Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am very happy to contribute to this debate, although I must confess that as I have heard Senator McLucas and Senator Marshall in this debate I have had some difficulty in coming to grips with exactly what it is that the Australian Labor Party is trying to put forward here and what exactly it is that they are alleging about the system of aged care in Australia that needs to be fixed or for which the government stands condemned. They have raised the four incidents of alleged serious abuse of residents of aged care facilities in Australia. As I think has been made clear very eloquently on this side of the Senate by the Minister for Ageing and others, we regard that with grave concern and as a matter of great seriousness that can be and will be fully and properly investigated.

It is worth pointing out, however, that in probably all of these instances—certainly in at least three of them—the allegations are of conduct which would have to constitute criminal conduct. Senators may have overlooked the fact that criminal conduct is a matter for state and territory police forces to investigate in the first instance. Indeed, in at least two of those cases to my knowledge, and perhaps in all four, there have been investigations by the police, or at least the police are being asked to consider whether investigations should be conducted. In at least one of those cases, a person has been charged and, I think, convicted. So the primary response to these sorts of allegations is appropriately with another level of government.

The case that the Labor Party appears to be making about the shortcomings of the government is that there are systemic issues to do with the accreditation and regulation of nursing homes and the overview of the operation of nursing homes, which, in some way, the government has not dealt with appropriately and needs to lift its game on. Senator McLucas’s motion talks about the minister needing to act to restore confidence in the aged care sector of Australia. That implies, of course, that there is a want of confidence in Australia’s aged care system.

Senator Marshall and, I think, Senator McLucas were at pains to refer to the report of the Senate Community Affairs References Committee that was delivered last June, entitled Quality and equity in aged care. I would also like to refer them to that report, because on the first page it says that ‘the standards of care in aged care facilities are generally adequate’. Senator Marshall, in fairness, did comment about the quality across most of Australia. To say that the standard of care is adequate, as the report said—I would say ‘good’ is a fairer description—across most of the system stands at odds with a statement that there is a crisis in confidence in Australia’s aged care system.

Look at some of the phrases that are being used in the media at the moment. They are about crisis, about the system failing and about there being a failure in the system to deliver quality aged care, and that is just not true. We need to put these issues into perspective, because—and this point cannot be overemphasised—we are not dealing with just any sector of the Australian community when these sorts of allegations are made. We are not dealing with the quality of sliced bread or motor cars or something of that kind; we are dealing with a sector which deals with people who are intrinsically frailer and more vulnerable than the average Australian. Each time we get up in here and talk about how the system has collapsed, about how there is a crisis in the system, about how we need to worry about the standard of fire protection in Australia’s aged care facilities and about the question of people being subject to abuse in their residential facilities, we generate a level of concern in the sector which we ought to avoid if at all possible, particularly given that in this situation the four sets of allegations that have been made cannot be described under any circumstances as an impugning of the entire aged care system. Even after a couple of weeks of very adverse publicity, we still have only four allegations of sexual abuse on the table across the whole of the Australian aged care system. We have 100,000 people in residential facilities in Australia and four allegations. In those circumstances, investigations are being conducted, or have been completed, into those allegations.

As the minister made clear—and he has pretty comprehensively responded to each of these issues—there are processes in place to deal with either the individual allegations and perpetrators or the systemic issues about the way in which the homes concerned dealt with those sorts of complaints. In each of those cases, those things have been put on the table and are being prosecuted appropriately, and yet we still have this allegation of an atmosphere of crisis. I think that that does very little to give people a balanced picture of what is going on, and it certainly does no credit to the Australian Labor Party.

This motion calls for the treatment of allegations of sexual assault to be ‘a matter of national priority’. To the extent that such cases are alleged in aged care facilities in Australia, they are, of course, treated as a matter of priority. What ‘national priority’ means is a matter of how urgent the political exigencies around such cases might be. As Senator Patterson pointed out in her contribution to this debate, let nobody imagine that these are the first cases of sexual abuse of residents of aged care facilities in Australia. They certainly are not. In my recollection, there have been such allegations made from time to time for many years. No one government can accept that they have a particular burden on their shoulders for this phenomenon in Australian aged care facilities. No one government can prevent such incidents occurring in Australian aged care facilities. But governments do have a responsibility to address the systemic issues, and there is not one skerrick of evidence that this is not happening at the moment. (Time expired)