Transcript ABC 891 Adelaide with Ian Henschke

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PDF printable version of Transcript ABC 891 Adelaide with Ian Henschke (PDF 373 KB)

06 August 2012

E &OE Only

Topics: Aged care, HACC, NDIS, dementia, 2012 National Aged Care Conference

Ian Henschke: Well, Mark Butler, I'm sorry we had to keep you waiting there, Minister for Mental Health and Ageing, but as you would realise coming from the Port Adelaide area, this is the big story today.

Mark Butler: Oh, it is and it's one I'm listening out for as well. I know everyone down in Port Adelaide is.

Ian Henschke: Now, look, you're here to open up a very big conference on ageing today. There is a lot of talk about ageing. What's the action going to be?

Mark Butler: We've got 1000 people down at the convention centre today for a two-day conference to talk about our aged care reform policy. It's a wonderful roll-up of people from around the country here to get down and dirty into the detail, if you like, about the policy we announced a few months ago.

We've just heard from Ita Buttrose who is the President of Alzheimer's Australia. She was the primary carer for her father in his last years who had vascular dementia, a very common form of dementia, and she's taken up the cudgels over the last 18 months as the figurehead of the Alzheimer's Australia campaign Fight Dementia.

So she gave a really inspiring speech over the last half hour or so and also I think set out some new challenges in addition to the things that we've identified in our policy, new challenges for our community in dealing with the epidemic of dementia.

Ian Henschke: Look, Mark Butler, one of the things that's been puzzling me over the last month is the announcement of the National Disability Insurance Scheme and I'm just wondering how ageing fits into this because they talk about packages for young people, then we hear people saying what about the people in the middle? What is the definition of someone who comes under the National Disability Insurance Scheme, for example, if you had the beginnings of Alzheimer's at, say, 60 or something like that, is that an ageing issue or is it a disability issue that would come under the new scheme? How is this all going to work with this new scheme and your portfolio?

Mark Butler: Jenny Macklin, the Minister with the responsibility for the National Disability Insurance Scheme, and I are working on that pretty hard.

You'll know our aged care reforms and the disability insurance scheme both came as a result of big inquiries by the Productivity Commission and in both of those reports the Productivity Commission essentially said this, that someone at age 65, if they get to what we consider the ageing area, so turning 65, with a disability, they should have the choice about whether they stay in the disability system or whether they move to the aged care system. So I guess that bedrock principle is the thing that we're thinking through now.

It really depends on what your condition is in that age area, about whether or not you've traditionally been dealt with in the disability sector.

For example, people who get an onset of dementia in their fifties or sixties have still traditionally been dealt with in the aged care system because that's where the clinical expertise to deal with dementia sits, rather than in the disability system.

But I know, talking to older Australians, one of their great interests in the disability insurance scheme is in their capacity as a carer. There are many, many older Australians out there who have been caring for their disabled children who are now perhaps middle-aged adults but who are ageing themselves and starting to think about their own care needs.

So, you know, as family carers they're very keen on us developing a National Disability Insurance Scheme that will give them some peace of mind that as they become less able to take care of their disabled child themselves there will be a system in place that will place those needs.

Ian Henschke: Now, Mark Butler, one of the areas that people say has been quite successful is the aged care package. This is the idea that you have a group of people working with a person to keep them in their home. A lot of people say that's the way they would like to see out their days. Is there any news on that front? Because if we're going to have more and more people ageing, living longer and more and more wanting to stay in their home, would that require more funding?

Mark Butler: It will and the centrepiece, really, of the reform package is to increase the number of packages for people in their own home by two-thirds.

I'd like to do it by even more but I think one of our real challenges is whether we're going to be able to get the number of workers needed to do that, but the central message I got talking to people about this over many months, is that what people want from their aged care system is not a system built around nursing homes but a system whose primary objective is to support them staying in their own home for as long as possible and, if at all possible, until the day they die.

Ian Henschke: And when you said that Ita Buttrose threw out some challenges, were there any particular things that she directed towards you in relation to the dealing with people with dementia in our society?

Mark Butler: I think the big challenge that Ita has identified is our research capacity. You know, we've got to do more not only in Australia but in America and Europe and the other big players in the health and medical research sector to understand what causes dementia and to try and be able to intervene earlier.

We have some level of understanding, mainly as a result of some discoveries made by Australians in the 1980s but we haven't really developed our understanding much since then. So we don't know what's happening to the brain, and we don't really know what we can do about what's happening to the brain. So what Ita's said is we really need to step up our research effort in the same way we have over the last few decades in areas like cancer and heart disease and suchlike and I think that's a very worthy challenge not just for government but for the country.

Ian Henschke: And you said that her father had vascular dementia. Is this related to arteriosclerosis, is it? So this is something that happened with age with her father?

Mark Butler: It is. That's right. It's a type of dementia that we know a little bit more about than we do Alzheimer's but still we don't know enough about so it's the second most common form of dementia and her father experienced it for a couple of years before he passed away and Ita was his primary carer so again, she brings a very personal perspective to this, as well as being one of Australia's greatest communicators.

Ian Henschke: Look, Mark Butler, we do thank you for your time this morning, stepping out of the conference there which you've just opened, the big aged care conference on in Adelaide and Mark Butler, the news has just come through about your football club, the Port Adelaide football club, announces that its board has decided not to proceed with an optional third year of the contract for senior coach Matthew Primus.

So you've heard it first there. Thanks for your time.

Mark Butler: Thanks, Ian.