Senator CHRIS EVANS (9:46 AM) —by leave—I move:

I wish to speak to the Community Affairs Legislation Committee report tabled today by Senator Calvert on behalf of Senator Knowles. It includes a unanimous report from the committee expressing very serious concern about the failure of the Minister for Health and Aged Care and the Minister for Aged Care, but particularly the Minister for Aged Care, to answer questions that were placed on notice or were asked at the estimates committee by members of the committee. I want to congratulate Senator Knowles for her assistance in this matter. She has proved to be a good chair in assisting the committee to get answers to questions. She has been proactive in making sure the committee's work was able to proceed with a degree of efficiency by applying pressure to ensure that we got answers to questions. I want to record my thanks for Senator Knowles's assistance in that. But there have been extensive delays in getting meaningful answers from the Minister for Aged Care as part of the estimates process.

It was frustrating to find at the 2 May hearing, following the events at Riverside, that the department was unprepared to answer many of the questions asked about the nursing home and the government's intervention in the nursing home. A commitment was given to provide written responses to questions taken on notice as soon as possible. A total of 83 questions were outstanding at the end of that hearing. At the start of the committee hearing on 23 May, 70 responses to those questions had been provided to the minister by the department, but only seven of those had been passed on to the committee. After the committee expressed some concern at the hold-up at the minister's office—and Senator Knowles took it upon herself to seek further information—the minister's office was suddenly able to produce 60 of those answers within the day. They had been sitting in the Minister for Aged Care's office for some time but had not been provided to the committee. I want to make it clear that the department had provided the minister's office, within a very reasonable time frame, with most of the answers, but they had not been cleared by the minister's office and had not been made available to the committee.

Included in those answers were answers to questions asked at the 7 February hearing. I was still receiving responses to questions asked on 2 May yesterday, and some are outstanding. Unfortunately, it seems that it is only when a deadline approaches—and when there is an understanding that a fuss is going to be made and some publicity given to the matter—that we get any answers to very serious questions about serious matters of public concern. What is of most concern to me today is what we do not know about Riverside Nursing Home and what we do not know about the government's intervention in the Riverside Nursing Home. The minister and the department, on her instructions, have repeatedly refused to answer questions on just what the minister was told about Riverside and when she was told. ·

We still do not know when the Minister for Aged Care was first told about the serious risks to residents identified in the first report on the nursing home. We still do not know when the minister was first told about the death of a resident following the kerosene bath incident. We still do not know when the minister was first told about the serious risks to residents identified in the second report on the nursing home. Instead of an answer, all the parliament and the Australian public got was this response: `The minister and her office were appropriately briefed at all times.' That is just not satisfactory. The Australian public have a right to know what was involved in the intervention in Riverside, why the decisions were taken and why those residents had to experience that terrible stress and trauma. We have been unable to get proper answers from the minister's office or from the department as to the events at Riverside, as to the knowledge of the minister and as to the sequence of events. We do know there are a number of contradictions in the minister's version of events. The answers to some of the outstanding questions may well resolve many of those inconsistencies, but I am not sure that is the case.

The Minister for Aged Care claims not to have been first told about the risks to residents until some time after 22 February, despite having ordered an inspection of Riverside on 15 February and having come into the parliament to express her serious concerns. We are expected to believe she was uninterested in knowing about the residents for at least seven days after first being told that they had been bathed in kerosene. We are expected to believe she did not inquire and did not receive a report from her department as to the condition of the residents and the circumstances at Riverside. The minister claims that she did not know about the risks to residents until after a decision on the sanctions to be imposed on the nursing home was made on 22 February. The minister has claimed that she referred the events of Riverside to the Federal Police as soon as she became aware of the death. We now know the referral occurred only on 29 February. From the evidence of the department, the minister may have known about the death and the serious risks to residents as early as 19 February, but we still do not know when she knew or why she was not told, if she was not. But, if she was told on 19 February, this is at least three days earlier than claimed by the minister, and this predates the decision to impose sanctions. This is at least 10 days before the matter was referred to the Federal Police.

Having heard of the death and the risks to residents, what was the minister doing in the 10 days before the matter was finally referred to the police? Why didn't the minister immediately refer the death to the appropriate authorities—the Victorian coroner and the Victorian police? The minister has tried to use the pending court case from the former owners of Riverside on the closure as a defence against providing full information, but I think the minister has to be accountable for her actions to the parliament. She has to be accountable to the people of Australia, and she should provide answers to these critical questions about the events at Riverside. To date, we do not have satisfactory answers, and we have a refusal by the minister and the department to answer many of the key questions.

Clearly, in the case of Riverside, the timing of the minister's briefing is an important part of making a judgment about how she handled the case at Riverside—whether it was handled appropriately, whether alternative options could have been pursued and whether or not those frail and elderly people were properly treated by the Commonwealth government. The minister has made a number of claims about when she was told about events in the nursing homes. We ought to be able to verify that that information is factual. Certainly the families of the residents of Riverside have a range of questions that have been unanswered about the treatment of their relatives, and they will continue to pursue answers to these very important questions. The opposition will also support them in seeking those answers.

What we finally did get yesterday in one of the answers to questions on notice was access to the Aged Care Standards Agency's report on Riverside made in November 1999. It has taken until now, until June 2000, to get access to the report on Riverside which the agency completed in November 1999. The minister claimed in the parliament that that report gave the nursing home at Riverside the all clear. She claimed that, following the unsatisfactory report in July 1999, the nursing home had been monitored and brought up to scratch. ·

What we now know, after finally gaining access to this report, is that the minister's claims were untrue. The report shows that the nursing home had still not reached appropriate care standards six months after the problems had been identified. The November report indicates that:

It found, on the key question of residents' care, that the performance of Riverside was unsatisfactory. Other problems were identified which led the standards agency to conclude:

So you had a very highly critical report of the Riverside Nursing Home available in November last year, yet the minister said in the parliament that the nursing home had been brought up to scratch and that it was operating satisfactorily. This report, finally released for the first time yesterday, proves that not to be the case. That means there are even more unanswered questions about the effectiveness of the monitoring of nursing homes in this country. How is it that a nursing home that had been proved to be unsatisfactory was allowed to continue to operate without the sort of supervision that would have prevented the kerosene bath incidents that occurred and the other mistreatment and lack of care of the residents at Riverside that were revealed in the reports in February?

There are a whole range of questions about the handling of the Riverside intervention that need to be answered. Unfortunately, we do not have those answers yet. The estimates process has been frustrated and the minister and the department have refused to provide full information. But I and the families will continue the pressure to ensure that we do get the full picture, because the Australian parliament and the Australian people deserve a much better explanation; they deserve answers to those very important questions.

Question resolved in the affirmative.