The Covid disaster in federally-managed aged care has been accelerating in recent weeks. 1100 aged care homes are now locked down due to Covid spread, with outbreaks reportedly affecting over 7000 residents and staff. Between January 7 & 14, the number of homes with Covid more than doubled. Last year's report from the Royal Commission into aged care confirmed that Australia's privately-run facilities were routinely mismanaged - leadership and training were slipshod and resident neglect common, usually stemming from prioritisation of profit over care. In response to the damning report, only a fraction of the recommended funding-increase was promised by the Morrison government (and most of it is yet to be allocated), already problematic providers were kept on, and no moves were made to improve the pay or conditions for nursing staff. At a time when the entire system urgently needed restructuring and a clean-out of shonks, a typically uninterested (some would say complicit) federal government opted to minimally paper over the cracks.
Which brings us to Richard Colbeck, the federal Minister for Aged Care & Sport. On the 7th of this month, Minister Colbeck was asked to spare 2 hours & 45 minutes of his time to attend the following week's Covid 19 Senate Committee hearings, to answer questions on the "fast evolving...Omicron situation" in aged care. Two days later, the Minister replied that he had concerns about "the impact of the timing of (the) hearing”, as "the Covid-19 pandemic is at a critical point with the onset of numerous Omicron outbreaks". As such, he believed his appearance at committee would constitute an undue diversion of time and resources, which would "impact the urgent...work the department (was) undertaking...to manage these outbreaks.”
Fair enough. Not a minute free, compounding portfolio disasters to avert, lives to save, the work of a minister is never done.
Or... is it that it never actually starts? Because when the date of his refused appearance rolled around on January 14, Richard Colbeck was not rushing desperately to fix Covid spread in aged care.
He was at the cricket.
As his register of interests now shows, Colbeck took himself off to The Ashes on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. And don't worry about the minister stretching his budget - it wasn't a trip he had to pay for. A sponsor shouted him for the travel and accommodation. (That sponsor remains undisclosed in reports so far.)
You can understand why the minister might have been relieved to skip out of the Senate committee - in June of last year he admitted to them that he didn’t know how many workers had been vaccinated in aged care, because the government didn't have consolidated data. Ten months earlier he admitted to the same committee that he didn't know the number of Covid deaths in aged care. That was also the session at which he angrily denied the government had been "absent" in aged care during the Covid crisis, despite the exposed baselessness of his previous assertion that the Morrison government had solid worst-case-scenario plans in place for the sector. In the wake of that train-wreck presentation, Prime Minister Morrison gave Colbeck his full support - and why wouldn't he? Richard Colbeck is, damningly, entirely representative of the Morrison team's quality.
Of course, it's possible the minister went a-cricketing in order to see how this whole Covid-management lark is done. After all, the Prime Minister himself, while visiting the SCG in his own spare time a couple of weeks ago, declared that Australians were "takin' wickets in the virus!"
Surely at this point we're overdue for a dismissal.
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