Kristina Keneally (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

The government has taken too long to introduce a Serious Incident Response Scheme that would respond to the cases of assault and abuse in Australia's aged-care system. It has been more than three years since this scheme was first recommended by the Australian Law Reform Commission following its landmark report into elder abuse in Australia. The Carnell-Paterson review commissioned by the government following the Oakden nursing home tragedy also recommended the scheme in 2017. How can Australians trust this government to properly respond to the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety when it can't even respond to serious incidents of elder abuse? Labor's been calling for the implementation of this scheme since both reports were released in 2017—understand this: 2017. It is almost four years now since the government was warned about outrageous and shocking incidents of abuse, yet it has done nothing.

Australia's aged-care system was broken before the COVID-19 pandemic, and the delay of this scheme is only putting extra stress on the system. Reported assaults in residential aged care go up every year. Four years the government have wasted. Every year incidents of assault are going up. They reached 5,233 in 2018-19, more than 100 a week. The government should hang their heads in shame. Day after day, the evidence of serious neglect in aged care mounts, and all we see from the Morrison government is running away, passing the buck and not accepting responsibility for their own failures. Neglect is not only the title of the aged-care royal commission's interim report, neglect is the legacy, neglect is the practice and neglect is the policy of the Morrison government when it comes to our aged-care system.

The Aged Care Legislation Amendment (Serious Incident Response Scheme and Other Measures) Bill 2020 amends the existing Commonwealth act to introduce a much-needed Serious Incident Response Scheme for residential aged care and flexible care delivered in a residential aged-care setting. This scheme will replace the current responsibilities of approved providers in relation to reportable assaults and unexplained absences in the Aged Care Act. It will require approved providers to manage incidents and to take reasonable steps to prevent them in the first place. The bill will require approved providers of residential aged care in a residential aged-care setting to report all serious incidents to the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission.

A wider range of incidents will now be reportable, including unreasonable use of force; unlawful sexual contact or inappropriate sexual contact; psychological or emotional abuse; unexpected death; stealing or financial coercion; neglect; inappropriate physical or chemical restraint; and unexplained absence from care. When you read that list and you think about our parents and grandparents living in aged-care systems for years, this government has neglected to progress this scheme and to put this serious incident response framework in place. They have neglected older Australians. They are not on the side of older Australians and their families.

This scheme is so important in protecting some of our most vulnerable fellow Australians by placing the rigorous safeguards and response processes in place where, until now, they have been deficient under the neglect of the Morrison government. The scheme will remove the existing exemption for reporting assaults where the alleged perpetrator is a residential aged-care recipient with a cognitive or mental impairment and the victim is another care recipient. The bill will strengthen protections for people who disclose incidents of abuse or neglect in aged care and these protections will extend both to existing and former staff members, as well as to current and past residential aged-care recipients. The bill will protect people disclosing such failures against any civil or criminal liability. Again, this is such an important reform. It is beyond time that these changes were made. It is extraordinary how long the government, the Morrison government, has neglected to progress these changes.

We do need to expand the powers of the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission to enforce the requirements of the new scheme, and this bill does expand those powers. These will include standard regulatory powers which provide the commission with a more graduated suite of powers for ensuring compliance and protecting consumers. An additional information-gathering power will also ensure the commission is able to obtain information and the documents it needs to administer the scheme.

The main concern that Labor brings to this legislation is that it does not include home care. Given that there are about one million older Australians receiving support or care in their own homes there is an equal risk of serious incidents happening in that setting, as well as in a residential aged-care facility. It should be noted that the counsel assisting the royal commission, in its final submission, recommended the government should ensure that a new and expanded serious incident-reporting scheme include all serious incidents, including in home care and regardless of whether the alleged perpetrator has a cognitive or mental impairment.

So it is incumbent upon the government in this debate to explain why millions of Australians, who care deeply about these matters, and over a million Australians who receive residential home care, are not included in this scheme. Don't they matter? Is the Morrison government not on their side? We know the neglect of the Morrison government; it is in the royal commission's report—right there in the title. It is the title of the report and it is the policy of this government. This legislation, unfortunately and tragically, neglects to include those Australians who are receiving home care—aged care in their homes.

Aged care should never be a policy of neglect. If there was one thing that a federal government should get right, it is looking after vulnerable, older Australians—the people who have built this country; the people who have raised families and created businesses, who served in our military and served as volunteers in communities, and who passed on the Australian traditions of a fair go and mateship. We shouldn't neglect them in their older years. Can you really trust the Morrison government to improve the aged-care system at large, given that their legacy, their policy and their practice is neglect? The evidence against them is now condemning in its depth, its breadth and its gravity.

Everyone in this parliament should read the foreword to Neglect, the interim report of the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety. I've read it. It is disturbing. Reading the first 12 pages of this report is possibly the most rage inducing, heartbreaking reading you will do of a government report. The interim report describes the experiences of aged-care residents with maggots left in open wounds and left to lie in their own urine and excrement for days. It details that up to half of Australia's frailest aged-care residents are malnourished. This is not some report from a Third World country; this is a report of supposedly one of the best healthcare systems in the world, in Australia. Australia has one of the best aged-care systems in the world? Not so. Neglect—that's what the Morrison government has turned to.

The report describes in detail how 60 per cent of residents are on psychotropic medication but that that medication is estimated to only be justified in 10 per cent of cases. It confirms for all who care to pay attention—I don't think that includes the Morrison government—that there were: 4,000 notifications of alleged or suspected sexual abuse reported in one year; 274,409 self-reported cases of substandard care; and 32,715 calls to the My Aged Care consumer hotline that went unanswered in one year alone. In short, the interim report of the aged-care royal commission is horrifying reading. This is all happening in our aged-care facilities on the Morrison government's watch, and it is a national disgrace. According to the latest population trends, 38 per cent of Australian men and 55 per cent of Australian women will end up in permanent residential aged care. However, for the 240,000 Australians currently in residential aged care, including more than 6,000 younger Australians with disability, it is already a brutal reality.

Not only that; if you are a taxpayer, this is your money. Your money is being misused by the Morrison government to pay for this national scandal. Let's understand this: the Morrison government treats taxpayer money like it is Liberal Party money. Australians want a government that acts in their interests, that is on their side. Instead, what do they get from the Morrison government? Sports rorts, dodgy land deals and secret contracts with Liberal mates to do advertising campaigns to tell us what a great job they're doing. Yet there is this national scandal of neglect of our older, vulnerable Australians in our residential aged-care system and in our home-care system. On those statistics I just read out about people being left in their own urine and excrement, having maggots in their mouths and in their open wounds, being malnourished and being chemically restrained: if the Morrison government weren't so busy looking after themselves and their mates, they might find time to get on the side of older, vulnerable Australians and look after them.

The Prime Minister was our nation's Treasurer when the government cut aged-care funding by $1.7 billion, ensuring services were capped and resources were strangled. Since 2013 the government have spent $1 billion on advertising to tell us what a great job they're doing, yet they cut $1.7 billion from aged care. Mr Morrison was in charge when COVID-19 hit, when aged-care homes were denied personal protective equipment and given an instructional video instead of infection and control training. No wonder Australia has one of the worst records in the world when it comes to residential aged-care deaths as a proportion of total COVID-19 fatalities. No wonder the Grattan Institute has described Australia's centrally controlled, heavily rationed aged-care services as a Soviet style system. That is what this Morrison government is overseeing. This government, elected in 2013, only called a royal commission in 2018 after it was shamed and shamed again by media scandals.

There are 1.3 million Australians in aged care and millions more who will need aged care—dare I say some of us in this chamber will. Of course we will. All of us will at some point have to contemplate going into residential aged care. We all need real policies backed up by real funding, from more home-care packages to more workforce development training and more oversight of quality and safety standards. We need to be cynical of any talk about how the so-called industry has learned its lessons and will now put the customer at the centre of everything it does. After all, the Australian government is the only customer the sector cares about, because the Commonwealth provides more than 80 per cent of its revenues and, as we know, the Commonwealth has been cutting that funding.

Finally, the economics of aged care speak to one of the most tragic elements of our experience of the COVID-19 pandemic: 655 people died in Victorian residential aged care during the crisis last year, entirely on the Morrison government's watch. Aged care is a federal responsibility, not a state government one. In fact, their own plan said they would be responsible for the management of COVID in aged-care facilities. Australia has one of the highest rates in the world of deaths in residential aged care as a proportion of the total COVID-19 deaths. A Senate inquiry has noted that deaths in aged-care homes account for nearly 75 per cent of all the deaths from COVID-19 in Australia. When more than 1,500 aged-care homes requested masks, gloves and gowns from the National Medical Stockpile last year, they were refused. Staff in aged-care homes also needed comprehensive infection control training; instead they got a 10-minute video.

The royal commission has found that the federal government did not have a specific pandemic plan for the aged-care sector. Neglect again. Neglect systemically, neglect before COVID-19, neglect during COVID-19. When is the Morrison government ever on the side of vulnerable older Australians? When this evidence from the royal commission was put to the government, what did the minister for aged care say? Minister Colbeck said, 'The government maintains its position that it has a plan in place.'

We have had eight years of despicable neglect—neglect from the point of view of funding, neglect in the priorities, neglect for the care of vulnerable older Australians, neglect of home care and neglect of residential aged care. This bill is important; make no mistake. This bill is necessary; make no mistake. The tragedy is that this bill is so long in coming to this parliament, and the tragedy is that it does not do anything to assist those Australians who receive home care, aged care in their home. We will continue to fight for them because we are on their side.