and if they didn't have the money I just gave it to them. They just wanted to talk about what the season was like, what the cattle prices were like—they wanted to talk about their life. It's called humanity, and this bill, which the coalition will be supporting, although we'll be putting up amendments to it, builds on allowing people's humanity. It builds on making sure that we treat people with dignity. That's what life is all about—treating people with dignity, respecting life and treating life with dignity.

The bill allows us to have greater oversight of what's going on, especially of things like the transfer of people into better rooms, which we listened to the member for Hughes talk about. I bet you those ladies—four beds on either side—would have liked a better room had it been offered to them. That's what issues such as this speak to. Being in aged-care facilities is such a vulnerable time for people. They're looking at their money. They're looking at how they're going to pay for it. The family is working out how they're going to pay for it.

In our family we were blessed. We were lucky. Dad was a pretty handy businessman and he had a bit of coin, so, with the support of nurses, we looked after both mum and dad in the house until the day they died, and that was so important. What resonated with me was that my dad lived to be 98½ years old. Why do people live longer? It's because they have an attachment to their family and they have an attachment to what's going on around them. But it's not only about living longer; it's about living with a quality that they enjoy. Even now in politics, I know all of us, as politicians, go into aged-care facilities—or we should—and we see the people who are just dying to speak to us. They want that connection. They just want to have another human being to talk to, and that is what is vitally important.

With the Aged Care Legislation Amendment Bill 2024, it's working together. People talk about this place and say, 'Oh, you always fight each other.' We don't really. Overwhelmingly, things in here go through in a bipartisan way. This is yet another intersection in trying to work for the common good. In making sure we look after people, we are suggesting changes that we think will make the bill better while making sure that our ultimate objective is the dignity of human life and the capacity for people not only to be born with dignity but to be treated with dignity. We must understand that we don't own people's lives. We have a duty of care over their lives, but we do not own people's lives and, because it's not our property, we must respect it. It is the property of the person whose life it is, not ours.

Another issue we have to touch on, though, is a big concern in regional areas. I know you, Madam Deputy Speaker Payne, would be very aware of this, coming from a regional area. So many of the aged-care facilities are not for profit; they're community based. They've got community boards. People work on those boards for free. The concern they have is this: 'Please do not regulate us to such a point, because the alternative to us is nothing. There is no alternative aged-care facility if we close down.' I think of the problems and the pressures on places such as Quirindi, which is a classic example, but there are other towns in New England as well.

We may have well-intentioned regulations here, but the effect on the ground is people going from an aged-care facility in their area to no aged-care facility. I don't mean another because the others are booked out—none. The only place they can go is palliative care, and even they don't have the beds. That's a terrible thing to do to a human being—to take them from an aged-care facility in their local town, where local people come in and maybe present them with the papers on the weekend, saying: ' Do you want to buy the Daily Tele? You haven't got three bucks? Don't worry, you can pay me next week. Here you go. Blah, blah, blah.'

To kick them out—this is where we have to be careful with the 24/7 registered nurse. It sounds great. The trouble is, if they can't get it, what are you going to do—shut them down? That is not the better alternative. There's got to be a capacity in this building—with its free air conditioning, free lights and, basically, free everything—to understand that other people don't have those sort of liberties. They are constrained by their cash flow. You have to make the suit fit the wearer, and that means you have to make sure that you say, 'Can I get an aged-care facility? Can I assist that community body to bring an aged-care facility into their town? Can I make sure that I'm aware of the facilities that are under stress? Have I got an active program on the ground to make sure that we touch base with these ones, even in Western Australia, and that none of these aged-care facilities are going to close down?'

It's a statement of the competency of government, isn't it? Law and order—that's a statement of competency of a government. If people feel scared, a fundamental aspect of government has failed. Medical care—I'm thinking of the things that get brought up with me—if a lady cannot have a baby in a local hospital, that is a fail. If a lady is on a bypass past Tamworth Base Hospital, having to be sent to Newcastle, that is a fail. If you cannot have a child in Muswellbrook because they don't have obstetrics, that is a fail. If you cannot defend the country, well, nothing else matters. You just don't have a country anymore; it's all over. So that's a massive fail. If you don't keep dignity for people in their later life, that is a fail.

These are fundamental things. They're not the exciting, glamorous things. 'Rah, rah, rah, we're going to talk about the weather,' or something like that. 'It's all marvellous.' But that is not what people out there are listening to. They want to say, 'Are you going to look after me when I can't look after myself? If I break my leg, is there going to be a doctor there? If someone attacks my nation, can you defend it? Later on, if I'm short of a quid, am I going to get a pension?' These are the things that people connect to.

This is why a bill like this is in the Federation Chamber, for all those watching—both of you!—because it is non-contro. It means it's going to go through. But I bet so many of you watching—both of you—are thinking, 'Hang on, what do I take out of this so that my parents and my grandparents are going to be looked after?'

In summary, we've got a couple of schedules, and schedule 1 is really about the conduct of residential care and assurances that the information the government gets helps them do a better job in managing aged care and finds problems early and deals with them, which makes abundant sense. The second schedule really is a sort of a backup of the first. It's how that information is used. Also there's a thing called section 83 that deals with breaches within that. It deals with typical things, like bedsores. There's nothing worse than when you go into an aged-care facility and you get that smell of boiled vegetables, faeces and urine. You know straightaway that there's something going wrong there. It worries you because you see the people there and you think, 'Are they being looked after?' Are these mums and dads and grandparents being looked after? So you've got to have close oversight of that. There are a couple of amendments to sections 332 and 337.

What we are also seeing is an attempt to deliver more aged care. It's a big issue. We have an ageing demographic. To be frank, we're not breeding our own. We're importing other people's babies. Therefore, with an ageing demographic, it means that a lot of people don't have the kids and the grandkids to financially support them when they go into aged care. My parents—may their souls rest in peace—had 18 grandkids. They had six children. My brother passed away, so they had five children. We were very lucky. There's my sister. My brothers are doctors and solicitors and there's me. We had the capacity to support our parents. There was a whole range of us, so we had the resources to support our parents.

Some people going into aged care now won't have had any kids. Some of them might have had one kid or two kids. If they've had one or two, those families are struggling to support themselves, they're struggling to pay their own bills and they've got no money to pay for mum and dad. That means that it falls to the state to pay for them. But, even so, it doesn't mean they should live the final part of their life like Oliver Twist. There's got to be a sense of dignity in how they live.

This is another thing. It's a strange thing, but it's part of what we've got to look at. Australians have got to have more children. We've got to try and work out why they're not having children and work out how they can, because it filters right through to how you support everybody.

You've got to ask yourself the question right now: when something happens to you, and it will—it absolutely will; even if you die, it's going to happen to you—who's going to support you? How does that work? Who is actually going to look after you? I think, for a lot of people, if they have a realistic view, the answer might be nobody. 'Nobody will be looking after me because I don't have children and I don't have grandchildren,' or 'I've got one son,' or daughter, 'and they're up to the gunnels in debt. They've got no money to look after me. So who's looking after me? I've got my super.' Okay. I'm an accountant. A very rough rule of thumb is that you're going to live on a tenth of that super a year. If you've got $300,000 in super, see if you can live on $30,000 a year. Good luck with that. A lot of people say, 'I'm doing well—600 grand.' Okay, that's 60. You'll get by, but it's not going to be flash. It's not going to be flash at all. Once you go into an aged-care facility, a big paw comes down onto some of that, and it becomes their super and their resource, and you've got to deal with that.

So we have to continue to work on this in a bipartisan way. We have to make sure, to the best of our abilities, that dignity in a person's life in the evening and the autumn of their times is as present as it was at the age of 35, and therefore aged care is crucial.

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