Murray Watt (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

I'll take the interjection from Senator Ruston. I am amazed that, with the record of the former government when it comes to aged care, which led to a royal commission—and the title of that report was Neglectany government senator would want to interject during this debate. If I were a member of the former government, I'd be hanging my head in shame every time aged care was dealt with in this bill rather than interjecting. So, Senator Ruston, I would really urge you to reflect on that.

I am proud of the fact that this is the first bill this new government is dealing with in the Senate, and it sends a very clear message about the fact that we take the rights of residents of aged care, their families and workers in the system very seriously. It's a very big contrast to the former government, who had to be dragged into a royal commission that they didn't implement the recommendations of. It took a change of government to see the implementation of those recommendations.

The approach of the Albanese government could not be more different from the approach we saw from the former coalition government. Under the Albanese government, we will finally see a federal government in this country that focuses and delivers on the needs of residents and their families and that focuses and delivers on the rights of aged-care workers.

I remember, Acting Deputy President Polley, you and I sitting in estimates hearings, year after year, with the former Minister Colbeck, asking whether he and the government supported a pay rise for aged-care workers. He would not even agree with that basic proposition that aged-care workers deserved a pay rise. Not one member of the former government would agree with that proposition, at least publicly. Certain people may have held views privately, but not once did we ever see a member of the former government publicly state that aged-care workers deserved a pay rise and that the former government would intervene or even offer a submission supporting a pay rise in that case that's before the Fair Work Commission. All the former government would do is agree to provide information—what a big step that was!—to a Fair Work Commission. But you wouldn't once get anyone from the former government say that aged-care workers deserved a pay rise. It's something that this government has made clear very early in our tenure.

I truly hope that on a local level, from my home state of Queensland, as a result of the reforms that this government is now putting in place, we will not see a repeat of some of the absolutely disgraceful aged-care situations that we saw in the last term of government. I'll just mention two.

There's the Earl Haven nursing home, at the Gold Coast, which is something that I was very vocal about. That nursing home had seen inspections by the aged-care regulator and recommendations made for action, for sanctions against the provider, which weren't taken. And what do you know? In the middle of the night, that nursing home literally fell apart, in the sense that there was no workforce, there were dozens of elderly, vulnerable people in that nursing home who did not have any care, and it took the Queensland government sending in personnel to ensure that these elderly, vulnerable people were looked after.

Even more recently than that, we saw another example, the Jeta Gardens nursing home in Logan, just south of Brisbane. It was ripped apart by COVID, as so many aged-care facilities were under the former government. Again, once you started having a look at it, it didn't take me much time to ascertain that that nursing home had been the subject of investigations and recommendations for tighter action that never got dealt with. And, again, what do you know? A few months after those inquiries and investigations into that nursing home, we saw COVID rip through, costing people their lives.

That's what happened under the former government, and we should never forget it. Under the former government, we had an aged-care system that was starved of funding, due to direct decisions made by the former Prime Minister and the rest of his cabinet at the time. That resulted in COVID ripping through aged-care homes, in people dying, in people being neglected, in workers not getting the pay they deserved, in people leaving the workforce because they could get better money doing work elsewhere. That's the kind of thing that this government is serious about cleaning up.

We want to put in place an aged-care system that Australians can be proud of, a system that people can have confidence in and a system where people can know that when their elderly parents or grandparents go to it they will be looked after. That's what we're going to see under this government.