Richard Marles (Corio, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Defence) Share this | Hansard source

[by video link] In the rhythm of parliamentary life, it really does feel remarkable to be making a speech in the parliament in this way, beaming in by video link, as colleagues have been doing over the last two weeks. It's an amazing part of an extraordinary period through which we are living. But the COVID-19 crisis has not just been characterised by novelties; it's been in so many ways characterised by a sense of fear, and that's been felt in no greater way than in the aged-care sector.

We've been focusing on aged care over the last couple of weeks in the hope that what we would hear from the government is a plan about how to fix the problems that are so endemic throughout the sector. But when you listen to what the government's been talking about in response over the last couple of weeks, you hear a group of people who are doing everything they can to try and avoid responsibility. They'll talk about what's happening overseas and how it's much worse there. They'll talk about the fact that, yes, they're responsible for regulating the sector but maybe they're not so responsible for its operation. They'll talk about the fact that, in Victoria, there's a whole lot of other stuff going on and so, in some ways, they can't be held responsible for what's going on in Victoria—it kind of doesn't count.

Indeed, we heard a contribution from a Victorian government senator who made the point that there are thousands of people who die in aged care every year, and so, in a sense, another 450 is almost just business as usual! That was an extraordinary point to make. It's obviously heartless. It's obviously repugnant. But it's also so tone-deaf, because it fails to understand that, in aged-care facilities, there is a deep sense of anxiety about the possibility of a COVID test coming back positive, and, for those aged-care facilities where it has come back positive, there is a white-knuckled fear about how they're going to stop this virus from spreading throughout their facility.

Aged care is a sector in which remarkable people work, looking after our loved ones—working, actually, for not a lot of pay, and doing so in such a brave way where they're exposing themselves to danger. It's not their issue, but what they're faced with is what they're not given to work with. In a sense, the faults are systemic. You have a system which is dramatically underfunded, where the Prime Minister himself, as Treasurer, cut billions of dollars out of the sector, forcing people to work across multiple facilities. We've got a sector where there's not enough PPE available—and the government is explicitly responsible for infection control. These issues go to the ability of the sector to manage infection control, and the infection got in there. Manifestly, that is the government's responsibility.

But this failure to take responsibility was seen yesterday as well, when we had the worst figure in relation to the contraction of our economy in almost a century. This is a dramatic event—one where we see a million people who are unemployed. The expectation is that another 400,000 are going to join that number by the end of the year. Small businesses are deferring $56 billion worth of payments. But, when the Treasurer got up to talk about it, the first thing he did was to point overseas. He pointed directly to the northern hemisphere. He wasn't trying to take any sense of responsibility for what has gone wrong here. Yet the fact of the matter is that, before COVID even struck, you had a whole lot that was wrong with an economy which was already anaemic, with record slow wage growth. We'd had, already, GDP per capita contraction of two quarters consecutively in the last couple of years, which means that, but for immigration, we were already in recession. We'd seen household debt at record levels. The truth of the matter is that the seeds of the Morrison recession were sown well and truly before COVID struck. But what we don't get from this government is any sense of taking responsibility for this at all.

Young people in this country—people who are feeling like, at a really difficult moment in their lives, they've lost an entire year—are looking for hope, but a precondition of that hope is that we have a government which takes responsibility, because that's the basis upon which a plan for the future can be developed and one which so clearly has not been developed by this government. But, without that plan and without taking that responsibility, what we've got in this country is fear. We have a nation where there is uncertainty and where there is fear. We have a nation where there is also no leadership from the Morrison government. (Time expired)

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