Jason Falinski (Mackellar, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to join the member for Perth in thanking the shadow minister for consumer affairs for being here to listen to this very important speech. Before I arrived in this place I had a business that supplied a lot of furniture and equipment to nursing homes and to the aged-care sector and the healthcare sector generally. It was a very interesting perspective on life and quite a confronting one for a 30-year-old to start a business and see so many people at the end of their lives. In the years between coming to this place and looking after people in so many nursing homes across Australia, I think I saw the best and the worst of humanity. But the one thing I can say for sure is that the aged-care system in Australia has never been better. In thinking back to when I first started out, 15 or so years ago, my first experience with a nursing home was to walk into the UnitingCare facility in Croydon. Before even getting to the door you were overwhelmed with the stench of urine emanating from the facility. To this day, it is something I cannot forget.

There were other instances, such as when I pulled into a nursing home in Bathurst one day and saw all the staff in the parking lot smoking. When I went into the facility—it was in the middle of winter—I found all the residents sitting in chairs in the common room of the nursing home watching a fish tank, literally. I remember another incident in which a not-for-profit provider was looking at one of our beds. As I walked down the hall, there were three women—they happened to be women—in three separate rooms screaming for someone to come and help them. I don't know how long they had been there. I still remember their cries of agony as they sought to be helped. That was 15 years ago. I haven't seen anything like that in the last 10 years or so. It wasn't because the facilities didn't have enough money and it wasn't because the facilities were understaffed—in fact, in many instances, quite the opposite. It was because we were coming out of a period in which aged care was seen as the annexe at the back of the local hospital. It was because we didn't treat our tribal elders as human beings, but rather as problems, in many instances to be forgotten.

A huge change occurred in 1987 when the then Hawke-Keating government started to allow new nursing homes to be built. There were also the reforms of the member for Pearce and the member for Menzies in the Howard government, which allowed private sector investors to come into the market. As the member for Perth mentioned, providers such as Graeme Prior, who was a good customer of mine, brought a level of service and care to nursing homes and to nursing home residents because he actually cared about the people who were in his home. The member for Perth mentioned that they are not just residents but are actually consumers of these goods. That's why it's so important that we have the shadow minister for consumer affairs here. The importance of that is that when we started treating these residents as human beings who had a choice, the quality and level of care went through the roof. It was an important and critical factor in improving the level of care that older Australians, our tribal elders, got. It wasn't by dint of government regulation. It was by dint of government reform that allowed people to come into this market and to provide a better service.

To that end I also have to congratulate the member for Port Adelaide. If the truth be told, the Howard government probably did hold off on a lot of other reforms that the member for Pearce would have liked to have implemented. But the member for Port Adelaide, and then Senator Fifield when he was the aged-care minister, did a lot of important work in terms of providing even further flexibility in this market, which allowed more people to come into this market and allowed more people to have choice. The greatest problem that we have in Australia today is the fact that people, when they need to move into their last home, don't have a choice anymore. They have to pick either from staying at home, which has no longer become an option, or moving into a nursing home that was built in the 1950s, for the 1950s, with attitudes of how people should be treated in the 1950s, because there is nowhere else for them to go. That's not good enough. It's not good enough in the 21st century and it's not good enough in a country like Australia.

So when the Labor Party talks about cuts to aged care, know this: what they're saying is that when Minister Ken Wyatt introduced this bill and said, 'We are going to stand up for the rights of those residents. We will no longer allow private sector companies, and for that matter not-for-profit companies, to use our ratings system to rort taxpayer dollars while not delivering the care that they say they are delivering to Australians,' he stood up for the integrity of this parliament, for the integrity of the aged-care system and for the integrity of those people who are in those homes today.

Let's be clear that when Labor talks about restoring the so-called cuts, what they are talking about is restoring the rorts that were out of control in the aged-care marketplace, where people were rating people as having a level of care and requiring a level of care that everyone knew they didn't know. We had providers in the Australian market whose business case was that they could better manipulate the ACAR system to ensure they got the highest level of funding that they could possibly hope for. It was a rort. It was taking money from the care of others and putting it in the pockets of the unscrupulous. That's what Labor wants to return to in this entire argument. It's absolutely appalling and they should know better. They should know better primarily for this reason: both sides of this parliament have done a tremendous amount since 1987 to restore the level of care, hope and generosity that our country has always been known for to older Australians regardless of where they are in Australian society. What they're seeking to do is undo some of that bipartisanship for base political purposes. It is absolutely appalling.

When they start talking about staff ratios, know this: they're not talking about staff ratios; they're talking about nurse ratios. There are a lot of people in every nursing home and very few of them are nurses, because the care that is provided by those people is unqualifiedly great. It is quantitatively and qualitatively out of this world. Nurses are good at providing clinical care. The carers that we have in so many of our nursing homes right around this country provide a level of care that you could not hope to get anywhere else in Australia. You ask any older Australian today whether they would prefer to be in a ward bed in a hospital or in one of these new aged-care facilities, and out of 10,000 Australians I doubt that you could find one who would say that they would prefer to be in a hospital. The reason for that is primarily the love and care that these staff bring to those nursing homes. The Labor Party wants to rip that asunder. For what reason? For the purposes of appealing to their union mates in the nurses federation. It is absolutely appalling that they would indulge themselves in this level of politicisation of this sector.

When you think about it, an older Australian who spends their time in a ward bed in New South Wales in your average public hospital will cost the Australian taxpayer $1,600 or $1,700 for that night, but in a nursing home it's $160 a night, and they will get a better level of care. And that's what they require—not clinical care, but care. That's what this parliament should want. That's what both sides of this House should want for Australians.

When you also think about home care versus residential care, in so many parts of Australia, the key is this: that we are spending billions of dollars in providing services to people in their homes. Some of those services are not care-related services. They are gardening, cooking and other levels of care that our home care packages provide, and no-one thinks or would suggest that that's a bad thing. But compare that to the level of care that someone can get in a residential aged-care facility. That includes ensuring that people get their medicine in the right dosages at the right times, that they are properly eating and that they are getting socialisation—because the biggest issue that older Australians are facing, in my electorate and, I suspect, right across Australia, is a sense of social isolation, because they feel that they are stuck in their homes, whereas, in nursing homes and aged-care facilities across this country, a large part of the mission and the purpose that those aged-care facilities have is ensuring that their residents have the capacity to go out and enjoy their lives. And that's why residential aged care is so important.

I cannot speak too highly of Thompson Health Care, which has a number of nursing homes in my electorate. They, for example, have undertaken a major project, with the University of Technology and a number of pharmaceutical companies, to ensure that older Australians—who so often find it more difficult to communicate with their carers—are being looked after when it comes to pain, because so many issues that were seen as behavioural issues were actually our fellow Australians, simply put, in pain. These are not studies that are undertaken in public hospitals. These are not studies that are undertaken in every nursing home. Indeed, this is the sort of level of care and innovation that is going on in the aged-care sector in Australia because that's what you get when you have a competitive and innovative marketplace like we have in Australia. That is what you get when you treat people as more than just residents stuck in your nursing home—rather, as consumers who have a choice as to where they can go.

This bill, the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission (Consequential Amendments and Transitional Provisions) Bill 2018, will make it even better for nursing homes and those people who spend the last few years of their lives in nursing homes, because it will ensure that every person who goes into a nursing home can know that they are getting a minimum level of care that is reliably performed, day in and day out.

I heard the other day that three-quarters of residents who live in these nursing homes have not been visited by a family member or someone in the last six months. That is just the way that our society is, unfortunately. It's the way that our community has evolved. So, for so many—for three-quarters of those people who are in nursing homes—their families have become the other residents and the staff of these nursing homes. We owe it to them to ensure that they have as much choice as possible.

When people have dementia, one of the side effects of the dementia is that people often end up reverting to the language that they first grew up with. We have so many Australians who were born overseas, who end up like my grandmother, who, in the last few months of her life, started speaking in Russian again. If she had not been in a nursing home where the staff were fluent in Russian, it would have been very difficult for her to communicate and for her to be understood and heard and cared for. But because we have a marketplace, because we agree with innovation, because we encourage it and encourage competition, there is a place for every person in the Australian aged-care market to get the type of care that they not only need but want. This bill is about ensuring that older Australians get the care that they need. But the marketplace that we on both sides of this parliament have created, over many years, has ensured that every Australian can get the care that they want.

In the minute that I have left, I would also like to mention that we have enormous challenges coming up. Those in the cohort of baby boomers are about to find themselves in that age category where they may consider putting themselves into their last home, being a residential aged-care home. We have challenges around workforce planning and we have challenges around the number of beds that are available. Ask any nursing home provider and they will tell you that the biggest challenge they face is planning and development. But we have created a system in this country that has ensured Australians get a superior level of care in their last few years. It is the job of this House and of this bill to make sure that we give them an even better experience than those who came before them.

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