Murray Watt (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Northern Australia) Share this | Hansard source

As other speakers from Labor have said today, older Australians deserve our respect, our support and our love. Instead, from this minister and this government they get neglect, they get cuts and they get blame-shifting and excuses. Instead of our respect and our support, they have a minister who presides over a rolling crisis, a crisis that has existed since he took on the role and that has only got worse as we have faced COVID-19. Instead of our support and our respect, older Australians, their families and the aged-care workforce get a minister who sees aged care as a part-time job, something he fits around his trips to the cricket.

We have known about the horror stories in aged care for years. There was a royal commission into it which exposed the neglect, which exposed the elderly Australians sitting with open wounds, unable to get the care that they need because of staffing shortages, because of underpayment of aged-care workers, because of underresourcing of the sector. We have known about this for years, and yet we continue to read about it, to hear about it, to watch it, to see it with our own eyes, in our own families, everywhere around the country. Rather than knuckling down and actually getting these problems fixed, getting the workers paid what is needed to attract and keep people in the workforce, making sure that providers use the funding they get transparently so that funds are used to support the elderly Australians in aged-care facilities, we have a minister who decides his priority is going to see a cricket match for three days. It's not as if time couldn't have been spent in those three days continuing to fix the problems in the aged-care facilities. There's no shortage of problems. There's no shortage of recommendations about what needs to be done. Instead, this minister chose to go to the cricket and let things rip. In just one example that we've turned to today—the Jeta Gardens aged-care facility south of Brisbane—at the time this minister was at the cricket COVID was ripping right through that aged-care facility, and we now see 15 residents dead, as well as dozens more testing positive. This minister must go and he must go today.