The Albanese Labor government is getting on with the job of delivering once-in-a-generation reform for high-quality, world-class aged-care services for older Australians. We're investing $47 billion in aged care this year, and that is the largest amount in the nation's history. The 2026-27 budget makes one thing very clear: the work of fixing aged care did not end with the passage of the Aged Care Act. With $3.7 billion to keep building and strengthening our aged-care system in the 2026-27 budget, our government is continuing to invest, continuing to listen to older Australians and continuing to listen to the people who care for them. Generational reform is not a single moment; it's a long-term project. Our government is getting on with it.

The subject matter of the order demands particular care. I'm advised that complying with this order requires searching for, extracting and cross-referencing waiting list data against mortality data across the financial year. That is not a small undertaking. It requires care in identification and it requires care in checking the resulting figures before they are put before this chamber. In responding to order for the production of documents No. 633, the minister advised the Senate that this data is still undergoing validation. The government has a responsibility to ensure that figures of this kind are accurate before they are released. I wish to assure the Senate that work to comply with this order is continuing and a response will be provided to the Senate. These are matters of real consequence for older Australians and their families, and they deserve to be treated with appropriate care

I move:

That the Senate take note of the statement.

I stand to condemn the government for their failure to properly comply with the order for the production of documents in relation to a very serious issue: how many older Australians have died waiting for the care that this government has assessed that they need.

Older Australians were promised care. In 2022, the then opposition leader, now Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, said:

… we will look after our older Australians.

No one held back. No one left behind.

But nothing could be further from the truth. This Prime Minister has overseen a policy agenda that has not only held back and left older Australians behind but has actively sought to pit grandparents against grandchildren. Of all the policy failings of those opposite, the most abhorrent has to be their absolute disregard and disrespect for older Australians.

I want to share some words from Lynne Meehan. Lynne has bravely become a public advocate for change in the home care system, sharing her dad's story in the hope that other families do not have to go through what they have. Recently, she spoke to the Senate inquiry into Support at Home. About her dad, John, she said:

He wasn't just a number; he was a respected member of society, a taxpayer all his working life, a husband, a father, a great grandfather and a great great-grandfather who was dearly loved.

Lynne had convinced her parents to engage with the aged-care system in 2023 so that, when the time came, help would only be a phone call away. Instead, when John needed that care in 2025, he was assessed as needing the second highest level of support at home, but only after serious advocacy by Lynne, who spent countless hours and days on the phone and writing emails. But, even after all that, Lynne was told that her father would have to wait 10 months for that care. Days after his funeral, the family received a congratulatory letter about his funding coming through. That was after John had passed away while waiting for that care. Lynne said, 'For Mum, who'll be 90 in October, the remnant of all of this is a profound sense of loss, both for dad and for the help they could have received.' She feels let down, as though she's been kicked in the guts by the government of Australia. John is so much more than a number. So are Lynne, her mum and her family.

Their family is not alone. The waiting list for Support at Home has nearly quadrupled under this government, from fewer than 50,000 when the coalition left government to closer to 200,000 today. For too many, that wait never ends. That is a number which this government is trying to keep secret and it's why we are here today. How can we fix something if the architects are unwilling to face the reality of the current state of the system?

On 9 September, the Senate ordered the Minister for Aged Care and Seniors to produce one thing: the number of older Australians who, like John, died waiting for a Support at Home care package. But the minister refused, saying that that search was too expansive. The Minister representing the Minister for Aged Care and Seniors, Senator McAllister, has just said that, basically, it's too much trouble to actually find out how many people have died while on the waiting list.

As I said, the minister has staff who are paid to do the work. Older Australians, on the other hand, rely on their families to overcome the roadblocks and hurdles this government has placed between them and the care they need. That is why the Senate ordered the Minister representing the Minister for Aged Care and Seniors to come into this chamber today and to explain that failure. An explanation is not compliance. It's an admission that the government is shamelessly hiding from Australian families how many of their loved ones died waiting for the care this government itself had assessed that they needed.

This explanation should not be taken as good enough, and the order should be complied with in full without delay. It has previously been complied with much, much earlier than the middle of September. The only conclusion that anybody listening could reach on the failure of this minister to provide that number is that he doesn't want Australians to know how many people have died waiting for the care they were assessed as needing by this government.

I rise to also speak to the government's failure to provide the Senate with the information requested on how many people are dying waiting for their aged-care packages. The minister has said that this number can't be provided to the Senate today because it is a big responsibility for them to get that right. If only the government and the minister took as seriously the responsibility to get aged care for older Australians right.

Right now, over 200,000 people are waiting for aged-care support. The royal commission said clearly and unequivocally that aged care in this country needed to stop being rationed and for people to get the care they need at the time they need it. Previous data has told us that around 5,000 people a year are dying while waiting for care. In a rich country, that is shameful. We can only surmise that the reason the minister has not provided us with the latest statistics is that they are not improving. It's not a complicated statistic. If you're on the waitlist and you die—how many has that happened to? We don't need to know why people died or how they died. We're simply asking how many people died before they got the package that they were assessed as being entitled to receive. The public has a right to know that information, the Senate has a right to know that information, and it should have been provided before now, yet the minister has come back and said, 'You all need to wait.'

It would seem that waiting is par for the course with this minister because waiting is exactly what older Australians are being asked to do week after week, month after month—for some people, it's up to a year—to get the care that they need. This is such a false economy. As the former inspector-general of aged care, Ms Siegel-Brown, said, for every person who waits, we're paying more in hospital admissions and early entry into residential aged care. The government should be doing everything they can to address this.

You can't tell us that this is a problem that wasn't foreseeable. We've known for 30 years that we were going to have an older or an ageing population. In the Senate today, the government has put amendments to their Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Aged Care Commissioner Bill to give people a pathway for review for their failed integrated assessment tool. This is just another example of the government and the minister not actually understanding what the problems are. The integrated assessment tool is broken. We've heard expert evidence that it is not assessing people appropriately. There is no human override for that assessment, so we have assessors sitting in front of people knowing that the assessment is incorrect and not being able to do anything about that. The minister's solution, put into the House today, is not to rework the integrated assessment tool—not to actually fix the problem—but to give people another option for a review.

Hundreds and thousands of people are already waiting for reviews, and that is further delaying their access to the support that they need. The government's fix to the problem with the IAT is to put more people into a system where they need to get a review—so yet more waiting to get the care that they need. No doubt, more people will die waiting for the care that they need, but will this chamber know how many people that is? No, because the minister is too cowardly to give the information to the Senate so the public knows exactly how many people in this country are dying waiting for care.

Question agreed to.