US puts stop to Myanmar exports
The horror and heartache of Australia’s aged-care crisis is laid out in harrowing detail in this week’s royal commission report, writes Natasha Bita
WASHINGTON: The US has tightened export controls on Myanmar, imposing its latest sanctions in response to the junta’s deadly violence against pro-democracy protesters.
Myanmar was reclassified into the same group as US adversaries Russia and China in the level of scrutiny for any sensitive technology or materials, with restrictions now in place on any exports that could be put to military use.
Secretary of State Antony
Blinken said the US was taking the action “in response to shocking and deadly violence against protesters”.
“We call for the restoration of democracy in Burma,” he wrote on Twitter, using Myanmar’s former name.
The US Commerce Department said it was taking the exportcontrol measures and studying further actions “in response to the military coup and escalating violence against peaceful protesters”.
State Department spokesman Ned Price voiced outrage after more protesters were shot dead by the junta, which on February 1 ousted civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi following a decade of democracy.
“This escalation in violence demonstrates the fact of the junta’s complete disregard for their own people,” he said. “The United States will continue to respond in tandem with our partners and allies around the world.”
WHEN Magnetic Island SES was looking for a group leader in 1983, Murray Withers stuck his hand up and said: “I’ll do it for a short time, until you find somebody else.” Thirty-seven years later, he’s finally stepping down from the role.
After an illustrious volunteer career with the orange brigade, Mr Withers has decided to step aside and reduce his hours with the service to “give someone else a go”.
He will, however, remain with the team as a leading field operator.
The decision marks nearly four decades in charge of SES operations on the island.
HUMBLE BEGINNINGS
Mr Withers was one of just four members of the Magnetic Island SES group when he joined 38 years ago, becoming group leader 12 months later.
He took on that role after his predecessor accepted a new posting, in what he thought would be a short-term appointment.
“I said: ‘I’ll do it for a short time, until you find someone else’,” he said.
“I’ve had businesses on the island for some time, and I figured to contribute to the community … I was already in that SES role and that’s something that benefits everybody on the island.
“I decided I’ll stick with it. “I’m a Vietnam vet so I had a bit of knowledge I carried with me into the job and I just enjoy helping people and helping the community.”
When he first joined the SES, the organisation was involved in road accident rescue before the urban fire brigade became more established and took over the role.
HOW THINGS CHANGE
Two major changes within the SES have made it a different beast to what Mr Withers signed up for.
Moving into the digital age and focusing on the development of its people, the Magnetic Island branch has undergone dramatic change.
“SES has really gone hitech, from the days when the local policeman used to rock
up on your door and say ‘we’ve got a problem’ to now I get a text saying there’s a job on the task management system,” he said.
“You flick on the computer, have a look at the task and allocate and have people out so much quicker than the old system.”
With 28 members currently in the Magnetic Island unit, it was the early adoption of social media and websites that helped to drive recruitment.
The internet was used effectively to give the community a better idea of what the SES does and the service it provides to the local community.
But along with the move to a more modern way of operating, Mr Withers said the professionalism of its members and processes meant volunteers needed to be more committed.
“The SES has become a registered training organisation and people are much more competent in what they do,” he said.
“In the old days, people said, ‘yeah, I can use a chainsaw,’ and you’d let them go.
“Now they’ve got to be qualified, they’ve got to be current before you can send them out on a job.”
NIGHT OF NOAH
In nearly four decades of service, Mr Withers has seen his fair share of major events – none bigger than Cyclone Yasi or the Night of Noah.
While Yasi was one of the North’s biggest storms, it was fairly routine.
Mr Withers said while Yasi was a major system, dealing with cyclones becomes routine after experiencing half a dozen.
While there was minimal structural damage on the island, there were plenty of fallen trees and debris following the 210km/h winds.
“The scary thing about Yasi was the fact it was online to target Townsville, then took a turn at the last minute,” Mr Withers said. “It would’ve been horrific if it hit Townsville.”
While Yasi was significant, it was the damage caused by the Night of Noah on January 10, 1998 that caused the biggest issues.
“There were 12 units at what’s now Amaroo destroyed by landslides and we had people missing in the middle of the night,” Mr Withers said.
“I evacuated everyone down to the reception area. I was the only one who could get there because bridges and culverts were washed away.
“In Nelly Bay we got 28.5 inches (72cm) in 12.5 hours. There was three times that night we got five inches in an hour. The hillsides became slurries basically.
“I think that was the scariest event. With cyclones you know they’re coming, you prepare, you lock down and you come out afterwards and fix the damage.”
WHAT’S NEXT
While Mr Withers has stepped down from the role of group leader, he will continue on with the Magnetic Island SES, which is a major part of who he is.
His hours will reduce but his passion for the volunteer organisation will remain, and he’s hoping to pass on his knowledge and expertise to the next generation as numbers swell.
Mr Withers hopes to see another five years in the service, potentially 10, as long as he’s still able to contribute.
“It’s teaching me things I probably wouldn’t have otherwise learnt,” he said.
“The idea is I’m going to mentor the new group leader and some of the other members through to a better understanding of how things run, especially operational – that’s the big key.
“Just as long as I keep my sanity, I’ll be right.”
Annunziata Santoro loved to feed the chooks and tend to her garden, but died with maggot-infested bed sores from a negligent nursing home. Harrowing tales of neglect in the royal commission’s eight-volume report into aged care, made public this week, include that of Italian migrant Mrs Santoro, a retired dressmaker who enjoyed drinking espresso coffee, watching old movies and gardening.
Mrs Santoro’s life ended soon after maggots infested a weeping bedsore that had festered for weeks on her foot at the Assisi Aged Care Centre at Rosanna in Victoria.
A nurse told her horrified daughter that “maggots are often used in modern medicine’’, then suggested a fly must have laid eggs in the open wound when visitors took Mrs Santoro outside.
A doctor declared that “unless she was prepared to have her foot amputated, palliative care was the only realistic option’’.
Mrs Santoro was moved to a better nursing home for palliative care, where she died in 2018 at the age of 94 after a spending a painful year at the Assisi nursing home.
She had lost 10 per cent of her body weight in two months — weighing just 49kg — and had broken three bones in an unwitnessed fall.
The royal commission spells out the extent of Australia’s aged-care crisis, in a 2733-page report revealing heartbreaking abuse and neglect, corporate greed and regulatory incompetence.
One in three elderly Australians living in aged-care homes have suffered “substandard care in the most basic of human needs”, the report states, with as many as one in five assaulted by a staff member or fellow resident.
A Medicare-style levy to fund agedcare reform is now on the table, after Prime Minister Scott Morrison pledged
an extra $452m for aged care this year and flagged more taxpayer funding in the May Budget, on top of the $20bn already to be spent this year.
He announced an extra 1500 snap inspections of aged-care homes every year, after royal commissioners
Tony Pagone and Lynelle Briggs concluded that “substandard care and abuse pervades the Australian aged-care system’’.
The two-year inquiry has exposed physical and sexual abuse of residents by staff members, with two out of three residents malnourished, medication errors common, abuse of restraints rampant, and vulnerable residents left in pain from untreated fractures and bed sores.
The royal commission’s 148 radical recommendations for reform include mandatory quotas of properly trained staff, with at least one nurse on duty at any time to provide guaranteed hours of care for each resident.
It warns that Australia’s aged-care system is “understaffed and the workforce underpaid and undertrained’’.
Short-staffing and shoddy care have caused residents to live in pain, sit in their own faeces and literally starve to death through malnourishment.
At the Anglicare-owned Brian King Gardens nursing home in Sydney’s
northwest, the royal commission found that an 82-year-old woman had to have rotten teeth pulled out in 2016 because her “dentures had not been removed or cleaned for a number of weeks or more’’, despite an internal care directive that they should be cleaned daily. The woman’s daughters took her to a dentist and held her hand, watching their mother “quietly sob as her teeth were extracted’’.
In Sydney, 72-year-old Terry Reeves — who spent most of his working life as a Telstra technician — was admitted to the Garden View nursing home in Merrylands with Alzheimer’s disease.
He was heavily sedated and tied to a chair with a lap belt for up to 14 hours a day, until his cancer-stricken wife managed to move him to a different home that stopped the medication and let him walk with supervision.
At the Oberon Village nursing home in NSW, 82 assaults upon and between residents and staff were recorded in the space of four years.
In 2018, an assistant nurse on night duty saw a male resident, previously accused of assaulting three residents, drag an 82-year-old woman out of his room, “bleeding heavily from her head’’. The man claimed she fell over, the woman claimed he pushed her — yet no one saw what happened.
The royal commission repeatedly criticised one of Australia’s biggest corporate aged-care providers, Japara Aged Care — the owner of Japara Noosa, where the Queensland coroner is investigating the death of a resident bashed to death, and police are probing the alleged theft of narcotic pain patches from residents.
The daughter of the late Clarence Hausler secretly filmed carers assaulting her bedridden father at the Japara Mitcham nursing home in Perth in 2015.
“He was the subject of a series of degrading assaults when he should have been allowed to enjoy the last years of his life in peace,’’ the royal commission report concluded.
“Beyond the indignity and criminality of the assaults committed against her father, (his daughter) had to contend with an organisation determined to avoid accountability for its actions.’’
Health giant Bupa Aged Care Australia was busted by the royal commission for savage cost-cutting, with managers ordered to slash staff across 72 nursing homes in a 2017 directive to “save shifts’’ to improve its “commercial position’’.
Bupa had a code name for its costcutting plan — Project James — which involved cutting the number of nurses, and their hours, and not replacing staff who called in sick.
In an email to Bupa managers, tendered to the royal commission, Bupa Aged Care’s director of operations in 2017, Ian Burge, wrote that there were “no sacred cows and anything’s possible’’, with the goal of reducing operating costs to “roughly … double our current monthly profit”.
The Australian Aged Care Quality Agency slapped sanctions on 10 Bupa nursing homes, including Bupa South Hobart, between July 2018 and March 2019, after they failed quality audits.
At Bupa Willoughby, a 70-year-old woman too weak to eat unassisted was taken to hospital in 2017 with aspiration pneumonia — caused by food being inhaled into the lungs — with “unchewed food and medication” still in her mouth. Her daughter told a hearing that she believed staff were putting food in front of her mother “then returning later to collect the untouched meal and throw it in the bin”.
The royal commission criticised Bupa Willoughby’s “substandard care’’, including pain management of a bedsore 4cm long by 3cm wide — so large that Bupa’s then executive clinical adviser Maureen Berry told the Sydney hearing it “would have been helpful for a ruler to be used’’.
Government aged-care watchdogs were also slammed by the royal commission for “regulatory ritualism’’, and failing to properly probe complaints or follow up on assaults.
At the now-closed SA governmentrun Oakden Older Persons Mental Health Service in Adelaide — where resident Bob Spriggs suffered unexplained bruising and heavy sedation before his death in 2016 — the royal commission identified “multitudinous failures that led to Oakden continuing to operate while it provided substandard care”.
“The system let Bob down,’’ the report states.
“The mistreatment of Bob Spriggs extends to the failure of the system to detect that mistreatment.’’
The royal commission found that the federal Department of Health failed to check the unusual business arrangements of the Earle Haven nursing home before it was shut down over a contract payment dispute – forcing the emergency evacuation of all 68 residents to a Gold Coast Hospital in 2019.
The royal commission was “struck by how unprepared the regulators appeared to be”.
Australia’s aged-care system, it concluded, is “a disgrace and should be a source of national shame”.