The Grattan Institute has released a new report entitled Rethinking aged care: emphasising the rights of older Australians, which calls for a complete overhaul of aged care:
Australia’s aged care system is failing older Australians and their families and needs to be overhauled. The care and support of older Australians must trump the profits of private providers.
Ageism as part of the problem, and emphasising the rights of older Australians in need of care and support is the start of the solution.
The horror stories from the Royal Commission into aged care and from the COVID-19 aged care crisis have to stop.
More money and different regulation are both necessary, but won’t be enough. Australia needs to fundamentally change the culture of its aged care system.
Over the past few decades the sector has become a ‘market’. As for-profit providers moved in, residential facilities got bigger. Regulation has not kept pace with the increasingly privatised market. Government focus has been on constraining costs rather than ensuring quality.
The government’s poor commitment to the care and support of older Australians reflects society’s disdainful attitude to the aged.
Older Australians are often seen as a burden and no longer valuable or contributing members of society. They are pushed out of sight and out of mind.
The result is the shameful mess we have today: a top-down, provider-centric aged care system that is under-funded, poorly regulated, and failing older Australians.
Merely adding further Band-Aids to a broken system is not enough. Australia needs to start again with a new Act that puts the rights of older Australians at the heart.
Five key rights-based principles should shape the system:
- Independence, self-fulfilment, and participation in community
- Informed and supported choice and control
- Universal access to reasonable and necessary supports
- Equity and non-discrimination
- Dignity, including dignity in death
This first report on aged care sets the overarching framework for reform. A second report to follow will detail how Australia can build a rights-based aged care system so that older Australians can live dignified and meaningful lives.
Too right. COVID-19 has exposed the neoliberal obsession with transferring the provision of public services to private providers, and this is now costing lives.
We witnessed the failures of this model first with the Victorian Government’s botched handling of hotel quarantine for returned travelers.
Instead of using the Victorian Police, the Department of Corrections, or the Australian Defence Force to run hotel quarantine, the Andrews Government instead contracted out provision to dodgy private security companies. These companies then subcontracted out quarantine to cheap untrained labour hire, resulting in widespread breaches and the transmission of COVID-19 into the community.
The results were catastrophic. After nearly eliminating the virus from Australia, COVID-19 spread like wildfire throughout Victoria, with infections seeping into NSW and QLD.
Victoria’s ballooning COVID-19 infections subsequently exposed another area of neoliberal failure: privately run nursing homes.
As explained below by Monash University’s Professor Joe Ibrahim, the failures with nursing homes are decades in the making and the result of relying on profit-making businesses to provide services formerly provided by governments or charities.
According to Dr Ibrahim, 20 reports over several decades have identified systemic problems with privately run aged care, including:
- Shortages of staff
- Staff not having the skills sets they need
- Free market principles, whereby there is a lack of transparency, a lack of information given to the residents and their families, a lack of accountability about where the $20 billion of taxpayer’s money goes every year
- Profiteering by providers cutting costs and failing to comply with standards
- Huge gaps in infection control
- Regulatory failure
The obsession with marketisation is costing lives and needs a full 180-degree policy reversal.
