STATEMENTS BY SENATORS
Senator RUSTON (South Australia—Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) (12:42): There is a generation of Australians who built this country. They worked, they paid their taxes, they raised their families, and they were told that, if they did the right thing, the country would look after them when they needed it. This week, older Australians learned what that promise is worth to this government because this is a government that has decided which Australians are worth looking after and which are to be left behind.
There is a carefully chosen list of Australians the government wants to carry with it to the next election, and older Australians have been left standing at the kerb watching the bus pull away and left behind. Let me be clear about something: this was not an accident. The government has chosen it.
It is a deliberate design feature of its policies. When the health minister announced he would strip the additional private health insurance rebate away from older Australians, he did not hide his reasoning. He said older Australians should no longer receive support based on their age.
He called it fairness between the generations. There's nothing fair about singling out three million older Australians—most of them on modest incomes and nearly one million of them full pensioners—and telling them they have to pay more for their health care. From 2027, around three million older Australians will lose the higher rebate.
Many will pay hundreds of dollars more and some as much as $640 a year more. Seventy per cent of all insured older Australians earn $55,000 a year or less—all 2.24 million of them. These are not the wealthy but pensioners and self-funded retirees on fixed incomes.
They took out private health cover because they were told it was the right thing to do, and now they're been punished for it. Tens of thousands will be pushed out of private care altogether. That change, by the government's own admission, is likely to cost the public system more than the savings the federal government is making.
It's just a cost shift. Private health is only one front. At the very same time, in aged care, this government has treated older Australians exactly the same way.
It has sent them to the back of the queue. Right now, more than 100,000 older Australians are on the national priority system waiting for a home-care package, and that's just the number they want you to know about. The real number, the number Minister Rae was exposed trying to hide last week, is a full 50 per cent, or 50,000 people, more.
The tricky minister and his untrustworthy government doesn't want to count the people who've only been provided with part of their package. They said they didn't change the methodology and then they were embarrassed, having to come back and correct the minister's mistake. It was an admission that they had lied.
The median wait from being assessed for care to actually receiving it is 10 months. Tragically, last year, more than 4,800 older Australians died waiting for the care that this government had assessed they needed. At the front of that queue sits a computer.
This week, Australians watched Four Corners on the ABC and saw what this government has built. A faceless algorithm, the integrated assessment tool, decides how much care an older Australian receives. It asks more than 500 questions, then ignores most of the answers, and no trained professional is allowed to override it even when they see it has got it wrong.
On Monday night, Australians met Audrey, 96 years old, blind and with emphysema and living on her own. She was assessed in person, and yet the government still refused to provide her with the support that she needed. Her daughter appealed.
The appeal was sent to a post office box and was never answered. Audrey is not the exception. Tragically, under this government, she is the rule.
Pay more, wait longer and get less. Don't take my word for it. Professor Kathy Eagar, one of the country's most respected health researchers, examined this tool and said that it cannot be fixed with tweaking and that it needs to be scrapped and started again.
It's an automated system that decides your fate and leaves the individual to prove it wrong. The ombudsman is now investigating. Appeals have run at six times the rate of the previous year.
This is not a system settling in. This is a system failing. At estimates, the department confirmed it all.
Removing human override was a budget decision made in 2024-25 to save money. The tool was never clinically validated and never trialled in a live environment. No older person, no provider and no advocate was consulted before they switched it on.
When we asked to see the advice behind that decision, the government refused to provide it. The minister said that it would take 360 hours to review the documents, and hinted that they might be protected because they'd gone to cabinet. If this algorithm decision went to cabinet, then the Prime Minister was in the room.
Australians deserve to know whether Anthony Albanese personally signed off on the decision that has denied care to thousands upon thousands of older Australians. You do not need cabinet documents to see the human cost. Let me tell you about Lana Hamdorf.
Lana asked for help from a hospital bed. Eight months later, she's still there. Lana is paralysed from the waist down.
For years, her husband cared for her until his own health failed and he died in care. Living alone, she had a fall—a broken hip and a torn shoulder—and nearly died. She fought back through rehabilitation and has made it home, but she's unable to get into bed or reach the stove without help.
She was assessed and denied the support that she needed. A second assessment, a reassessment, finally approved her for the highest level of care that existed, and then the algorithm handed her a medium priority in terms of the urgency of that care. That meant an eight- to nine-month wait.
Her family cut back on her care and her meals just to stay within their budget. They advised me that they'd raised the matter with the minister, but nothing changed, and so the tragic saga unfolded. Lana's family applied for a reassessment and pleaded to have Lana's case treated as a high priority.
I wrote to the minister on her behalf. He said on television that he is always happy to follow up personally. In Lana's case, what did the minister do?
He did follow up. He said no. Strangely, though, his own department delegate admitted that the family had been right all along.
Lana's priority should've been high. That decision came on 12 August. Today, Lana still has no date as to when her new care arrangements will kick into place.
The Albanese government is presiding over a slow-motion car crash in aged care, and every day older Australians and their families are paying the price. The coalition has offered this government a way out. We introduced a simple, practical bill—the Aged Care Amendment (Restoring Human Override for Aged Care Needs Assessments) Bill 2026—to restore human override to aged-care assessments and to put a trained professional back in charge in order to give older Australians the right to have a real person look at their case.
We passed it through the Senate. What did Labor do? They tried to vote it down, but they failed.
In the other place they didn't just vote it down; they won't even let it be debated. Let's be honest about what fairness between the generations really means under this government. It means older Australians pay more for their health cover.
It means they wait longer for the care that they've been assessed as needing and that they've been promised. It means they get less when that care finally comes, and when the computer gets it wrong no human is being allowed to fix the mistake. The generation that built this country is not asking for special treatment.
They're asking for a fair go. They're asking that a real person, not a computer, decides what care they get and how urgently they receive it. A computer should never have the final say on whether an Australian gets the care that they need.
Labor has made a very clear choice. It has decided who it will carry and who it will leave behind. But older Australians will not forget who has left them behind, and neither will the coalition.