I was on a friend's house boat at the time and dived off the house boat into the water.
Neil Radley was on a day off from his job as a truck driver, enjoying the sun with some friends in regional Victoria. He looked off the side of the house boat, no branches, the water was clear. He decided to jump. What he hadn't seen was a sandbar.
When I passed out in the water, my friends, I think.
Thought I was mucking around trying to hold my breath, then realized that I wasn't.
They dragged me out of the water. They got the water out of my stomach.
I can remember that I was semi consciously all I was going through all that, And I can remember when it really hit home was when the ambulance came there and they asked me whether I could move my hands or my toes, And then I realized that nothing was moving, and yeah, that really And then I thought, Wow, I've really done something big this time.
Neil remembers being carried into a chopper, the door closing and the chopper taking off. After that, his memory goes blank.
I woke up one day and I see you, and you got all these machines, bitmen and stuff like that, and it was a bit of a shock. You just, yeah, it's coming to the realization that your whole life is going to change. You don't realize the time how much it's going to change, but you know it's never going to be the same as what it.
Was, that's for sure.
And it was in the ICU for eight weeks. It was here he was told he'd broken his neck. He later learned he would live the rest of his life as a high needs quadriplegic. He realized he needed somewhere to live and his options were limited.
My mom and dad are in there like their eighties.
If they had been a bit younger, they probably would have looked after me, but it was too much to ask for them. And that's so then they sort of thought, well, you know, because the NIS wasn't in, then I've virtually.
Slipped through the cracks and there was nothing for me. So age care was about the only choice that I had.
Neil was in his early forties and suddenly he was dealing with the prospect of living the rest of his life in aged care. They are currently close to fifteen hundred younger people with disabilities living in aged care across Australia. The federal government wants to pass a law that could see that number rise. From Schwartz Media, I'm Ruby Jones.
This is seven AM today. Neil Radley on the reality of living in aged care and The Saturday Papers senior reporter Rick Morton on the plan that might make the problem worse. It's Tuesday, August thirteenth. Neil. When it became clear that you would need to move into an aged care home after your accident, what was your first thought.
Well, I thought, basically, if someone said to you, what would be the worst thing that could happen to you, I'd probably say that mainly because I was such an independent, active person. It was more you had to sort of come to grips with that this was your life now. From straight away, you really felt like you didn't fit. You're a young person and you know, just as examples like the music you listen to is not the same.
In the end, I sort of shut off from being friends with a lot of them because they're getting older in life and sometimes they're here and the next to gone. You know, it's like you just felt like you always wanted to get out.
Can you tell me about your room, about your life there.
Well, I couldn't really open the doors myself because there's not an automatic door, and there's a handle on it and that, And after a while I sort of felt like, you know, I was virtually in a cell because I couldn't get out unless I rang buzzer and got let out. Sometimes I didn't leave the door open, but at night it was closed. I couldn't get out if I wanted to. Oh, I had a few few times where it wasn't there fault.
A few people with dementia come into your room and you're sort of thinking, well, without that buzzer, I'm pretty much helpless here. I can't get out of the bed and run away. I can't do it. So it's the lack of freedom, the lack of consistency and reliability and care.
Yeah, it wasn't good, that's for sure.
And it definitely over time wears you down and plays on your mental health. It doesn't matter how strong and how stubborn you are, it's going to get to you sooner or later. And yeah, the longer you stay there probably the worst it's going to get.
I think.
So Rick Neil spent four years of his life in a nursing home, but he is far from alone, and being forced into that position tell me what we know about how common this is.
It used to be a lot more common for a young person under the age of sixty five with pretty profound disabilities to be stuck living in a nursing home or what we call a residential edge care facility, particularly
since the closure of large scale of disability institutions. Suddenly, these big, hulking, awful institutions were closed and there was really nowhere left for people with disabilities to live, and nursing homes became literally a dumping ground to the point where you know, people just gave up trying to find
a solution to know where these people could live. And you know, just a few years ago there are more than six thousand people under the age of sixty five who had disabilities but who did not have an aging related illness or condition, who were in residential edge care. They should have had somewhere else to go, but they didn't. And pretty much since that peak of around six thousand, seven thousand people, we've been trying really hard to get them out of there.
So there's been this push to get young people out of nursing homes for years, the Royal Commission into Aged Care explicitly called for that. How have governments responded.
When the Morrison government finally responded to that.
Age kre Royal Commission report, the Interim report in particular, they kind of come up with an implementation plan and there were areas of immediate action, and there was kind of stage steps where initially they were meant to basically get rid of everyone under the age of forty five to start off with, and to stop new people entering age care if they were under the age of sixty five, and then finally make sure that from next year no
one has lived there that shouldn't be. We have already failed the first two of those steps, and the Albanezi government has inherited these targets and they're now in government and they're about to fail the third and final herd.
Right, So what is it that's going on here then, riek? If there is this consensus among commissioners, ministers, departments that this is something that shouldn't happen. Young people just shouldn't be in nursing homes, yet it continues. So why is that?
I mean, partly it's this game of institutional buck shutting. So for a long time there wasn't really anywhere else to go, and the funding had dried up.
But then along comes.
The National disflilt Insurance Scheme. Right and out of everyone, people with profound disabilities and long term, round the clock physical and mental and intellectual care needs were the people who were supposed to have been looked after by the National Disflilted Insurance Scheme. And the NDAs just went real slow. They dragged their heels and they didn't want to touch this issue because they were too busy trying to sort
out everything else about the scheme. And of course they got hauled over the coals by the Edge Care Rooral Commission by saying, you know, we've got this semi commitment to get people out of nursing homes and you've done nothing about it. But it's not just the National disflult Insurance Scheme. You've got state and territory governments who themselves have played silly buggers, I think with the NDAs in the early stages of the scheme, who themselves have responsibility
for building houses and providing housing. But with the clarion call of the Age Care raw Commission. We finally had not just bipartisan support for this, but also a pretty clear indicator of what needed to happen.
And the numbers were going down, not nearly as.
Fast as they should have been, but you know they were. You know, the last time I checked, there were about fourteen hundred people under the age of sixty five in nursing homes across the country as of the end of December. But people are still going in and there were forty four I think that went into nursing homes in just in the last quarter from September to December twenty twenty three.
So the practice hasn't stopped, it hasn't gone away, but we were making some progress and that seems to now be unraveled.
Coming up after the break the new law that could see even more young people and up in aged care. Rick, you've been looking into changes that the federal government is planning to the Aged Care Act. Tell me about what you've uncovered.
It has a new eligibility criteria for someone who can go into a nursing home or receive home care services under the Age Care Act. And the key part of this eligibility criteria is that you can have an assessment made if you are under the age of sixty five but older than the age of fifty, if you are
homeless or at risk of being homeless. The problem with that is that there is no definition in this Act about what constitutes homelessness, and people with disabilities who have been put into hospital or who do not have.
The right funded supports for them to live in the.
Community anymore, those people will be classed as homeless or at risk of being homeless. And so we are now introducing for the first time ever an explicit clause in the federal legislation that Governor's Age Care, which will actually codify in legislation pretty much the same thing that happened to Neil happening to a bunch of people who are
aged between fifty and sixty five. If you're a young person under the age of fifty, you have to show all this evidence that you've tried every single service system that they've rejected you. You have to put it in rioting, and basically you have to show evidence that there is nowhere else for this.
Person to go.
But if you're over the age of fifty and under the age of sixty five and you're at risk of homelessness. Then all you have to show, or all someone who wants to get rid of you from their services has to show before they can put you in a nursing home,
is that you've been informed of other options. So essentially, and I've been talking to people from the Young People in Nursing Home National Alliance, Dr Bronwan Wlcombe in particular, who says that this is now legislating bad practice and this will actually unwind decades of effort to get people out of nursing homes and over the next decade will possibly see an uptick in the numbers because exemptions in a legislation are fraught, and this is poorly designed, poorly drafted,
poorly written, and the government doesn't seem to have responded to that key criticism.
And so what is the federal government saying about why it's putting this into the legislation?
To be honest, I didn't really understand their response me when I put questions in. They said that, you know, this new legislation is an example of how they're taking the next step to making sure that young people can't be in nursing homes.
And what they say quite rightly, and I wish they'd.
Recognize this across the government when it comes to the stress of being on below poverty level welfare payments. But they say that someone who's homeless or at risk of homelessness, who's aged over fifty in particular, they the stress of living like that can prematurely age them. And that's the reason they say that they're including this particular eligibility exemption in the Age Care Act so that these people can go into a nursing home they're sleeping rough or they've
got nowhere else to go. That's great for people who are homeless, it's not great for someone who can be excused away by the NDIS or state churchury housing departments.
What does it say to you, Wrick that after multiple Royal commissions which have had firsthand testimony presented by people like Neil who spoke to how diminished his life was by living in this way, how are now in this situation where it seems like everything that people who have been in nursing homes are saying about their needs is being ignored.
You know, if there wasn't an NDIS, you could find yourself having an argument saying, well, maybe there's nowhere else, Maybe there is nowhere else.
It's not good.
Maybe we should fund somewhere else, but we don't have an NDAs. But we do and we have had for a decade. And if it can't do this job, what's the point of any of it. And I feel like this is a cohort of people amongst a cohort of people that is really profoundly disabled, people who are already part of the broader.
Disability community, who are often ignored, who.
Have decisions made about them where very few people are taking notice, and the government might think that not enough people are going to say anything about it to stop them from making a bad decision.
Rick, thank you for your tam.
Thanks Ruby, I appreciate it.
After four years in aged care, Neil found a way out. He's now living in his own place. He can come and go as he wishes and has twenty four hour care.
Oh I love life now. It's great.
Yeah, it's like I said, it's about as close I think is what you can get to living without an injury, as far as the choices and the.
Freedom you have.
You can go anywhere, you can pretty much do anything you can. The it makes sure feel a whole lot better. You feel like you've got a purpose now that you know. And I've also helped a few advocate groups out as well, and I think I've got a little bit to give hopefully.
But where I am now is pretty good. I want to keep it as long as I can, that's for sure.
Also in the news today, leading gambling reform advocate Tim Costello says Labor risks an internal rebellion if it waters down gambling reforms. A twenty twenty two inquiry into the harms of online gambling called for a total ban on gambling ads, but reports suggest the Abenezy government is considering a partial ban. Mister Costello, who leads the Alliance for Gambling Reform, says his spoken with several Labour MPs who are pressuring the government to deliver on the inquiry's recommendations.
And the UN says Israel has forcibly evacuated roughly seventy five thousand Palestinians from carn Unie as it again expands operations into the region. The news comes as Hamas is calling on Katari, Egyptian and US mediators to implement a cease fire plan that was put forward by US President Joe Biden. I'm Ruby Jones. This is seven am.
Thanks for listening.