It being past 12.15 pm, pursuant to the order agreed to earlier, there will be a 30-minute debate. The Senate will now proceed to further consideration of the Aged Care Legislation Amendment (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Aged Care Commissioner and Other Measures) Bill 2026 and the motion of Senator Allman-Payne for an instruction to the Committee of the Whole.

I seek leave to speak again on the contingency motion that's before the chair.

Leave is granted for 15 minutes.

I stand here today because we will support the government in the bill that is before the chamber, because older Australians cannot wait any longer—not because the problem is fixed, because it is not. Make no mistake about what this is. This is an admission by the government that its assessment system is failing older Australians. For almost 12 months, older Australians and their families, assessors and providers have been telling the government that the computer generated algorithm that has no human override is getting it wrong time and time again. They told the Senate inquiry. They've been telling our electorate offices. They were telling anybody who would listen. And, for almost 12 months, this government told them the system was working. Now, under the weight of sheer evidence, the government has finally capitulated. It has agreed to an independent review of the very algorithm it spent a year defending.

I'll remind the Senate what that evidence looks like. In the full year before the algorithm was put in place, 170 people asked for their assessments to be reviewed. In just the first five months after the algorithm was in place, 834 people asked for a review, and we heard of many more that would have asked for a review but were just so tired of fighting the system.

Australia's peak bodies for geriatric medicine called the tool a clinical safety risk, the Commonwealth Ombudsman launched an investigation, and documents released under freedom of information show the human override was stripped out from the top down, with the department's own staff finding out just days before the system went live.

Then there are the people. A man living with motor neurone disease was told by a computer he needed less help, not more—a cruel progressive terminal illness, and the computer said no. The government has since had to change the rules to recognise motor neurone disease as warranting urgent priority. That is not a refinement; that is an admission the system is getting it wrong. So why support these changes? It's because we've listened. We've listened to stakeholders, to advocates and to older Australians who live with this system every single day. And what they've told us is clear. The system is so bad right now we cannot afford to walk away from even the most modest of improvements. But they told us something else as well. Any improvement of the nature that is being put forward by schedule 4 of this bill must only be interim. It cannot become this government's excuse to stop this process from being fixed. We were not prepared to leave older Australians stuck with the current system while this government takes its time producing a perfect bill that we know will never come. So we've done what stakeholders asked of us. We have supported this improvement, but we've made sure it is interim.

In return for our support, the coalition have received two things. As I said, the first is an independent review of the aged-care assessment tool—a clinically informed review backed by experts in geriatric medicine, dementia care and allied health—examining how the algorithm classifies older Australians and who gets priority. That review must inform the rebuilding of any assessment tool. We're pleased that the government has agreed to it and agreed to publish the results of that review in full so it's there for everybody to see. But a review is not worth the paper it is written on unless its results are turned into action.

Older Australians have had enough waiting under this government, and that is why the second thing we secured matters so much: a sunset clause. These provisions will sunset after 12 months. So the government has 12 months to fix the problems that have been identified by so many people. If it does, older Australians will be better off and we will herald that as a welcome advancement. But if it doesn't, these provisions will lapse and the government will have to come back into this place and explain why it has continued to fail older Australians, why it has failed to give them the care that this government has assessed them as needing. That's our mechanism, and we will force the government to act.

Let me be very clear about one more thing. The coalition is not stepping away from our fight for human override. A computer, and a computer alone, cannot be left to make the decisions about the care needs and care priorities of older Australians. I know the Greens have moved an amendment on human override, and, in principle, we support the Greens. We do not believe that what the government have put forward today is adequate when it comes to human override. What they're putting forward today is an escalation pathway run by the department for people in exceptional circumstances. It is a step—it is an improvement on what we have now—but it is not the same thing as letting a qualified assessor, sitting across the table from an older Australian, correct the computer when it gets it wrong. And we know it is getting it wrong time and time again.

The Senate has already passed the coalition's bill to restore human override, with the support of the Greens and the crossbench, and I acknowledge the incredible support of the crossbench, particularly the Greens and Senator Allman-Payne, on forcing this issue. Earlier this year, a senior minister in the Albanese government told the parliament:

… in every case there needs to be human oversight of any use of AI. We don't just hand over decision-making to abstract computer programs…

Well, guess what. We agree with you, Minister. We are simply asking this government to apply that standard to older Australians when it's assessing their care needs and their care need priorities. The government has now said it will review the algorithm, and that is what we expect it to deliver.

We're giving the government the opportunity to go away and do that work. Get it done. But, if it does not, we will be back, and I'm confident that the Greens and the crossbench will be back with us. Together, we have the power to force the government to do the right thing. Remember when Prime Minister Albanese was the opposition leader prior to the 2022 election and told Australians he was going to come in here and put 'the care back into aged care'. Nothing could be further from the reality that older Australians are facing right now. So, today, we're putting the government on notice. The clock is ticking. The coalition will never step away from older Australians. We will never step away from supporting older Australians getting the care they need when they need it. We will keep pushing for a permanent fix, and what we're doing today is telling the government 'you have the chance to come back with a permanent fix, so you'd better do it'.

We will always back a human being able to override a decision when the computer, quite frankly, has made a botch of it. No algorithm has ever grown old. Older Australians deserve a system that sees them as people and not as data. We know, as we stand here today, that 250,000 older Australians are currently waiting to either be assessed or get the package that they've been assessed as needing. We know that, last year, over 6,400 older Australians died while they were waiting to get the home-care package they had been assessed as needing. And we know that right now in excess of 3½ thousand older Australians have been assessed as clinically able to be discharged from our hospitals, yet they languish in hospital beds because this government has rationed care when it comes to aged-care packages. It has failed the sector and the sector's viability with its actions—other actions apart from in this bill—so we're not seeing aged-care beds being built. They need 10½ thousand aged-care beds every year for the next 10 years. Last year, the government's incentives managed to deliver, through the private sector, 802. The government is a long way short of delivering for older Australians, and we believe older Australians need better. That's why we are asking the government to make good on its promise. Fix this absolutely disastrous system. Fix this algorithm that is producing terrible results for older Australians. Quite frankly, older Australians deserve more from their government than they're currently getting.

by leave—There's been a lot said in the last 24 hours about the Greens' approach to the Aged Care Legislation Amendment (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Aged Care Commissioner and Other Measures) Bill 2026. I sat here in the chamber yesterday and listened to numbers of people on the government side accusing the Greens of playing politics with older people.

Let me reassure every older Australian in this country that the Greens will never play politics with older Australians. We have come into this chamber in good faith, seeking to do what advocates are telling us needs to be done and what older people are telling us needs to be done, and that is to try and reinstate human override into the aged-care assessment tool. We came into this chamber in good faith, seeking to split the bill so that the First Nations components of the bill, schedules 1 to 3, could pass through quickly and swiftly, and so that we could have a little bit more time to debate schedule 4 and to seek to reinstate human override—to at least take the fight up to the government to try and get human override back in.

Many government senators spoke yesterday, and many have spoken this morning; they have spoken at great length and quoted many of the advocacy groups that have spoken about this bill. But they have selectively omitted the statement that what people would prefer is that human override be reinstated in aged-care assessments. That is the preference of advocates, carers and providers and of older people themselves. So the Greens have tried to use every lever at our disposal to try and reinstate human override into aged-care assessments. Many government senators have stood in this place, yesterday and this morning, and said that this is 'urgent', and yet have filibustered, delaying us coming to the question of whether we should split the bill and getting on with the committee stage.

I heard many phrases being used by government senators, saying that we only need an escalation pathway because we only need humans to get involved in 'exceptional circumstances'; that we need the algorithm because we need 'consistent, rules based decision-making', or that we need 'a standardised assessment tool'. I kept hearing people talking about 'standardisation'. Senator Ananda-Rajah said that computers are the best decision-makers. Well, I'm sorry, the Greens disagree. People, clinicians, should be the final arbiters of the care that an older person needs to receive—and the government has effectively admitted that by saying that, in some exceptional circumstances, people will have the benefit of a person, a human, a clinician, having the final say. The Greens say that every older person is entitled to have a person make the final decision on the support and the care that they need and should receive.

I put to the government: if you are so concerned about too many clinicians overriding the outcome of the algorithm, then I think that tells you that the algorithm is not working, because if the algorithm were making decisions that accurately reflected the standard and level of care that older people need to receive then there would be very little need to override it. The escalation pathway is an admission that the algorithm is not working, and it is providing human oversight for a small number of people in the aged-care system. Government senators said that we need the algorithm because we need efficient and standardised testing or assessment of older people. Well, again, I put it to you: if the algorithm is so efficient, why do we now have a waitlist of a quarter of a million people waiting either for an assessment or to get the care that they've been assessed as needing? This is efficiency for efficiency's sake.

Senator Whiteaker said that we can't have human override because it would be too expensive. That is precisely why the government is wedded to a computer making these decisions, because this is not a measure to improve the care and support that older people need; this is not a measure to hasten the ability to assess those older people, because we are seeing that assessments are taking longer than ever before. This is a budget measure; it is a measure to cut the cost of care for older Australians. We know this because the government senators said it themselves. As Senator Ruston said, the Greens and the coalition and the remaining members of the crossbench have already voted to reinstate human override into the integrated assessment tool. The Greens have come into this place in good faith seeking to try and get human override back into this bill. We have sought to do it without holding up the First Nations commissioner components of this bill, and we have sought to have a debate in good faith on that question. We have been denied the ability to do that by government senators, who have filibustered for two days so that we could not get to that question. So please don't accuse the Greens of playing politics with older people.

We know that the decisions that are made in this place, as they relate to aged care, are life and death decisions for so many thousands of people. Over 6,000 people in this country died last year waiting for an assessment. That is shameful. And, right the way through this process, we have simply sought to get a better deal for older people—older people who are telling us computers should not be making decisions about their care; older people who are telling us in their thousands that it is unacceptable that, when they finally get assessed, they only get part of their package; and older people who have told us that they are too scared to get an assessment because they know of so many other people who have come back with underassessments from the algorithm and that they're choosing to remain on the Commonwealth Home Support Program because they're terrified that, if they get an assessment, they will be assessed as having a lower level of need than they need. We know this because they have told us. They have told us when they have contacted our offices. They have told us when they have given lived experience evidence at two of our inquiries that have gone right around the country.

I fail to understand how the department and the government can continue to be so wedded to the idea that a computer is the best decision-maker for the care needs of older people. We know their needs are complex. No two older people are the same. No two older people's houses and the way they're laid out are the same. No two older people's support systems, whether they have family and who has what amount of time, are the same. None of us would want to go into a hospital and have a doctor tell us that they're just going to punch our condition or our symptoms into a computer and that it'll tell us what they're going to do, and, if we don't agree with it, too bad, wait for a review that could take 90 days. Older people don't have time to wait. In so many instances, they don't want to ask for help until they absolutely need it. Providers and carers and their families tell us that. When an older person reaches out to seek help and support in aged care, it's because they really need it—and they need it now. Not in six months time, when they might be able to get an assessment; not in another 12 months time, when they might be able to get a package—they need it now.

These reforms are failing older people. You cannot say that the reforms are on the right track when waitlists are blowing out, when people are telling us that they are not getting the care that they need and when they can't even get a full package when it's finally assigned. That is not a system that works well. Older people saying that they can't afford co-payments and that they're going without care is not a system that is working well. The Greens have said that we won't stand in the way of this bill going through to appoint the First Nations commissioner, and we won't stand in the way of the bill going through if our amendments aren't successful. We know that older people need as many avenues as possible to access the right type of care at the time that they need it.

But I can't help reflect that this is a missed opportunity. As Senator Ruston said, the Greens, the coalition and the crossbench have worked together to pressure the government. We had an opportunity here to try again to reinsert human override into this bill, to force the government to take another look at it and to keep the pressure on them. Saying that you're going to do a review that was needed 12 months ago, because it was obvious from the beginning that this algorithm is not working, is such a small step forward. It just makes more older people wait. Everything that happens around older people is just about waiting. 'Wait for us to do another review. Wait for us to see whether it makes the algorithm any better. Wait to see if we need to tinker around the edges a little bit more.' All the while, a quarter-of-a-million people are waiting for care and dying while they wait. I am incredibly disappointed that we were not able to work with other members of this chamber to keep the pressure on, to force them to at least reject putting human override in again, because that is what is needed here.

Every older person in this country deserves to have a person have the final say on the care that they need. And families should not have to be in a situation where they see their older parent or their grandparent die waiting for care. I know what that feels like. I watched my mum die of MND like so many other people do in this country, knowing how rejected they felt that the government did not care enough to give them the care that they needed when they desperately needed it. I watched my father, a man in his late 70s, trying to do his very best to care for her without any package support at all. And I know that the MND community welcomes the rapid access, but I want to put on the record again that it is still far too little. When it costs $300,000 a year to care for somebody in the late stages of MND, and the most they can get is $70,000, if the algorithm gets it right, that is not okay. No family in this country should have to be trying to fight their way through a system that is so complex and so complicated, only to find themselves in a situation where they feel like they have to fight for their older parent or family member to get the care they need because a computer is making those decisions and getting them wrong. It's already hard enough to navigate the system.

My plea to everyone in this chamber is this. We have lost an opportunity on this bill to put humans back in charge of making the decisions for older people's care. But I hope the next time we have a piece of legislation before us that gives us the opportunity to do that, we can get it done, because older people do not have time to wait.

I rise to speak on the Aged Care Legislation Amendment (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Aged Care Commissioner) and Other Measures Bill 2026. The coalition welcomes the commissioner, and I have said so in this place earlier this week. Today I want to speak about the government's changes to aged-care assessment and why the coalition will support them. Let me be clear at the outset. We are supporting the changes in this bill because older Australians cannot afford to wait any longer. They can't afford to wait any longer. They're telling us that right around the country, when you listen to them and you listen to their families. The problem is not fixed. It is absolutely not fixed. Make no mistake about what this is: an admission by the government that its assessment system is failing older Australians. For almost 12 months, older Australians, their families, assessors and providers have been telling this government that the algorithm is getting it wrong. They told the Senate inquiry. They told our electorate offices. They told anyone who would listen. For almost 12 months, this government told them the system was working.

Now, under the sheer weight of evidence, the government, which talks about caring for vulnerable people, has finally capitulated. It has agreed to an independent review of the very algorithm it spent a year defending. I'm not sure how you could defend it with the weight of evidence that said the algorithm was just the wrong thing to do. It wasn't assessing people appropriately. It was unfair. It was making mistakes. There was the removal of human override. How much more wrong can you get it?

We are giving the government the opportunity to go away, do that work and get it done, but if it does not, we will be back, and I'm confident the Greens and the crossbench will be with us. Together, we will force this government to do the right thing. The coalition won't step away from this fight for human override. That's because we have heard it time and time again. Senator Ruston and I have been speaking to people in communities across South Australia and everywhere else in this country, and we're hearing exactly the same message. The only people that don't seem to be hearing that are on the opposite side. We won't move one inch from pushing for this to happen.

I know the Greens have moved an amendment on human override. We do not believe what the government has put forward is adequate when it comes to human override. An escalation pathway run by the department for people in exceptional circumstances is a step, but it is not the same as letting a qualified assessor sit across the table from an older Australian and correct the computer when it gets it wrong. This Senate has already passed the coalition's bill to restore human override with the support of the Greens and the crossbench. Earlier this year, a senior minister in this government told the parliament:

… in every case there needs to be human oversight of any use of AI. We don't just hand over decision-making to abstract computer programs …

Of course the coalition agrees; it's common sense. Today, we are putting this government on notice. The clock is ticking. The coalition will never step away from older Australians. We will keep pushing for a permanent fix, and we will always back human override, because no algorithm has ever grown old. Every Australian is different, and older Australians deserve a system that sees them as people, not as data. They deserve nothing less.

The time for consideration of this bill has expired.