Tony Sheldon (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today, amidst the greatest public health crisis in several generations, to speak to the matter of urgency. As of yesterday, 335 Australian families had lost a loved one to COVID-19 in aged care in Australia. So many Australians have been failed by a Commonwealth government that failed to prepare and that failed to learn the lessons from overseas and from outbreaks like those at Dorothy Henderson Lodge and Newmarch House. Those nursing homes, both in my home state of New South Wales, needed special planning and care as the virus bore down on us.

While most of these victims of COVID-19 could not be with their loved ones, they did have tireless and selfless people by their side. I am talking of the 165,000 health workers in aged care who do the overwhelming majority of the work in our aged-care homes and services. They are kind and patient people who feed our loved ones, keep them hydrated, turn them, bathe them and lift them so that they are comfortable and safe. They share their stories and quell their fears, and they take them outside for a precious hour of sunshine. I cannot say enough to applaud the hard work that they endeavour to do.

The measure of how we value aged care in this country has no more important indicator than how we value the health workers, who are the care. Like truck drivers, cleaners, and food delivery, postal and supermarket workers, healthcare workers in aged care are the front line of this pandemic. They are the quiet heroes. We dishonour them, and we dishonour the older Australians they care for every day, when we pay them so little, when we deny them paid pandemic leave and when we condemn them to such insecure and unfunded work. They deserve better than this, and we can do better than this. The COVID-19 pandemic pulled back the curtain on the lack of funding and on job insecurity in aged care that were already there. Years before COVID-19, unions had been warning about the staff cuts and the underfunding of aged care. We should not be surprised that the pandemic took advantage of the systemic running down of staff levels and training. If Scott Morrison and his hapless aged-care minister care to actually address the crisis in aged care, I invite them to listen to the aged-care workers themselves.

Aged care is complex and the long-term decline in funding and the lack of transparency and accountability in how $13 billion of taxpayers' money is spent will not be solved overnight. But there are some important steps that workers in aged care know the government could and should take right now to address this crisis in aged care. Every worker needs paid pandemic leave. Every worker needs proper personal protective equipment and training in how to use it. And we need a trained and ready surge workforce. Every worker in the health and aged-care sectors needs access to paid pandemic leave—because the virus does not care what kind of job you do or where you do it—regardless of where they work and what state they are in.

The ACTU and unions like the Health Services Union, which covers healthcare workers, have been calling for universal paid pandemic leave. Many have trumpeted the Fair Work Commission's recent decision to adjust the award, granting paid pandemic leave for aged-care workers. This is welcome news, but the problem is that only one in 10 workers in aged care are covered by that award. That means 90 per cent of aged-care workers who are covered by enterprise agreements may not be getting paid pandemic leave at all. Unless you are an aged-care worker in Victoria, you are facing the prospect of losing your income or losing your job if you have to self-isolate.

The Health Services Union wrote to aged-care providers around the country to ask them do the right thing and offer paid pandemic leave to their staff. Here are the results. Some employers have agreed to pass on the full two weeks, like Twilight Aged Care to its 240 staff. Some employers, like UnitingCare, are paying only a few days, and the vast majority are determined to do nothing. Why won't the not-for-profit aged-care chains, like Whiddon and Mercy Health, offer paid pandemic lead to their staff? Why are for-profit aged-care operators, like Regis, effectively telling their staff that they must choose between safety, and paying their bills and feeding their kids? Apparently the cost of pandemic leave is too much even when stacked up against its real cost in stress, loss of livelihoods and loss of life. And this government, which, despite Scott Morrison trying to pass the buck, has responsibility for aged care, has done nothing to extend aged-care pandemic leave to cover these most vulnerable workers, these essential workers in aged care.

The second thing the government must do is mandate proper levels of personal protective equipment and training. This chamber may be shocked to hear that there is still no nationally mandated PPE used in aged care. How can we expect staff to manage complex infection control of patients and visitors when staff have little or no training and often have highly limited access to PPE? Members have spoken to the Health Services Union when questioned about what employers were doing about PPE supplies. One care manager said they planned to make calico masks for staff. Another worker told the union that, as of last week, she was given only one mask per eight-hour shift, in clear breach of infection control protocols. And where is the federal government? We know that, prior to the outbreaks in Victoria, just one in five aged-care workers had completed the government's training modules on how to use PPE, and this was weeks after the earlier outbreaks at Dorothy Henderson Lodge and Newmarch House.

If they don't listen to our aged-care providers, the Prime Minister and aged-care minister could look at the revelations in the final report on the Newmarch House tragedy. Just last week we learned that, as of now, the Morrison government has spent only half the funding committed to addressing the critical surge staffing problem, and now we have a growing crisis of worker fatigue and stress across the sector. As Health Services Union National President Gerard Hayes said:

The chronic underfunding of aged care has created the perfect storm for the devastating effects of COVID-19 that we now see in Victoria and have witnessed at Newmarch House in NSW.

The bottom line is that, even with a strategy to create a surge workforce, it will not solve the underlying problem, which is that 20 per cent of workers in aged care have at least two places of work because of their extremely low pay and zero-hour contracts in the sector. Honouring our older Australians means committing to providing decently paid and secure work for the people who are relied on the most.