When Senator Richard Colbeck, the Aged Care Minister, defended his decision to attend the cricket for three days in Hobart at Wednesday's Senate hearing, he offered up numerous excuses.
One seemed to come straight from the mouth of a naughty schoolboy: "I wasn't the only one", pointing the finger at other politicians who also left appointments to attend the Ashes.
It's true. Other politicians did attend the cricket. But none of them is responsible for a sector which has already seen more than 500 people die and thousands more sick and isolated.
Mr Colbeck, who is also the Minister for Sport, had declined a request to attend the Senate Select Committee on COVID-19 on January 14, saying he was busy dealing with the Omicron outbreak.
"It was a decision I made, I have to stand by and live with it," he told the Senate Select Committee on COVID-19.
"Other people will make judgements about it. I'm sure plenty already have."
This COVID-19 wave is shaping up as the most devastating for aged care, so far having killed 566 people in just four weeks and infecting 30,000 staff and residents.
It will likely kill many more people in nursing homes as the weeks pass. The numbers who will die of malnourishment and neglect because of a lack of staff will never be known.
Despite the overwhelming number of infections and deaths, Mr Colbeck told the Senate Select committee yesterday: "I don't accept that the system is in complete crisis."
"My view, and the data supports that, is that the sector is performing and has performed exceptionally well in the work that it's doing."
It's a remarkable statement from a minister whose portfolio is under such strain and whose performance has been blighted by ignorance and mismanagement.
The numbers tell the story
Here's some of the data the minister might be referring to:
- 15,000 elderly residents were COVID positive even before the end of January
- almost 17,000 staff also COVID positive
- more than half of facilities locked down due to outbreaks or fears of an outbreak.
And it's not just the past month which has been a problem for the Aged Care Minister. For the past two years, thousands of elderly residents have been subject to lockdowns — sometimes unnecessarily — causing psychological and physical declines.
Staff are leaving the sector in droves, many because of the poor wages and working conditions — issues the royal commission recommended be rectified with a wage rise. That's something the government has refused to do, instead offering an $800, one-off bonus delivered in two instalments.
Aged care providers are also up in arms, complaining of a shortage of PPE, not enough RAT tests and a non-existent surge workforce.
That's despite two reports after the 2020 COVID-19 wave that killed more than 650 aged care residents in Victoria.
Those reports laid out all the mistakes that should never be made again and the way to ensure it didn't.
Instead, nursing home owners are calling for the defence force to step in, something Prime Minister Scott Morrison has refused to consider.
The pictures and the headlines that would accompany such an action are not a good look just months out from an election.
'The last days of their lives'
The government knows just how politically devastating the aged care crisis is.
Perhaps that's why the Minister for Health, Greg Hunt, engaged in an insulting attempt to downplay the severity of the mounting death toll.
In a briefing on Monday he volunteered some "important information": He had been told that 60 per cent of those who died in aged care were palliative and "were in the absolute last days of their lives".
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It's hard to know how such data would have even been collected. There's plenty we don't know about those who have died.
When Mr Colbeck was asked on Wednesday what percentage of those people who died had been given a booster, he said that data wasn't available.
That's yet another failure in the sector — the slow rollout of the booster program, in a similar way to the initial vaccination rollout.
Mr Colbeck now says 99 per cent of nursing homes have had some access to boosters but that a third — or 65,000 residents — haven't had their booster because they were new residents, sick or their family had refused it.
But just a few weeks ago — as the virus was spreading like wildfire — government figures showed less than 60 per cent had received their boosters.
Families have been complaining about the difficulty of getting the booster for loved ones, even if they had been vaccinated six or seven months earlier.
Further slowing the program, some of the private contractors tasked with the booster rollout took a break over the holidays. More outbreaks in homes meant the vaccinations had to be delayed again.
It's just another mistake in a sector that lurches from one crisis to another while the main recommendations of the royal commission continue to be ignored, namely attracting more trained staff by paying a proper wage, legislating for a registered nurse to be on duty 24/7 and more transparency of how the billions in taxpayer dollars are spent.
A new focus on aged care
Sadly, it's taken the focus on a minister's visit to the cricket to reveal the failure of the government to protect its most vulnerable citizens.
The Aged Care Minister has stumbled, time and again, since being appointed just as the royal commission began in 2018.
Remember how he infamously fronted up to an earlier Senate committee on COVID-19 without knowing the numbers of aged care residents who had died?
He later walked out of the Senate when he was questioned about more elderly deaths.
Then there was the botched vaccine rollout where residents — who were supposed to be first priority — were still waiting for their needles months later.
Each time he has been defended by the Prime Minister. This time, it has been no exception.
In the UK, it's not the COVID-19 crisis itself that's threatening Boris Johnson's future, but the series of parties thrown at his residence while the country battled with severe lockdowns.
For Richard Colbeck, perhaps it won't be the deaths of hundreds of elderly people that will put his position at risk but, instead, three days watching wickets fall at the 2022 Ashes series.
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2022-02-02 18:43:37Z
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