Derryn Hinch (Victoria, Derryn Hinch's Justice Party) Share this | Hansard source

This is going to sound like a broken record, but the whole issue of the way we treat older Australians has sounded like a broken record for years, even decades. I preached the mantra on radio and television for years that the only difference between uncaring politicians and old people is that they, the old people, got there first. At a nurses' rally in Bill Shorten's electorate, recently, I made that point again. But I also pointed out that, since I jumped the shark and was elected to Canberra, I'm now not only a politician; I'm also old.

In recent weeks, while parliament was in recess, I spent a lot of my time in rural and regional Victoria—Ballarat, Ararat, Horsham, Echuca, Shepparton and Colac. I even swung by a place where I spent some time in 2014, called Langi Kal Kal Prison. I met a lot of disillusioned Liberal voters, upset with what even the new Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, has described as a muppet show. I made a point of visiting aged-care centres and nursing homes. I almost committed the ultimate political sin of delaying the start of the bingo game in Horsham! As I pointed out, I'm old enough to remember when the game of bingo was called housie-housie. At the Ararat Hotel I met six former registered nurses celebrating with a get-together. They all agreed with me when I started talking about ratios for RNs and carers in nursing homes and aged-care centres. Some of them are fantastic, but many of them, sadly, are not.

I mentioned Langi Kal Kal Prison. Now, something's really out of whack in the way we treat our elderly when the average spend per day on food for residents in aged-care centres is $6.08. I pointed out earlier my extensive jail experiences, and that is less than I received daily as a prisoner. At Langi Kal Kal I received nearly $10 a day for food, and we received all the free milk we could drink—litres and litres of fresh milk daily. One other prisoner in my block, of Middle Eastern extraction, would turn about nine litres of milk into yoghurt and cottage cheese to share with us.

But back to the main issue of staff ratios for nursing homes and aged-care centres: I will be moving an amendment to this bill, on sheet 8448, which would introduce the concept of a minimum staffing standard for Australian government funded aged-care residential facilities. The amendment would require that the task of calculating a safe and specific ratio, including variables such as day and night shifts, higher- and lower-care residents, and metropolitan and rural and regional areas, would be undertaken by the Department of Health in consultation with the aged-care sector and included in the quality-of-care principles. The concept of a mandated ratio of skilled staff to care recipients in Australia's aged-care residential facilities is at the centre of the Australian Nurses and Midwifery Federation's Time to Act for Ruby campaign. It also has the public support of MPs and senators from the ALP and the Greens and some crossbenchers. Going public so far are: me, Senator Richard Di Natale and some members from the other place—Chris Bowen, Terri Butler, Milton Dick, Mike Kelly, Justine Elliot, Cathy O'Toole, Susan Lamb, Julie Owens, Susan Templeman and Graham Perrett.

The ABC reported today that a change.org petition with close to 230,000 signatures will be delivered to aged-care minister Ken Wyatt on 14 September calling on him to mandate staff-to-resident ratios for all aged-care facilities across Australia. That's the way it should be. The real experts—the passionate and compassionate experts called RNs—demand better staff-to-resident ratios. I mentioned earlier how an RN in her 40s came up to me recently, in Shepparton, in tears. She told me she'd just quit her job because she'd get home at night and would start to cry because she knew she had not done a great job as a nurse that day: she had neglected patients because she just didn't have the time to properly do her job. That is shameful in Australia in 2018. Things must improve, and only we can force this to happen. I'm old enough to remember the kerosene bath scandal in Melbourne some decades ago. Sadly, while we're not back there, some of the practices in understaffed facilities across this country are Dickensian.