Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

It is with pleasure that I present the report of the Community Affairs References Committee inquiry into the adequacy of existing residential care arrangements available for young people with severe physical, mental or intellectual disabilities in Australia, together with the Hansard record of proceedings and documents presented to the committee.

Ordered that the report be printed.

I move:

That the Senate take note of the report.

This report documents the current situation, as much as we can ascertain, of the circumstances for young people with disability living in residential care. Before I go any further, I would particularly like to thank the submitters and the witnesses who presented evidence to our committee. Sometimes that evidence was quite distressing for the person who was giving it, and I thank them most sincerely for their evidence.

I would also like to take this opportunity to acknowledge Senator Linda Reynolds, who has put so much effort into this report. She brought this reference to this chamber and has worked tirelessly on this report and at the committee hearings that we had. Unfortunately, she cannot be here today, but I thought it was very important that we acknowledge her very significant input into this issue.

This committee report makes 12 recommendations but, from the outset, what we have found in this report is that far too many young people under the age of 65 are still living in residential aged care. It is completely inappropriate for these young people to be living in these circumstances. When you talk to the young people themselves, you hear their personal accounts of what it is like to live in aged-care facilities, living with older people. We have to acknowledge that aged care is for older people, so you have got people under the age of 65 who are living in circumstances where they do not have any peers; they do not have their age cohort there. They also tell stories of how they make friends with the people who are in aged care, who then pass away. That is very distressing for them. One of the really important facts here is: when young people with disability are in aged care, they are not receiving rehabilitation, so they are stuck there with no way to get out.

We still do not know exactly how many people are in residential aged care, as the figures we got differed. One of the figures was that there are still 8,658 young people under the age of 65 in residential care; however, that needs to be clarified, because 90 per cent of those people are between the age of 50 and 65. Some states, including my home state of Western Australia, do not include those people in the numbers of young people. They quoted us numbers under the age of 50, which made it sound much more reasonable in terms of the number of people that are still in aged care.

We have made recommendations about the need to get our database correct and to actually look at the ACAT numbers. To go into aged care, a young person with a disability has to go through the aged-care assessment process—so it should be easy, you would think, to know the numbers of young people under the age of 65 who are in aged care.

One of the huge issues preventing young people from coming out of aged care is the lack of suitable accommodation. That issue came up time and time again, and we have made a series of recommendations about the need to address the issue of adequate accommodation. One of the big issues with the NDIS is that we still have not come to terms with how we are going to address housing for people coming out of residential care.

We have made a series of recommendations about better support for people, if they are in residential aged care: we need to be providing much more adequate support and we need a better assessment tool for those young people who are going into residential aged care. Of course, we want to see people coming out of residential aged care and going into appropriate housing so, as I said, we do make a series of recommendations around housing.

We believe that the Department of Social Services needs to finish the discussion paper that they have been working on for so long. Everybody out there is waiting for the joint-government approach to housing—and they are waiting and waiting. We did get quite an insulting answer to one of our questions on notice, telling us to wait until the Disability Reform Council paper comes out, which may be by September. People have been waiting and waiting for this, and waiting for far too long. So we make a recommendation there.

We also make recommendations that we need joined-up approaches here. We need a national task force where the states, territories and the Commonwealth work together to address the very significant barriers to enable young people to come out of residential care. They need to be able to access rehabilitation, which requires a national rehabilitation strategy.

Each young person needs wrap-around services, so we recommend that each young person with a disability in residential aged care has an advocate who is there to help them to work their way through the system. The other thing we heard repeatedly is that services do not join up, and you need to be able to address issues around housing and access to services and rehabilitation. We are also recommending that each young person in residential aged care has a key worker who—Senator Reynolds coined the phrase of having a 'system wrangler'—can assist them to access those services.

We heard quite a bit of distressing evidence that, in some of the trial sites, young people in nursing homes were not being picked up for assistance with NDIS. That is a key issue, and I would like to congratulate the Summer Foundation who did that work. The NDIS and the NDIA have responded to that work and are starting to work better to address the issue of young people in nursing homes.

As I said, we make 12 recommendations, which I commend to this place. I commend them to state and territory governments, COAG and the NDIA. We have made a series of recommendations for all those bodies and we will continue to look at them to make sure that they are implemented. I would like to finish by thanking the secretariat, who has done such hard work and such a good job on this particular report.