Maltreatment of the elderly in Australia is one of the many growing social changes which now demand us as a community to take urgent and positive steps to eliminate.

According to a recent study by the Australian Institute of Family Studies, national elder abuse is currently being experienced by over 600,000 older men and women — and that figure is rising by at least six per cent a year.

The Institute warns that coercive control of older people is one of the biggest developing maltreatment problems being faced by our grandfathers and grandmothers in all States.

This widespread form of control by family members, friends and supposed honest carers usually involves a pattern of controlling and manipulative behaviour within family or friendly relationships with the aim to commandeer personal finances and other assets.

There are also many instances where maltreatment of the elderly is carried out by outside people who claim to be “known” to the victim.

One very nasty incident I am closely aware of involved an old friend and one-time competitive squash-playing partner of mine who owned a banana farm on a property overlooking Australia’s prime tourist destination of Noosa.

His name was Roger Hack and his magnificent hilltop farm had for years stunted the further development of that seaside paradise. He had for decades stoically refused to sell out to a bevy of interested and hungry developers until he eventually started to show signs of dementia and finally relented to sell his property for a tidy $29 million.

After gifting $17 million of this money to his children, he unexpectedly found himself on an isolated farm well away from Noosa and his family living inter-state. Whenever his sons or daughter tried to contact him, they were served with legal restraining orders to stay away but, when Roger eventually died 18 months later, all evidence of the $12 million he still owned had evaporated into supposed thin air.

Financial experts were called in, but no traces could be found of the missing millions, believed to have been quickly passed through scores of different and non-identified financial companies and trusts.

This sad story of my friend is only one of countless thousands of maltreatment cases occurring each year in Australia. These cases also include instances of family violence and adult children coercing a parent to leave the family home to live in aged care accommodation so they can enjoy the spoils of the house being sold on a rising market.

There are also even cases of sons and daughters basically forcing their aged parents to reverse mortgage their homes and pass them the proceeds on threats of withdrawing their family love.

In addition to all this, there is also the possibility that the elderly will be victims of house invasions by aggravated burglars, as occurred in Yamba during the past couple of weeks.

In addition to Roger Hack’s unfortunate story, I also had the personal experience of a 90-year-old bedridden woman friend of very considerable means being held captive by people she originally trusted and to whom she had unfortunately surrendered her freedom by granting them full control over her affairs.

As this person lived well away from me here on the Clarence River, I had over time lost contact with her — that is, until someone ‘in the know’ contacted me with desperate pleas to urgently help my friend in obvious distress.

After I had hurriedly arrived at her bedside, I discovered that she was prevented from taking or making telephone calls, had no access to her own money and assets, had suspiciously willed all cash and property to the wrong people and never knew that intending visitors were being turned away from seeing her on pretences of her ill-health or always being asleep.

The wrongs of this case revealing serious maltreatment of the aged were eventually righted through drawn out legal action but there was a big associated ‘but’ as far as I was concerned.

I soon discovered the ‘but’ while first attempting to help this friend of former days. In doing so, I needed to obtain some additional legal and practical advice and help, and consequently set out to talk to relevant professionals.

The several solicitors I approached well away from Yamba wanted, however, immediate downpayments of up to $10,000 a time and more before we could even speak. Their argument was that cases of this nature involved expensive and protracted research, paperwork and legalities.

This was a particular problem to me at the time as I was not in a position to further finance my investigations, and my well-heeled friend had no access to even one cent of her own very substantial invested funds.

In desperation, I turned to certain government funded welfare bodies but each of them answered my cry for help by saying it had nothing to do with them as the case was purely a legal matter.

I have never been able to understand this as every report of elder maltreatment involves someone breaking the existing Aged Care legislation, let alone our everyday laws.

As a current member of the Federal Government’s Aged Care panel, I have seen and heard ample evidence of the need for our elderly to enjoy more legal protection from the increasing number of money-hungry predators possibly already stalking them.