Zed Seselja (ACT, Liberal Party, Assistant Minister for Finance, Charities and Electoral Matters) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you for the opportunity to speak to what is a very important issue. Of course, it's an issue that this government treats with the utmost seriousness and urgency and gravity. One of the Prime Minister's first actions upon becoming Prime Minister was to call the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety. This is a government that takes these responsibilities seriously and a minister who takes those responsibilities seriously. We heard Senator Urquhart's contribution, somehow claiming that Minister Colbeck doesn't care or that, in fact, his answer did anything other than respond to those serious issues. I think that is a complete misrepresentation of this minister, of the work that he has been doing and, in fact, of the answers that he was giving in question time to some of the Labor Party's questions that were put to him.

I do want to go through some of the responses to the report. I just want to point out that the Labor Party, despite all of its promised tax hikes at the last election, couldn't bring itself to promise one extra dollar when it came to aged care in this country. Despite $387 billion of new taxes, there was not one dollar to show its priorities in this space. When it comes to the response, the Australian government accepted all six recommendations of the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety's report, Aged care and COVID-19: a special report. In response to recommendation 4 of the royal commission's report, the government has updated the National COVID-19 Aged Care Plan to its seventh edition, in consultation with the AHPPC Aged Care Advisory Group. The national plan sets out how the government has and will continue to support the aged-care sector to prevent, prepare, respond and recover from COVID-19. It also provides links to guidance, information and tools to support aged-care recipients, their families, the aged-care workforce and providers of aged-care services. The revised plan builds on and consolidates the critical and successful work already undertaken by the Commonwealth government and allows flexibility to manage individual situations in each state and territory. It represents the seventh stage of national aged-care planning.

Other measures which have been announced include that aged-care residents will now be eligible to receive up to 20 individual psychological services, in line with the services available to the broader community. They will also be eligible for double the allied health sessions under the Medicare chronic disease management plan. In addition to the recommendations of the royal commission, the government is also funding group allied health sessions for residents in facilities affected by COVID-19 outbreaks, including people who need rehabilitation after recovering from COVID-19 and people who have lost condition or mobility because of restrictions put in place to manage the outbreak. A range of actions have been undertaken by the Australian government to ensure the right balance can be struck between restricting visitations in residential aged-care facilities, where necessary, but ensuring residents are not isolated and lonely during these difficult times. So this is a government that takes these issues seriously and is carefully responding to these recommendations.

But I would make this point in terms of the Labor Party's attacks, and we saw this again today, in question time. Even though we have seen tragic deaths—which the minister again acknowledged in his answers today, which wasn't acknowledged by those opposite—and those tragic deaths have occurred almost overwhelmingly in the state of Victoria, the Labor Party seek to deny that, for rank political opportunism and for rank political purposes. They seek to try and ignore the fact that virtually all of the deaths were happening in Victoria as a result of the huge outbreak there, as a result of the Victorian Labor government—