Page 1804 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 7 June 2006
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What you have to do is compare bricks and mortar on the ground—open, accommodating people—with what the government has done today. In part (2) of her motion Ms MacDonald “recognises the commitment of the Stanhope Labor government to maintaining services for these people”. I think you really have to ask the question: what have they maintained and what have they done?
I note that, on page 78 of budget paper 3, there is an initiative called “helping younger people with disabilities in residential aged care services”. But clearly this is aimed at providing programs to assist, whether they live in a nursing home, which is not going to get people out of nursing homes, or whether they live at home as they age. The problem with that is they can only stay there for a finite period of time. As Ms MacDonald rightly points out, their families often cannot cope with some of the injuries that young males in particular have received, and indeed they end up in nursing homes because there just are not enough beds.
I note that this initiative in the budget paper this morning is in fact in response to a commonwealth government initiative. At February’s COAG meeting they agreed to provide $122 million towards a five-year program that was designed to help keep younger people out of aged care facilities. Well done to the federal government. Indeed, with the almost one million dollars here, congratulations to the ACT government on at least starting to acknowledge that there is more that needs to be done. But we do not see initiatives that will put more accommodation on the ground, and that is the problem.
We know we have a problem with nursing home beds, we know there is a lack of them, and we know there are long waiting lists. For instance, I was told that Leslie Moreshead had only placed one new resident in their facility last year and have a waiting list of something like 750. It is those sorts of numbers that are not being dealt with by this government at all, and I think there is more that needs to be done.
The whole issue of quality of life, as raised by Ms MacDonald, is something that needs to be addressed. If you are a young bloke or a young woman and you go into a nursing home and the only free bed is in a dementia ward, then you are spending your entire day with people who do not know who they are and probably have no idea who you are or what you are. For a young person coping with a physical disability or a physical injury, that must drive you crazy, quite literally.
Ms MacDonald raises the point that the statistics all show that their friends then drop off and young people tend not to visit nursing homes. It is often hard enough to get young people to visit their own relatives in nursing homes, let alone a young mate or a young female friend, and that is the problem they are in. It also puts pressure on the nursing home sector.
They are taking up beds that reasonably and appropriately should be there for older people, for people with specific injuries or dementia or just suffering from the ravages that old age brings to us all. So there are a number of problems here. At the core of it, yes, we need to keep people in their homes as long as we can but we also need to make sure that, when they do need accommodation—bricks and mortar on the ground—the facilities exist.
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