BRYAN Wiseman has been working seven days a week for the past 20 years.
How much superannuation does he have? Not a cent.
Mr Wiseman, 38, of Sutherland Shire, is among the 2.5 million Australians providing care for relatives or friends with a disability, mental illness, chronic conditions, or who are frail aged.
He is helping save the economy $16 billion a year in respite and nursing costs, yet his Centrelink entitlements are less than the minimum wage.
Mr Wiseman said the Government had lost touch with carers.
He has now teamed up with Reverend George Capsis from Community Outreach Ministries, Cronulla, to form a new carers' advocacy group.
The aim of the group will be to lobby the Government for increased carers' allowances, more public nursing homes, and extra aged care beds.
Mr Wiseman had just starred opposite Russell Crowe in the 1998 television hit Living with the Law when his mother Caroline, 80, had a big stroke.
He had also been left to care for his father, who had asbestosis and died in 2001.
"No one came to me and said, `you could be doing this for the next 20 years','' Mr Wiseman said. "I hadn't planned that far ahead.
"It's left me without any superannuation, any work.''
Mr Wiseman said being a carer was emotionally and physically draining, so much so he once took "a whole heap of pills'' and woke up in his kitchen "with the dogs licking my face''.
"You get to the point where you get so low you just can't cope anymore,'' he said.
"It was then that George [Reverend Capsis] called in.''
Mr Wiseman's mother spent a short time in a nursing home this year but became seriously ill. She has been in Sutherland Hospital but may soon move to a nursing home at Bexley.
"I was desperately trying to get something in the shire, but couldn't,'' he said.
Mr Capsis, a supporter of Daniel's Shield, a Queensland-based organisation that fights for those affected by nursing home neglect, said the Government needed a new attitude to carers.
"There's just no humanity anymore,'' Mr Capsis said.
"Half-baked respite care [is] just not enough.''
Mr Capsis said one solution was for the Government to establish medical facilities providing intermediate care for people on waiting lists for nursing homes.
These facilities could be connected to hospitals.
Sutherland Shire Council recently rejected a development application for a private, 112-bed nursing home in Sutherland Hospital grounds.
But residents in Hinkler Avenue, whose homes adjoin the hospital, stopped the plan, which would have resulted part of the nursing home being the same height as their fences.
There are a number of carer support groups in Sutherland, Kirrawee, Penshurst and Kogarah.
For contact details go to: www.carersnsw.asn.au
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