Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

If you sit in this House for even a short period of time, you notice something about the Morrison government: they seem to wait until things have got really bad, so everybody knows there's a problem, then they rush forward with their silver announcement, and they make an announcement. But when you dig underneath it, you find there's nothing there. And there is no area where this is more true than in aged care.

We in Australia have known that we had an aged-care crisis coming for decades. We had the Hawke and Keating government writing papers on the ageing of the population. Peter Costello went on and on and on about the ageing of the population and the changes we needed to make to ensure that this country was able to care for its people as they aged. We knew about the needs of the workforce. We knew all about it. We've known about it for decades. We've also known for quite a few years now that the crisis had well and truly hit and that the standards in our aged-care facilities were not up to it. We've had stories of extraordinary numbers of people malnourished, of people lying in beds unable to get out of them, of people with maggots in wounds—we've had some dreadful stories. But we've also had some really across-the-board assessments that up to a third of people were simply not getting the care that they needed, with enormous numbers malnourished. So we have known for a long time that the crisis was well and truly here.

Two years ago, this government finally called a royal commission into aged care, after nearly a year or more of being begged for it—by the community, by the people who worked in aged care, by the opposition, by people whose parents were suffering and by people whose partners, who they loved, were being left lying in urine. We heard dreadful stories for months and months and months. Finally the government said, 'Okay, royal commission', and they've done nothing but brag about it ever since. The Prime Minister gets up and says, 'I called the royal commission.' Well, it was two years ago. Two years ago we knew the situation was so bad that even the Prime Minister knew we needed a royal commission and finally called one. That was two years ago. A year ago now we had an interim report that was entitled Neglect. How often do you see a royal commission put out an interim report with such a totally outrageous title? Neglectit says everything about what it found.

Meanwhile, we had the government saying over and over again, 'We can't do anything, because there's a royal commission happening; we have to wait for the findings,' even though what we were hearing through that royal commission was stories of appalling neglect. Every day this government did nothing, someone—in fact, hundreds and thousands of people—lay in bed, unable to get out, sometimes all day. Those of us who have struggled through lockdown in the last six months know how dreadful it is not to be able to leave your house. But for these people there is no out, there is no end. It doesn't stop when we get a vaccine; they're there for the rest of their life, living in circumstances that most of us wouldn't wish on our worst enemy, let alone people that we love and people that we care about. Yet this government, dragged kicking and screaming to the royal commission itself, ignored all the evidence, ignored the interim report and kept saying, 'Nothing we can do here; we have to wait until the royal commission is over.'

The report is due in November, and today we're looking at a bill. Apparently the government can do some things while the royal commission is going on. It's hard to imagine why this bill was so urgent that it had to be done before November. The final report will be there in November. They've been saying they couldn't do anything until that time, and now, suddenly, 'Oops, must do this!' The bill does three things. It triggers a change to the way providers are paid. Providers are currently paid one month in advance. After this bill passes the Senate, they'll be paid one month in arrears. Again, it's hard to imagine why they couldn't wait another month to read the full recommendations of the royal commission, which they said was so important to wait for, before they did this. The second phase of the reforms, which commences in April 21, means that providers will only be paid the subsidy for what they actually provided to consumers, and the third phase will mean that subsidy payments to providers will be reduced by a portion.

In some ways these are quite minor changes, relative to the kind of effort that is needed right now, and has been needed for several years, in the aged-care system, and given the aged-care system that we know we're going to need as the population ages. We're living longer. We're healthy for longer. The number of people with dementia is going up. As we live longer, more and more really high-needs care is required. We're stuffing around at the moment with this sort of stuff, when really there is major work to be done.

I want to talk specifically about home care at this point. For all that we've seen of the problems within the aged-care system and for all of the major changes that are going to be needed in terms of the quality of the workforce, the way the funding works and the whole funding system, there's another part of the aged-care system which is probably much easier to fix, and it's called home care. It's an incredibly good policy, home care. It was introduced a number of years ago now, before the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government was elected, and it's particularly important because it allows people to stay in their homes longer. One of the great interesting things about health care, generally, is that in the vast majority of cases what's best for the person is actually cheaper for the taxpayer. The person can stay home longer if their bathroom is renovated so they can't slip. If they can make minor changes to make their home safe, if they can have someone coming in and checking that they're okay and that they've taken their medication—all those small things can be done and people can stay at home longer.

For communities like mine, where large numbers are born overseas and putting a parent or partner into an aged-care facility is something they would not even consider, home care becomes even more important. A lot of these families will work tirelessly to keep their loved ones home for as long as possible, because that's what they do. So home care is incredibly important. And yet, according to the government's own Productivity Commission report this year, the waiting time for people with high care needs is up to three years. So you are assessed and, if you are found to need the care, you wait three years. Before the royal commission was even called, there was a waiting list of over 100,000 people for home care. There is still a waiting list of over 100,000 people for home care. The list has not changed. The number of people waiting has not changed.

And you can see why that is when you look at how the money has been allocated. The government is really good at making announcements but, when you look at it a little bit, the money is not there anymore. In the 2017-18 budget, they announced 14,000 home-care packages—that's over a number of years, by the way, so it's not a lot—but they were funded entirely by a reduction of 26,000 residential care places between 2017-18 and 2020-21. They took the money out of aged care and stuck it into home care. But they still didn't put enough places in home care to affect that queue of 100,000 people. And now there are lengthy waits for people to get into residential aged care as well.

In MYEFO in 2018—there was still lots of criticism; there were still 100,000 people waiting to get into home care—they put in $287.3 million. But all they did was bring it forward from a later year. Again, that was no additional money and no real effort to solve it. In February 2019, on the eve of the royal commission into aged care hearings, they announced another couple of hundred million dollars over five years. But it was actually a re-announcement of the 2018-19 budget. Again, there is nothing new here. And do you know what? Even if there was new money, the nature of being a government is that you don't get to stand in this place, or out there in front of the media, and make wonderful announcements about how fantastic you are if you are failing in this way. This is serious and it needs to be solved. You can get up here and brag that the government called the royal commission and claim that you put new money in. But even if the government did put new money in, if it doesn't fix the problem, they are responsible for the problem.

The Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government has been in this place for seven years, and this problem has been growing and getting worse every year they've been here. In spite of all their announcements, they have not made a difference. If they didn't understand it, if they weren't aware of just how bad things were, if they hadn't been listening to the evidence to the royal commission, if they hadn't been listening to people telling them in the electorates of all the members over there—just as all of us over here are told every day—if they weren't aware of how bad it was then COVID should have shown them. The COVID pandemic exposed, in the bright light of day, just how under-resourced our aged-care system is. My mum was in hospital last year. I went in there and showered her and took her to the toilet. I went in there every day and spent two or three hours with her. If I didn't, she wouldn't have had the care. But a lot of people in aged care do not have family. COVID exposed just how under-resourced aged care is. It exposed the issues with a casualised workforce. It exposed the issue of workers going from one centre to another because they only have a few hours here and a few hours there. It pulled apart the curtain and showed us what has been going wrong in our aged -are system for years. We have a huge budget, we are billions and billions of dollars in debt, and there is not a single extra dollar for aged care in the budget. Given what we've just seen, given that we've got the report of the royal commission into aged care coming down the pipeline in just a minute and given all that we know about the disaster that is aged care and the growing problem with home care delays—there's a three-year delay for getting urgent assistance at home—you would expect the government to say: 'We're spending all this extra money. We can spend it. This is a great way to create jobs, a great way to help our ailing aged-care system.' But, no, there's not another dollar in the budget.

The home-care packages announced by the Morrison government recently won't even come close. The 23,000 additional packages are just a drop in the ocean, because they're not all in one year but spread out over a number of years. They're not even going to touch the sides, when it comes to it. Again, you need to look behind the figures and announcements, because there's always nothing there. Documents tendered at the aged-care royal commission recently revealed that the Morrison government will deliver just 300 new home-care packages by 2024. That is, royal commission evidence revealed just 300 new home-care packages by 2024. There are 103,000-odd people waiting in the queue now, people getting older every day. The entire population is getting older. In spite of all of the announcements, the home-care packages haven't touched the sides, and there'll only be 300 new ones by 2024.

In my electorate I hear from people every day about this. One woman came to me about her mum, who'd been approved for a level 3 home-care package. Her mum is in her 80s. She had a heart attack and a stroke last year. Owing to her condition, she was assessed as needing bathroom and home modifications and domestic assistance, which would have allowed her to stay at home. Then this woman found out her mum might need to wait two years for the modifications—two years! One of two things happens there: her mum goes into aged care or someone gives up a bit of work to care for her. Neither of those is the best solution. The best solution is proper funding of home care by this government right now.

Another one: a local man in his 70s contacted me about the long wait for services. He'd been approved for a home-care package and assessed as being in need of domestic help with cleaning—not particularly heavy help, by the way. None of the local service providers have the capacity to provide this service, so he's just waiting and waiting and waiting. He hasn't even been given a time frame; he's been told just that nobody can help. Again, this is easy to fix, yet we've got a government that year after year makes announcements that it is, and fails miserably. There's been no change over several years: 100,000 before the royal commission and still 100,000 waiting in the queue now.

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