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Senator ALLMAN-PAYNE (Queensland) (10:18): I rise to also speak to the government's failure to provide the Senate with the information requested on how many people are dying waiting for their aged-care packages. The minister has said that this number can't be provided to the Senate today because it is a big responsibility for them to get that right. If only the government and the minister took as seriously the responsibility to get aged care for older Australians right.

Right now, over 200,000 people are waiting for aged-care support. The royal commission said clearly and unequivocally that aged care in this country needed to stop being rationed and for people to get the care they need at the time they need it. Previous data has told us that around 5,000 people a year are dying while waiting for care.

In a rich country, that is shameful. We can only surmise that the reason the minister has not provided us with the latest statistics is that they are not improving. It's not a complicated statistic.

If you're on the waitlist and you die—how many has that happened to? We don't need to know why people died or how they died. We're simply asking how many people died before they got the package that they were assessed as being entitled to receive.

The public has a right to know that information, the Senate has a right to know that information, and it should have been provided before now, yet the minister has come back and said, 'You all need to wait.' It would seem that waiting is par for the course with this minister because waiting is exactly what older Australians are being asked to do week after week, month after month—for some people, it's up to a year—to get the care that they need.

This is such a false economy. As the former inspector-general of aged care, Ms Siegel-Brown, said, for every person who waits, we're paying more in hospital admissions and early entry into residential aged care. The government should be doing everything they can to address this.

You can't tell us that this is a problem that wasn't foreseeable. We've known for 30 years that we were going to have an older or an ageing population. In the Senate today, the government has put amendments to their Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Aged Care Commissioner Bill to give people a pathway for review for their failed integrated assessment tool.

This is just another example of the government and the minister not actually understanding what the problems are. The integrated assessment tool is broken. We've heard expert evidence that it is not assessing people appropriately.

There is no human override for that assessment, so we have assessors sitting in front of people knowing that the assessment is incorrect and not being able to do anything about that. The minister's solution, put into the House today, is not to rework the integrated assessment tool—not to actually fix the problem—but to give people another option for a review.

Hundreds and thousands of people are already waiting for reviews, and that is further delaying their access to the support that they need. The government's fix to the problem with the IAT is to put more people into a system where they need to get a review—so yet more waiting to get the care that they need. No doubt, more people will die waiting for the care that they need, but will this chamber know how many people that is?

No, because the minister is too cowardly to give the information to the Senate so the public knows exactly how many people in this country are dying waiting for care. Question agreed to.