Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Trade) Share this | Hansard source

Well, we've heard evidence from the royal commission; I just want to read out a section of it. One of the submissions told the aged-care royal commission:

My father told me that when the man entered his room, he told the man to leave his room. The man then hit my father over his head several times with a plastic doll, resulting in a small cut to my father's forehead, bruising across the bridge of his nose and defensive bruising on his forearms. There were no staff around at the time the incident occurred.

Another said:

My 71 year old husband is a resident in aged care because of advanced Parkinson's disease. On the night of December 31 2018 he was horrifically sexually abused by 2 night duty staff …

Yet another told the royal commission: 'What I do know for absolute sure now is that Mum, who three weeks ago waited in anticipation for family to arrive and spent every day talking, laughing, reminiscing and going on outings and being engaged with life, is now drugged to the eyeballs.'

I think of my own family's experience in aged care, which at best is variable. My wonderful father-in-law, a terrific bloke struck by the ravages of Alzheimer's disease, a former Telstra liney who could tell you a story about every little country town and every bit of Telstra infrastructure throughout the Hunter Valley, in his years in aged care, his wife—my wife's mother—spent every daytime hour with him, making sure that he got fed and making sure that he got cleaned. The staff in that centre were really good people, but they did not have the resources that they needed. They did not have the staff they needed. They could not fulfil their responsibility. I remember the effort that my wife's mother put into Peter's care.

These are snippets of stories from the royal commission itself, but they are elements of the lives of every Australian family who's had somebody in aged care. The bravery of families, friends, carers in the system, advocates, peak bodies, the unions and others who submitted to the royal commission meant that it laid bare just how broken the aged-care system is. 'Shocking', 'alarming', 'harrowing' and 'a source of national shame' are just some of the ways the final report into aged care described it.

In the face of this mounting evidence, you would have thought that the previous government would have acted urgently on the 148 recommendations contained in the report. Well, you would be wrong. Consistent with their track record on so many issues, the Morrison government sat on their hands. They turned their backs on aged-care reform and on older Australians. The COVID-19 pandemic, of course, made this so much worse. It exacerbated the pressure on the system, in which a largely female, underpaid aged-care workforce was already under incredible strain. Almost a year after the final report was handed down, in March 2021, former Prime Minister Morrison called in the ADF to fill worker shortages in the sector—a year of inactivity and then called in the ADF. There was a year of policy failure, trying to fill the skills shortages, and then they relied upon our men and women in uniform to try and fill the gap. You can't help but think how different the COVID crisis in aged care would have been if the Morrison government had acted with some sense of urgency. Some of the backbenchers on the other side still don't believe that the COVID crisis was real, so perhaps that played a role in the government's dysfunction. At the time, Lynelle Briggs, one of the commissioners, said that the government should have heeded the warnings about the sector's longstanding workforce challenges much sooner.

Putting dignity, respect and humanity front and centre underpins our approach, the new Albanese government's approach, to fixing a broken system. We've introduced in the Senate a key piece of aged-care legislation, delivering on our promise to ensure older Australians receive the higher quality care that every single one of them deserves. Older Australians deserve a government that cares. Older Australians deserve a government that will do what it says that it's going to do and delivers on the promises to have the standard of care that each of them deserve. Bandaid solutions won't work. We have to be honest about the scale of the problem and the kinds of steps that will be required to fix it.

Comprehensive legislative action, delivered with the urgency that Australians deserve, will make a difference. The bill that's been introduced will introduce a new Australian national aged-care classification funding model which will replace the outdated aged-care funding instrument in October 2022. More equitable funding, matched to providers' costs will make a big difference in delivering the care that residents need.

The star-rating system will see the Department of Health and Aged Care publish a comparison rating for all residential aged-care services by the end of 2022. The extension of the—