Helen Polley (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Aged Care) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak once again about the Abbott government's blatant disregard for older Australians and the fact that there is no apparent plan to deal with dementia, which is now the second leading cause of death in Australia. The test for the Prime Minister's second federal budget was to plan for the future, but a coherent long-term vision for Australia's ageing population is nowhere to be seen. Tony Abbott is a notorious faux fixer whose poor record in dementia care funding and planning continues to be reiterated. The wool has not been pulled over our eyes, and those living with dementia, their families, friends and carers realise that the Abbott government and his ministers have nothing positive to offer them. All we are seeing are nasty surprises in store for the most vulnerable Australians.

The lack of leadership and vision demonstrated by the minister responsible, the Assistant Minister for Social Services, Senator Mitch Fifield, during budget estimates was astounding. Senator Fifield likes to talk about his support for dementia, but his actions do not follow suit, and the insults to those with dementia just keep coming. Last year he left the sector shocked and reeling when he abandoned those with severe behaviours living in residential care by abolishing the dementia and severe behaviours supplement. Then he introduced his experimental, untested severe behaviour response teams, better known as 'flying squads', which are still grounded, with no flight path. He was asking tenderers for the flying squads to come up with a model for how they might work. This year he has overseen a nasty $20 million cut to dementia initiatives, hidden in the fine print of the budget. And now the senator plans to abandon over 25,000 Australians living with younger onset dementia, some only in their 30s and 40s, by discontinuing funding for the life-changing program they rely on, the Younger Onset Dementia Key Worker Program.

There are currently 630 people in Tasmania living with younger dementia who face ongoing issues that also affect their families. The only choice that these people may well have in the future is to go into residential care. The Younger Onset Dementia Key Worker program is discontinued and will be rolled into the NDIS in July 2016. This government forgets there is a human face behind this discontinued program. I can tell you from experience that residential care is not the answer for younger onset dementia. My own family has been touched by this. When my brother-in-law was 38, he was diagnosed after a number of years of not being able to identify what it was that he was suffering from. At 38 years of age, he found that he had early onset dementia. That was devastating for his young family. So I am speaking from firsthand experience. As I said, over 630 people in my home state of Tasmania are currently living with early onset dementia, and their families and communities lose out.

It would be a failure of the system for residential aged care to be the only answer. In most cases it is completely inappropriate for the needs of people with younger onset dementia. The government needs to work harder to find responsive and specialised solutions. It is clear that the Abbott government has abandoned vulnerable Australians living with dementia. The string of heartless cuts sends an unmistakable message to every person in Australia—to never trust this government again.

It is very disappointing and disheartening to see the Abbott government continually take an axe to the heavy lifting previously done by Labor to support our aged population. The Abbott government are out of touch with the most vulnerable Australians, because fairness is not something intrinsically imbedded in their values. They do not value older people. I have said this before and will say it again: I just do not understand why the Abbott government do not care about older people.

Older and vulnerable Australians do not need further cuts and uncertainty when it comes to their care, especially at a time when the aged-care system is undergoing significant changes. The Abbott government have not been able to demonstrate that it can be trusted to manage reform or to carry through the changes set down by the previous Labor government, because they have taken their eye off the ball. From the first day on which they took up the government benches, they have not been across the issues. The minister responsible has never been across the detail and he keeps dropping the ball. If the Abbott government continue on this path, Australia will lose its reputation of being a world leader in dementia awareness and risk reduction.

This leads me to yet another nasty surprise for people living with dementia, as Tony Abbott discards the world's first dementia risk reduction program, Your Brain Matters. This is a program which saw Australia declared a world leader and pioneer in creating awareness and in public risk reduction programs. Tony Abbott is the reason Australia's aged-care sector is not world-class.

Dementia is a deeply personal issue, and those living with dementia and their families deserve an adequately funded and strategic approach that responds to the complexity of dementia care. There are already more than 342,800 Australians living with dementia, a figure which, as we all know, is expected to triple by 2050. It really is not that far away. I am not sure that Mr Abbott and his ministers understand that, as our population ages, dementia will increase. It concerns me that many older people living with dementia are going to miss out on care they desperately need. Dementia is not going away, Mr Abbott, and we are all still waiting to see how you plan to make aged and dementia care easier to access, fairer and more sustainable into the future. We are all still waiting for dementia to be put at the forefront of the government's thinking and to start treating it as a national health priority—because it is a national health priority and an international health priority.

The public mood towards ageing is shifting, and the government must keep pace, listen up and learn. The government is ignoring the opportunities that ageing presents. Labor did the heavy lifting with the Living Longer Living Better campaign, which surrounds the notion that ageing should not be something that separates you from you community and society. It seems that the government has underestimated the level of leadership required to oversee the roll out of a significant reform such as Living Longer Living Better. Older Australians need certainty and the aged-care services sector needs stability. We would all like to know what the government is doing to make this happen.

What does it say about this government when it keeps cutting support from our most vulnerable in our communities? Labor understands that older Australians and those living with dementia deserve certainty; they most certainly do not deserve to be treated as a burden. Dementia is one of the biggest challenges for this country and of this century. It will also be one of greatest opportunities of the century. Labor will always stand up for fairness and the most vulnerable Australians. Only Labor will remain committed to listening, learning and working with the aged-care sector to grasp the opportunities and face the issues that arise. We owe it to those who built this great country to provide them with the aged-care facilities and the security they deserve as they age, and particularly those with dementia. Early onset dementia is devastating for younger people, and not only for them as individuals but for their families and for our community.

We need to recognise these challenges; we need to have a minister and a government that has the vision, the plan and the drive to give this the priority we know it deserves. The evident failure of Tony Abbott when he became Prime Minister was that he did not designate a minister for ageing. That was the beginning of the end for him to demonstrate in any capacity at all to the Australian community that he put ageing where it should be—and that is as the No. 1 priority—(Time expired)