Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I agree with this motion. This aged-care crisis has been a long time in the making—35 reports over 40 years, and yet we end up here in this crisis!

I have lost track, actually, of the number of committee inquiries on aged care I have chaired, and I don't want to have to continue doing it—reporting on the failures of the system and the need to increase the workforce. Just yesterday, Professor Pollaers again outlined the need for a significant investment, but we have government senators in here defending the government's investment. On Friday there was another in the piecemeal approaches trying to fill this gap and this gap and this gap; this time it was $171 million. What is recommended is $3.5 billion. We don't have the workforce that is necessary to provide the level of care that is necessary—four hours and 18 minutes. We haven't used the surge workforce. We did self-assessment of aged-care facilities, to see if they were pandemic-ready and COVID-ready. And most of them said yes! They clearly were not.

The Australian community has lost confidence in this government's, this Prime Minister's and this minister's ability to handle this crisis. And please don't lecture us about what's going on in other countries and use that as some sort of excuse as to why some level of death is acceptable! No level of death is acceptable! There could and should have been more effort made to stop what we knew was likely to happen if COVID got into an aged-care facility. We knew it would spread, because these are the most vulnerable people.

I'm also deeply concerned that, in this country, we have not been tackling the elephant in the room, which is putting profit before care, given the number of providers that are profit driven. We need to be looking at care, not profit. We found out on Friday from evidence before the COVID committee that 37 of the 60 facilities that the government was prepared to name that have had more than five deaths are for-profit providers. We need to be doing better in this country. We have lost confidence in this government's ability to handle this crisis.