Extract from ABC News
Analysis
We are living in grim times. Governments, along with the rest of us, have had to contemplate even grimmer scenarios.
The national security committee of cabinet, Defence Minister Peter Dutton, told 7.30 on Thursday night, had been contemplating some particularly grim prospects.
"When we were first briefed as a national security committee on COVID, we were preparing for morgues at public hospitals, for defence personnel to be deployed to turn people away from hospitals."
The rather apocalyptic picture Dutton painted of desperate people being turned away from hospitals by gun toting military personnel came during a spirited defence of his prime minister: a PM on the political ropes this week, confronted by a disastrous polling slump and a trainwreck of an appearance at the National Press Club, topped by text message revelations that former NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian had described him as a "horrible, horrible person" while an unknown cabinet minister had called him a "complete psycho" and a "fraud".
Denying that he was the leaker, the one-time leadership aspirant was also aggressively putting to bed any suggestion that he might make another tilt at the top job.
But his comments once again saw the military featuring as the go-to answer to all things that go wrong these days.
At the Press Club on Tuesday, Scott Morrison noted that "on the vaccination program, if I had my time over, I would have put it under a military operation from the outset and not later in the year".
Last June, with the government under pressure over the vaccine "strollout", the PM announced Lt Gen John Frewen would be taking over the running of the national COVID vaccine taskforce.
Why is the ADF the go-to?
Defence has played a big role during this pandemic, including in running the hotel quarantine system. But it was a bit odd to suggest that bringing the military in earlier on vaccinations could have helped, because the problem earlier on wasn't getting them distributed — the job for which Frewen became known — but a lack of supply.
With the aged care system close to collapse just now, there have been calls to bring defence personnel into nursing homes to help, too — a call first made by former NSW premier Mike Baird back in January, only to be told by the PM that it was unlikely to happen.
"I just want to dispel this notion that the Defence Forces can come in and replace workforces all across the country, whether it be in aged care or health care or transport or in food production or anything like that," Morrison said.
But it seems that is exactly what the government has repeatedly done itself.
By Friday this week, Peter Dutton was once again leaving open this prospect "if that was what was required".
Little wonder, really, with a grim daily tally of COVID infections in nursing homes, COVID deaths in aged care, and an aged care minister in deep trouble for going to the cricket in the middle of the crisis.
Just why do the ADF keep cropping up as the go-to option?
Well, because so many of our institutions and care systems have either been ground down, or under-funded, or contracted out that a federal government trying to respond to something like a pandemic has little alternative option, just as it has no other assistance option for natural disasters like bushfires and floods than the ADF.
But the ADF's non-combat role has gradually spread and morphed from being primarily one about helping in emergencies into logistics and daily service delivery.
The aged care and disability sectors are struggling
Let's wind back to September 2020 — when the issue was all about quarantine capacity — and a Senate committee hearing at which Lachlan Colquhoun, from the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, was asked why the Commonwealth was not opening more quarantine facilities and running them using the ADF.
"The Commonwealth obviously doesn't have a public health capacity," Mr Colquhoun said.
"The ADF element is a point that, of course, has been raised. All medical personnel in the ADF amount to 935 staff. They are almost all deployed supporting states and territories already. The real limiting factor on increasing quarantine capacity is the availability of trained medical professionals."
The particular crisis may have changed in 2022, but the underlying flaws in the system are the same: the pandemic has exposed the paucity of staff and capacity within the federal government's areas of responsibility which include the aged care sector and also a good slab of the disability sector, too.
Both the aged care sector and the disability sector are now struggling with underpaid workforces pushed to the edge by illness and long hours.
In the case of the disability sector, the pandemic has taken attention away from crucial questions about whether it is properly funded.
In 2017, as federal treasurer, Scott Morrison announced an increase in the Medicare levy to help fund the NDIS, citing the experience of his own brother-in-law Gary Warren, who battles multiple sclerosis, as a talisman for his commitment to the scheme.
"I'm not saying no to Gary, and the 500,000 Australians counting on this," the then treasurer declared.
"The National Disability Insurance Scheme under a Turnbull Government will always be fully funded," he said at the time.
Twelve months later, an improving budget bottom line meant the government scrapped the extra levy, but not the commitment to the scheme.
Another year on, and it was revealed that an underspend on the NDIS of some $4.6 billion was instrumental in bringing the federal budget back into effective balance in 2018-19 for the first time in a decade, however briefly that lasted.
A crisis in the workforce and the system itself
But things have subsequently changed. An increasing number of people have found their NDIS support packages cut, or found that they cannot get access to the scheme at all.
The most reliable data that tells us this are appeals to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal — the only avenue of appeal against a decision beyond an internal process of the body that runs the scheme.
The number of appeals lodged with the AAT has jumped between three and fourfold in the last year.
Keep in mind that only the really well-resourced and resilient can actually undertake an appeal to the AAT, so these case numbers are likely to be the tip of the iceberg.
They come at a time when there has also been a big increase in the number of people going into the scheme — though just what is driving that is not entirely clear.
As the PM said this week, the original constraints on the scheme set out by the Productivity Commission did not translate into the way it was structured.
But in the meantime, it is hard to argue that a scheme that is supposed to be driven by the needs of consumers is either fully funded or doing its job.
So, in addition to the crisis in the disability workforce, there are major flaws in our disability support system as well as the aged care system.
The pandemic has both exacerbated these, and distracted the conversation from one about what fundamental changes we need to make to fix these flaws that are making life so grim for some of the most vulnerable in the community.
Laura Tingle is 7.30's chief political correspondent.
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