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

The Greens will be supporting this censure. We are sick of having Australia compared with global situations. Australians are sick of hearing that. They are desperately upset that so many people have died in aged care in this country. We are sick of hearing that there was a plan when quite obviously there was no plan. You rip a cover off one report and stick another one on it and say, 'Here's our plan.' The planning included self-assessment by providers of their preparedness for the pandemic—self-assessment! And guess what? Most of them said, 'We're prepared.' Well, quite obviously they were not.

We should have had people in these facilities from the beginning. We should have made sure infectious disease control training was mandatory—and not online. It's come to the point where we've got the defence forces there in these residential facilities providing the training that should have been provided from the start. I will admit that the scene for this was set a long time ago; it didn't just suddenly happen. There is the fact that we don't have a sufficient number of hours of provision of care, for a start; the fact that we don't have enough workforce in place; and the fact that we don't even have minimum standards in residential aged care for staffing ratios. All that has set the scene. The fact that funding for the provision of care hasn't been dealt with has also set the scene. The fact that we haven't got it right with clinical care, the balance of which is provided in aged care, is also a factor. But the fact is that we knew that if COVID got into aged-care facilities it was going to have a devastating impact.

Where I will accept international comparisons is where we look and see what happened. There have been facilities that have kept it out. All the facilities in this country should have had an audit, not a self-assessment. They should have had an audit. They should have been prepared for this pandemic, for the fact that it might get into the facilities and the fact that more staff needed training and made sure that we had sufficient PPE—so that people weren't having to share masks, weren't having to use just one glove—and knew how to use it. Then we had the excuse that the staff were bringing it in, that that's how residents were catching it, when in fact we know that healthcare workers predominantly have caught it in the workplace and weren't bringing it into the aged-care facilities.

This has not been handled. We didn't have a plan. We don't a system that's set up to protect workers. And now all of a sudden we will have someone who's ensuring that we have infectious disease control in place in facilities—now. Now we put it in place. Why wasn't that—making sure we had somebody checking that—there from the beginning? We get accused of base politics. It is base politics not to accept and acknowledge that you did not have a plan, that you weren't prepared, that you didn't learn the lessons internationally.

The fact that the regulator does not have enough staff and that the regulator has not been there doing its job also needs to be strongly considered and factored in. A strong regulator in place, a strong cop on the beat, would also have helped to ensure that this did not happen. The fact that we have so many notices now in place on these facilities that have had a lot of infection and a lot of deaths again points to the failure of the regulatory process. And it's not as if we hadn't been warned. I will keep saying it: 35 reports over 40 years—a lot of them on the watch of this government. This was not inevitable, and I will not have it said that it was inevitable. It wasn't! We could have done more and we should have done more.