Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to express the Greens support for this urgency motion that calls on the government 'to demonstrate leadership, stop seeking to deflect blame and take responsibility for the tragedy unfolding in aged care'. We strongly support this motion. It is clear to us that the government does not have a coordinated, well-resourced national plan in place to protect older Australians from future COVID-19 outbreaks in aged care. Before I go any further I would also like to extend my condolences, sympathy and support for all of those Australians who have lost loved family members in aged care.

We've just heard a list of the things that the government says it has done in aged care, but clearly it is not enough because we have lost 335 older Australians in residential care and home care during this latest outbreak of COVID-19 in Victoria. It is clearly not enough. This government has failed to take accountability and, in doing so, failed older Australians and their families. It has apparently come as a surprise to the Prime Minister and the minister that aged care is in fact a responsibility of the Commonwealth government. The Commonwealth government is the primary funder and regulator of the aged-care system. The Department of Health is responsible for the operation of the Aged Care Act and the associated aged-care principles.

Today I would like to focus on how we could have avoided the scale and heartbreak of the COVID-19 outbreaks in residential aged care and what we need to be doing to make sure it doesn't happen elsewhere. Today the minister said that the government is looking at the learnings from the Newmarch House outbreak, but the changes being made—for example, relating to early identification of cases, facility management and surge workforce—are all reactive. While those are very important, of course, the government is not taking seriously enough the prevention of outbreaks in aged-care facilities on a national level. They must start putting in place preventative measures now. They can't wait until after the royal commission has reported, because this is happening now.

Last week, at the Senate inquiry into COVID-19, the minister tried to pin problems in Victoria on the depletion of the workforce and on not appreciating that a whole workforce would have to be moved. I strongly believe that that was flawed thinking, given the circumstances we are seeing. But I also believe that if we had had the adequate number of staff and proper staff ratios and if we had had good clinical care measures in place in aged care we would not have seen issues on the scale that we now do. For years and years workers in aged care, some of the providers, and friends, families and loved ones of people in residential aged care have been raising the issue of workforce. For years we have known that we needed to significantly increase the numbers of workers, both nurses and care workers, in aged care. We've known for a long time that we needed to significantly improve the training and support for the workforce.