Slade Brockman (WA, Deputy-President) | Link to this | Hansard source

With the concurrence of the Senate, the clerks will set the clock in accordance with informal arrangements agreed by the whips.

Kerrynne Liddle (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Health and Aged Care) | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by ministers to questions without notice asked by Opposition senators today.

I start by addressing Senator Wong's answer, which failed on every transparency and accountability level and measure on aged care. In our home state of South Australia—the great state of South Australia that we both call home—record ramping, mostly for old people, is through the roof. Bed blocking is a crisis due to aged-care shortages. There's the cancelling by Labor of the private health rebate for older Australians. The latest data from this month in South Australia says waiting an average of 317 days is someone's mother, grandmother, aunt, sister, brother, uncle or grandfather. They're waiting for non-specialist support-at-home services. That's the aged-care system under a Labor government—poor, inadequate, unresponsive.

Now, let's talk about the Four Corners expose. It's not a surprise to anybody trying to navigate the aged-care system under Labor. It confirmed exactly what the coalition has been warning for months: that the algorithm for aged care that was developed under Labor, that was pushed through under Labor, is hurting vulnerable older Australians. A leading expert on that program showed that changing the answer to a single question can make a difference of tens of thousands of dollars in someone's funding. That's not a sophisticated tool; that's actually a lottery in the life of older Australians who have contributed to our great country. They are then subjected to an algorithm that says no. A bit like Labor: no to the evidence in front of them that this is flawed; no to the alarmed experts that say, 'There is a problem with your algorithm'; no to the painful stories of older Australians—true stories, honest stories, raw stories; and no to their families, who just want a better deal for older Australians.

Labor designed the system, legislated it and implemented it. Every failure we are seeing has happened under their watch. Labor must return human override to its untested, unreliable, rigid and flawed algorithm assessment tool. It's hard to believe that's a difficult concept to grasp. We're not talking about a tool; we're actually talking about humans and the tool you introduced to assess their needs.

In South Australia, we've got a particularly big problem with aged care. We should be caring better for our older people. It is simply not acceptable that more than 5,000 people have died waiting for a package. That's not acceptable by any measure. The coalition's position is simple: if an older Australian has been assessed as needing care, they should receive the care they have been assessed as needing. Not a fraction of it, not a portion of it, not after months of waiting and certainly not after they have died! That's not acceptable. (Time expired)

Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to respond to that contribution and to talk about the reality of aged care and the fact that we do, proudly, have a larger number of ageing Australians in our country. That presents a particular challenge to all governments. And I do know that in previous governments, under leadership not of the Labor kind, this challenge went unmet for a very long period of time. In fact, it was so unmet that there was the necessity for a royal commission into aged care. And the interim report for that commission was shorthanded in its very title, which was the term Neglect. And that can happen in governments, when people don't pay attention to things, but what we're talking about here is a range of questions that are accusatory, inflammatory, instituted to create drama, offence and anxiety. That doesn't help anything or anyone.

The commissioner, in response to the challenge of what was left by the coalition's failure to see the problem and do anything about it, described it as 'an underpaid, undervalued and insufficiently trained workforce'. Commissioner Lynelle Briggs found that the former government's main consideration was what was the minimum commitment they could get away with. Well, we are in a vastly different place to that.

But that doesn't mean that everything's hunky dory. We are not shying away from the fact that there is a massive policy challenge for Australia to face to meet the needs of our ageing Australians. I put on the record again Senator Wong's words: 'It is a matter of sadness that people in this country, under both governments, have not been able to receive care in time.' But Senator Wong made it very clear that the minister and the government are working hard to ensure that we provide more places, that we reduce wait times and that we respond to that reality of our ageing population. We understand it's about people—it's not about politics; it's about people—and that is why the Labor government is investing $3.7 billion in the package that we've put in to make home care more affordable for Australians. We're also investing $47 billion in aged care this year, which is the largest investment in the nation's history.

The challenge of making a system work perfectly for the Australian people is a challenge that every government faces, and no government gets it a hundred per cent right all of the time. But we are not neglecting ageing Australians. We are working hard, investing Australians' money for ageing Australians to make sure that they can get the services that they need to live in their retirement and in their final years with a dignity that we believe they absolutely deserve.

We're rebuilding this new system. We had to introduce a new act. We had to strengthen the home-care system. We've delivered record pay rises so that there are people to come and give support to people who receive these packages, and we're investing in record infrastructure all across this country. We support care at home. We are working to make sure that Australians who want to live their life and get on with it, who want to be able to do that at home, get the care that they need when they need it. (Time expired)

Richard Colbeck (Tasmania, Liberal Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

It's fascinating to see members of the government rewriting history in respect of this matter. Senator O'Neill made reference to the royal commission. I think we all should acknowledge that was an extremely difficult time. Clearly there were a lot of problems with the aged-care system, and the government of the day had the courage to actually call a royal commission to properly have a look at the system and the way that it was working. It tabled its final report in March 2021, and the then government responded in the budget in May of that year with $17.1 billion of additional funding for the aged-care system, including about $7.2 billion into the home-care system.

The problem that we have right now, with the way that the home-care system is working, is that the failures that we are seeing in the system are of this government's making. In 2019 there were 128,000 people on the waiting list for a home-care package, and the waiting time was way too long. It was well over 12 months—in some cases, two years—for a level 4 package. By September of 2022, 100,000 people had been taken off that waiting list; it was down to 28,000 people. Those stats are from the department's system. The waiting time for a package at any level was 30 to 90 days. If you'd been assessed as having high-level needs, it was less than 30 days. Those are the actual numbers that this government desperately doesn't want to acknowledge.

When the new system was brought in, that number just skyrocketed. There have been more than 150,000 people waiting for a home-care package in the last 12 months alone. Tragically—we suffered this when we were in government—in the last 12 months, alone, 5,000 people have died waiting for their home-care package. I agree with Senator O'Neill: none of us want to see that.

All of this is of the government's making. So what did have they done about it? They've rejected a bill that was passed by this chamber to put human decision-making over the top of the assessment tool. The government rejected it. It pushed back on that. Experts like Professor Kathy Eagar AM said that the assessment tool is fundamentally and completely flawed—yet this government clings to it. They say it was tested. It wasn't tested publicly.

What are senior Australians to think? This is the government that has also cut the private health insurance rebate for senior Australians. Effectively, if you're a full pensioner, it is a $5-a-week cut in your pension. If you're a couple, it is a $15-a-week cut in your pension. That is the action of this government. Why is it that senior Australians are concerned about attitudes towards them with respect to this?

The royal commission said—and I'll go back to the point that Senator O'Neill made, and I acknowledge the work of the royal commission and their 148 recommendations—in respect of the home-care system that it was a cruel lottery and that this cruel lottery must end. The government promised to put the 'care' back into 'home care'. The only thing they've put back is the waiting list and the waiting times.

Michelle Ananda-Rajah (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

In our first term of government, the Albanese government acted on a promise made to older Australians to fix a system that had utterly failed them. This was a system that we inherited after nine years of stewardship—or lack thereof—under the coalition. When we came to government, we picked up the royal commission findings. The interim report, which was released in 2019, was entitled Neglectand it basically said it all. This was an aged-care system that had been chronically underfunded and characterised by chronic underinvestment over the nine years under the coalition. For three of those years, mind you, my colleague Senator Colbeck was the aged-care minister. Senator Colbeck, I remember when you were at the cricket and declined to attend a COVID committee. I remember this because I was in PPE, caring for those aged-care patients who were coming through hospital at the time—and I've never forgotten it. I remind you of that. I find your interest now in aged care a tad disingenuous.

Nevertheless, we as a federal government took those 148 recommendations from the aged-care royal commission, and we are working methodically through them. At the heart of the controversy is the integrated aged-care assessment tool. This tool started development in 2020. There were advisory groups—clinical, technical and statistical—and in 2022 Flinders University ran a living lab trial. These included mock scenarios with actors and clients. In 2023 there was a live trial in over 22,000 people, and it was clinically validated on this cohort. It then went on to be further validated on another cohort of nearly 300,000 people in datasets that were held by the department of health. We heard this testimony in one of the Senate hearings.

We know this tool has now been rolled out, and there is a 0.5 per cent rate of review—so around 400,000 Australians have received home-care packages as of June this year, with 0.5 per cent going on to require a review. That is a very small number. But behind every one of those statistics are people and families under stress. My own experience caring for older Australians over a very long period of time in acute-care hospitals right around the country is that people tend to leave these assessments till quite late because it takes a lot of time before families, and, indeed, people, are ready to take that next step towards even acknowledging that they might require help from someone else. It's a very big deal to say that you need care from someone else and to allow them into your home. By the time these assessments are made, people are often pre-crisis, if not in crisis. It's tragic.

Our government is now undertaking a rapid review into the integrated assessment tool, and we have committed to legislating a escalation pathway to ensure that those older Australians who are falling through the cracks, or feel like they are falling through the cracks, have a pathway where their needs can be prioritised and attended to. But this does not detract from the $47 billion we have committed to reforming this aged-care system and the nearly $4 billion this year towards building more aged-care residential beds and providing additional care to older Australians in aged care.

Leah Blyth (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Defence Infrastructure) | Link to this | Hansard source

I just want to pick up a little bit of what Senator Ananda-Rajah started off with in her contribution. The Albanese government did make a promise to the older Australians here in Australia. He made a promise that he would look after them. What is happening is an absolute disgrace for older Australians. It is unacceptable that we have older Australians who are dying before they get the care that they need. These are older Australians who have contributed to the Australian taxation system their entire lives. When they need help, this government is nowhere to be seen.

Let's talk about the facts a little bit there. Rather than making personal attacks towards Senator Colbeck, perhaps it would be better to actually look at the facts. The waiting list is now 150,000 older Australians. That number has increased exponentially. That is nearly five times the number that was inherited from the coalition. So I think perhaps we should be looking at the facts here before we start making personal attacks on people on this side of the chamber.

Five thousand people have died just in the last 12 months. These are older Australians. They have families. The answer from this Labor government is, 'Apply for your home care package earlier.' The system doesn't let them if they don't qualify, so they can't. So they are stuck on a wait list for over 12 months, desperate for the care that they need because of the system that has been set up by this Labor government. This is a problem that this Labor government has created, and now they're trying to blame older Australians and say they're the reason that they're not getting the care they need. It is disgraceful. This Labor government doesn't care about older Australians. They're more interested in spinning their own tales about how this is playing out. People will continue to die until they are able to actually tell the truth to the Australian people. We need a prime minister who is going to stop making promises that he can't keep.

Then we move to the Coalition of Veterans' Voices. I was very privileged to meet this group of veterans here in Parliament House this week. These veterans are desperate. They have come to Canberra for help because the Labor government is going to put a cap on the funded allied health services that veterans in Australia are going to be able to access. So not only is this Labor government failing older Australians; they're now failing veterans in this country as well.

These are brave men and women who have worn the uniform, who have gone out there, prepared to put their life on the line for Australia. When they need help, when they are broken, when they come back from war and need help, this Labor government said, 'You can only have $5,000 worth of help a year.' This is going to cost veterans their lives. These brave men and women deserve the support that they need from a country that they were willing to go and fight for and defend.

This Labor government is at war with everyone in this country, and it seems that the veterans are just the tip of the iceberg. The Minister for Veterans' Affairs didn't want to meet with the Coalition of Veterans' Voices yesterday; he was forced into it. What we've been told is that when he did finally take that meeting, he refused to shake hands. He crossed his hands and wouldn't engage in any kind of decent conversation. This is a government who is turning its back on old people in Australia and turning its back on veterans. It is an absolute disgrace.

Question agreed to.