Michelle Ananda-Rajah (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I welcome the opportunity to speak about a topic close to my heart, and that is aged care. As you know, in my previous life I was a doctor working in a major public hospital. I wore two hats: one was as a general physician, and the other was as an infectious diseases specialist. As a general physician, which was actually the bulk of my work, I looked after a lot of elderly Australians. It was, in fact, probably the majority of my workload and my case mix. I saw every ailment and every problem under the sun, and one of the characteristics of all those frail elderly Australians who would come through the door and would be admitted into hospital was multimorbidity. They would have multiple comorbidities, one on top of another on top of another.

But it could be much worse than that. In some cases, these were elderly Australians who were coping or barely coping with social isolation. Some had been abandoned by their families; they were alienated from their families or estranged from them. Others were actually victims of a pretty silent scourge in our communities, and that is elder abuse—where an older Australian is exploited, usually by one of their children. This was a common occurrence, and we would often have to bring our hospital lawyers to deal with this.

But there was certainly a surge during the pandemic years. Senator Colbeck cited 2019 to 2022 and all the achievements of the former Morrison government, but that period, for me, was spent on the frontline in the hospital in PPE caring for a whole string of elderly Australians who were flooding through the doors. Many were gasping for air. Others were delirious. Some had had falls. Some experienced all three of those things together. What I noticed during that time was a complete collapse of the aged-care system, such that we had hospitals that were getting overwhelmed with frail elderly people and we had a workforce that was utterly decimated during that period, burnt out and leaving the sector. Is it any wonder that we are now trying to clean up the mess, a legacy that was born from chronic underinvestment in aged care over the previous decade of Liberal stewardship and then made worse by the pressure test that was COVID?

In fact, the first piece of legislation we passed as a government in 2022 was not actually about climate change; that was the second one. It was on aged care. We had to bring on this emergency legislation in order to rescue the sector. What we've seen since is, in fact, a huge uplift in the workforce. We've poured $18 billion into the aged-care workforce, and it always starts with the workforce. In care, it always starts with the workforce. The workforce is everything. They are the ones who provide the care. It is called 'aged care' for a reason. It's not infrastructure and all of that; it is the workforce. So we brought in $18 billion and basically increased the wages of this important, mission-critical workforce, such that registered nurses are now $430 a week better off and carers are $320 a week better off.

But that wasn't all. We also brought in 24/7 nursing, and that's present now in 99 per cent of aged-care sites. Having a nurse on site actually means that you get far less egress of patients into hospital because nurses on site can manage medical issues. They can seek advice. They can dispense medication. They can also palliate patients in residential aged-care facilities. This has, in effect, lifted the confidence of Australians again in residential aged care.

The next piece of reform that is going to start on 1 November is a whole new generational change, which looks at how we better support Australians at home and how we put their wishes and preferences at the centre of everything we do. That is something that was missing in the previous aged-care act, so there'll be a whole new act that kicks off on 1 November. It has been passed thanks to the bipartisan approach we have taken with the coalition, and a key part of the act is Support at Home. Support at Home will come with the injection of 83,000 new packages into the system. That is designed to enable more Australians to have autonomy and remain at home, which is entirely aligned with their own wishes.