Older Carers
HON ALISON XAMON (East Metropolitan) [9.45 pm]: I rise tonight to acknowledge that this is Seniors Week, which has been running from last Sunday and goes through to next Sunday. It is a special time of celebration for Western Australian seniors. During the week a range of events and activities are being held across the state to celebrate the contribution of seniors to the community. Of course, when we use the term “seniors”, it potentially encompasses an enormous range of members of our community, and Seniors Week certainly recognises the great diversity among older people. I want to also make it clear that it is my intention to one day be a senior myself.
I have spoken in this place before about grandcarers, who tend to be older people who are either formally or informally taking on the responsibility of full-time care of their grandchildren, and I have raised the challenges faced by grandcarers and the need for them to be recognised and supported. But tonight I want to mark Seniors Week by talking about a similar special group of older people, and that is older carers.
Under the Western Australian Carers Recognition Act, a carer is defined as a person who is caring for a family member or friend who requires support because of a disability of any kind, including mental ill health, chronic or terminal illness, or age-related frailty. I note that grandcarers do not technically fit into this category. However, I want to talk about the amazing role played by older carers and to share with members some of the information that has been provided to me by Carers WA, which provides support to the more than 300 000 people who provide either substantial or full-time care in Western Australia. Older carers are caring for many people within our community. Often they may be supporting their spouse, which I suspect many people would expect. As a person grows older with their partner, it is likely that one of them may find themselves in the position of needing to care for the other partner or for others, such as a sibling or a neighbour. However, in many instances we are also talking about senior carers who are still responsible for the care of an adult child with a disability or an impairment, or even a grandchild with a disability or impairment, and that is the group that I particularly want to mention tonight. According to Carers WA, more than 45 000 carers in WA are over 65 years of age, and that huge number represents about 17 per cent of all carers in WA. As I noted before, these statistics do not reflect people who care for an able-bodied child or a grandchild, but solely reflect people who are caring for someone with a physical or mental impairment. That type of caring is certainly quite an additional component to parenting.
The role that carers are playing in our community is enormous. Deloitte Access Economics has estimated that if the family and friend carers who do this work were replaced by paid staff, the cost to the Australian economy would be $40.1 billion annually. In my time in Parliament I have spoken to a number of parents who are older carers, and I have been very touched by the sorts of responsibilities that they take on. In particular, I spoke recently to an older carer whose life has effectively become subsumed with the ongoing care of her severely schizophrenic son. When she describes her week to me, I walk away feeling quite exhausted. I am particularly concerned to hear about her ongoing fears about what will happen as she becomes older and more frail. She also wonders what will happen to her when she ultimately passes away. Her story is very touching. I have likewise spoken to an older carer who has the ongoing responsibility of looking after her daughter who is in a wheelchair and requires care. The carer’s primary concern is to ensure that she manages to keep her daughter, who is quite severely physically impaired, out of a home for as long as she possibly can. I note that it is also a fear that is also very much shared by her daughter.
Older carers face a number of really specific issues and, as I have illustrated, quite understandably one of the key issues that they deal with is incredible levels of anxiety regarding the future. As I said, they are uncertain about what will happen to the person they care for when they are no longer able to provide that care. That anxiety is often further exacerbated by the knowledge that the person for whom they care also very much shares these fears. Obviously we cannot ever fully assuage that anxiety; however, we can ensure that there are enough appropriate and high-quality supported and other specialist accommodation options for when carers are no longer able to take care of their loved ones. According to Carers WA, older carers also have very specific health needs. Some carers may not adequately look after their own needs or might put off seeking support for themselves because they feel that they have to continue prioritising their caring role. I note that many older carers actually have a disability themselves, yet still find themselves carrying the caring responsibility. Also, financial stress is not uncommon for older carers. If they have been caring for many years or even decades, such as happens when caring for a child who has been born with a disability, their income may be low and they find themselves without the financial means to adequately maintain their home or car, if they even have one. Unfortunately, the occurrence of older carers still finding themselves renting is common. They also tend to experience higher rates of social isolation. Older people caring for someone at home may have a limited ability to leave their house due to the care needs of the person for whom they care or due to the stigma often associated with caring. As a result, they often experience serious social isolation. Carers often spend a lot of time and energy advocating for the needs of the people for whom they care, and it is important that carers’ individual needs are acknowledged as these are too often seen as secondary to others’ needs.
Carers WA recently published a report entitled “Carers of family and friends in country Western Australia: The services they have, the services they need”, which identifies that the country carers have a range of specific challenges. It identifies that carers’ lives would be improved through more timely access to respite, co-location of relevant services, fuel subsidies to offset the cost of multiple trips to specialist services in the city and coordinated access to different services. This report adds to the growing body of evidence about the experiences and needs of carers in our community and I would urge the government to consider and act on the report’s findings.
I also want to recognise tonight the important work done by carers groups in WA. Their work includes supporting carers through advocacy, counselling, education, social and peer support, advice and information. I note that Carers WA and Arafmi, among others, do fantastic work in this area. I congratulate them and all the other carer support groups for the essential roles they undertake. Because caring is a full-time job, sometimes a really difficult job that often goes completely unnoticed by others, carers report that they wish there was a wider understanding of their needs from service providers as well as from the general public. We each have a responsibility to raise awareness of the roles of carers and to promote recognition and understanding of their needs, so I thought that Seniors Week was a good opportunity for us to spread the message and to applaud the too often unsung role played by our carers. My hat goes off to carers, particularly senior carers who face such specific challenges.