Ged Kearney (Cooper, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Skills) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister knows workers moving between different facilities is a key driver of infection of the deadly COVID virus. Given the opportunity he had over the weekend, can he now advise whether aged-care workers are still working across multiple facilities?

Greg Hunt (Flinders, Liberal Party, Minister for Health) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As I advised in the press conference previously, we have AUSMAT workers working across a variety of facilities in Victoria. We have ADF facilities that now have completed a very significant number of cases. We also have testing capacity which is delivered across a variety of facilities. These are people working in aged care precisely because they need to deliver services to different facilities on different sites.

In addition to that, following agreements between the unions and the providers, the work with the Commonwealth and Victoria, the Commonwealth single-site workers scheme was put in place. That is a system that is designed to ensure that the overwhelming majority of workers do work on one site. The reason that provision has been made for individuals—and I think it is very important to be upfront about this—to do that is to leave no facility short of workers. I am sure that not one person here would support the concept that a facility should be left short of workers.

The design that was adopted came from the sector in conjunction with the unions, with strong support to make sure that each individual facility was able, to the best of its ability, to adopt a single-site worker program. With the ADF, with AUSMAT, with nursing support surge staff—for example, from Western Health, which has worked across, I believe, over 30 different sites—and with the testing facilities needing to work across a variety of facilities, it is fundamental that that flexibility is in place. However, having said that, the design of the overarching system was agreed with the workforce, was agreed with the providers, was developed with the Victorian government and was designed to make sure that two things occurred: that the possibility of workers working across multiple sites was dramatically reduced but that the capacity for each and every facility to have an unbroken workforce was maintained.