I want to bring to the Senate’s attention a sad circumstance in central Queensland where the Mount Morgan aged-care facility is due to shut later this year because of the government’s inflexible requirements for nurses. However, laudable the new government’s ambition is to require a registered nurse to be on site 24 hours a day at aged-care facilities, it is having a shocking impact on rural and regional communities that simply do not have that many nurses in that community. In Mount Morgan, a town of just 2½ thousand people, 40 minutes west of Rockhampton, an aged-care facility that has served the community for decades will shut. All residents were written to in the last few weeks saying that they could not find the required nurses under the government’s new regulations; therefore, the residents there would have to make other arrangements. Invariably that will mean those residents will have to go to Rockhampton, which is about a 40-minute drive away. This will have a terrible impact on those families. Ms Marlene Sealey’s husband, Fred, has been in the Mount Morgan aged-care facility for the past three years while he battles dementia. He is just down the road. She can go and visit him every day and she does. But if Fred has to go to Rockhampton, Marlene will struggle to see Fred very often, given the drive, the fact that she does not even have a drivers licence and there is not an extensive amount of public transport for a community that small.
This is the real-world impact of the Labor government’s inflexibility. I call on the Labor government to apply their new rules in a flexible fashion that can allow families to stay together, that can allow aged-care facilities that have served their communities well for ages to survive. The reality is that requiring a nurse to be on-site 24 hours a day does not mean Mount Morgan has to find one nurse; it of course has to find at least three for the eight-hour shifts, and then four and five—I am told—to cover absences and holidays. That is never going to happen in a town of 2½ thousand people. These rules are designed for the cities, not for the bush, and the government should reconsider.
