Kim Carr (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Question time today highlighted the fact that the minister is now acknowledging the tragic deaths of some 457 people in our aged-care facilities across the country. What was particularly remarkable was that he said that there were 33 people that he as the minister didn't know about, and this had to be reported. It's a consequence that I find quite an extraordinary proposition, particularly in the case that we're talking about of Victoria. When I checked today, my advice was that, as the minister suggested, those figures of 420 Victorians in aged-care facilities who had passed away during this crisis needed further work. He said that the Victorian Aged Care Response Centre clearly needed to do further work to reconcile the figures.

The number of 420 that the Victorians are using today stands in contrast to the 457 that the Commonwealth is still using. What's of particular concern to me is that the tragic deaths that have occurred have entirely been within Commonwealth managed facilities. There has not been one death in a Victorian government run facility. All of these fatalities have been in centres that you would have thought the Commonwealth would have had a direct line of advice on. Of course, the Victorian government run facilities are public facilities and, unlike the private ones, have mandated minimum staffing requirements, so the question around quality and the deregulation of private facilities, which I think is at the core of much of the quality issues, doesn't arise.

We know that many groups—public, private and not-for-profit—play a role in providing care for our aged Australians. But what is absolutely critical is that it's the Commonwealth government that has overall responsibility—a proposition that the Prime Minister has acknowledged on many occasions. In that context, it's a simple proposition. He set up a royal commission, but he has then sought to ignore that royal commission and the advice that that royal commission has provided to him in its interim report. As recently as 24 August, the royal commissioners have said that, currently, the Australian government has no care quality outcome reporting for its home care and reports are only on three indicators for its residential care, and that had the Australian government acted on previous reviews of aged care the persistent problems in aged care would have been known much earlier and the suffering of many people would have been avoided.

Senator Fierravanti-Wells, who has been referred to today by Senator Wong in her question, made it very clear in her submission to the royal commission that the aged-care sector is on the brink of collapse. She said:

There needs to be a clear direction to Government to stop tinkering at the edges and to undertake real structural reform.

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The Coalition had promised real reform of the sector, regrettably, it instead became a merry-go-round of ministers, with lack of stability and inertia as demonstrated by the Aged Care Sector Committee design and operation.

By any standards, this minister, under previous conservative governments' arrangements, should have resigned. But it's not just this minister who should be held to account in terms of responsibilities. The role of the health minister himself comes into question. He's the senior cabinet minister. He's the minister responsible at the cabinet table. Why has he left these vital tasks to the junior minister when there had been so many warning signs and so many examples of the failure and administrative neglect of the system to the point where they don't even know how many people have died as a result of their failures? The Prime Minister has tried to dodge this issue, cut funding and pretend it's someone else's problem, as we heard yet again today. He has tried to blame somebody else: the health minister or the junior minister. This is a government that has presided over a shocking tragedy. This is a government that should front up to its responsibilities and should acknowledge that there needs to be— (Time expired)