Decade old aged care abuse scandal still haunts son of one of victims

When Stewart Johnston first suspected his mother Helen was being mistreated, he was told she was a confused old lady and that everything was fine.

The last picture of Helen Johnston (left) before she died Picture provided by Stewart Johnstone

When Stewart Johnston first suspected his mother, Helen, was being mistreated at the Oakden aged-care facility in Adelaide’s northern suburbs, he was told she was a confused old lady and everything was fine.

When his father, Ian Johnston, a highly educated man and successful industrial chemist, also pushed the issue, he was assured that Helen was in the safest possible hands.

Helen Johnston had become distressed while residing at the aged-care facility, which specialised in the treatment of elderly people suffering from mental illness and acute dementia.

She believed she was being slapped, shouted at, denied assistance to use the toilet and physic­ally slammed down on to the seat by an angry male staff member when he eventually acquiesced to her pleas for help.

Stewart and his father even went to the SA Police to see whether they could look into Helen’s allegations. They gave the Johnstons the same reassurance: they had spoken to the operators, there was nothing to worry about.

Except, of course, every word that Helen said was true.

She had been beaten. She had been abused. And the operators of this now-closed centre had done everything in their power to con the families, con the cops, con anyone who dared look into their squalid operation.

The galling thing for Stewart Johnston is that it took another nine years, from his family first raising concerns in 2008 to the collapse of Oakden amid a full-blown political scandal in 2017, for the truth to fully come out.

“When you talk about the ‘right to know’, cases don’t get much worse than this,” Mr Johnston told The Australian.

“At every step of the way, the key weapon that was used against people like me and my Dad, and all the other Oakden families, was secrecy. They even used secrecy as a weapon against the SA Police.

“They marshalled all their ­forces to make sure none of us could get to the bottom of what was really happening, and as a result dozens of defenceless old ­people endured a full decade of neglect and abuse because of a shameful bloody cover-up.”

Mr Johnston, 46, who works in an advisory role in the disability sector and has given evidence to the royal commission into aged care, said the saddest thing was that no one took them seriously, and even went so far as to lie to them to shut down a scandal.

“We never even bothered going to the media because we kept getting told that there wasn’t a story there,” he said. “We still don’t have the level of transparency that we need. We have no safeguards in place to make sure that our loved ones are safe.”

He says he remains devastated about the toll the ordeal took on his parents. His mother died in 2014 and his father in 2011.