QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE: TAKE NOTE OF ANSWERS

Senator ANANDA-RAJAH (Victoria) (15:56): In our first term of government, the Albanese government acted on a promise made to older Australians to fix a system that had utterly failed them. This was a system that we inherited after nine years of stewardship—or lack thereof—under the coalition. When we came to government, we picked up the royal commission findings.

The interim report, which was released in 2019, was entitled Neglect—and it basically said it all. This was an aged-care system that had been chronically underfunded and characterised by chronic underinvestment over the nine years under the coalition. For three of those years, mind you, my colleague Senator Colbeck was the aged-care minister.

Senator Colbeck, I remember when you were at the cricket and declined to attend a COVID committee. I remember this because I was in PPE, caring for those aged-care patients who were coming through hospital at the time—and I've never forgotten it. I remind you of that.

I find your interest now in aged care a tad disingenuous. Nevertheless, we as a federal government took those 148 recommendations from the aged-care royal commission, and we are working methodically through them. At the heart of the controversy is the integrated aged-care assessment tool.

This tool started development in 2020. There were advisory groups—clinical, technical and statistical—and in 2022 Flinders University ran a living lab trial. These included mock scenarios with actors and clients.

In 2023 there was a live trial in over 22,000 people, and it was clinically validated on this cohort. It then went on to be further validated on another cohort of nearly 300,000 people in datasets that were held by the department of health. We heard this testimony in one of the Senate hearings.

We know this tool has now been rolled out, and there is a 0.5 per cent rate of review—so around 400,000 Australians have received home-care packages as of June this year, with 0.5 per cent going on to require a review. That is a very small number. But behind every one of those statistics are people and families under stress.

My own experience caring for older Australians over a very long period of time in acute-care hospitals right around the country is that people tend to leave these assessments till quite late because it takes a lot of time before families, and, indeed, people, are ready to take that next step towards even acknowledging that they might require help from someone else.

It's a very big deal to say that you need care from someone else and to allow them into your home. By the time these assessments are made, people are often pre-crisis, if not in crisis. It's tragic.

Our government is now undertaking a rapid review into the integrated assessment tool, and we have committed to legislating a escalation pathway to ensure that those older Australians who are falling through the cracks, or feel like they are falling through the cracks, have a pathway where their needs can be prioritised and attended to. But this does not detract from the $47 billion we have committed to reforming this aged-care system and the nearly $4 billion this year towards building more aged-care residential beds and providing additional care to older Australians in aged care.