Last Friday night Channel Nine’s A Current Affair returned to retirement villages with the mixed message that there have been “years of complaining and hurt” but that authorities across Australia are acting with compliance “swoops” and new regulations.
“For years we have been telling you about complex and confusing contracts that have been gouging money out of the elderly with ever increasing costs and hefty exit fees”.
It was the lead story and ran for five minutes and 30 seconds.
A Current Affair is the No. 1 program at 7pm across Australia’s five mainland capital cities. Its nightly average audience is 1.226 million viewers, including 354,000 regional viewers.
The reporter, Brady Halls, said “After years of heartache and complaint by residents of retirement villages finally something is being done”.
Halls went to Canberra and interviewed the Federal Minister for Small Business (and Consumer Affairs), Michael McCormack.
He said: “people have been ripped off by retirement villages… people can’t keep getting abused in this way”.
ACA pointed to action in NSW: “After a decade of troubles and complaint authorities are taking action. In the last week NSW Fair Trading has reportedly swooped on 50 retirement homes in a crackdown and Minister McCormack has his own hit list”.
McCormack: “High sales pitches, some retirement villages unilaterally changing sales contracts, refurbishment costs that cost the price of an average home in the nearby area to just to keep the unit up to standard, these are the sorts of things I want to see stopped”.
The Minister also pointed out that he assisted his mother into a retirement village and Brady Hall tempered his pitch with “Let’s make it clear; there are many more good ones than bad ones (retirement villages)”.
The program concluded that hopefully by mid-2018 new regulations will have cleared up the ‘bad ones’.
COTA CEO, Ian Yates, also featured, seeking a national regulatory platform and standardised contract.
Kathryn Greiner hands in her retirement village inquiry report to the NSW government in the next few weeks and the Minister’s response is likely in February.
In Melbourne the Aveo class action gets its first proper day in court, if lawyers Levitt Robertson can get the legs to make a run of it, in March.
And Fairfax and the Consumer Advocacy Law Centre of Victoria (CALC) have surely not withdrawn.
