Glenn Sterle (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to make my contribution to the debate on the Aged Care and Other Legislation Amendment (Royal Commission Response) Bill 2022. It is an extremely important piece of legislation, as we've heard so many times today and last week. It is absolutely necessary, following the damning report of the royal commission into aged care. The title of the interim report summed up the experience of many in the aged-care sector, whether they be the staff who provide the care that is so important to our elderly Australians and their families or the residents and patients themselves.

Let's think about neglect. In fact, the opening title of the first paragraph reads, 'A shocking tale of neglect.' One of the opening paragraphs reads:

Australia prides itself on being a clever, innovative and caring country. Why, then, has the Royal Commission found these qualities so signally lacking in our aged care system? We have uncovered an aged care system that is characterised by an absence of innovation and by rigid conformity. The system lacks transparency in communication, reporting and accountability. It is not built around the people it is supposed to help and support, but around funding mechanisms, processes and procedures. This, too, must change.

It goes on to read:

Our public hearings, roundtable discussions with experts, and community forums have revealed behaviour by aged care service providers that, when brought to public attention, has attracted criticism and, in some cases, condemnation. Many of the cases of deficiencies or outright failings in aged care were known to both the providers concerned and the regulators before coming to public attention. Why has so little been done to address these deficiencies? We are left to conclude that a sector-wide focus on the need to increase funding, a culture of apathy about care essentials, and a lack of curiosity about the potential of aged care to provide restorative and loving care—all of which is underpinned by an ageist mindset—has enabled the aged care system to hide from the spotlight. This must also change.

It also reads:

Left isolated and powerless in this hidden-from-view system are older people and their families. 'This is not a life.' 'This is not my home.' 'Don't let this happen to anyone else.' 'Left in her own faeces, and still no one came.' 'Mum doesn't feel safe.'

This cruel and harmful system must be changed. We owe it to our parents, our grandparents, our partners, our friends. We owe it to strangers. We owe it to future generations. Older people deserve so much more.

We have found that the aged care system fails to meet the needs of our older, often very vulnerable, citizens. It does not deliver uniformly safe and quality care for older people. It is unkind and uncaring towards them. In too many instances, it simply neglects them.

Quite frankly, it is a national disgrace that the system has just carried on under these conditions. What makes it worse is that those who had the power to do something about it did nothing. I'm happy to say that the Albanese government is not going to cop that. The evidence taken and recommendations made by the royal commission are far too important to ignore. We owe it to older Australians to put it into practice by introducing this bill so that they have the assurance that they will get the very best care when they go into aged care and that that assurance also extends to their families.

This bill makes a series of important changes that will improve the health, safety and wellbeing of older Australians. It will also assist older Australians and their families in understanding the quality of care and operations of providers. This bill contains nine measures to implement urgent reforms to the aged-care system and responds to 17 recommendations of the final report of the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety.

The Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety was established on 8 October 2018 by the Governor-General of the Commonwealth of Australia. Experts saw it as a crucial opportunity to address a failing system. The royal commission made no fewer than 148 recommendations to address structural issues in funding and governance, formulated after evidence from 641 experts, residents and families, over almost 100 hearing days since the former Prime Minister ordered the inquiry in October 2018. Those are just a few facts about the royal commission. For someone who's spent a fair bit of time in Senate inquiries, this is mind blowing. There have been 10,574 submissions received to date, and 6,800 telephone calls were made to the information line. Like many Australians, I was horrified to hear stories and cases about the conditions aged-care residents were being forced to live in on a daily basis across our country.

As part of their lobbying for change, I did meet last year with a delegation of aged-care workers and United Workers Union members who came to parliament to appeal to the former government to act and make change. These are good, decent, hardworking people who actually love their jobs and the care they provide to older Australians. It was terribly sad to see how heartbroken they were because of the conditions they were being forced to endure at work and the conditions their residents were also experiencing as a result.

The UWU submission to the royal commission included some direct experiences of aged-care staff, which I want to put on the record:

I get disheartened and frustrated— there's not enough staff or money for what we do. Management do not listen to us, notice what we do, or take notice of our complaints. This has to change.

Another quote:

In the last three years my income has reduced each year and I expect this year to make four. I have no guarantee at all regarding how many hours I work. I cannot get out of this job soon enough and when I do would never consider working in this field again and would never recommend for anyone else to do so. It's a complete dead end.

How sad is that? Here's another quote:

I do the job because of how much I care not for the money because it's terrible pay for the amount of physical, mental and emotional strain on us…I'm sure more people would do it if the pay was better …

And another:

Paper work, documentation are necessary but our residents come first, carers are working back in their own time to finish workload …

Another one:

I work extra hours in my own time …

And another one again:

People should not be allowed to do a 6 month course and then be qualified to work in aged care. They have no idea what they are doing and it's not fair on the elderly that end up getting these care staff.

Another quote:

It took me 9 months to get qualified through TAFE. Stop doing six week courses to qualify to be a carer.

Poor quality of food, abuse, neglect, lack of quality care, poor standards and conditions for staff and residents, understaffing, lack of training, low levels of pay—the list goes on and on and on. You've got to ask yourself: how did it get to this? Conditions in the aged-care sector had gotten so bad that earlier this year aged-care peak bodies and unions made a request to the former government for the Australian Defence Force to be brought in to assist in residential aged-care facilities to alleviate stress on the embattled aged-care workforce. As we learnt, COVID-19 hit the aged-care workforce hard, with some facilities losing anywhere between five and 50 per cent of their staff due to COVID-19 results or staff needing to quarantine as close contacts of a case. On top of this, peak bodies stated that staff burnout among the workforce was resulting in widespread resignations.

Industry bodies—including the Australian Aged Care Collaboration, consisting of six aged-care peak bodies; the United Workers Union; and the Health Services Union—joined together to call for extra assistance from the former government. Those same organisations pleaded with the former government to fix unresolved systematic funding and workforce issues, which were outlined in the final report of the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety. And what did they get? Nothing. So, on top of the complete neglect that the former government was guilty of, there was a complete disrespect for the peak bodies who represent the aged-care sector, which is in so much need of attention. And despite the former Prime Minister himself conceding that the aged-care sector was indeed in crisis—not my words but his—his government refused to act on aged-care reform.

Prior to the election Prime Minister Albanese told Australia that fixing aged care was a Labor priority, and the introduction of these reforms demonstrates this government's commitment to reform. The royal commission response bill provides the legislative framework for the new AN-ACC funding model for residential aged-care homes, which will replace the outdated Aged Care Funding Instrument in October 2022. This framework will offer more equitable funding, better matched to provider costs in delivering the care residents need. It also extends the functions of the Independent Health and Aged Care Pricing Authority, which will lead to better price setting for aged-care homes.

Other measures enshrine transparency and accountability of approved providers, and improved quality of care and safety for older Australians receiving aged-care services. This includes the star-rating system, which will see the Department of Health and Aged Care publish a comparison rating for all residential aged-care services by the end of this year; an extension of the Serious Incident Response Scheme to all in-home providers from 1 December 2022; many increased protections from preventable incidences, abuse and neglect of older Australians; and a new code of conduct for approved providers, their workforce and governing persons—and what a good thing that is. There will be better accountability, improved quality of care and a code of conduct for providers and their workforces, which will go a long way to address the experiences of aged-care staff that I did mention earlier.

I wish there had been a system of transparency and accountability in place when we were looking to settle finally on a place for my mother-in-law, Ilma—we do miss you, Ilma. She would have turned 90 last week. But I know the effort that my wife and her sisters put in to find a suitable home for Ilma. A lot of research was done and much consideration, I have to say. The family made the decision to settle Ilma at the Aegis residential care facility in Melville, not far from our home in WA. When the family looked at the room and checked out the facility the management told us that Ilma would have her own bathroom, no problem. I know that when the girls moved her in there they were packing her stuff into the bathroom and saw another door. They opened the door and it was the door to another room; it was a shared bathroom.

Now, that's fine. But the thing is that on the Aegis website, which was checked out again on Friday and had been updated on 6 July, these lying so-and-so's are still saying that you get your own bathroom. You do not: the age-care residents do not. They even lie about it, and to this day they're still getting away with it. I would encourage any Western Australian—I'm happy to meet with the board of Aegis and I'm happy to meet with whoever from Aegis; I wouldn't put a cat or a dog into an Aegis home while they lie like that. The sad part is the staff at Aegis too: really decent people, all agency people. They didn't know where they were going to work this week or where they would work next week. They were just shuffled and shunted around. Aegis: do you think that's a good model for old people, when older people desperately need recognition and desperately need some form of stability? They have to have that; it makes them feel more comfortable too. Not only that, it's the poor staff. The poor staff are being shunted around. They didn't know the intricacies of their residents; they didn't know that some people may be a little bit harder to do something for here or there. They didn't know because they weren't around long enough, and Aegis had great pride in taking people's money for that.

But, I'm happy to say, that Ilma ended up at RAAFA, in the Royal Australian Air Force aged-care facility in Perth. What a magnificent facility! It was chalk and cheese: everything about the place I would thoroughly recommend. The food that was served to the residents was the same food that was provided in the canteen for the workers, which was the same food provided at the little lunch bar when family came in to visit them. What a magnificent bunch of people. When Ilma did pass away, it was lovely to see that half a dozen of the staff came to her funeral. They treated her like family, as they treated all the residents at RAAFA as family—not like Aegis, one of the worst of the worst. I would thoroughly—thoroughly—enjoy a conversation with Aegis, but I know they wouldn't dare pick up the phone because I would even start using my truckie language when we got into it, seriously!

In saying that, I want to commend these bills to the Senate and I thank the Senate for its time.