Louise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Today as we speak to the Aged Care and Other Legislation Amendment (Royal Commission Response) Bill and the government's proposed legislative response to the royal commission into aged care, we have before us a great opportunity to get on with fixing the problems created by the former government in aged care. We are here to amend aged-care law to implement a series of urgent funding, quality and safety reforms. This includes, as we know, a number of really important recommendations made by the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety.

That commission can only be described as giving an absolute picture of a national disgrace—the absolute disgrace that the former government allowed aged care in our nation to become. It allowed it to absolutely deteriorate, to the enormous detriment of the lives of thousands of older Australians depending on care and their carers, both family and paid, in the aged-care sector, and broader families and communities.

I think all Australians have, over the last year or so, come into contact in one way or another with the significant atrocities that older Australians suffered at the neglectful hand of the Morrison government, so much so that the royal commission itself saw fit to name its interim report Neglect. This came after many years of the former government's attacks on and budget cuts to our aged-care system. It was an approach by the Morrison government, those now in opposition, and this is part of the reason they were sent there. It was a pattern of behaviour, policy approach and lack of attention that systematically endangered and harmed older Australians who were the grit of building our nation. They paid their taxes, worked hard and raised their families. The least we can do as a nation is offer dignity and respect in the care that people receive as they move into frailer years where they need that care. No-one wants to be in aged care. It's an absolute last resort, so there are pressures on and tensions in families to keep their loved ones at home and for partners who are also ageing to keep their partners at home. In the case of my own family, people who have retired are now caring in their retirement for their very elderly parents, who don't want to be in aged care because of this systemic neglect.

It's worth remembering as we discuss this legislation before us today that this royal commission began as far back as 2018 and delivered an interim report in 2019. What you can see from this between 2019 and the final report, evident in the last few years in this place, is that of the horrors that were exposed by the report in 2019—which is the purpose of issuing an interim report, so governments, aged care providers and communities can get on, respond and start to take action—none had been addressed in the final report of the royal commission. It's a really telling reflection on the final report, abandonment and neglect being its major themes. So let's not forget that those over the aisle from us now presided over this neglect and abandonment, and they presided over it during the course of the COVID pandemic, when of course the vulnerabilities of people in aged care became even more profound.

Had action been taken back in 2018 and 2019 when the royal commission was started—you know, normally governments recognise that, when they're under so much attack and pressure that they need to call a royal commission into something, that's the time to start actually getting on and fixing it. When things are so bad you need a royal commission to do something, it shouldn't be the case that you then say, 'Well, we can't possibly act now on these very urgent issues, because we need to see what the royal commission says.' Honestly, in the case of an issue that is live, where people are suffering harm and damage every day, the important thing to do is get on with reforms and put a stop to that harm as quickly as possible. It's kind of why we, here now in the very first week of convening ourselves as a Labor government in this parliament, have this legislation before us, because we recognise that it's urgent.

The abandonment of the last government led to people being put in really difficult situations, worse situations than they had to be. Our former Prime Minister seemed to have been banking on an exhausted collective national amnesia as to his failings to act on these issues—in yet another term, post-2019, of ignoring vulnerable Australians. The former PM, as we know, had previously been the Minister for Social Services and was the Treasurer who cut $2 billion from aged care, leading to this disaster. In so many areas of the public policy failure that we've seen from the previous government, cuts like this were the most common weapon in a dwindling arsenal of what was a neglectful and ineffective government.

But the Australian public have spoken. They have changed the government, and the message that we got—and we knew it all along because we had been fighting the government on these issues—was that Australians have said that the quality and safety of our aged-care system is of the utmost importance, which we intend to deliver on prioritising. The last government failed in its final days to bring forward any bill related to fixing the crisis in our aged-care system. This bill addresses that. It's more reflective of the recommendations of the royal commission's report. We have a bill before us that is already dangerously late in terms of responding to a damning royal commission that has implored us to increase funding to our aged-care sector. But, as I said, we as a Labor government have done this as urgently as possible.

I recognise that this bill is largely the same as the previous government's Aged Care and Other Legislation Amendment (Royal Commission Response No. 2) Bill 2021, but it is significantly improved. I also note the government had ample time to introduce such measures into this place. If you look at the legislative agenda that they pursued during 2020-21, there's no reason that this agenda could not have been dealt with then.

In this bill we are requiring a qualified registered nurse to be on site at every residential aged-care home 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This is absolutely critical. When you look at the issues in our health system nationally, state government health hospital systems are under significant pressure. We have ambulances ramping at hospitals. We've got emergency departments trying to get patients admitted. And we've got patients who have come from aged-care homes, who are inside the hospital as they've needed urgent care, who are waiting in the hospital to go back to their aged-care service but can't go because there is an inadequate level of supervision and care from a registered nurse on site 24 hours a day. It's important to recognise that, while many people in our aged-care services might be physically healthy but have dementia or other challenges that mean they need to be there, others have physical ailments which make it difficult to be at home, and many others are this close to being in and out of hospital. But being in and out of hospital doesn't actually help them live as healthily and as happily as they can in an aged-care facility, because that kind of dislocation and movement doesn't support their health. What does support their health is having that access to a quality aged-care service, and quality supervision and support with a registered nurse inside their aged-care facility.

The former government ignored the royal commission's recommendation that nursing homes should have a registered nurse on site, so the legislation before us delivers on what was Labor's election commitment to stop the rorting of home-care fees by placing a cap on how much can be charged in administration and management fees. These are two key platforms that Labor have taken forward and that we have consulted on. We have worked with unions, we have worked with people who care for people in aged care, we have worked with their families, and we have worked with the whole sector to ensure that we are able to deliver what are incredibly important reforms, reforms that the last government ignored and refused to prioritise.

A Labor government wants to be confident that the precious money that comes out of people's pensions, that might even come out of the equity of the family home, to pay for that care is going directly to care and not to the bottom line of corporate providers. These improvements, we believe, reflect in a much better way the recommendations of the royal commission. We have a new code of conduct to set high standards of behaviour for providers. We are looking to improve communication between care and support sectors so that regulators can do their jobs and supervise risks in facilities and a lot more.

I have kind of rattled on without getting to one of the things that I really wanted to outline today. Amina Schipp has been a constituent of mine. She bravely told me her mother's story about how unqualified staff dispensed and administered drugs and shared medication soon after placing her mother in an aged-care home. The home did not get a doctor quickly. There was a lack of urgency in getting a doctor. She had a major fall, a number of unreported falls and then her mother passed away. Those complaints had already been made to the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission before her mother passed away and nothing was done. This is why Amina has been so angry at the last government, and I want to be accountable to her and people like her. (Time expired)