Catryna Bilyk (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'm pleased to speak today on my MPI. We've seen the disastrous outcomes of an aged-care system in crisis. Sadly, so far COVID-19 has taken the lives of 335 Australians in aged care—loving fathers and mothers, grand mothers and grandfathers, aunts and uncles and dear friends who should have had more time with their families.

We have to remember that the current government has been in power for seven years. It's a third-term Liberal-National government. The world has known about COVID-19 since the beginning of the year, with reports emerging very early this year of outbreaks in aged-care facilities in Europe with high death tolls. We were warned. The signs were there. Yet the Morrison government failed to act. The aged-care royal commission has confirmed Mr Morrison had no workable plan to protect vulnerable older Australians in nursing homes from COVID-19. Then, when the government did say they had a plan, what did they do? They just renamed the CDNA. All spin, no substance, no responsibility on that side. We're seeing now the tragic impact of this failure. I have to say that Mr Morrison's attempts to deflect blame are an affront to older Australians and their loved ones. What hubris made the government think that these scenarios that have occurred around the world could not or would not happen here?

I would like to take this opportunity to thank my Tasmanian colleague Ms Julie Collins, the member for Franklin and the shadow minister for ageing, for her tireless work in holding the government to account for these abysmal failures. Ms Collins has continued to highlight the government's failure to act not just during the current crisis but through the crisis in aged care over the last seven years.

Whenever the government cops criticism on aged care, what do they do? They commission a report and then they ignore the report's recommendations. In all the reports into aged care gathering dust, there are a total of 150 recommendations which the government has failed to act on. Aged care was already in crisis before the pandemic struck, and the government's failures leading up to the COVID-19 outbreak have exacerbated the problem. This is what the aged care royal commissioners said:

Had the Australian Government acted upon previous reviews of aged care, the persistent problems in aged care would have been known much earlier and the suffering of many people could have been avoided.

I suspect that everyone else in this place, like me, has had numerous calls to their offices from constituents who cannot get the support they need; calls from people who are waiting to receive home care packages months or years after they've been approved for them; calls from people concerned about the health of their loved ones in residential aged care because they're being chemically restrained; calls from someone whose husband, wife, mother or father has had a fall or who has soiled themselves and has gone for hours unattended.

Despite aged care clients at home or in residential care struggling to get the care they deserve, many providers are operating at a financial loss. I know our aged-care workers and the providers they work for are doing the best with the resources they have, but they are working in an underfunded, under-resourced sector that has been neglected by this government for the past seven years. If aged care was already in crisis before the pandemic, and those opposite failed to plan for the pandemic, how can aged-care providers possibly be expected to manage the additional costs and logistical challenges presented by COVID-19?

The simple answer is that they can't, and hundreds of residents are suffering and dying because of it. Labor is pursuing this issue because we owe it to residents of Australian aged-care facilities and their families to demand the answers they seek. My heart goes out to the families who have lost members in residential aged-care facilities, and I would like to pay my condolences to all those who have lost loved ones due to this pandemic. Not getting consistent news about their loved ones in a timely manner and not being able to hold them and say a proper goodbye has just added another layer of pain and grief to an already deeply painful experience. I once again reiterate the condolences I offered during the debate on the urgency motion yesterday as well as today to the families for their tragic loss. (Time expired)