Good policy is being damaged by poor legislative drafting and an institutional reluctance to acknowledge mistakes until Parliament forces change.
I hope Sam Rae has a good physiotherapist. His back must be killing him. Not to mention that foot he keeps shooting himself in.
The federal aged care and seniors minister has been flogged from pillar to post this week after a third backflip in 2.5 months.
Back in April he announced the government was going change its mind about charging senior Australians for showers and continence care. But not until October.
Early last month he quietly provided a cunning little workaround for Support at Home providers trying to override the IAT. It might have been a solution had it not doubled up on the complication of it all.
And then this week, finally, he put humans back in the loop of that ridiculous IAT by announcing that the DoHDA secretary Blair Comley will be able to override egregious IAT decisions in “extenuating circumstances”.
Is it the perfect solution? No. Mr Comley, for all his talents, is not a clinician, or a clinical assessor so he’s either going to accept the word of those who are and overturn every decision, or he’s going to refuse to overturn every decision. He doesn’t have time for this.
Of course, “system governor” will be a euphemism for a cache of public servants who will do this on behalf of the Secretary.
Regardless, the simplest, easiest solution would be to just let human clinical assessors override bad decisions by the IAT – as it was designed to be back when this whole farce began.
The chief floggers of Mr Rae this week have been Greens Senator Penny Allman-Payne and Opposition health and aged care spokesperson Senator Anne Ruston.
“Labor’s aged care reforms are unravelling, with another humiliating defeat on the floor of the Senate today,” said Senator Allman-Payne.
“Piece by piece, the parliament is forcing this Labor government to unwind its disastrous reforms, yet they keep pretending everything’s okay.
“How can older Australians trust Labor when they still act like the system is working fine?
“Minister Rae is clearly out of his depth and older people are paying for it, some with their lives.”
Senator Ruston was no less pointed when she introduced her private members bill which effectively forced the Department’s hand.
“They know that they’ve got a problem,” said Senator Ruston on the ABC.
“They seem to have put this tool in place and then haven’t bothered to check it.
“We know through [Senate] estimates that they didn’t do any testing on this tool. They need to go back to the drawing board and get this right because right now older Australians are paying the price of the lacklustre and terrible way that the government has designed this particular [tool].”
Then came Thursday’s Question Time.
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Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was asked why his party would not support “the Coalition’s bill to provide human oversight of all aged care decisions”.
Albo stood up and said two remarkable things.
“I’ll make two points before I ask the Minister to respond. The first is that the premise of the question is wrong. There is human oversight over all of these processes.
“And the second is that for the party of Robodebt to actually have the hide to come in here and talk about these issues shows extraordinary, extraordinary gumption. We were left with an aged care system that was summed up by one word in the Interim Royal Commission established under the former government, and that word was neglect.
“We have not engaged in neglect. What we have done is to actually have legislation that passed the parliament.”
Wow.
Human oversight is categorically not “over all these processes”. The whole point of the IAT is to take humans out of the very particular process of applying the rules to the human assessor’s inputs.
To deny that is just flat-out disingenuousness at best, and deception at worst.
Second – seriously, Albo? You’re going to actually put the word “robodebt” out there when that is precisely what the IAT and the NDIS I-CANN tools reek of.
Just saying this isn’t reminiscent of Robodebt does not make it so. And in fact you just embedded the concept in the public consciousness.
Honestly, nobody wants this Labor government to be better at healthcare policy than me. Truly.
But, none of this should have required Senate defeats, Opposition private members’ bills and weeks of public criticism.
Governments make mistakes. Good governments fix them quickly. The troubling part isn’t that Labor got parts of the aged care reforms wrong. It’s that, time and again, it seems to require maximum political pain before anyone is prepared to admit it.
Gough, Hawkie and Keato are spinning in their graves, both real and metaphorical. Seriously.