Australia grows harsher, cares less, aged care inquiry and Woolworths underpayments show

Two stories this week — Woolworths’ underpayments, and aged care’s shocking tale of neglect — highlighted a nation where caring for others has been trampled by greed, writes Jack.

Two big stories came to light this week. One, a continuing roll call of corporate shame that we can broadly refer to as wage theft. The other, an interim report released yesterday by the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety, a digest of neglect and cruelty foisted upon Australia’s elderly.

Taken together, they reflect shifting attitudes in our nation where a sense of care for others in the community has been trampled by greed and an obsession with maximising profit.

Let’s name and shame them — bearing in mind they are just the organisations that have either self reported or been exposed by the overseer, the Fair Work Commission.

Qantas, Woolworths, Wesfarmers, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Rockpool Dining Group, Seven-Eleven. Even legal firm Maurice Blackburn who chase up other wage underpayments are on the growing list.

I could mount a solid argument that any business that can navigate its way through complex tax law, pay senior executives staggering salaries and become fixated on woke expressions of feel-good vacuity yet can’t pay their employees a legal wage shouldn’t be in business.

READ MORE:

PM promises extra aged care funding by Christmas | Beyond hopeless: Porter slams Woolworths’ $300m underpayment | Aged care ‘a shocking tale of neglect | Staff burnt as ‘companies put shareholders first’ |

Self-regulation and the prospect of slap on the wrist penalties has shifted priorities away from basic standards of employee welfare. The Attorney-General, Christian Porter has indicated new laws will criminalise wage theft. I suppose the prospect of a stretch in HM Silverwater will see executives shift priorities back but why must there be a threat of criminal sanction to make people do the right thing?

That’s the concern. Ethics or morality don’t count for much but throw in an outside chance of a prison sentence and people might behave themselves.

But possibly not even then when we turn to the appalling stories of abuse inflicted on the elderly in residential care.

‘Give up the pretence Australia is a decent place to live’

The one remark from the commissioners that struck me was this:

“As a nation, Australia has drifted into an ageist mindset that undervalues older people and ­limits their possibilities.”

If we really have given up on one demographic and in this case, one that should be honoured, we might as well give up any pretence that Australia is a decent place to live.

It’s dog eat dog where only the lucky and the well heeled can hope to enjoy basic human dignity in old age.

Too often the cry from the community is the government should step in and make things right. Obviously government has an oversight role in industrial relations and aged care.

Labor and some media have accused the government of cutting funding in aged care. The claim is based on an element of 2016-17 federal budget handed down by then Treasurer Scott Morrison. Ignore the smoke and mirror arguments, the short answer is funding to the sector has increased in real terms.

A generation treated abysmally

Moving on from the naked politicking, the simple fact is public funding in aged care is inadequate and with a rapidly ageing population will always be so.

The lessons of this Royal Commission is not just that a generation of elderly Australians have been treated abysmally when they are at their most vulnerable but that Australians of my vintage and younger can have little or no hope of living the final years of their lives with dignity when their time comes as things stand.

Without significant improvements to the aged care industry we can expect assisted dying or euthanasia legislation to flourish. I broadly support the concept of euthanasia but with a profound sense of dread hanging over aged care in this country, the clamour for changes in law until our parliaments will cross lines that should not be crossed and we end up with a very ugly response to ageing in Australia.

An old lady's hands in generic photo for Aged Care.

Simply the provision of aged care facilities cannot be a high profit business based on low overheads, inadequate staff levels who are poorly or untrained in any event and whose idea of care is to dope residents up to a point of paralysis.

The federal government does encourage in-home or stay-at-home care for the elderly through the My Aged Care program. Overall, most people would prefer to stay at home although it may not be possible if they need constant care.

Stay-at-home stumbling blocks

I’ve looked at the program for support for my own 87-year-old mother. She’s a self-funded retiree who won’t have a bar of residential care.

She declined to enter into My Aged Care, but having made the calls I can only say the program is mind-numbingly complex and provides in-home care at a level determined if not arbitrarily then by a problematic bureaucratic assessment.

Funds are allocated via Centrelink and the individual to pay for services on a needs basis.

Ultimately, my mother declined to enter the Commonwealth program and it was left to me to arrange support services that she pays for out of her own pocket.

At the end of the day I have confidence she gets the care she needs on a daily basis and she gets to stay in her own home.

This tells me the best responses in a great many cases are determined by the level of retirement income available. That in itself is a lottery and subject to tax grabs.

What we can’t continue to tolerate is substandard care for our mothers and fathers.

Australia can be a harsh and unforgiving place. What we need to ask ourselves is are we happy with that? Are we content with workers being ripped off and the elderly being subject to cruelty and neglect? Government can’t solve these problems on its own.