Richard Colbeck has defended his decision to attend the Ashes cricket in Hobart instead of a parliamentary Covid inquiry, insisting the aged sector was not in crisis and he continued to work on the Omicron outbreak.
The aged care and sport minister told the Senate’s Covid-19 inquiry on Wednesday the aged care sector was performing “extremely well” despite coming under “genuine stress” due to coronavirus.
The hearing also heard the Morrison government did not consider the possibility that PCR testing would be overwhelmed over summer, with officials from the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet blaming the states for imposing testing requirements to travel across borders.
Guardian Australia last week revealed Colbeck attended the Hobart Test from 14 to 16 January after declining to attend the Covid committee on Friday 14 January – citing the workload of officials battling the Omicron wave.
The prime minister, Scott Morrison, has said he can “understand the criticism” of Colbeck but backed him for continuing to work on aged care issues.
On Wednesday, Colbeck said he stood by the decision to attend the day-night Test because it “would be hypocritical of me not to”.
“I made a judgment call. I have no option but to stand by that and take the criticism that comes from it.”
Colbeck denied putting his sport portfolio above aged care, insisting he “continued to work on both”. “I wasn’t just at the cricket – I continued to work with officials to manage the issues in aged care,” he said.
Colbeck said on 14 January he spent “the predominant part of the day on the aged care outbreak”, including meetings with the head of the vaccine rollout, Lt Gen John Frewen, in the morning to discuss aged care boosters, and with the deputy chief medical officer and head of the aged care advisory group, Prof Michael Kidd, at 3.30pm.
“The Test match in Hobart was a significant event for Tasmania, as minister for sport I had to be conscious of that as an issue,” the minister said.
“All through that weekend, I continued to work on matters in both portfolios, particularly aged care, even though it was a weekend and I attended the Test match.”
Colbeck noted that, despite criticism from Labor, the shadow agriculture minister, Julie Collins, had also attended the Test after leaving Anthony Albanese’s tour of regional Queensland.
The Labor senator Katy Gallagher noted on Wednesday that the aged care sector was struggling with outbreaks in half of all facilities with 10,000 cases overall, residents locked down, and the sector suffering workforce shortages. There had been 657 deaths in the sector since July 2021.
Colbeck said the sector was performing “extremely well” despite the Omicron outbreak. He cited the fact that in 2020 there were 28,000 Covid cases in Australia, of which 2,051 were in aged care (7.2%), but now of the 1.8m Covid cases, just 10,500 were in aged care (0.58%).
Some 89% of aged care residents have had both doses of a vaccine, but just 66% have received their booster despite 99% of centres being visited by teams offering them – meaning 64,600 of the system’s 190,000 residents have not had a booster.
Frewen said boosters in aged care lagged due to issues including a lack of consent from residents or carers; residents only receiving their second dose recently and a lack of urgency in some communities due to no outbreaks.
Colbeck and health officials could not say how many of the 471 people who have died in aged care since January were boosted, citing a “time lag” in getting data from the states.
Despite rollout delays throughout 2021, Australia now had the eighth-highest vaccination rate in the OECD, Frewen said, with 95.6% of the population aged 16 and over having had one dose and 93.5% fully vaccinated. More than 8m boosters have been administered.
Frewen said the Indigenous vaccination gap had closed by 12%: some 88% of Indigenous Australians have had a first dose and 75% were fully vaccinated.
Earlier, officials from the department of the prime minister revealed that despite the health department commissioning new modelling from the Doherty Institute in December, the government did not anticipate PCR testing delays and inadequate capacity over summer.
Asked if a collapse in testing was a scenario considered by models,
Alison Frame, the deputy secretary of social policy, replied: “Not that I’m aware of.”
Frame explained that earlier Doherty modelling that accompanied the national reopening plan in mid-2021 had considered the possibility of a more transmissible variant but the government believed that because PCR testing had held up well during “significant” waves in New South Wales and Victoria it could cope with high demand.
Chief health officers had been “zealous” in controlling how rapid antigen tests were used in their states, she said, and health advice still recommended PCR testing as the best option.
“The preference was for PCR as a higher standard of testing,” Frame said. “Rapid antigen testing may complement that, but it was not the mainstay.”
Frame blamed the states for a surge in demand for PCR testing, noting that “test to travel” requirements had added about 20% to demand. She claimed that had not been anticipated.
The head of the Therapeutic Goods Administration, Prof John Skerritt, rejected suggestions the regulator had been “asleep” or “lazy” in the process of approving rapid tests.
Skerritt said the TGA gave advice in favour of rapid tests in September and 13 varieties were approved by October.
But the decision to wait before recommending their use more widely was “deliberate”, he said, because it “would have been dangerous” to rely on tests with false-positive rates of up to 50% or 60% while Australia was still in the Delta wave.
The chief medical officer, Prof Paul Kelly, agreed that rapid tests were “not the best in the Australian context at that time” because of low community transmission. Skerritt said they were a “significant part of the armoury”.
In the first week of the government’s limited free RAT program for concession-card holders, some 2.8m free tests were delivered through community pharmacies.
