We support any steps that will fix the aged-care system, but this bill, like so much of what this government has done, is a very meagre response. It's a bare minimum. It's probably not even a minimum. It falls short of the sorts of things that older people who are in aged care and their families and the people who care for them should be expecting. The government has fobbed off or delayed or simply rejected key recommendations from the aged care royal commission, which was done, let's remember, because of how dire the situation was in aged care. Of the 148 recommendations, over half are not being implemented or are not being implemented properly, and this bill is no different, with alterations and a number of items missing from the original royal commission recommendations that this bill claims to be addressing. It's also very concerning that older Australians, the aged-care peak bodies, the providers, the workers and their unions, like the HSU and the nurses and midwives, were not consulted in the drafting of this bill despite the impacts that the things in this bill will have on them, considering it covers things like funding, workforce screening, governance and banning orders under code of conduct. These are all very significant areas of concern, and there should have been consultation. This is yet another example where we see the government producing stuff and not listening and talking with the people whose input they should be seeking.
When I visit my dad in his aged-care facility, I get an insight into the overworked, underpaid yet extraordinarily caring workforce who care for him and his fellow residents. I see their efforts to bring a richness, even during the pandemic, to the lives of every person that they care for. For instance, at the Anzac Day service for residents this year, my dad was absolutely resplendent in his sports jacket, with his rosemary and poppy, and his wearing of a multicoloured wig to mark Harmony Day was something my mum and I never thought we would see! But the big grin he had showed that he was really enjoying the attention and the engagement.
Older Australians like my dad helped build this country. They worked hard, they built businesses, they paid their taxes and they raised their families, and they rightly expect that the federal government will support them in their frailer years. That's what they deserve. It's what they've earned after a life of contributing to their communities and to Australia. But the Morrison government has consistently let them down, and I hear from people on a weekly basis who are struggling with the circumstances that their families face in aged care or that they fear that they're going to experience. After 21 reports the Morrison government knew that older people were suffering in aged care, but they didn't fix the problem. They had to be dragged to it, and they're still not fixing it. As Treasurer, Scott Morrison, the Prime Minister now, was actually cutting funding. His record proves that he cannot be trusted to fix aged care. Another three years of the Morrison government will not do it. After eight long years, there is still a crisis in many aged-care facilities.
In Macquarie, in the Blue Mountains and Hawkesbury, the aged-care centres have felt the pressure of trying to keep COVID out, and I want to take a moment to talk about that. In the months that they were waiting for the promised vaccinations, there was great fear about the impact COVID would have, and, even when residents were largely vaccinated, staff were not. It's beyond my comprehension that the government could not get its act together to vaccinate residents and staff at the same time. Clearly the lack of supply of vaccines kept the threat of COVID in aged care much higher than it should have been for longer than it should have been. The lack of coordination in the rollout—a federal responsibility, outsourced to the private sector—left many aged-care resident families and workers dismayed, and unvaccinated. It was a terrible failure of government. There were not any assurances to providers that they would have adequate staff to be able to manage all the things that happened to them when they had a break-out of COVID or even on a day-to-day basis so that they could ensure that family members could come in safely and visit relatives. I think we all know in here the loneliness that those residents have experienced. It's really something this government should be apologising for. There were ways to do it, but it needed resources way beyond the existing resources that aged-care facilities had. The government needed to support it.
I want to turn to the lives that were lost in aged care in my electorate during the pandemic. Based on the Commonwealth Department of Health data from just last month, there were 60 cases of COVID in three aged-care facilities. Forty-two were residents, and the remainder were staff. Eight residents died of COVID or COVID related causes. I can only express my deepest sympathies to the families who experienced those losses and to the carers who had been part of that person's life for the time that they had been in care. I hope that these are the last deaths and I welcome the government decision to provide boosters for aged-care residents. We do need to do what we can to keep people who are already vulnerable safe. And I do rest easier knowing that those looking after my dad are vaccinated, although I recognise that they can still catch COVID and they can still share COVID with each other and with the residents.
I think we've got a real opportunity to reduce the risks for people in aged care by much better use of rapid antigen testing. Rapid antigen testing was provided free by the government for some local government areas of concern but not automatically in mine, and most facilities missed out. It's had to be paid for by the facilities. It's a really useful tool, and when self-testing kits are allowed to be used from 1 November, it will be an even easier tool to use, not requiring nurse supervision to administer. It's an easier way to provide an extra level of confidence that workers are not COVID-positive. Rapid antigen testing can also provide much more confidence for facilities to open their doors to the families and friends of residents and the activities that so enrich the lives of people who live there. You do the test, you wait 10 minutes and you know with a reasonable level of assurance whether you're carrying a high viral level of COVID or not. To be able to hug their loved ones without a plastic shield is vital for residents in aged care, and it's equally vital for their family members, but these tests have to be affordable both for the facilities and the families. The deprivation that residents have suffered can't continue, and they have to be prioritised by the government. But, given what we've seen in aged care and given what we see in this bill, I don't have a high level of confidence in this government to put the needs of aged-care residents and their families first.
The system has been neglected for eight long years. It truly is a national disgrace. The Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety graphically highlighted the tragic outcomes of the neglect that some people had experienced, including maggots in the wounds of residents and two-thirds of residents being malnourished or at risk of malnourishment. These are things that the Prime Minister failed to listen to. He failed to listen to the urgency of the need that the residents, their families and the workers in the system were expressing, and the operators also expressed to me how urgent they thought the need to respond to the royal commission recommendations was. Their fear was that if it didn't happen now the opportunity would be lost, and that's what I fear when I see bills like this coming to this place.
There were 21 expert reports prior to the royal commission, 21 reports with really practical advice and evidence about what could happen. I want to turn to the issue of workforce, because nothing can happen if the workforce isn't reformed. There has been nothing to improve the wages for overstretched, undervalued aged-care workers, often women, often women who are working in multiple places. Aged-care workers are exhausted, there's no two ways about it, yet they remain extraordinarily resilient. What I often see, when I have had the chance to visit my father, is that it will be time for someone to leave but they'll hear a call from a resident and so, bag in hand, as they're about to walk out the door at the end of a goodness-knows-how-long shift, they'll just drop the stuff. They'll just leave it there and they'll go and attend to the needs of that resident. That's the sort of people they are. They're just not prepared to walk away. As we saw during the pandemic, though, they have lacked resources. I believe these workers need to be paid more and that there should be more of them.
One of the things that concern me in the government's response to the royal commission is the gift of $3.2 billion to providers in the form of a basic daily fee increase. We all thought there needed to be an increase in the funding that went to providers, but this one went with no strings attached to ensure that it actually went to care or food, not to management bonuses or a new office fit out. It's not necessarily going to the workers. It's not going to provide more workers so that they have a few more minutes a day to spend with somebody. Nor is it necessarily going to go to better food. A lot of providers are going to do the right thing, but what we saw in the royal commission is that the standards have to be set high so it's not a negotiable thing, so it's not a case of 'maybe we'll do it and maybe we won't'. We have to have standards, standards that we would be happy to accept were we residents.
The other major issue with the response from the government to the royal commission is the failure to clear the home-care package waiting list. I've heard my colleagues talk about their constituents who have long, long waiting times before being able to access the care that they have been assessed for and that have been found to require so they can stay in their own home, but they're just simply isn't a package available until someone dies or goes into an aged-care facility. The extra packages that have been included in the budget simply don't add up to fixing the waitlist that exists. That has to be a priority area.
When visiting a facility, or if they have someone in a facility, I think a lot of people have an expectation that the issue of having a nurse on shift for 24 hours a day has been fixed. Well, of course, it hasn't been fixed. That recommendation has been ignored and there's no requirement for a nurse to be on duty 24/7 in residential care. That's absolutely at the core of improving clinical care for frail Australians. Firstly, we should be helping people to stay in their homes for as long as they can and for as long as they want to—surrounded by their garden, their pets or all the things that keep them grounded in this world. But if they do go into care they also deserve to have that high level of care. The promise of mandatory care minutes for each resident is completely full of holes. It doesn't meet the royal commission recommendation, and we now know that cleaning and some admin will count as care minutes. Well—that's great.
The Morrison government have shown that they can't be trusted to fix aged care. Labor can. We actually care about it and want to see it happen. We have fought for it; we fought for the royal commission and every one of us wants to see older Australians, their families and their carers being treated with respect. This is a government that couldn't be trusted to vaccinate the aged-care workforce; they bungled it so badly that even now I don't think we know exactly how many aged-care workers have been vaccinated. For a long time, the numbers were so opaque. The government can't be trusted to fix the nutrition crisis that people experience in aged care and they can't be trusted to act with urgency on it—we've seen that. They can't be trusted to pay dedicated and hardworking workers properly and fairly, even though I'm sure they recognise how key the workforce is to delivering a high-quality aged-care system.
Aged care has always been a priority for Labor. Our workforce compact, which was designed to help fix these issues, was cancelled by then Prime Minister Tony Abbott just weeks after he was elected. That's what we need to judge this government on—not what they say, not the words that come out of their mouths, but on what they do. In aged care, they have failed.
