(Image: Tom Red/Private Media)

If for some perverse and malignant policy reason the Morrison government wanted COVID-19 to once again affect unvaccinated residents in aged care, what steps would it have taken?

In particular, what learnings could it have applied from the experience last year in Victoria when hundreds of seniors died as a result of an outbreak due to poor hotel quarantine standards?

The first step would have been to ensure that further outbreaks were certain. The best way to ensure that would have been to continue to rely on the hotel quarantine system, which a report commissioned by the government advised would continue to be prone to breaches. That’s what the federal government did, with the complicity of the states. No new quarantine facilities were funded or built to provide higher-quality quarantine that was not prone to leading to infections of people within.

The second step would have been to ensure that one of the key vectors of transmission between aged care facilities –casual workers being required to work across multiple facilities because they aren’t paid enough by providers — was restored to operation after it was suspended last year after the Victorian outbreak. The moment that community transmission was over last year, Aged Care Minister Richard Colbeck advised Senate estimates this morning, the Commonwealth requirement to work at only one facility was rescinded.

Better yet, the Commonwealth policy is now to restore the suspension only after community transmission reemerges — ensuring that the virus will have had the opportunity to spread before people are stopped from working across multiple facilities.

Just to make sure, the government also declined to lift pay in the sector even in its “generational reform” of the aged care sector, making sure the core problem driving multi-site work was not addressed, despite recommendations of the aged care royal commission.

The third, and arguably most important, step would have been to ensure that the vaccination rollout did not reach aged care facilities by the time an outbreak occurred. This was conceivably a difficult challenge, given the prime minister promised that both the aged care sector and residential disability sector — residents and staff — would be fully vaccinated by the end of March.

However, that too has been achieved: we learnt this morning in Senate estimates that of the more than 50,000 aged care residents in Victoria, only about half have been fully vaccinated, and about 19% remain unvaccinated. The government has no idea how many aged care staff in Victoria have been partially or fully vaccinated.

Victoria could have constructed a bespoke quarantine facility to replace the breach-prone hotel quarantine system, but that would not have prevented this outbreak, given it came from an individual who contracted COVID in quarantine in South Australia.

There were no further cases reported in aged care facilities in Victoria today — a blessed relief given that staff and a resident have already contracted it.

If the outbreak doesn’t spread within aged care facilities it will have been through sheer dumb luck. It it does, it will be the direct result of an astonishing policy failure by the Morrison government, which at literally every turn has made the wrong decision on vaccinations, quarantine and aged care workers — and all with the benefit of hindsight from last year’s horrifying outbreak.

The minister responsible, Greg Hunt, and his departmental secretary, Brendan Murphy, should be the first to go if families lose loved ones as a result of this disaster. At long last, there has to be some accountability for such negligence and incompetence.