He said he did it: court
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Intersex people’.
“If you run an aged care facility with 150 people and think you’ve got no clients outside the mainstream heterosexual population, you’re deluding yourself,” Mr Rowe said.
“We’re now seeing a cohort of people accessing aged care that grew up in an environment where they were punished for their sexuality.
“Until the early 1970s, it was illegal in Queensland for two consenting males to have sex … so some people are very reluctant to disclose within the (residential) aged care system that they may be gay, transgender or whatever.
“We’ve seen gay men who have been in relationships for decades but one moves into an aged care facility and, for whatever reason, staff don’t provide them with the privacy they should be able to have.”
Not that such concerns are confined to LGBTI people.
“A simple thing is having the ability for people to lock their door,” Rowe said.
“Requesting privacy for an intimate moment isn’t something most of us have to do, but someone in an aged care facility has to almost be explicit, often with people who are strangers, about what their intentions are.
“It’s about listening to people and providing chances (to fulfil a need for intimacy).”
Mr Rowe’s call for greater empathy from aged care providers comes in the wake of Federal Government Increasing Choice in Home Care reforms, which he said would hand more power to a generation accustomed to choice.
“The current users of aged care services are the grateful generation – a generation that doesn’t really complain and are grateful for any support they can get,” he said.
“Now the Baby Boomers are on the way to using aged care services and no one ever called them grateful.
“They are a generation that said ‘We want it and we want it now’ and the Government’s broader intention is to give consumers more choice and control because the generation that’s coming is certainly going to demand it.” VINCENT O’Dempsey allegedly told three separate people he was involved in the Brisbane cold case murders of Barbara McCulkin and her two daughters, a trial has heard.
Mrs McCulkin and her children Vicki, 13, and Leanne, 11, have not been seen or heard from since January 16, 1974.
Prosecutor David Meredith told the Brisbane Supreme Court yesterday that O’Dempsey admitted to three separate people he was involved in the subsequent murders of the women.
The witnesses were a person he was growing cannabis with in the late 1990s, a lover from the 2000s and a fellow prisoner in January 2017.