Andrew Giles (Scullin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Cities and Urban Infrastructure) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. Epping Gardens in my electorate is the site of Australia's worst aged-care coronavirus outbreak. More than 20 residents have died. At the height of the outbreak, just six rostered staff were available to care for 115 residents, many of them already ill with COVID. Why didn't the Prime Minister have a plan to stop tragedies like this?

Scott Morrison (Cook, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Epping Gardens was one of the other facilities of the four that I have already mentioned in my earlier answers to this House. And, as was the case with Epping Gardens and other places, once advised of the situation, the officials and health officers and others moved very quickly to restore the workforce and to provide whatever supports were necessary right across that facility, conducting the testing, and conducting the transfers to private and other hospitals—facilitated by the private health agreement put in place by the Minister for Health with private hospitals right across the country—to ensure that, in those cases, for the people who were affected by this terrible event at Epping Gardens and the other facilities that I've nominated, we were able to stabilise the facility as soon as could be practically achieved.

The events that have occurred in these four centres in particular, that have occurred in Victoria, are terrible outcomes, as I've already mentioned, and we deeply regret the terrible events that have occurred to those individuals. What it reminds us is that, in the vast majority of cases, the plans that have been put in place have been effective. But, in specific cases, that is the day when the viruses got the better of those centres and the arrangements around those, and the reason for that is that the level of community transmission that has occurred in Victoria cannot be underestimated.

The reason we haven't seen that level of distress in those facilities in seven other states and territories is that we have not seen that community outbreak in those states and territories. As I just mentioned in my answer to the last question, we have seen these outbreaks in other countries—in the United Kingdom, we have seven times the impact in aged-care facilities as compared to Australia. In those four cases, it is our deep regret, as I'm sure it is of everyone who has been involved and working to try to support those facilities, but the plan we put in place enabled us to stabilise that facility as quickly as possible, and that facility was ultimately stabilised and residents were fully transferred out of those centres.

The government will continue to apply this plan. As we said, the number of critical facilities has been reduced from 13 to three as a result of putting those plans in action in those circumstances. And we will continue to do that. But, for those who were impacted, particularly the families of residents, the communication support that was put in place by Services Australia to ensure that we were reaching all of those families and providing outward calls was part of the plan, and that was put in place to deal with the most extreme of circumstances. I want to thank all of the staff who turned up to work, who were able to source and get into that facility, and the Defence Force personnel who went into the facility to make that situation as stable as we possibly could under the circumstances.