Richard Colbeck (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Minister for Aged Care and Senior Australians) Share this | Hansard source

I reject the premise of the question from Senator Carr. In fact, we acted very, very quickly to ensure that there was capacity to provide surge workforce to the aged-care sector in Australia. In fact, I think the announcement of our funding was on about 11 March, which was only a few days after the Dorothy Henderson Lodge outbreak started. So we acted very, very quickly and put over $100 million on the table to support the aged-care sector with surge workforce. So I reject completely the assertion of the question from Senator Carr, because we acted extremely quickly to ensure that there was capacity available, and we have continued to build and grow that capacity as the scale of the outbreak has continued, particularly in Victoria.

All through this process, we engaged with the aged-care sector. We started engaging with the aged-care sector back in January. We talked to them about their responsibilities with respect to having an infection control plan. We talked to them about the COVID-19 virus during February. We continue to work with this sector and have been there consistently with them all through this pandemic, providing them resources, ensuring they had information, providing advice from the AHPPC, acting on the advice of the AHPPC in our response to the pandemic and ensuring that they had information and resources available to them to be able to meet the requirements of an infection if, in fact, it occurred within their facility. It is worth noting that, as we said yesterday, 97 per cent of facilities in this country haven't had an outbreak, which I think is an incredibly good statistic for this country.