While the Royal Commission into aged care made some useful recommendations, Aged Care Crisis has been very concerned at the matters they failed to address. These are issues within our society and our political system that impact on aged care and the many other sectors that have failed.
Our experience, our research and our analysis indicates that they were the reasons why the aged care system has failed repeatedly and so badly. This analysis also shows why policy failures like this are so resistant to change and why the failures in aged care and similar sectors keep recurring in spite of attempts to make changes.
We have been even more concerned by the response of government and industry who seem to be denying their responsibility for what the Royal Commission found to be “a sad and shocking system that diminishes Australia as a nation”. They are pursuing the same policies and behaving in exactly the same way as they did before. They have appointed and commissioned the same people from industry to advise and work with them.
We became aware of another consultation 'Aligning Regulation across Care and Support Sector' by the Department of Health and discovered that they were conducting it in exactly the same restrictive way they have done in the past. This restricts criticism and prevents other parties from seeing the criticisms that others are making. Nothing seems to have changed.
We have therefore decided to set out the result of our experience, research and analysis (PDF658.67 KB). This explains what has been happening and indicates what needs to be done to create a context where we can address the difficult problems that develop in the complex world we live in more sensibly in the hope that some will find it informative and useful.
