I do not normally watch Q & A. In fact I consciously avoid it such was the affect that Tony Jones and his stacked audiences had on me but last night for reasons unknown, when I finished my dinner and went to the TV room it was on. Obviously the 7.30 Report had not been turned off.
This was the first occasion when I saw it chaired by Hamish Macdonald and I have to say that I was impressed. The topic of the moment was the Brittany Higgins rape complaint but the programme quickly morphed into the aged care discussion. The more that went on the more interested and disgusted I became.
The stories from sensible people were harrowing. The clap trap from the motor mouth of Katie Allen had me yelling at the TV in disgust at her trundling of the party line. The contributions from Claire O’Neill and Professor Ibrahim were little short of breathtaking. Disgusting is not too extravagant a word for their description of what occurs and is ignored.
I have had experience with my own relatives in nursing homes and mostly they have been unpleasant but better than they could have been by the mere fact that my wife and her sister attended daily to the facility where my mother-in-law was housed and by my sister where my own mother was a patient for some 10 years. They kept the staff up to the mark but in between times we had to move my mother-in-law three times due to the really bad care she was getting in some places.
One of the e-mailed contributions last night stated that the profit motive needed to be removed from the system and with that I thoroughly agree. The worst service from my own experience is at the corporate run facilities where administrative types run the show with no care for anything other than the bottom line. These places are usually extravagantly presented up front to appeal to the relatives who do the paying. The staff, particularly at weekends and public holidays are no more caring than workers on a factory production line. The whole system just stinks and in my opinion is so serious that direct intervention from the prime minister is urgently called for.
Unfortunately we have a prime minister who is incapable of doing anything practical in any situation. His solution is to call an inquiry or a Royal Commission and leave it at that. Nowhere good enough Morrison.
I have been a dedicated voter for the Liberal Party all my voting life which is 68 years. I have been a strident critic of Morrison on almost every topic that has arisen since he was elected to this office but I must say that last night’s Q&A has decided me to vote Labour at the next election whenever that is. Bad as they are I can’t see how we will be any worse off than we are with the current mob of useless parasites. If Labour can produce candidates like Claire O’Neill we will certainly be better off despite the impact of the Shortens and Bowens in their ranks.
In the past few days we have had contributions full of nostalgia and I can relate to all of that without being accused of living in the past. The fact remains that prior to the advent of Whitlam it was very common practice for elderly people to live with their adult children. This was the case with both sets of my grandparents and common among my childhood friends.
In more recent years the combination of smaller families and mothers going to work have rendered this difficult or impossible and the advent of what we now call nursing homes or aged care facilities has created a less caring atmosphere in our society. The demands of having to balance a growing budget have made this a necessity but that does not excuse the oppressive conditions our elderly citizens have been sentenced to. When an elderly person even thinks of the options of nursing home –v- euthanasia that brings our sense of care and responsibility to its absolute lowest ebb.
If Morrison can find the money to splash around under the guise of COVID-19 he can just as easily find the money to replace the current profit driven system with something that represents real social service. Morrison wallows in the glory of being seen as a dedicated church going Christian. It’s a pity he does not put the façade behind him and apply some real Christian ideals in practice.
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