Look Overseas for answer to Aged Care - 29th April 2014
Look
overseas for answer to our aged care problem
·
THEO THEOPHANOUS
·
HERALD SUN
IT’S time Australia looked
to Europe for inspiration and considered allowing foreign carers to look after
our elderly in their own homes.
Many of us Baby Boomers have watched the difficult and often
dehumanising experiences that our parents went through in aged care or nursing
home facilities and it is the last thing we want for ourselves.
Call it selfish or a desperate attempt to hold on to freedom, but
many of us would like to live in the comfort of our own homes until a very old
age. But we will need help to do that. The Home and Community Care program is
inadequate and paying privately for care at home is very expensive.
That’s why I was surprised during a recent trip to Europe to see
so many people in their 80s and 90s living at home and being cared for by
live-in hired help. Average and low-income earners are increasingly turning to
home care because they cannot afford or are unwilling to move into aged care
facilities. This trend is prevalent even in economically depressed places such
as Greece and Cyprus.
Such a plan could be a far better alternative for helping
Australia’s federal Budget in the long term than lifting the retirement age to
70. On average, even low-intensity residential aged care in Australia for an
elderly couple costs the Government about $47,000. If 12,000 such couples were
being looked after in their own homes at their own cost, the saving to the Government
could be $500 million.
You may wonder how people overseas can afford live-in carers. In
Cyprus, where I was staying, the Government introduced a scheme some years ago
whereby foreign workers — predominantly from the Philippines, eastern Europe
and Vietnam — could be hired as carers at affordable rates to live with and
look after the elderly.
The live-in carers are regulated and approved by a government
department and sourced from registered agencies. They must be paid a minimum
rate of 360 euros per month (about $600) and all their living costs covered.
Carers work a six-day week and no more than 40 hours in a week. The scheme has
inspectors and a complaints system to ensure fines are issued for breaches of
working conditions under European Union rules. The carers are required to
return to their own countries within three years.
It is true that the wages these workers receive are low by Western
standards. Nevertheless, they are high by standards in their own countries and
carers also receive all their living costs. When I was last in Cyprus my wife
was unwell and was treated in the local hospital. The two elderly women in the
same room had Vietnamese carers who would spend up to four hours at a time at
their bedsides comforting them. The affection and tenderness those carers
showed was humbling. Perhaps it is not surprising, given that they tend to come
from cultures that revere the elderly.
Foreign carers will not take Australian jobs as I doubt the small
number of existing Australian live-in carers who cater to the rich and receive
award wages in Australia would be affected by such a scheme. It should be of
far greater concern that our telcos outsource their call centres overseas, pay
a fraction in wages of what they would pay in Australia and deny thousands of
Australians access to jobs they have always done in the past. Those overseas
workers might be out of sight and mind, but they are still being paid low wages
by Australian companies to provide services to Australians. Already an
Indonesian institute has made a submission to the Productivity Commission
arguing for a scheme to bring live-in Asian nannies to Australia and pay them
$200 per week to overcome the high cost of childcare. This is double what they
would earn in Indonesia. I would say that with an ageing population, with
burgeoning healthcare costs and with the acute projected shortage of aged care
beds, the need for low cost live-in carers for the elderly is even more urgent.
And ageing Baby Boomers may be able to stay at home, potter around
the garden and listen to our vinyl records for a little bit longer.
Theo Theophanous is a former state government minister
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