Why Young People Should Care About Aged Care Reform.

When COVID-19 hit, the number of things to care about increased exponentially. Hundreds of thousands of people lost their jobs. People couldn’t make their rent. Food banks and homeless shelters had to turn people away. And in aged care homes across the country, 685 people died.

I’m a campaigner at GetUp, working on human rights. I’m the person who sends you emails to sign petitions, the annoying friend who’s always begging you to come to rallies, and the awkward one at parties who calls people out for telling problematic jokes.

It’s my job to make people care about things.

I’ll be honest: before it was my job, I didn’t really know much about aged care. I’m in my mid-20s. I don’t have family in aged care facilities. It wasn’t that I didn’t care, exactly; there just seemed to be so many other things that were more important.

I’m not alone, either. Opinion polls and research studies usually find that young people care more about things like climate change, equality, discrimination, and mental health.

So why should fixing aged care be a top priority for young people?

Let’s step away from the personal for a second —  or as my mum would put it: “Think about someone other than yourself for a change”.

Young people shouldn’t give a damn about aged care because they might get old one day, or because they might have a parent or grandparent in aged care. Young people should care about aged care because it’s reflective of a society that we want to be a part of — one that values and respects its elders, and one where people care as much for each other and each other’s problems as they do their own.

So What’s Even The Problem With Aged Care?

The problems in aged care are a symptom of the systemic problems in Australian society.

For the last 25 years, selfishness has been the guiding principle of Australian politics. The question most people ask when they’re going to the ballot box or considering a policy change is — how will this affect my bottom line?

And it’s not because we’re bad or selfish people — it’s because individual advancement is the undertone of our democracy.

And that’s where the problems with aged care started.

In 1997, the Howard government deregulated the aged care industry. Under the guise of “using public money efficiently,” he turned what should be a public system run by public health authorities into a commercial enterprise. Aged care is now largely funded by public money going to private companies whose motivation is to maximise their own profits at the expense of providing decent, dignified care for residents, and resources for staff.

We’ve known for a long time that Australia’s aged care system is profoundly, desperately broken. Well, everyone except for Scott Morrison, who boasted that “our aged-care sector in Australia provides some of the best care in the world”.

The horror stories that have been coming out for years beg to differ.

In 2016, a woman named Dawn Weston died after pressure sores on her feet grew gangrenous to the point where her bone was sticking through the skin. In the two and a half years she had been in aged care, she had lost nearly 25 kilos.

Tanya Bosch, a former personal carer, told 4 Corners of residents being so depressed, they would ask her to smuggle them pills so they could die by suicide.

After huge amounts of political pressure, Scott Morrison called a royal commission into the aged care industry in 2018. For over two years, residents, carers, nurses and families spoke out about what conditions are really like inside aged care homes all across the country.

Then COVID-19 hit, and more horror stories came out. Care staff in a Melbourne home found a 95-year-old woman with ants crawling from a wound in her leg. As carers and support workers fell sick, some facilities left a handful of staff to care for dozens of residents, leading to people going days without food, water, showers or toilet breaks. Elderly people were isolated inside their rooms for months at a time, enduring unimaginable psychological suffering.

COVID-19 exposed the horrors of a system designed to make money at the expense of our elders. In Victoria, 99.6% of COVID-19 aged care cases occurred in private facilities. It really highlighted the system’s complete inability to keep people safe, let alone live with comfort and dignity.

At the same time this was happening, the Royal Commission was drafting its findings and recommendations.

The Royal Commission provided a positive vision for aged care. It’s now up to us to make it happen

In February this year the Royal Commission laid bare its 148 recommendations for aged care.

Of course, the Royal Commission can’t fix everything. But for the first time it seemed like a positive vision for aged care was within reach.

One that put respect for the elderly at the heart of the system. One that properly funded, trained and valued the workforce. And one that set standards for private providers and held them accountable for delivering quality care for our loved ones.

All of those changes will come at a huge cost. Experts estimate that fully implementing the Royal Commission’s recommendations will cost $28 billion over the next four years.

Early leaks from the upcoming Federal Budget show Morrison will fall $18 billion short of this — dedicating only $10 billion over the next four years. His early response to the Royal Commission in March also cast doubt on his seriousness to adopt wide-reaching reforms.

He paid lip service to the seriousness of the problem, but refused to acknowledge any of the systemic issues the Commission identified. Like how his government has allowed the private sector to get away with siphoning away funds from our elders with virtually no oversight.

So It Seems Like It’s Up To The Government to fix this. Why Should I Care About Aged Care?

Our entire response to COVID-19 fundamentally flipped the individualistic way our country had been functioning for years. It showed that in order to make transformative changes that truly protect people through tough times, we need a collective mindset. One that puts people over profits.

Looking at other countries, it’s easy to think Australia got lucky.

Truth is, it wasn’t luck — it was people’s commitment to keeping each other safe. We stayed home, even through emotionally and socially devastating lockdowns. Thousands of people started and joined mutual aid groups to look out for neighbours in need.

For the first time we saw a conservative government increase income support, put a ban on evictions and generally put the safety of people above the profit of businesses. All things that would’ve been completely unimaginable pre-COVID.

Now, as Morrison uses the post-COVID economy as an excuse to shred our social safety net even more, it becomes ever more important to remember what got us through the pandemic:our ability to think of ourselves as a collective, rather than individuals.

Arguments to get people to care about aged care often centere around personal experience.

“Is this how you would want your grandparents to be treated?”

“Is this where you would want to live?”

But those arguments, while compelling, are inherently flawed. If you’re like me, and the problems of aged care don’t directly impact you, they’re far too easy to ignore.

We need to step away from thinking of policies as ‘me’ problems and ‘you’ problems and start thinking about things as a collective.

We can’t have a fair and equal country if our elders are not living their final years in aged care with dignity and respect. And that’s the ethos we should use to approach all policy changes — whether that be fighting to stop Black deaths in custody, fighting for a better income support system, or against gender discrimination.

It’s time for all people — young and old, from all sides of the political spectrum — to come together to demand aged care reform.

If you’d like to know more about our campaign – check it out here!

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Tessa is a senior campaigner on GetUp’s human rights team. She’s passionate about racial justice and memes that both make people laugh and cry about the world.