Lyn Allison (Victoria, Australian Democrats) Share this | Hansard source

It is disappointing that we are again having a debate about a nursing home which has had to be closed down for appalling treatment of the elderly. Listening to the list of visits, checks and monitoring that the government has been engaged in since 1998 makes me wonder just what the government found when it went to this place and whether the situation which finally caused it to act decisively was not apparent at those other visits. If it was apparent at that time, one wonders why the situation was allowed to go on. It seems to me that if the AAT knocked back perfectly reasonable efforts on the part of the government to sanction the operators then there has to be something wrong with the law. It is clearly too indulgent of those nursing homes which are doing the wrong thing. They are a tiny minority, as we know, but every time something like this comes up it shatters confidence in the sector as a whole. It is one thing to come in here and suggest that there has been enormous pressure put on this agency, as Senator Humphries just said, and another to demonstrate that the government has not been simply indulgent with the aged-care provider in this case.

We want better. We expect those standards to be upheld. I acknowledge that this government brought in those standards and they were missing with the previous government. There is no question about that. I had quite a bit to do with Senator Bishop at the time that she brought them in. I congratulated her then, and I do now, but it seems to me that the government have dropped the ball a bit on this issue and they are not as vigilant on aged care as they might have been back when Senator Bishop began this reform process.

I think we need to look more broadly at aged care, however. There are ongoing concerns about the quality of care available to residents in many nursing homes and hostels, and the government needs to be more vigilant, as I said, to make sure that residents receive the quality of care they are entitled to expect. A number of people of my generation are now unfortunately having to place their parents in aged-care facilities and they are deeply troubled by this process. Some find an aged-care facility which is very good and they are pleased and enormously relieved, but others are deeply anxious about the process because they do not have confidence. It is incumbent on the government, having subsidised the industry substantially, and rightly, to provide the best quality care and ensure that we do not have shysters, such as we have heard about today, taking advantage of older people and obviously taking that money and not using it in those facilities.

There is a history of failing assessments over years, and we need to get to the bottom of it, but it is also the case that the complaints monitoring and accreditation system could be much more transparent and much more independent of government than it is. We need more resources to monitor our aged-care facilities so that they are not simply glossing over the problems so that they are not seen to be to blame.

There are major problems looming for future governments when it comes to aged care. With the number of people 80 years and over set to increase from the level of 680,000 in 2002 to 2.6 million by 2045, there is going to be a massive increase in demand for aged-care services and aged-care workers. The number of people with dementia will increase more than threefold over the next 50 years unless there are effective methods of prevention and treatment found. Some 65 per cent of residents in aged-care homes are estimated to have some degree of dementia, and dementia will progressively become the biggest disability driver of demand for aged care. We may have solved the problem of accreditation and standards to some extent, but there are bigger issues looming. It is disappointing that the government has not turned its reformist zeal—if I could put it that way—to some of the problems that are already with us but are looming as greater problems into the future.

We need a system that is transparent, takes into account capital, staffing and operating costs and can respond to those future needs. We also need to ensure the money is there to provide dementia-specific care for people with challenging behaviours, including funding for training for all nurses and care staff, and we need additional supplements to provide care for residents— (Time expired)