Aged Care Legislation Amendment (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Aged Care Commissioner and Other Measures) Bill 2026

Senator RUSTON (South Australia—Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) (12:18): I seek leave to speak again on the contingency motion that's before the chair. Senator RUSTON: I stand here today because we will support the government in the bill that is before the chamber, because older Australians cannot wait any longer—not because the problem is fixed, because it is not.

Make no mistake about what this is. This is an admission by the government that its assessment system is failing older Australians. For almost 12 months, older Australians and their families, assessors and providers have been telling the government that the computer generated algorithm that has no human override is getting it wrong time and time again.

They told the Senate inquiry. They've been telling our electorate offices. They were telling anybody who would listen.

And, for almost 12 months, this government told them the system was working. Now, under the weight of sheer evidence, the government has finally capitulated. It has agreed to an independent review of the very algorithm it spent a year defending.

I'll remind the Senate what that evidence looks like. In the full year before the algorithm was put in place, 170 people asked for their assessments to be reviewed. In just the first five months after the algorithm was in place, 834 people asked for a review, and we heard of many more that would have asked for a review but were just so tired of fighting the system.

Australia's peak bodies for geriatric medicine called the tool a clinical safety risk, the Commonwealth Ombudsman launched an investigation, and documents released under freedom of information show the human override was stripped out from the top down, with the department's own staff finding out just days before the system went live. Then there are the people.

A man living with motor neurone disease was told by a computer he needed less help, not more—a cruel progressive terminal illness, and the computer said no. The government has since had to change the rules to recognise motor neurone disease as warranting urgent priority. That is not a refinement; that is an admission the system is getting it wrong.

So why support these changes? It's because we've listened. We've listened to stakeholders, to advocates and to older Australians who live with this system every single day.

And what they've told us is clear. The system is so bad right now we cannot afford to walk away from even the most modest of improvements. But they told us something else as well.

Any improvement of the nature that is being put forward by schedule 4 of this bill must only be interim. It cannot become this government's excuse to stop this process from being fixed. We were not prepared to leave older Australians stuck with the current system while this government takes its time producing a perfect bill that we know will never come.

So we've done what stakeholders asked of us. We have supported this improvement, but we've made sure it is interim. In return for our support, the coalition have received two things.

As I said, the first is an independent review of the aged-care assessment tool—a clinically informed review backed by experts in geriatric medicine, dementia care and allied health—examining how the algorithm classifies older Australians and who gets priority. That review must inform the rebuilding of any assessment tool. We're pleased that the government has agreed to it and agreed to publish the results of that review in full so it's there for everybody to see.

But a review is not worth the paper it is written on unless its results are turned into action. Older Australians have had enough waiting under this government, and that is why the second thing we secured matters so much: a sunset clause. These provisions will sunset after 12 months.

So the government has 12 months to fix the problems that have been identified by so many people. If it does, older Australians will be better off and we will herald that as a welcome advancement. But if it doesn't, these provisions will lapse and the government will have to come back into this place and explain why it has continued to fail older Australians, why it has failed to give them the care that this government has assessed them as needing.

That's our mechanism, and we will force the government to act. Let me be very clear about one more thing. The coalition is not stepping away from our fight for human override.

A computer, and a computer alone, cannot be left to make the decisions about the care needs and care priorities of older Australians. I know the Greens have moved an amendment on human override, and, in principle, we support the Greens. We do not believe that what the government have put forward today is adequate when it comes to human override.

What they're putting forward today is an escalation pathway run by the department for people in exceptional circumstances. It is a step—it is an improvement on what we have now—but it is not the same thing as letting a qualified assessor, sitting across the table from an older Australian, correct the computer when it gets it wrong. And we know it is getting it wrong time and time again.

The Senate has already passed the coalition's bill to restore human override, with the support of the Greens and the crossbench, and I acknowledge the incredible support of the crossbench, particularly the Greens and Senator Allman-Payne, on forcing this issue. Earlier this year, a senior minister in the Albanese government told the parliament: … in every case there needs to be human oversight of any use of AI.

We don't just hand over decision-making to abstract computer programs… Well, guess what. We agree with you, Minister. We are simply asking this government to apply that standard to older Australians when it's assessing their care needs and their care need priorities.

The government has now said it will review the algorithm, and that is what we expect it to deliver. We're giving the government the opportunity to go away and do that work. Get it done.

But, if it does not, we will be back, and I'm confident that the Greens and the crossbench will be back with us. Together, we have the power to force the government to do the right thing. Remember when Prime Minister Albanese was the opposition leader prior to the 2022 election and told Australians he was going to come in here and put 'the care back into aged care'.

Nothing could be further from the reality that older Australians are facing right now. So, today, we're putting the government on notice. The clock is ticking.

The coalition will never step away from older Australians. We will never step away from supporting older Australians getting the care they need when they need it. We will keep pushing for a permanent fix, and what we're doing today is telling the government 'you have the chance to come back with a permanent fix, so you'd better do it'.

We will always back a human being able to override a decision when the computer, quite frankly, has made a botch of it. No algorithm has ever grown old. Older Australians deserve a system that sees them as people and not as data.

We know, as we stand here today, that 250,000 older Australians are currently waiting to either be assessed or get the package that they've been assessed as needing. We know that, last year, over 6,400 older Australians died while they were waiting to get the home-care package they had been assessed as needing. And we know that right now in excess of 3½ thousand older Australians have been assessed as clinically able to be discharged from our hospitals, yet they languish in hospital beds because this government has rationed care when it comes to aged-care packages.

It has failed the sector and the sector's viability with its actions—other actions apart from in this bill—so we're not seeing aged-care beds being built. They need 10½ thousand aged-care beds every year for the next 10 years. Last year, the government's incentives managed to deliver, through the private sector, 802.

The government is a long way short of delivering for older Australians, and we believe older Australians need better. That's why we are asking the government to make good on its promise. Fix this absolutely disastrous system.

Fix this algorithm that is producing terrible results for older Australians. Quite frankly, older Australians deserve more from their government than they're currently getting.