Anne Urquhart (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

This is a minister who appears to be genuinely befuddled when it comes to articulating his own party's policies. In fact, from what we've been listening to on this matter today, I wonder if he's making any decisions at all regarding caring for ageing Australians or whether his portfolio is actually managed by a group of rapidly privatising ideologues who simply push him out there to parp on while they run his portfolio and privatise everything in sight.

Just for the record in this chamber, let's note the following points. The aged-care minister has never been in the Liberals' cabinet. We've had four aged-care ministers since 2013. There's been a $1.5 billion cut to the aged-care workforce compact and supplement, a $110 million cut from the dementia supplement in residential aged care, a $500 million cut from the 2015 MYEFO, a $1.2 billion cut from the 2016 aged-care budget, funding cuts to the community visitors scheme, and seven years of inaction, cuts, chaos and crisis. In fact, the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison governments have done such an appalling job of driving aged-care reform and have been so rubbish at it that they basically had to call a royal commission into it themselves.

Now they have a plan to privatise the ACAT assessment services. That is not supported by the aged-care sector, Liberal state governments or the royal commissioners. In fact, Minister Hazzard in New South Wales said the plan 'lacks logic'. One of their own says it lacks logic. Just two days prior to Christmas last year, the Morrison government put this up on its website:

New aged care assessment arrangements will provide streamlined consumer assessment for access to aged care services from April 2021.

…   …   …

The new workforce will comprise a network of assessment organisations. These organisations will be selected through a national tender process. The tender process will happen in 2020.

On 30 December, this aged-care minister claimed that the royal commission supported the privatisation of aged-care assessment services. It did not, and it's so perturbed by the outrageous statement that on 14 January 2020 the chair of the royal commission issued a statement in response to the minister's comments. Commissioner Pagone QC stated:

Public concern has been expressed about statements made by the Minister for Aged Care and Senior Australians that we had decided to support the privatisation of the Aged Care Assessment Teams in our Interim Report. I take this opportunity to make clear that the Interim Report did not endorse the Government’s stated position …

Commissioner Pagone also stated:

Our tasks as Commissioners are detailed in the terms of reference and we have not yet made recommendations about which sector or mechanism will best achieve an integration of Regional Assessment Services and the Aged Care Assessment Teams.

You might think that at this stage the minister would offer an apology to the royal commission or retract his false statement, but he didn't. You might think he'd go back and read the recommendations of the commissioner's interim report and think: 'Whoops! I'd better fix that.' But that would require him to have a view of his own on that—a mind of his own, a sense of the policy direction that he, as a minister of the Commonwealth, would like for aged care in our country and the ability to clearly articulate that vision. But no. So the ideologists push their obliging frontman out there again and mumble something evasive and unconvincing yet again. And that's what we witnessed once more today. It is very clear that the Morrison government is loose with the truth and does not want to tell the truth.

Labor have voiced our concerns over the Liberal government's plan. We've been very clear that we support the joining up of assessments—clearly, done by ACATs and regional assessment services—but we do not support the privatisation of the current ACATs around the country. Despite question after question, we are still being kept in the dark, as are all the Australians out there. We still don't know why, when the Morrison government knows there is so much wrong with the aged-care system, it is intent on progressing its only idea, which is to privatise aged-care assessment services. We will continue to hold this government to account for its mismanagement of aged-care services in Australia.

Question agreed to.