Caxton Community Legal Centre CEO Cybele Koning’s keynote speech at the Unite for Action Elder Abuse Prevention Forum
13th June 2025
“An older couple from my home town asked me over for a cuppa on the weekend. They are a retired teacher and accountant, confused about the practical workings of their EPoAs, planning for aged care supports, and what voice they should have in family decision-making about their future.
One has a recent diagnosis of early dementia, the other a broken foot after a trip over the garden hose. Their adult daughters live nearby and are very supportive in that kind of way care can turn into cling wrap and so, there I was, invited into their home, to talk candidly about how to build and strengthen safeguards for their longevity, adopting the role of elder abuse seamstress, stitching personal and financial safety into the fabric of their ageing, mending some of the holes created by silence and sacrifice, weaving rights, dignity, and voice into this otherwise peaceful but perfect storm for the type of situations we all see.
They had tears in their eyes when I left, overly grateful for the opportunity to understand how to piece together all those loose threads that had been worrying them for a while.
This couple’s situation is a classic precursor to elder abuse—not the crisis itself, but the quiet conditions in which abuse can take root:
- Early cognitive decline creates uncertainty about capacity and consent
- Physical injury increases reliance and vulnerability
- Legal confusion around Enduring Powers of Attorney raises the risk of misuse—even unintentionally
- Supportive family members, without guidance, may begin to substitute their judgment for the older person’s own, in ways that slip from protective to controlling
Elder abuse often begins in the gaps – between a daughter’s good intentions and a parent’s fading confidence, between legal capacity and actual understanding, between systems that don’t share knowledge. By stepping into their home, I acted as the missing link – weaving together aged care, legal frameworks, health realities, and emotional safety.
Preventing and responding to elder abuse can’t depend on who happens to drop in for tea.
Okay, let’s do a little imagination stretch. I would like you to close your eyes so you can really get the picture of what I want to say. Imagine a hand size single crocheted square like the ones grandma made, beautiful, intricate, full of care. Pick your colour, pick the design. This represents your working connection with being here today: your health service, your aged care service, your legal centre, your community group, your department or your organisation. The square, on its own, offers warmth, to a small part of the body. But alone, it’s not nearly enough. Now, open your eyes and look around and picture everyone’s squares and how they could be brought together.
When we talk about collaboration, the message in this exercise is obvious, sewn together into blankets, each piece becomes stronger, warmer, more varied and more protective.
Today we are here to talk about how we can become blanket makers in our own communities as a key initiative to prevent and respond to elder abuse. Stitching takes intention. It doesn’t happen by accident. The magic isn’t in the pieces. It’s in how they’re sewn together.
You may not know this, but Queensland has been a national leader for over three decades, embracing place-based collaborations, in tackling elder abuse. Part of my role today is to set the scene for you to hear more about these from our expert panel so let me shift gears to do this scene setting for a moment before returning in my final words to our metaphor and a call to action.
Prior to the 1980s elder abuse was largely invisible – socially, legally, and politically in a cloak of darkness. It was not recognised as a distinct form of harm, nor as a public policy issue.
In the late 1980s, when grappling with the implications of rapid global population ageing, the WHO and UN started highlighting elder abuse as a public health, family violence, broader social and human rights issue.
Queensland’s response, like the rest of Australia, has been led by legal interventions through two key avenues:
- Firstly, state-based legislative reform such as Queensland’s guardianship laws and DFV laws which are some of the strongest in Australia for older people experiencing abuse.
- Secondly, via community legal centres and aged rights advocates who have championed the cause over 3 decades while there has not been a coordinated national health or social care systems focussed on preventing or responding to elder abuse.
In 1997 there were two “Australian firsts” both initiated in Queensland: Caxton Legal Centre commenced a specialist multidisciplinary elder abuse service, and the Elder Abuse Prevention Unit was established with funding from the Queensland Government. Now there are over a dozen specialist services working across Qld with their local communities to deliver a place-based response including through health justice partnerships where legal teams join with health teams, through aged and disability advocacy and through partnership with community-controlled organisations.
The last decade has heard a loud call for reform and there has been a series of inquiries on elder abuse including the 2015 Queensland ‘Inquiry into the adequacy of existing financial protections for Queensland’s seniors’, the national Inquiry into Elder Abuse undertaken by the Australian Law Reform Commission, and now the current Queensland Inquiry. The Not Now, Not Ever Report and the Inquiry into the Policing of DFV also made recommendations specific to elder abuse.
Recommendations from the national inquiry led to the completion in 2021 of the first ever national elder abuse prevalence study, the piloting of 12 elder abuse trial sites testing 3 models of service delivery, one being based on our multidisciplinary service, and the development of Australia’s first National Plan to Respond to the Abuse of Older Australians containing the commitments of Queensland towards action on this issue. Unfortunately, most of the recommendations from that national inquiry remain unaddressed. I have greater hopes for our own Qld Inquiry.
It has to be stated that there needs to be a greater investment by the Queensland government in initiatives to tackle elder abuse. $8.5m per annum, compared with $154m over 4 years for DFV and $1.12b for the child safety system is such an underinvestment that it caused me to say in our submission to the Inquiry, and I quote: “The Queensland Government needs to give equal priority to preventions and interventions to address elder abuse, as it does to domestic and family violence and child protection. Given the data about the prevalence, seriousness and impact of elder abuse, anything less is ageist.”
But today we are here to talk about collaboration (hopefully supported by more money in the system).
In reading through and listening to submissions made to the Queensland Inquiry, there is a consistent emphasis on how this government must support collaboration, coordination, strengthening partnerships, and service integration.
And so, returning to my metaphor, I reflect that when we integrate – when we tie together all those crocheted squares of health, legal, aged care, police, housing, advocacy, social connections, local offerings, cultural safety – we can offer real protection to older people. Not patchwork solutions, but a cohesive system.
We should start by recognising that systems integration IS abuse prevention. Let’s use the rights of older people as the threads that bind us to a shared responsibility to end elder abuse.”