Allegra Spender (Wentworth, Independent) | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Aged Care and Seniors. Last night, on Four Corners, Professor Kathy Eagar described the algorithm which determines home-care packages as fundamentally flawed and argued that the government should ditch it and start over. People regularly approach me with concerns about access to home care, and now people are concerned that the assessment tool is just wrong. Will the government establish a mandatory automated-decision-making framework, including human oversight, as recommended by the robodebt royal commission, to improve public confidence and trust?

Sam Rae (Hawke, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Aged Care and Seniors) | Link to this | 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—

Darren Chester (Gippsland, National Party, Shadow Minister for Veterans’ Affairs) | Link to this | Hansard source

You are delusional.

Milton Dick (Speaker) | Link to this | Hansard source

The leader of the Nationals will cease interjecting.

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

under the new pathway, their assessment can be escalated to the system governor and adjusted, if necessary, so they get appropriate care.

Milton Dick (Speaker) | Link to this | Hansard source

The leader of the Nationals is going to cease with those interjections.

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

Our escalation pathway will be the practical, responsible protection the system needs without compromising the care of older people. This change is in addition to the change we made earlier this year to amend the prioritisation systems queue rate in order to reduce the wait times of a person assessed as high priority from just over two months on average to just over one month and for our changes to ensure people with MND are automatically treated as urgent. Minister Butler and I have also directed the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing to undertake a rapid review of the Support at Home prioritisation mechanism to make sure that the right people are being fast-tracked for the care that is desperately needed. While this work is occurring, importantly, the median wait time from request to completion of these assessments is consistently under one month.

We promised older Australians that we would rebuild the aged-care system that we inherited in tatters, and that's exactly what our government is focused on doing.