(Image: Private Media)

A taskforce? A fucking taskforce?

That’s the response from Scott Morrison and Health Minister Greg Hunt to the unfolding disaster that’s killing hundreds of seniors, has locked down tens of thousands and has left the sector with only enough staff for 75% of the shifts required.

The plea from the sector for the Australian Defence Force to be sent in to help offset the staff shortages that have left many isolated residents without basic services continues to be ignored. At least Defence Minister Peter Dutton signalled this morning that it could happen — undermining the prime minister’s rejection of the idea two weeks ago.

The “taskforce” wasn’t even announced yesterday by Morrison or Hunt but by Department of Health bureaucrat and chief medical officer Paul Kelly, who “committed” to “setting up a specific taskforce in the department to look at that and to do everything we can to get more detail about the issues”.

So a bunch of bureaucrats from the same department that has presided over two botched rollouts, the rapid antigen test debacle and the unfolding carnage in aged care will “look at it” and “get more detail”.

Such a pointless reaction to most policy challenges would be laughable. In this case, as the death toll mounts in our nursing homes, it’s sickening and enraging. 

And increasingly it looks like a wilful negligence that speaks of a decision to let people regarded as expendable die — after all, Hunt and Morrison have insisted this week, most of them were going to die anyway.

Why are Morrison and Hunt unwilling to do anything significant about the aged care disaster? Surely even the political cost would be enough to force a government obsessed with appearances to take action?

In fact there’s a horrific political calculation — one that most politicians understand — at the heart of their refusal.

While everyone remembers Bronwyn Bishop and kerosene baths from the 1990s, that scandal was atypical in forcing a government to intervene in aged care.

Aged care generates headlines and induces plenty of hand-wringing and complaints — that’s why so many dozens of reports have been written over the decades — but doesn’t shift votes significantly. That’s because, at any one time, there are only a small number of households exposed to what is happening.

This is the horrible maths: at the moment there are about 240,000 Australian aged care residents. They’re not evenly distributed, of course, but for argument’s sake assume that the households they’re from are distributed across Australia — that’s across 150 electorates. That’s about 1600 households in each electorate.

More than half of those already don’t vote for the Coalition, and are unlikely to shift. The number of Liberal-voting households affected by aged care issues is probably about 700. So maybe 1400 people might be in a position to change their vote in anger at what they’re seeing. Then factor in nearly half of them are in seats already held by Labor.

It’s a crude portrait, and the parties would have their own polling showing in much finer detail which seats where aged care will be a real issue. But it illustrates how the transient nature of aged care means people are exposed to it for only a limited time and then move on.

But the 1990s scandal also illustrates that when aged care does break out from being an electorally limited issue and starts dominating the political cycle, it can wreak havoc on governments.

As the death toll mounts and the government’s disgraceful negligence becomes more apparent, that may well be the fate of Morrison and Hunt. The ADF should start preparing for an intervention.