Rebekha Sharkie (Mayo, Centre Alliance) Share this | Hansard source

Aged care assessment teams are known as ACATs and they are teams of medical professionals who work alongside the Regional Assessment Service. They work out of our hospitals and they expertly assess the level of care required by individual elderly Australians. These teams are ultimately responsible for assessing who should receive government funded care and at what level. There are 80 of these care teams across Australia. They are physiotherapists, nurses, psychologists, social workers and occupational therapists.

But in late December last year the government quietly announced it will amalgamate the ACAT and RAS workforce from April 2021, with a tender to be put out for organisations to deliver the combined assessment service rather than state health professionals and that should be an issue that should concern every single Australian.

This decision appears to have caught the state health ministers unaware, with the Victorian and Queensland ministers expressing concern at the rushed privatisation, while the New South Wales health minister, a Liberal, Mr Brad Hazzard, went so far as to say that it lacked logic. Meanwhile the chair of the royal commission into aged care, Mr Pagone QC, took the unusual step of issuing a statement on behalf of the royal commission to confirm that the interim report did not endorse the government's stated position on privatising the aged care assessment teams.

I would like to say that we have heard from government that they can't move on aged care until we actually have the findings of the royal commission but privatisation—don't worry about what the commission says; don't even worry about waiting for the commission to finish; let's go gung-ho and privatise—is a detrimental step. Health experts have argued that private providers are unable to offer the expertise to adequately assess the complex needs of hundreds of thousands of elderly Australians. For example, Dr John Maddison, President of the Australian and New Zealand Society for Geriatric Medicine, gave evidence to the royal commission that the changes proposed by government represented a potential threat to the availability of expertise in assessing aged-care recipients, and suggested that moving the assessment model in-house would likely remove any meaningful consultation with geriatricians during the assessment process.

So what is behind the government's proposed reform of the home care sector? It's been reported by Rick Morton, a well-known journalist from The Saturday Paper, that this is little more than an accounting trick designed to improve the figures, at least on paper, for the national prioritisation system. The national waitlist right now is 112,000 people. They are still waiting for a package, and that is a national shame. The government's report on Home Care Packages Program data for the most recent quarter provided an estimated wait time of 12 months plus for level 4 packages. However, a more accurate picture can be gleaned from the Productivity Commission's 2020 Report on government services, which shows the wait time for a level 4 package is more likely to be closer to three years. It is unclear how, if at all, the proposed ACAT system would reduce wait times or improve the quality of care for those lucky enough to receive their package in a timely manner.

Last Friday the royal commission was in Adelaide for a hearing. During the hearing, senior counsel assisting the commission Mr Rozen QC put forward a number of recommendations for consideration by the commission to address the shortage of appropriately skilled workers in the sector. In making the recommendations, Mr Rozen QC suggested the government lacked real leadership and instead had employed:

… an approach at the highest levels of the aged care bureaucracy that is timid. It's risk averse, more worried about political risk than making a contribution to the …

vital issue of aged-care reform.

It is galling that the focus of reforming aged care is a path down privatisation of the ACAT model rather than adequately funding all of those on the waitlist and supporting the ACAT model as it currently exists. This is a shame. We are letting older Australians down. We are doing the wrong thing by older Australians. It is no wonder that they are fearful in their home waiting for a package. It is no wonder they are fearful about going into an aged-care facility. This government must do better. This government can do better. We need to do better for all Australians on this.

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