Bill Shorten lashes out at profit-driven aged care and Morrison government over Covid failings

The shadow government services minister, Bill Shorten, has taken aim at the profit-driven focus of the nation’s privatised aged care homes, while blaming the federal government for failing in its duty to oversee the system during the pandemic.

The former Labor leader asked how privatised centres were able to “serve two masters” – profit and care – given the cost of properly caring for elderly people, particularly those with health issues such as dementia, was not insignificant.

“This is the problem,” he told the ABC. “Looking after elderly people with diagnosis of dementia is not cheap. So if we want to make a profit, and you want to look after people, then you create faultlines in the system.

“Covid-19 right across Australian society has revealed things which have been glossed over. And if you’re a worker in the system, and they’re doing the hard and the tough work, they have to work at multiple centres just to make a living.”

Shorten said the federal government was also falling short in its pandemic response to disability care, and repeated his call for the federal government to make public the number of people with disabilities who have died after being diagnosed with Covid-19.

“The Victorians have got some data, but I think that’s a federal responsibility. I don’t think that it is adequate enough,” he said.

“Did you know, for example, that disability carers often have the same skills as aged carers. The UK showed that two thirds of people who died there had a disability. Yet, disability carers can’t get a retention bonus.

“So the very problem that we’re identifying as a trigger in aged care, low-paid casualised workforce, forced to go to work in multiple centres, that’s happening in disability right now.”

One solution Shorten suggested was to “look at it as a sector-wide workforce, so facilities who don’t have the disease and the virus, can tap some of their workforce to help out”.

Shorten said Morrison was too quick to dismiss the suggestion of an aged care-specific national coordinating body to advise the government, which was offered up as part of the royal commission into aged care, which in March was asked to examine the pandemic response.

So far the counsel assisting the commission, Peter Rozen QC, has been damning in his assessment. On Friday, Morrison rejected Rozen’s criticism as “not a finding of the royal commission”, but a “position that has been asserted”, and pointed to the Victorian Aged Care Response Centre as a solution.

However the Victorian response centre does not have carriage of a national response. If an outbreak was to occur in any other jurisdiction, the government would not have a centralised body overseeing it.

Shorten said given the situation (more than 200 of Australia’s nearly 400 Covid deaths have stemmed from within the aged care sector), ignoring ideas was not good enough.

“If you set up a royal commission and the royal commissioner makes a direct intervention, why are we second-guessing it?” he said.

“Why do we leave old people, elderly people and vulnerable people, with a second-class system? The people in the system are working hard. But this has been the dirty secret of Australian politics. And Covid-19 has just revealed it.”

Another solution, Shorten said, was “to pay people properly” and improve training, across both the aged-care and disability-care workforces.

“Don’t rely on a casualised workforce who, whilst they do the work of angels, are effectively treated like fruit pickers,” he said.

“We have to stand up and say that if we care about our parents and our grandparents, which we do and most Australians would agree with that, you can’t do that on the cheap.”

Shorten took a front-foot approach to his criticism of Morrison and the federal government during his interview, which came after the prime minister was prompted to apologise for failings in “the system” on Friday, while deflecting responsibility from his government.

He also criticised Morrison for not being strong enough in pushing Australia’s case in a US-Taliban prisoner swap deal, which could include the release of a sergeant in the Afghan national army who murdered three Australian soldiers while they were playing cards in a shared base.

Hekmatullah has spent seven years in jail for the murders of Lance Corporal Stjepan Milosevic, Sapper James Martin and Private Robert Poate in August 2012, after he was captured by US forces.

Shorten said he believed Morrison’s predecessor, Malcolm Turnbull, did a “better job standing up to Donald Trump” and the prime minister needed to be transparent in what he was doing to ensure Hekmatullah’s ongoing detention.