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

My parents have also contributed to a podcast called laughter and tears. They said the 'tear' bit was bringing me up. I thank the members for Perth and Curtin for putting this motion forward. When I saw that both of them had done so, I thought, 'How can I repay them?' I can repay them by calling them both good friends of mine, thereby making their careers in this place less pleasant, and when they return to Perth, a state that I have referred to as the kingdom of Narnia, they can explain to their fellow Western Australians why they would have anything to do with someone like the member for Mackellar. While the member for Dobell is here, I want to pass on my sympathies for her father's passing due to dementia. As always, the contributions of the members for Macarthur and Bonner were insightful, and the member for Newcastle has given us a personal feel for what this is like.

Before I came to this place, I was involved in the provision of goods and services to the aged-care sector. I got to see what wonderful work is being done by aged-care providers throughout Australia to help people with dementia. There is a greater concentration of people with dementia in aged-care homes than you would find in other parts of our society. Therefore, in many ways, aged-care providers are on the front line of dealing with people with dementia. It's interesting that we talk about sending people to Mars and exploring the depths of our ocean, and, every single day, we uncover such extraordinary knowledge of our universe—quasars, dark matter, black holes—and yet we understand so little about ourselves and what the brain means to human beings. When you compare us as a species with all the other animals we share this planet with, the thing that sets us apart, above and beyond anything else, is our brain. Our brains hold our memories, our personality, our capacity to innovate. They allow us to love, they allow us to care, they give us compassion and they allow us to work together. They have, in so many ways, changed the world in which we live. We stand today on the shoulders of such great thinkers, yet we understand so little about this mechanism that we have atop our bodies, which represents so much to us.

When people begin to lose capacity and their brain starts to ossify because of plaquing, which we know is one of the features of dementia, they begin to lose not just their memory but their personality and their capacity to communicate and associate with other people. It becomes incredibly difficult for us to help people in that situation. They often revert to earlier years in their lives. The member for Macarthur was talking about having a workforce that is prepared for dementia, and he's absolutely right when he says that. One thing I observed in aged care was the number of people who had come to this country from elsewhere. For some reason I always pick on Italy. I think it's because the first time I came across this was in meeting a lovely lady who had come to Australia when she was 18. She spoke only Italian when she arrived. By the time I met her she'd been here 71 years, I think. She suffered from mild dementia, nothing serious, but she constantly would talk to me in Italian because she had reverted to her native tongue. Of course, that made it very difficult for her English-speaking carers, and she actually needed someone who spoke Italian. I think we need to be cognisant of that in our immigration and visa system—to ensure that our aged-care providers have the flexibility to bring people from different parts of the world to this country so that people have someone they can communicate with.

I think both sides of this parliament, whenever they've been in government, have dedicated massive resources not just to this disease of the mind but to many other diseases of the mind. That is both appropriate and sensible. We will spend tens of billions, if not trillions, of dollars getting to Mars. I wonder if we are willing to spend that amount of money in dedicating ourselves to this inquiry—of ourselves and our minds.

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