Page 994 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 21 April 2021
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This can take many forms. My grandmother had dementia as well. You can get very difficult behaviours from people. It can be embarrassing and it can be difficult. You really do not have many options. You either stay at home, and that is not good, or you find that people end up in aged-care facilities, which are very limiting and constraining.
Trying to have a community that welcomes people with dementia, that understands people with dementia and how they are affected by it, that accepts that their behaviour sometimes will be a little bit abnormal and difficult, is a wonderful thing. It is something that, as a community, we have to embrace, understand and come to grips with.
There are a lot of people doing a lot of good work. I acknowledge the work that the government are doing; I applaud it. It is very necessary that they get on with it. I thank Ms Lawder, who is a strong advocate. We have had conversations about this going back quite some time. She has been working on this, and I hope that the cooperation in this space continues.
There are a lot of people in the community doing good work, and I would like to give a couple of plugs. Nicole Smith is a registered nurse who runs an organisation called Community Cafe. I have visited an aged-care facility that has been affected by COVID in what they can do. It gets a bunch of kids along, people with dementia and aged people, and it is about having music, joy and light. For a lot of people with dementia, they do not get a lot of that.
When you meet people who are passionate about aged care and people with dementia, you realise how singular that is. There are not a lot of people in our community that perhaps have that passion. It seems that, with aged care and seniors, dementia is not something that we necessarily talk about a lot, or that a lot of people are passionate about. It is good to see that people in our community—and a number of them have been acknowledged today—are doing that; it is fantastic.
I would like to recognise an old mate of mine, Greg Fraser, who has been associated with what was Alzheimer’s ACT and is now part of Dementia Australia. He has been passionate about this for a long time. I am sure that all of us—and I can see that a lot of people are nodding—have been lobbied by Greg in one form or another, so it is good to see that there are a lot of people working together.
I just add that perspective. Members, my dad is now in a specific dementia ward in a facility in Queensland. He is very well cared for and very well looked after. It costs my family, my mother, an enormous amount of money for him to be there. It is difficult. There are not enough places in our community; we know that. It puts a lot of pressure on families. They are either in a facility that is not as good as it could be or they are at home when they should be in a facility, and those families are under pressure. If there is anything that we can do, in working together as a community and as an Assembly, I think it is a great thing.
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