Santo Santoro (Queensland, Liberal Party, Minister for Ageing) Share this | Hansard source

In terms of the provision of information to the Senate, and particularly to Senator McLucas, I will continue to provide information as regularly as I have—obviously at estimates, in response to your questions, in response to questions from senators on my side of the chamber, through media releases and through any other accountability mechanism that exists. You can draw whatever conclusions you wish to draw from the figures that I have already provided, Senator McLucas; that is up to you. I will certainly continue to be very open and very honest with the Senate, and I look forward to providing further information in due course. We do have estimates in a couple of weeks time, which is not too far away. There will also be three question times in the Senate at which you may wish to ask questions. I am not trying to hide any information from you in relation to July, August and September figures.

I will ask the agency to let me know and, if I can provide that information in the near future, I will. Again, I can assure you that the government in its budget provided additional funds—I think it was $1.5 million; I will stand corrected on the exact figure—for additional spot checks. The agency informs me that it is able to conduct the additional spot checks under its current budget. I can assure you that those spot checks, one per facility, will take place, and that is the best advice I can give you.

I think how the agency makes its decisions as to what it is going to check against is up to the agency. It is an independent agency; it operates at arm’s length from the government. Obviously the agency is very aware of the strong public interest in the safety of residents within publicly funded aged-care facilities. The physical and health wellbeing of residents is paramount. After all, the issue of spot checks, unannounced visits and all the other measures that the government is putting in place to help to secure the physical and health wellbeing of residents arose because of the public controversy when some isolated issues of physical and sexual abuse became public. I wish to stress that, when those issues were brought to my and the public’s attention, we did everything we could as a government to address them in a very public and accountable way.

I think the agency is very aware of its responsibilities. I believe it is very capable of making determinations broadly and also about specific facilities that it may have under attention. Based on some information that it has received either anonymously or very openly the agency may decide to do a random spot check and check against certain outcomes. It is very difficult to give you, Senator McLucas, a broad brush indication of what they are going to check against other than what they deem fit at the time and what will assist in looking after the best interests, particularly the physical and health interests, of residents in care.