Anne Stanley (Werriwa, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That this House:

(1) notes that:

(a) World Elder Abuse Awareness Day is recognised on 15 June; and

(b) this day is an opportunity to increase awareness of the different forms of elder abuse, whether they be financial, psychological, physical or neglect; and

(2) acknowledges that the Government is committed to:

(a) implementing the recommendations of the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety; and

(b) ensuring that older Australians are afforded the proper care and respect they deserve.

15 June last week marked World Elder Abuse Awareness Day. It's a timely reminder for all of us in this place that we must do everything that we can to end the scourge that is elder abuse. Elder abuse is any act which causes harm to an older person and is carried out by someone they know and trust. The Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety was established on 8 October 2018. One of the terms of reference for the royal commission referred to examining mistreatment and all forms of abuse. Many of the commission's findings were shocking, not the least when it came to uncovering the prevalence of elder abuse.

The office of the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety estimates that around 39.2 per cent of people living in Australian aged-care facilities experience elder abuse. They experience it in any number of ways. They can suffer neglect, emotional abuse and physical abuse. But elder abuse is also more wide ranging than just these three forms. Financial, social and sexual abuse may also be experienced. Internationally, the UN estimates that about one in six people over 60 years of age experienced some form of abuse in community settings in the past year. Worse still, rates of elder abuse increased during COVID-19. No older person should ever be subjected to abuse, never, and it beholds each of us to be on the lookout for elder abuse, to look out for the signs and to see the red flags in whatever settings they may be found. The Elder abuse phone line is an excellent initiative and one I commend. In New South Wales we have our own Ageing and Disability Abuse Helpline, and I'm aware of other services around the country.

World Elder Abuse Awareness Day is a day that we can highlight the needs of our elderly in general, and I'm proud of the government's record in this area. The most recent budget is a good example because it is a budget that very much addresses the recommendations of the 2018 royal commission. We are helping our elderly by providing them with up to $500 towards their electricity bill. We're helping them reduce the cost of their medicines. But the one I'm particularly delighted with is the Albanese government's $11.3 billion commitment over four years to fund a 15 per cent increase to the wage of many aged-care workers. The wage increase will take effect from 30 June. This initiative will help build a skilled aged-care workforce, one that can better deliver the high-quality aged care older people deserve. This is transformational change. It is a change that will make a real difference, a life-changing difference, to thousands of elderly Australians around the country.

But this government's record goes further. This year's budget also allocated more funding for an additional 9,500 home-care packages. The initiative will allow more elderly Australians to get the care and help they need to live at home with dignity and respect. This government leaves no one behind. That's why the budget also included funding for the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Flexible Aged Care Program. This additional funding recognises the higher cost of delivering residential care in remote locations.

I do not pretend that the job of improving our aged-care system is completed—far from it—but the royal commission provided us as a parliament and as a nation an opportunity to stop, assess and, more importantly, commit to do better. Our oldest Australians deserve nothing less, and they deserve to age with dignity. The journey to delivering a world-class aged-care system is well underway, and I look forward to future Albanese Labor budgets, which will take us further along that journey. We should all commit to improving the quality of our aged-care system, and by acknowledging that elder abuse still exists we can also ensure that it is not acceptable and, moreover, ensure that there are enough safeguards to stop it happening at all.

Rebekha Sharkie (Mayo, Centre Alliance) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is the motion seconded?

Tracey Roberts (Pearce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I second the motion and reserve my right to speak.

James Stevens (Sturt, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to 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.

Michelle Ananda-Rajah (Higgins, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Vulnerability is bimodal in Australia for all of us. Peak vulnerability occurs at two points in our lives—at the very start of our life and right at the end of our life. This is pertinent because it's something that I saw and dealt with as a general physician. When I practised, I did encounter, on many an occasion, patients who had suffered elder abuse. They were overwhelmingly women and they presented with all kinds of ailments, but overwhelmingly most of these patients were in fact malnourished. In some cases they were cachectic, which means that they were wasted. And they were universally fearful of discussing their experiences.

Currently in Australia there are around 4.2 million people who are 65 years and over. They comprise around 16 per cent of our population. That number is expected to double, to nine million, over the next 25 years. These older Australians, or seniors, are our parents, our grandparents, our aunts and our uncles. They deserve, as they enter a more vulnerable phase of their lives, to remain protected and to feel safe wherever they are, whether that be in the community or, in the case of some Australians, as they transition to residential aged care.

The issue is that elder abuse is more prevalent than we think. It affects one in six community-dwelling elderly. This is based on a survey that was done in 2021, the National Elder Abuse Prevalence Study. What is most concerning, however, is that there is a real taboo around disclosing the experience of elder abuse. That is because it tends to be perpetrated by other family members, often children. It is much, much worse in patients or people who come from non-English-speaking backgrounds. They overwhelmingly feel the shame associated with this and often do not even have the language to describe what is actually going on at home.

So it falls to two groups to try and identify, or at least screen for, these problems. One is the aged-care sector and the second is the healthcare sector. I want to thank the member for Werriwa for bringing forward this motion and discussing the problems in aged care, which we are all familiar with, but the healthcare sector is a different beast. There are a lot of people around and multiple opportunities for health encounters both with doctors or allied health professionals or nurses, but you really do need to be clued in and you need to have structures in place. This speaks to the need for having health justice partnerships.

I was privileged enough in April this year to attend the launch of a successful pilot program by Eastern Health and the Eastern Community Legal Centre. The Attorney-General was present. The launch basically demonstrated that a successful health justice partnership, where a legal centre partnered with a major health network in Victoria, could lead to positive outcomes in the sense that they were able to identify and help at least half of all people who were brought forward as suffering from elder abuse. There were two programs that were highlighted. One was called the Rights of Seniors in the East, ROSE, and the other one was called Engaging and Living Safely and Autonomously, also named ELSA. That was a partnership with the Oonah Health and Community Services Aboriginal Corporation, because this is intersectional. It affects all communities, multicultural as well as mainstream.

We were thoroughly impressed with this program and, as such, the attorneys-general recently decided that they would invest in a national plan to ensure that we can keep this work going. In that respect, the Australian government—we, the Albanese government—have committed $4 million towards a campaign to educate the community on how to recognise abuse in the elderly. There's a national free call phone line—1800 ELDERHelp—and you can also go to the Compass website find further information, educate yourselves and educate your family members. I would urge you all to do that.

Debate adjourned.

Federation Chamber adjourned at 19:29