Karen Grogan (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

You'd be hard-pressed to find a single Australian who doesn't have a loved one in aged care, approaching aged care or in some form of at-home support care. The broad range of services for older Australians is necessary and vital in a compassionate society. Unfortunately, the message that we've heard on this side of the chamber and the message the royal commission heard is that you'd be hard-pressed to find a single Australian who thinks that our aged-care system is working. It just isn't, and the stories that we hear over and over again throughout our communities reinforce that.

In 2013, when the coalition came to government, they unpicked a wide range of reforms that had been put in place by the previous Labor government. They'd been legislated, they'd been planned, they'd been consulted, and those reforms would have gone a long way to ensuring that we did not find ourselves in the situation that we do find ourselves in today. It is a system that has been on the precipice of disaster for the last decade, a system that was ignored by the previous government, underfunded and allowed to languish. When you allow the aged-care system to languish, you allow Australians to languish. People who've worked their whole lives to support this country are being left abandoned and are not being cared for in the manner that they deserve.

In the last nine years, we've seen 23 reports from inquiries and studies all the way to the royal commission. That's 23 reports. Each and every one of them was completely and utterly ignored. I don't need to explain to you all how shocking the findings of these reports are because many of you have read them. Far too many Australians, as they've read them, have felt sick to their stomach at the situation that we are placing our older Australians in.

Last week, I spoke to this chamber of how Australian communities, industry and workers are sick and tired of the uncertainty and the divisive politics that have surrounded climate change in this country for over a decade. I spoke of how workers and industry and communities are needing certainty, are needing to understand what that plan going forward is, are needing to understand the issues that we face and how we intend to address them. We need a plan that is backed up by consultation, by input from industry and from communities. Best practice policy is what we should be aiming for. Last week when I spoke about climate change, I may well have been speaking about aged care. We have exactly the same circumstance. It's an issue that has been long neglected and ignored, and just as the Australian people sent a clear message to us on the need for climate action, they have sent that same message of need for strong action on aged care now. We need an aged-care system that cares, we need a system that we can have confidence in and we need a system that will deliver the support our loved ones need.

Prior to the election, I had the opportunity to travel around regional South Australia, talking to workers, talking to aged-care providers and talking to families. The stories were consistent and they were alarming. No-one felt that they had their loved one in a situation that was all that it should be. Some were in better situations than others, but in the main people were really upset, really concerned and felt very powerless in that circumstance. I spoke to families who had loved ones who needed help eating food, for whatever reason. They needed to be coaxed; they needed to be supported through every meal, and the hours in those aged-care facilities were insufficient for staff to undertake that work, yet the families were not given permission to be there at every meal. For many of them it's then a decision about whether they maintain their own employment circumstances and how they share around that workload. All the while, those frail, older people are in a care facility where, without one-on-one support, they are not getting sufficient nutrition. So I can tell you, whether it's in Whyalla, Port Augusta, Port Pirie or Mount Gambier, or anywhere else in regional South Australia—or in the rest of the country, for that matter—the message is exactly the same. The litany of issues, from food and personal care to the amount of time that anyone could spend engaging in a meaningful way with their loved one, was just the same. Everyone had the same stories. This is a huge and unconscionable systemic failure.

People are worried that, when they need aged care, they'll have to move away from the communities they have lived in their whole lives. We've seen the closure of facilities in many places, which has affected the ability of families to visit with their loved one and the ability of those families to afford the petrol to get to the aged-care facility. It's different in the regional areas. It's not the same as in the city. It's not just an extra 10 minutes. It's not just an extra couple of kilometres. We're talking about people having to travel hundreds of kilometres to see their loved ones, while also maintaining their own jobs, bringing up their own families and still trying to maintain that strong bond with their loved ones.

The other critical issue here is that of workers. I spoke to many, many workers who feel exactly the same way as the families of those older people in residential aged care. They care so much and they try so hard to undertake their jobs, yet they do not have the time. The staffing is insufficient. The structures are inefficient. The way things pan out on a daily basis is that they are left running from one resident to the next, often with many, many bells lit up on their panel—knowing they have to go and see someone because they need assistance but just not having the ability to get there, given the enormous number of people who are requiring support. They're exhausted. They simply can't go on. I heard story after story from aged-care workers saying that, if they went and worked in a retail environment or in a cafe environment, they would earn more money and they would be less stressed. The additional shifts they're being asked to do, the hours that they're undertaking and the level of stress that they're having to deal with are causing what can only be described as a mental health crisis across our aged-care workforce.

The industry are worried that they won't be able to sustain the care they want to provide, having been stuck in a nine-year revolving door of inquiry and report and inquiry and report and no action. Earlier this year, the ABC reported that a resident in an aged-care facility in Port Augusta had developed very bad bedsores, and the sore on his back became so bad that you could actually see his spine. That's the kind of situation that we are seeing in some of our aged-care facilities, and it's one that we should all be ashamed of.

I heard stories of workers spread so thinly that they would find co-workers in tears and they would find co-workers trembling with anxiety about not being able to care for the people that they genuinely want to work with and genuinely want to support.

This kind of anguish for the families and for the workers cannot go on. The neglect must end—and the Albanese Labor government intends to do just that. We are not waiting. The bills that have been provided are going to take those first steps, and there's more to come.

Key to today's legislation is the principle of transparency. Part of the message I heard consistently was that people didn't understand how the aged-care system was being funded and what the aged-care providers were spending on food and on care—and various other aspects, be it administration, profits or the like. They did not know what those taxpayer funded subsidies were actually going towards; they did not know how the subsidies were calculated. And they did not know how to pursue their concerns. This bill begins to address some of those very specific concerns—namely, it establishes the Australian National Aged Care Classification model, which will be the structure for calculating the aged-care subsidy. This was endorsed by the royal commission and will ensure transparency and clarity about what subsidies are provided and what they are spent on.

The bill facilitates the publication of star ratings, so the community can start to understand exactly how those facilities are operating. It introduces a code of conduct for the aged-care sector—again, transparently sending the message to the community about what they can expect and what they can deserve from our aged-care sector. The provisions in the bill facilitate increased information sharing and oversight of refundable deposits and bonds and strengthen the governance of approved providers.

Crucially, this bill extends a serious incident response scheme to home care and flexible care, whereas it previously only operated in residential. That will move the sector to start covering off on all the in-home care that is provided, and that serious incident response scheme will help address issues as they are coming to light and to get onto it immediately, to make changes and address those situations.

We know that aged care needs to be tailored to people's specific needs and we know that that's a challenging situation. We know that the more independence that people have in aged care the better they fare, and the better the quality of life that they enjoy. Still being able to make the decisions that you can, even though you are unable to make other decisions or you are unable to continue with certain aspects of your life, to retain that control, is desperately important for the wellbeing of our older Australians. But the flexibility isn't a barrier to accountability. Those two things have to go hand in hand. Approximately one in 20 older Australians will experience some form of abuse or neglect but it's only one in six cases, it's estimated, that are reported. So there is a huge disparity there between what is happening and what is being talked about and what is being reported up the line.

At the end of last year, just over 16,000 South Australians were receiving home-care packages. Unfortunately, at the moment, the structures and mechanism for reporting abuse and neglect in those in-home facilities is vastly lacking and does not give the opportunity to improve those circumstances, improve those services and make a difference to those older people. So the bill introducing that legislation is necessary to extend that report and to ensure that we fill that gap.

The fundamental issue we face here is how we treat our older people and how we provide their families with the confidence, the knowledge and the understanding to be able to work with the system, to be able to look at where those issues are and pursue some solution, some resolution, to the problems they're facing. It's about the transparency that we choose to bring in here and the additional information for people, to understand how the aged care they're selecting for their loved one is performing, how they are matching up to the standards that we set as a country for the care of our older people and, then, having that detail about the percentage of the money they receive—the government money they receive, public funding—what that is being spent on.

Is there an overspend in the administration, noting that there does need to be administration but it needs to be balanced? How much of that money is going into profits for our profit based providers, and is that appropriate? How much money is being spent on the food that is being provided? How much money is being spent on the care, the time that individual care workers have to spend with residents, to see how their day's going, to make sure they have the care they need, that they're not lying waiting to go to the bathroom, that they're not having accidents because they need the support and assistance. These kinds of things are critical to how we run our aged-care system.

I commend these bills, particularly the accountability that we wish to bring into this system, the accountability and transparency.