Meryl Swanson (Paterson, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Corangamite for putting forward this motion and giving us the opportunity to speak on aged care. My mother passed away at the age of 90 in March of this year. She spent the last eight months of her life at an aged-care facility in our home town of Kurri Kurri, and she had a very, very good time at that facility. In fact, yesterday I was cleaning out some of mum's things—you might think that taking from March until September to do it is quite a while, but I'd had them at my house, and sometimes you just can't do these things so quickly. I came across a very small, simple Christmas card and it said: 'Dear Joy, it is such a pleasure to care for you.' Mum had kept that card. It was from one of the staff at the nursing home that mum was at, and I knew that it must have meant a lot for her to have kept it. She had it tucked in with her 90th birthday cards. I knew that mum had received many more Christmas cards than just that one, but she'd kept that one. To me, that spoke volumes, not only about my mother's sentimentality but also about the fact that an aged-care worker, on a very meagre income, would go to the trouble, in a busy life, of penning a note to my mum saying, 'I love caring for you. You're such a pleasure to be with and care for.'

And I think that speaks so much to aged care in Australia at the moment: there are people who love their jobs—they enjoy caring for our older Australians—and they say that it's a far richer experience than the money they're paid, and that they don't do it for the money, but it would be better if they were paid more. That was the overriding sentiment that I got when I talked to many of the staff at the facility where my mum spent the last eight months of her life. They were good people, highly trained and doing an incredible job under incredible pressure.

There are always lots of buzzes and beeps and whistles in healthcare facilities. I can tell you that when monitored patients in an aged-care facility are wanting to have a shower or have had a fall out of a bed, those beeps and those monitors are going off continually, and the person who is responsible for those people at that time is constantly having to prioritise, 'Who do I go to next?', and 'How do I make this all fit in?' That's where that care time—those minutes of care, and having those increased—is so important, as is increasing the wages of aged-care workers, because, at the end of the day, they are doing a very important job. Yes, we all want to be cared for professionally and well in our last days. But not only that: it's a hard job, and they should be recompensed appropriately for it. And we in the Albanese government are not wasting a minute. We said that we couldn't have a royal commission report titled Neglect and not turn our focus to it straightaway, and that's what we're doing.

In my electorate of Paterson, we have a very high population of older Australians. In fact, when I was last in a nursing home a very lovely gentleman said, 'Meryl, welcome to God's waiting room, darling.' It's affectionately known that way, especially up in Port Stephens. We say it in jest but it is true.

It is critically important that we ensure that people are being cared for adequately, and our bill, the Aged Care Amendment (Implementing Care Reform) Bill 2022, will ensure that registered nurses are in aged-care facilities 24/7, unless those facilities are in very small towns where it's just not possible. There will be provision for that. The bill also introduces a new responsibility for approved providers of residential care and specific kinds of flexible care to have those registered nurses on site and on duty at each facility, so it works for them. This is such a critical point, because we need to be taking the pressure off our emergency rooms, and, not only that, we need to be taking the pressure off our older Australians. For someone like my mum, who was getting pretty frail in the end, to have to be put into a patient care transport unit or an ambulance and be taken off to emergency because there is not a registered nurse or a doctor at the facility. It is traumatic, and it takes away so many resources, because usually someone will have to travel with them. If we can at least take some of that pressure off our older Australians, that is a good move. I commend this motion to the House.

Debate adjourned.

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