If for some perverse and malignant policy reason the Morrison government wanted COVID-19 to once again affect unvaccinated residents in aged care, what steps would it have taken?
In particular, what learnings could it have applied from the experience last year in Victoria when hundreds of seniors died as a result of an outbreak due to poor hotel quarantine standards?
The first step would have been to ensure that further outbreaks were certain. The best way to ensure that would have been to continue to rely on the hotel quarantine system, which a report commissioned by the government advised would continue to be prone to breaches. That’s what the federal government did, with the complicity of the states. No new quarantine facilities were funded or built to provide higher-quality quarantine that was not prone to leading to infections of people within.
The second step would have been to ensure that one of the key vectors of transmission between aged care facilities –casual workers being required to work across multiple facilities because they aren’t paid enough by providers — was restored to operation after it was suspended last year after the Victorian outbreak. The moment that community transmission was over last year, Aged Care Minister Richard Colbeck advised Senate estimates this morning, the Commonwealth requirement to work at only one facility was rescinded.
Better yet, the Commonwealth policy is now to restore the suspension only after community transmission reemerges — ensuring that the virus will have had the opportunity to spread before people are stopped from working across multiple facilities.
Just to make sure, the government also declined to lift pay in the sector even in its “generational reform” of the aged care sector, making sure the core problem driving multi-site work was not addressed, despite recommendations of the aged care royal commission.
The third, and arguably most important, step would have been to ensure that the vaccination rollout did not reach aged care facilities by the time an outbreak occurred. This was conceivably a difficult challenge, given the prime minister promised that both the aged care sector and residential disability sector — residents and staff — would be fully vaccinated by the end of March.
However, that too has been achieved: we learnt this morning in Senate estimates that of the more than 50,000 aged care residents in Victoria, only about half have been fully vaccinated, and about 19% remain unvaccinated. The government has no idea how many aged care staff in Victoria have been partially or fully vaccinated.
Victoria could have constructed a bespoke quarantine facility to replace the breach-prone hotel quarantine system, but that would not have prevented this outbreak, given it came from an individual who contracted COVID in quarantine in South Australia.
There were no further cases reported in aged care facilities in Victoria today — a blessed relief given that staff and a resident have already contracted it.
If the outbreak doesn’t spread within aged care facilities it will have been through sheer dumb luck. It it does, it will be the direct result of an astonishing policy failure by the Morrison government, which at literally every turn has made the wrong decision on vaccinations, quarantine and aged care workers — and all with the benefit of hindsight from last year’s horrifying outbreak.
The minister responsible, Greg Hunt, and his departmental secretary, Brendan Murphy, should be the first to go if families lose loved ones as a result of this disaster. At long last, there has to be some accountability for such negligence and incompetence.
Colbeck is an unmitigated disaster, and yet, supported by SmoCo, he continues to take his pay for doing what exactly? He really has become the Minister for Death and Misery, and his epitaph for his time in politics will now always be ‘The shameless man who failed during the one time when his presence in politics really mattered’.
But even the “incomparable” Colbeck can’t make Scotty and the rest of the gang look good anymore.
People have accused Colbeck of incompetency but I’m not sure that description applies. For there to be incompetence on the part of the Aged Car Services Minister, he first needs to have actually done something.
Hopefully this episode will at least stop the political hacks from repeating their favourite line – that the PM is a political genius. No political competent would have stumbled into a situation that makes a 3rd wave likely and hence re-election very unlikely.
The simple, much avoided truth is that the PM is as thick as the proverbial plank. There has already been evidence aplenty, but the case is now closed.
The level of hopeless incompetence is almost English.
The LNP are simply unfit to govern. The level of policy and service delivery incompetence associated with the failed vaccine purchasing and roll-out, the failure, once more, to protect those in aged care (by failing to vaccinate staff and residents and by continuing to allow multi-site working), the failure to vaccinate those with disabilities and their carers, the failure to build purpose-built quarantine facilities and the ongoing failure to repatriate tens of thousands of stranded Australian citizens, is surely as unprecedented in Australian political history as it is just the stuff currently happening above the snowline on a veritable mountain of LNP detritus. A rotting, moving, semen-stained pile of blame-shifting, responsibility-shirking, accountability-dodging, obfuscation, deflection, outright lying, cover ups, secret prosecutions of whistle blowers, tribunal stacking, sport, community development and other fund rorting and pork-barreling amounting to billions and closed tenders for mates. A foul mountain layered with poorly structured policies lacking accountability mechanisms and evidentiary bases. A towering mound of purulent ideology-shaped policies designed to thwart scrutiny and undermine the last vestiges of the things that once allowed us to claim ours was an egalitarian society, a social democracy.
Why are we saddled with such a government, why has this government endured, why is it not facing devastating polling? Because the MSM is failing to operate as the fourth estate and is now as unfit for purpose as the LNP is to govern.
So thanks once more to Crikey et al for continuing to report and comment ethically … you’re all our democracy has to fall back on.
Besides Hunt and Murphy, surely Colbeck should have to walk the plank – for all the reasons you have listed Bernard and also because some 685 of our 900+ covid deaths happened in aged care facilities that it was his job to safeguard.
And take Kelly for a dip with ’em.
If you watched Brendan Murphy during the early covid outbreak, he hadn’t slept in weeks and he managed a fresh shirt and tie and coat. I believe that is thanks to his also working wife.
He stayed quiet whilst Slomo wandered off script, head down calculating how much effort was going to go into put things back on track after the “I’m going to the footy, and then, went to a Hillsong Jamboree before the Monday lockdown”.
As today in Senate estimates, he would never lie for or cover for scottie from marketing or Hi, I’m the disappearing Greg.
Morrison kept the Chief Medical Officer position vacant from March until November 2020 because he thought he could control the narrative, until he realized that he had also buggered up the vaccine purchases process, because an “Acting” CMO can’t negotiate or sign contracts.
Paul Kelly won’t lie or cover for them either.
Both Brendan Murphy and Paul Kelly are Public Servants and are under the Public Service act, so to get them to directly answer needs Senate estimates questions.