Aged care budget changes need to be more than just the numbers

The federal government will significantly increase aged-care allocations in the budget (“Billions for aged-care overhaul”, 10/5). Unions, professional bodies, centre owners and regulators have been quick to put up their hands about where the funding needs to be spent. Naturally residents of these centres won’t have a say as everyone else knows what’s best for them. If they did have a voice I am sure they would ask for friendly staff dedicated to their care, in contrast to career professionals with bundles of certificates and qualifications to justify six-figure salaries. They would ask for good old-fashioned cooks who could prepare meals that residents have been eating for the past seven or eight decades rather than slop regulated by nutritionists counting calories and vitamins with complete disregard for taste.

Everyone should work together to make the last years of our seniors’ lives happy. Big salaries and over-regulation should be secondary.

Chris Blanch, Spring Hill, Qld

I write on behalf of all frail aged residents who have ever had their vitamised meal returned in haste, unfinished, to the kitchen, had been given inadequate pain relief due to undiagnosed terminal cancer, had been left in cold wet beds. Or all those whose teeth were cleaned too infrequently, those who wanted only some warm human interaction and were too hurriedly transferred from wheelchair to bed — and of the lady who was called “a princess” when she complained of pain on being made to walk on an undetected fractured femur. I could also add those staff who had little or inadequate education in COVID infection control management.

My plea on their behalf is that when the federal government finally announces on budget day its response to the aged care royal commission, it most urgently amends the foolish and criminally inadequate staffing requirements of the 24-year-old Aged Care Act that gave licence to providers to dispense with all but the barest minimum of staff (particularly trained staff), which clearly can be correlated with nursing care conditions that could be headlined only as “Neglect” in the commission’s interim report of October 31, 2019.

Glenda Addicott, Ringwood East, Vic

How will the $18bn aged-care budget response, designed to increase staffing levels, possibly succeed in its objective when that workforce of humble, unskilled and lowly paid immigrants willing to perform the menial tasks demanded of aged-care staff to look after elderly Australians on the nation’s behalf will be banned from even entering the country due to our international borders being closed in the foreseeable future? COVID-19 restrictions have educated us to the fact that just as picking fruit is simply quite an unacceptable option for Australians to contemplate, there is absolutely no reason to believe working in aged care will be any different. Just as our fruit rots on the ground, our aged seem doomed to decay in their beds.

Crispin Walters, Chapel Hill, Qld

With the budget one cannot but get the impression that the federal government is looking more like an old-fashioned Labor government. There will be handouts galore, but I must say I cannot be too critical of Treasurer Josh Frydenberg. Australian voters automatically believe the government owes them a living. To get re-elected the Morrison government must go down this pathway or else pay the price of defeat. Because of COVID, fiscal restraint by all governments has become a thing of the past, but there will be a day of reckoning.

Peter D. Surkitt, Sandringham, Vic

One million adults between the ages of 40 to 49 can now register to get the Pfizer vaccine within weeks. In the meantime, we older Australians have no choice. We must make do with the flawed AstraZeneca vaccine, which is also considerably less effective against the mutant strains now present in scores of countries. We will also have much less protection here in Australia if there is an outbreak of the mutant strains. When we discussed this, my doctor commented: “The federal government considers older Australians expendable.”

Paul Raffaele, Leichhardt, NSW

An $18bn aged-care reform budget package will be throwing good money after bad should the extra funding largely be diverted to boost nursing home profits and executives’ salaries.

Steve Ngeow, Chatswood, NSW