Legal rights of elderly people

Speech given at the University of Western Australia, Perth, 21st October 1988, by Adam Graycar, Commissioner for the Ageing, Adelaide, South Australia. This speech is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Every aspect of the lives of elderly people is affected by change and its social ramifications, from increased consumer activity, through electronic banking, through to travel and entertainment, through to changing family structure, through to systems and processes of care and support for frail elderly people. Protection of the rights of elderly people has not always kept pace with the changes. While social and technological change is essentially unregulated, responses by governments are heavily circumscribed. Rights of elderly people can be examined under two general headings - rights which they share with all other citizens, such as common law rights and consumer rights, and rights which arise because of their special vulnerabilities, particularly when one leaves one's long standing place of residence and moves into a new form of accommodation, accommodation which is occupied solely because of vulnerability, whether physical, social or economic