Helen Polley (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Tomorrow, the federal government will be handed the final report by the royal commission into aged care in this country. It will be the 22nd report presented to this government in the last eight years, and this government will accept, quite frankly, no responsibility for the inept administration of the aged-care sector in this country. Over the last eight years, yes, there has been additional funding, but when Mr Morrison was Treasurer he used this sector as an ATM and gutted it by almost $2 billion. We know that the interim report into aged care was handed to this government over 12 months ago. What have we seen since then? Further neglect. You would have thought that the title of the interim report—Neglectmight have given the government a hint that they might have to do something sooner rather than later, but what they've just done is they've used the royal commission as an excuse not to take the courses of action that have been well documented and raised by, as I said, 21 inquiries and reports into the aged-care sector.

They have known that ACFI, the Aged Care Funding Instrument, has been broken for a considerable period of time and that it needs to be fixed. They also know that there are in excess of 100,000 older Australians still on the home-care waiting list waiting for the level of care that they have been assessed as needing. We know that almost 30,000 older Australians have died while waiting for the level of care that they should have been receiving in their own home. We know that almost half of residential aged-care Australians in this country are malnourished. Only today we had aged-care workers visiting Parliament House and talking to parliamentarians, including myself. We heard—not that I hadn't heard this time and time again—of the difficulties that these workers are faced with every day. They don't have enough time to provide the care that older Australians deserve. We heard about an older gentleman who fell and broke his ribs. He was left without adequate medical care for days. Broken ribs! He was having difficulty breathing. This was happening because there wasn't enough time and there weren't enough workers to give this gentleman the care that he needed. He died. That could have been prevented.

This minister comes into this chamber day after day when we're asking questions and he accepts no responsibility for the failings. The reason the royal commission was called in the first place is that this government and the previous Liberal governments over the last eight years have failed older Australians. Day in, day out they've failed older Australians and their families and they've failed workers in the aged-care sector. We know that there needs to be more money put into aged care, but it's got to be done properly. There has to be transparency. You can't be spending these billions and billions of dollars year in, year out without knowing if older Australians are getting the care, the dignity and the respect that they deserve in this country. We hear time and time again what a rich nation we are and that we respect our senior Australians. That's what the minister says, yet we're hearing case after case of neglect in this country.

Another story shared with me this morning concerns a woman who weighed 200 kilograms. Her residential aged-care home didn't have a lift to help the staff, so, when she collapsed and died in the hallway of that home, where all the other residents could see her, they had no equipment to take her the 20 metres to her own bed so they could prepare her, to ensure that this woman was shown dignity and respect. That is a disgrace! It's a national disgrace! It's unfair that Australian workers in the aged-care sector are put in this situation day after day. (Time expired)