JANE NORMAN, HOST: Hello, welcome to Capital Hill coming to you live from the Federal Parliament. But today really the focus is firmly on Victoria where authorities have confirmed and other three COVID-19 cases today. We'll jump straight into the political panel now to sort of wrap up the developments in federal politics this morning and I'm joined by Trent Zimmerman, Liberal MP, and Labor MP Susan Templeman, thank you for your time today. Now, we've had a big morning of Senate Estimates and one of the key questions has been how many aged care workers have actually been vaccinated and the Minister wasn't able to come forth with the numbers. Why has there been such a lack of transparency over the numbers of this vaccine rollout?
 
TRENT ZIMMERMAN: Well, we're publishing numbers on the vaccine rollout every day of the week, and you can see them at health.gov.au to get the health department promotion. But I think what is really important is the outcome and we now have a situation in aged care and Victoria where 100 per cent of aged care facilities have now received either the first or second dose. And that's a good outcome because we know that even the first dose starts to provide protection within a matter of days. So that's really the key goal. And nationally, four states have now reached 100 per cent of aged care facilities, the rest of it about 99 per cent.
 
NORMAN: But given the rollout started three months ago, aged care residents and workers were in 1A, the highest priority group. Today, the Aged Care Minister Richard Colbeck, said he was comfortable with the progress and pace of the rollout. Would you be comfortable if all these people still had not been vaccinated?
 
ZIMMERMAN: The vaccine programme has been hit generally, but also for aged care, by two fundamental problems. The first is that obviously, with Pfizer, the storage requirements that were put in place makes it a massive logistical challenge to disperse it. And I think the Department of Health was obviously over optimistic in its predictions that they could do the whole nation within six weeks. But secondly, particularly relating to aged care workers, we had that advice from the experts, which suddenly overnight, limited the use of AstraZeneca to over 50 years. And that had a big impact.
 
NORMAN: I mean, yes, there have been some problems, supply, we've seen a change in health advisors, has the government being agile enough really to adapt to those?
 
TEMPLEMAN: The whole programme has been a joke, and I love the putting a bright shine on it. But yesterday, the minister said that there are only six aged care facilities that hadn't received vaccines. Today, we find out in Estimates, it's something like 21 who haven't started vaccinating. The number of workers who've been vaccinated is down below 10 per cent for aged care workers.
 
NORMAN: We don't actually have the data, the government hasn't collected it.
 
TEMPLEMAN: The whole data collection has been appalling. And you know, it would be a joke if we didn't have people's lives at stake here. And these are lives in Victoria, but had things gone differently, it could very well have been lives in any other state. So while we're saying it's a Victorian issue, this is something every Australian should be thinking; why has this government bungled the rollout so badly? One hundred and ten days, and this is where we're left.
 
NORMAN: So the Victorian authorities just confirmed there that aged care workers who were in the public state run facilities, there'll now be a blitz on vaccinations for them to get them vaccinated. Would you like to see a similar blitz for those federally run private facilities?
 
TEMPLEMAN: I think this is yet another wake up call. The government missed the last wake up call last year and didn't prioritise these vaccines. We should be looking at in-reach programmes across the country to make sure aged care staff have the protection they need, particularly as we know now, that many are working between facilities still. And that's been changed now in in Victoria, although we're hearing from the unions, that there's been pressure being put on workers to still turn up to work, even when they're home isolating and you know, during their 14 days isolation. So real problems, and we should not be here in 2021. This is the equivalent of 'I don't hold a hose' from last year.
 
NORMAN: Well I just want to ask about the single site rules. So when there's an outbreak that's been declared like in Melbourne last Thursday, the Commonwealth said, 'Okay, if you're an aged care worker, you can only work at one facility'. We know that many work across several, do you think it's too late to wait for a declaration of a hotspot to actually put that rule in place?
 
ZIMMERMAN: Well, that was the protocol put in place nationally. And I think in the light of this, it's not a bad idea to look at whether there's an earlier trigger point when community transmission re-emerges. But I think the fundamental point is that, firstly, it's about 5 per cent of the aged care workforce, for example, in Victoria that are working in multiple facilities. But I also think that it is a case of balancing the risk of both because we know that the workforce in aged care is under increasing pressure and to effectively withdraw from the aged care sector for the entire year, those that are doing multiple casual or part time jobs, could have a serious impact on the quality of care. So that's why the focus on only working in single site is triggered when community transmission emerges. And for the rest of the time, and it's like immediate transmission, which thankfully due to the great management of Australians and federal and state governments, has been the case in this country, then you don't need to apply that rule. So it is really adapting to when community transmission emerges and very quickly putting in place the measures to protect aged care.
 
NORMAN: So potentially too late though because when you get under the state level they have a one site rule all the time now since the pandemic but it seems federally there's a different rule.
 
TEMPLEMAN: Yeah, if you haven't got quarantine right, and we haven't got quarantine right in this country because the government hasn't addressed that, you can't afford that lag time between notification of the virus leaking out of quarantine and being in the community to then, 'oh, we better do stuff'. You know, you have to have foolproof things in place to keep people safe. What we've seen for a second time is it's hit