Kedgley Sue: Budget Debate 
Kedgley Sue: Budget Debate 
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SUE KEDGLEY (Green) 
: 
 Before the Budget was announced the Prime Minister said in this House that there would be good news in the Budget for the elderly and for aged care. But I am not sure what the Prime Minister meant because there was no good news; there was only bad news. There was no new Budget funding for aged care despite the acute shortages of staff in many aged-care homes and the pitifully low wages that aged-care workers are paid. 
There was no increased budget for home care either. It was quite to the contrary. More and more elderly all around New Zealand are having the few hours of home-care help that enables them to stay in their own homes cut. Yesterday Winnie Laban and I were in Invercargill where 682 older New Zealanders have had their home help cut. Two hundred people turned up to a meeting to discuss the devastating impact these cuts are having on them causing widespread distress dismay and anxiety. We heard horror story after horror story. A 99-year-old woman who is getting treatment for cancer has just had her home help cut. She has absolutely no one to help her as her family live in the North Island. A woman who is blind is having her home help cut as is another woman who can walk only with the aid of a walking frame. A caregiver told us that she had popped in to see a woman who had had her home help cut a month before. Nobody had been to visit this woman for a month and she was then living in squalor. Is this how we want to treat our elderly? We were told that already two people who had had their home care cut had ended up in hospital after falls. These drastic cuts to home care around the country which the National Party campaigned against before the election amount to little more than discrimination against and even abuse of our elderly. 
The story is equally grim for aged care. People who are living in rest homes are some of the most vulnerable in our society. Surely we have a duty to ensure that these vulnerable elderly are treated with dignity and respect and do not suffer from abuse or neglect. But unfortunately as a succession of recent reports have revealed many residents in aged-care homes are suffering from neglect and even abuse. We have reports of residents not being showered for days on end not being walked properly and suffering from malnutrition weight loss lack of fluids or dehydration. Some are not being fed properly or are being put on psychotic medication to keep them quiet. Residents have not been discovered for 8 hours after a fall and so on. I could go on and on about the stories that people have been telling us as well as those incidents that have been reported in official documents. 
The aged-care workers we have been talking to around New Zealand say that most of them are so overworked they are simply unable to provide the care they believe residents need. Many of them say they are instructed not to talk to residents because the workers are too busy and it is not in their job description. Many aged-care workers report they are doing the work that would normally be carried out by nurses on a routine basis. Despite lacking qualifications or training they are dispensing medication—even drugs like morphine—on a routine or even daily basis. Nurses themselves report that on a shift they are caring for as many as 30 or even 50 residents on their own. One nurse I talked to was responsible for 30 residents in an aged-care facility and another 33 residents living in villas. 
Can we imagine if these sorts of problems were discovered in preschools or creches and if we had preschoolers suffering from malnutrition and dehydration untrained staff and toddlers left on their own for long periods of time? There would be a national scandal. So why do we turn a blind eye when it is happening to our elderly? One of the main reasons I believe that these incidences of neglect and abuse keep on surfacing is that the aged-care sector is almost completely deregulated. There are no minimum staffing levels or any requirement for even minimum qualifications for aged-care workers. On the one hand we have large multinational corporations making huge profits out of aged care—Rymans Healthcare made a profit of $61 million last year—on the other hand we have older New Zealanders suffering from neglect and abuse because of a lack of staff.