One of my constituents, Denise Newton, has summed up where we find ourselves right now. Quoting an academic she'd been listening to on the radio as she drove to meet me and the Leader of the Opposition last week, Denise said, 'COVID has been like an X-ray, showing where all the broken bits are.' Denise was speaking at a roundtable discussion I held with a small group of women who have loved ones in aged care. I wanted to give the opposition leader a glimpse of the sorts of problems I hear about from families of aged-care residents in my electorate. I know they'll be similar to those being heard right around the country. Some of these women have known that the system has been broken for a really long time—years—and they've actively tried to improve it and have not been taken seriously by any of those who have the power to fix it—that is, those on the other side. In fact, in presenting a list of issues to the regulator during a visit to a facility, they were told, 'We're not the complaints department.' If a regulator won't hear of the problems being raised by residents' families, who will?
Denise, Lisa, Sandra and Sue spoke passionately but calmly about the fears they have for the health for their loved ones residing in the Uniting Hawkesbury Richmond facility. This facility was recently among 104 aged-care facilities issued with noncompliance notices about infection control. I acknowledge that Uniting say that they've worked hard since then to implement a plan to improve infection control and that they're confident they'll demonstrate full compliance with all the standards and requirements. I don't doubt their efforts or the intentions to protect their residents and their team members, knowing that the staff themselves have so much pressure on them at the moment and that they are at a higher risk than any of us here, yet they earn a minimum wage. They are to be absolutely congratulated for the work that they're doing, but they can't do it alone.
I've visited the facility on a number of occasions. The staff have been a delight, from those slogging away in the laundry to those who care for residents like Ken, Lisa's dad, who's just turned 90. But that doesn't change the fact that these families have had long-running issues that I think go to the broken bits of the system, which COVID is really exposing. There are not enough staff, which means there isn't the time or the people to provide the quality of care that I'd expect for my family.
I think the other two participants at my roundtable, Liz and Jo, who have family members in other facilities, were shocked at what they were hearing. But we have to talk about this. That's why the royal commission is so important and so overdue. That's why it's not good enough for the Prime Minister to give a belated apology to families of those who have died, for whom all of us here have the deepest of sympathies. That's why it's not enough for the Prime Minister to try and pretend he doesn't have full and total responsibility for aged care and the tragic deaths of people in aged care with COVID. We're at over 330 so far, and no-one thinks that that number won't rise. It strikes fear into the heart of anyone with a family member in care, and that includes me.
The reports on Newmarch House, where 19 people died—17 of those deaths being directly linked to COVID—and Dorothy Henderson Lodge, where six lives were lost, were kept hidden by the government even though they had them in April. Back in May, I called on the Morrison government to learn what went wrong in those facilities, particularly because Newmarch House is just outside my electorate and my constituents include residents of the Hawkesbury and the Blue Mountains who had family members there. The government didn't learn those lessons, and Victoria's heartbreaking experience shows us that. They knew from Newmarch that as many as 90 per cent of a workforce could be out of action if COVID got into a facility, but in late July the Prime Minister said it couldn't have been anticipated or foreshadowed. That is just not true. The report into Newmarch shows it could and should have been anticipated and planned for. The need for more PPE should have been anticipated. It was clear to me in conversations with the minister and others during the Newmarch disaster that PPE was being reserved for outbreaks, not being used to prevent them. Why was there no obvious plan to ensure that every resident had a way of communicating directly with their families if they were able to? The silence during the Newmarch debacle was agony for families, and that's why Sandra, Sue, Denise, Lisa, Jo and Liz, and everybody else who has a parent, a wife or a husband in aged care, deserves— (
