Page 3708 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 21 November 2006
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
replacements are incredibly expensive, incredibly painful and often lead to a lowering of life expectation.
DR FOSKEY (Molonglo) (4.08): I want to thank Mr Mulcahy for raising this topic as a matter of public importance. Of course, there are a number of ways that we can interpret the word “mobility” in relation to aged citizens and I have chosen one interpretation; others have touched on others. Mobility for the aged may mean the ability to get out of bed in the morning and move around their home adequately, bend down, put food in the oven, take it out, clean the fridge, hang the washing out on the line—all those tasks that we take for granted until we have an affliction of some kind: a sore back or anything else that gives us a sense of what it will be like when we are old ourselves. Even though it is absolutely horrible to be ill at our age, and especially in our position when there is not time to be ill, it gives us a sense of what it is like all the time for a lot of people in our community.
I have one older friend who suffers from multiple sclerosis—and whose dog I was walking for a time until I ran out of the time to do that on a regular basis—who said that what was probably going to get her into residential aged care was a lack of ability to even put her bins out. Do we think of that? No, we do not. Such a small thing as a community scheme that would assist that woman once a week to put her bins in and out would allow her to remain in her home; without it, she does not feel she can.
I am going to focus on the ability to access public transport and I am going to start off with a story that is quite telling. I was thinking of ending with it, but today, as you probably all know, we all started getting pamphlets advising us of changes to the ACTION bus service and suggesting that we go to the net to find out how those changes affect us. Of course, quite a number of elderly people do not have the net. However, the constituent who rang me does. He is a resident of Rivett and he is extremely perturbed by the impact of the changes to bus services in his area because he is 70 years old and he has a wife, 65 years old, who has cancer. One of the things that they enjoy doing—and probably have to do, because I do not believe they have a car—is going shopping every day. Previously, they could catch a bus very close by; they did not have to walk at all far to the bus stop. Now they will have to walk 15 minutes to the nearest access to the bus service to go shopping—to get milk, bread and all those other things without which they would surely, like any of us, starve to death. His comment was that when it is hot like this they cannot, because of his wife’s health, walk the 15 minutes.
That is a significant impact on the lives of two of our elderly citizens who live in Rivett. I have no idea how long they have lived in their house, but when they bought it they thought they lived near a convenient bus service—and now they do not. The other point that he wanted to make clear was that when he inquired into changes to his bus service he found out that hard copies of the new timetables will not be available until next Monday and the new timetable kicks in a week after that. He pointed out that many elderly people who have lived the same way for many years—or for however long we have had the existing bus timetable—will not know of those changes; they will not see them. They will go to catch buses and buses will not come. It takes a while to get used to things if you are older and you are used to a certain way of doing things.
He also pointed out that it will probably result in more elderly people who would rather not drive, or who try to avoid driving unless they have to, having to drive to Civic simply
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .