Richard Colbeck (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Minister for Aged Care and Senior Australians) Share this | Hansard source

I want to thank the Senate for the chance to further outline the government's record and commitment to preventing and tackling COVID-19 in aged care and how that has evolved as we learn more about this virus. These are extraordinary times—times of great tragedy for so many and full of emotion, pain and grief. I would like to extend my condolences to the families and loved ones of the more than 360 older Australians who have lost their lives from COVID-19, each one of which is a tragedy.

We continue to work day and night as a government to safeguard the most vulnerable in our community. The care and welfare of senior Australians has been and remains the highest priority for the Australian government. I, as minister for aged care, along with the Minister for Health, the Prime Minister, the government and the national cabinet at every step of this pandemic have acted on the advice of our medical experts, including the chief medical officer, the team of deputy chief medical officers and also the various subcommittees of experts who provide advice to the government—the AHPPC, the CDNA, the ICEG and now the AHPPC Aged Care Advisory Group.

I have been working every day with the aged care sector—providers, staff and families—to ensure that these people in care, those who first cared for us, receive the highest level of protection. For this I am accountable. We've heard the stories of heartbreak as this virus has impacted on our senior Australians. I've spoken directly with scores of families. Through tears they've told me of their mums and dads: the contributions they've made to their family and their community and how they should never have spent their final hours isolated and alone. I've also been in almost daily contact with providers, facility managers and staff who have shared similar stories of distress. We have had to learn about this novel virus and continue to learn and apply those learnings to our response to new outbreaks. There have been missteps, though. During last Friday's Senate hearing I didn't have details to hand that I should have. Again, I apologise.

We know that COVID-19 has had a devastating impact on the elderly and those with compromised immune systems. There are few countries anywhere in the world where there has been coronavirus and where they have been able to avoid outbreaks in residential aged care. Where there is widespread community transmission there is a significant impact, and unfortunately—and tragically—there are deaths.

Our swift and decisive action, our frontline response, our decisions about borders, our national pandemic plan and our hospital agreements—the strength of the public health response in Australia—has seen us avoid the scale of tragedy in aged care seen in so many other countries. Our early response has ensured that so far 97 per cent of our aged-care facilities have not had a COVID-infected resident. That is a high-water mark compared to other regions in the world, like the UK, which is battling COVID-19 in 56 per cent of its facilities. It's a heartbreaking reality that in some countries they have stopped counting aged-care deaths altogether. Every death in aged care as a result of this COVID-19 pandemic is a tragedy.

We have a far from perfect aged-care system. That is why one of the first acts of the Morrison government was to call the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety to address the systematic problems that have existed for decades. In my tenure as aged-care minister, significant changes were made even as the royal commission continued to undertake its work. Some of these things included: completing work on the new, independent Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission; implementing new consumer-focused Aged Care Quality Standards; introducing a new National Aged Care Mandatory Quality Indicator Program; and implementing a new single Charter of Aged Care Rights covering 14 fundamental protections relating to safety, quality care, independence, control, fairness and choice. We have mandated requirements to reduce the use of chemical and physical restraints and improved medication management in residential care. We've invested in the implementation of a Serious Incident Response Scheme, and we've invested in dementia research. We have provided a Business Improvement Fund to assist residential aged-care facilities in financial difficulties, including prioritising those in regional, rural and remote areas, and those impacted by bushfires earlier this year.

Since the 2018-19 budget, we have invested more than $3 billion in home-care packages to support more Australians to remain living in their own homes for longer. That's an increase of more than 50,000 home-care packages and, for the first time, we've seen the national waiting list decline. We are delivering record investment in the aged-care system, from $13.3 billion under Labor to $21.4 billion this financial year and $25.4 billion in 2022-23. But more reform is needed. We will not sit idle, and the work continues.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had the undivided attention of the government from the outset. The wellbeing of our most vulnerable has been our highest priority right from the beginning. As the former Chief Medical Officer, and now the Secretary of the Department of Health, said in a statement to the royal commission:

The Australian Government has, at all times, had the protection of elderly Australians at the forefront of our approach to COVID-19 and this has dominated our planning and preparedness. Any suggestion to the contrary is strongly rejected.

We commenced our planning in January—very early in the cycle of this devastating global pandemic. We closed our borders, and we released our national response, which included the overarching plan for the management of COVID-19: the Australian Health Sector Emergency Response Plan for Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19). We published the advice of the CDNA to the sector on 13 March. This document has since been updated twice as our understanding of the virus has grown. We negotiated hospital agreements—which have proved to be so vital, Mr President, particularly in your home state of Victoria—to safeguard older Australians and to release pressure on stressed facilities and, importantly, to provide additional workforce capacity into aged-care facilities.

We negotiated and resourced surge-workforce capacity, an announcement we made on 11 March, and we continue to build on that capacity. Almost 1,000 Commonwealth-funded surge staff have been deployed into aged-care facilities just in Victoria, plus ADF and AUSMAT teams. We secured and built a substantial national stockpile of PPE, so vital in the fight against COVID-19, at a time of global shortage. We negotiated and signed a national testing contract to ensure that residents and workers in infected facilities could be tested quickly for the virus. We conduct asymptomatic testing in COVID-19 hotspots throughout Victoria. We developed nine training modules, including infection control and PPE use, and made those freely available to the sector. The Aged Care Quality and Safety Commissioner has conducted cycles of preparedness testing for the sector, and that work continues.

Through the AHPPC and national cabinet, we've provided advice on visitation and worked closely with the sector to develop a very successful code of conduct for visitation. We put in place communication systems to assist facilities that weren't able to maintain contact with family and loved ones so that they understood what was happening with their family members. We commissioned investigations and acted quickly on the learnings of Dorothy Henderson Lodge and Newmarch. In Victoria, as the scale of the outbreak grew, we established the Victorian Aged Care Response Centre, which brought together the decision-making of both the state and the Commonwealth and played a significant role in managing an extremely difficult situation that has developed in Victoria. That structure has now been endorsed by national cabinet for application, if required, in other states and territories.

We meet every day—sometimes twice a day—to ensure that every resource required is directed to the effort. We have placed no limits on those resources, with over $1 billion committed to our COVID-19 response to aged care to date.

Senator Watt interjecting—