Sam Rae (Hawke, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Aged Care and Seniors) | Hansard source

I thank the member for her question. I will firstly address some of those issues that she's raised around the integrated assessment tool. The integrated assessment tool is part of the single assessment system, which was a key recommendation of the royal commission. This is about delivering a system that is efficient, accurate and fair so that, no matter where in Australia someone lives or who does their assessment, they are always treated equitably. The IAT standardises the way that older Australians are assigned funding and a priority level for support at home through a classification system and a prioritisation system. It was developed using data from 20,000 assessments across diverse demographics and refined with direct input from our outstanding assessment workforce before going live. It supports assessors to make and record their subjective clinical judgement about the older person and their circumstances. The aged-care rules are then applied objectively and equally to those clinical inputs to determine the outcomes in a fair and consistent way.

Now, this government has always said that we'd watch very closely as these reforms roll out. The royal commission found that the former government's priority was the minimum commitment that it could get away with, but ours is guided by the rights of older Australians and their ongoing lived experience of the system. That's why last month I announced our government's plan to establish a new legislated escalation pathway so that outcomes of the aged-care integrated assessment tool can be changed in extenuating circumstances. In the small number of cases where a person's complex circumstances are not fully captured by the assessment tool—

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