Louise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Manufacturing) Share this | Hansard source

I also rise to take note of answers to questions asked of Senator Colbeck by myself and my colleagues. The government, as we have seen clearly now, month after month, is behind in every aspect of the COVID pandemic in Australia, and Australians continue to suffer. The government promised as recently as late last year—October—that all aged-care workers would be vaccinated by March this year. Yet here we are in June, in this question time, with the Minister for Senior Australians and Aged Care Services, speaking on behalf of the Minister for Health and Aged Care, unable to tell us how many aged-care workers have had the vaccine and unable to give us any state breakdown of what that looks like.

It's all very well for those opposite to try and blame the procedures and processes of the national cabinet. This is not a job for the national cabinet. This is not a cover-up, where the states will have paid detailed attention to this, leaving it open for the Liberal Party to lay the blame: 'Well, this is how it was supposed to be all along. We did this deal with the states.' The simple fact is that in this nation aged care is a Commonwealth responsibility, and the need to track any vulnerabilities in our aged-care system due to COVID-19 is clearly and firmly a Commonwealth responsibility. Yet we have a government that simply does not know how many people who work in the aged-care sector have been vaccinated. A person's occupation isn't being asked for when they line up for their vaccination. Yet, within this context, plenty of younger workers who are supposed to be in the 1a cohort, who would not otherwise have been eligible, are not being asked what their profession that would make them a vulnerable frontline worker is. In the recent estimates, we heard that fewer than two per cent of people living in residential disability care are fully vaccinated, and yet we hear time and time again that the government is 'comfortable' with the vaccine rollout. This is the very same government that said they were committed to underpromising and overdelivering, and yet they have not been able to meet their own explicit measure of what they promised they would do, which even they said was, in effect, not a very high benchmark.

The government has lifted the ban on employees working at multiple facilities, which was imposed during the last outbreak, and yet again we have evidence to show that only 15 per cent of aged-care workers have been vaccinated. We know a proportion of these workers may be Medicare ineligible and may have to go through clinics, but where's the oversight to ensure that the state-run clinics, as per our protocols with the states for people who are Medicare ineligible, are actually prioritising and seeing aged-care workers? There's nothing here that demonstrates there's been any proactive effort by this government as the regulator of aged care to ensure that aged-care workers are going through any of those systems. We're told that staff members who were vaccinated at aged-care homes were done with the spare doses that were left over. There wasn't an intention to completely vaccinate those staff members, because they were vaccinated with the dregs of the system.

Frankly, it's clear to me that, with many workers being under 50, they would want to wait for the Pfizer vaccine. We know there's been vaccine hesitancy, and I'm by no means endorsing that. But—