Peter Khalil (Wills, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission Bill 2018. Deputy Speaker Hastie, you know that we support the royal commission into aged care, as, of course, do the vast majority of the public—there was a 240,000-strong petition to that effect. But it should not be an excuse for inaction on the issues that are facing the aged-care sector today. I've received emails, phone calls and letters—hundreds of them—and I've visited constituents of mine who have shared with me their struggles with the quality of their own aged care and that of their family members. As the need for high-quality and transparent aged-care services expands, we must act now. We must address these issues and support the quality of care that older Australians should be receiving. This bill goes some way to doing that.

The impacts of understaffing and underfunding are real—we've heard about that. The ones who get the short straw as a by-product of those shortcomings are our parents, our grandparents and our loved ones. That is not to mention, as the previous speaker has, the nurses and aged-care workers who look after them. There are around 1.3 million Australians who are currently receiving some form of aged care. This care is being provided by around 400,000 nurses and carers. There clearly are not enough carers and nurses to do the job, and the ones who are doing the hard work on the ground aren't given enough pay, respect and support. Their role is critical in the care of our older Australians and will become increasingly important as the numbers increase, so we have to act now.

We have to implement long-term solutions to this growing and demanding issue. It is projected that by 2056 the aged-care workforce will need to triple to around one million workers to adequately deliver the services for more than 3½ million older Australians, who will represent one in four aged Australians who will need that care.

The recommendations from a Senate inquiry and the subsequent Carnell-Paterson review following the investigations into elder abuse at the Oakden facility in South Australia have led us to this point, but it has been slow, halting and fumbling. We are extremely concerned about the government's dithering response in introducing legislation into this parliament. We are concerned that the government have yet to respond to many of the other recommendations of the Carnell-Paterson review. We are concerned that the government have known about this review and the recommendations since October 2017. That was a year ago. What is the hold-up?

The government only decided to act when they watched, or heard about before watching, the harrowing Four Corners series, the first part of which aired during the last parliamentary sitting week. The sharing of the personal experiences of families and residential aged-care facilities suddenly made them wake up to some of the problems that were right before their noses the entire time. But the Carnell-Paterson review is not the only review that has sat untouched by the government. There have been more than a dozen reviews and reports, and there are hundreds of unactioned recommendations.

There can only be one sad answer to this dithering, this slowness. Clearly, unfortunately, the coalition government are too busy fighting amongst themselves, day to day, to actually do their day job, to drive long-term reform and to make the necessary changes to address the issues in the aged-care sector. What they've managed to do, just barely, is fit in what is pretty much a piecemeal—piecemeal in nature—process.

I recently visited the Ethnic Communities Council in my electorate to speak and participate on a panel at its forum on the aged and those on the aged pension. A lot of the discussion included the challenges faced by culturally and linguistically diverse pensioners in particular—the rising cost of living, access to health care, maintaining active lifestyles, mental and physical health in retirement, but also the additional language and cultural challenges faced by those pensioners from very diverse backgrounds, some of whom migrated to this country in the fifties and worked all their lives helping build Australia. Really, these challenges are shared by all ageing Australians.

The forum took place on the Monday after Scott Morrison's ascension to the position of Prime Minister. The slowness in addressing these issues could be an indication, maybe, of another reason besides the infighting—that is, his philosophical view towards the elderly. As I was researching that speech, it was interesting to read what Scott Morrison had said about those elderly constituents—

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