Thread by @CrankInstitute

1100 aged care homes are now locked down, with outbreaks affecting over 7000 residents & staff. Between January 7 & 14, the number of homes with Covid more than doubled. Jan 14 was the first day Richard went to the cricket.
The PM has expressed full confidence in the minister.

In Morrison's response to the damning Aged Care Royal Commission report last year, only a fraction of the recommended funding-increase was promised (most is yet to be allocated), offending providers were kept on, & no moves were made to improve the pay & conditions for staff.

At a time when the entire aged-care system urgently needed restructuring and a clean-out of shonks, a typically uninterested (some would say complicit) federal government opted to minimally paper over the cracks.

You can understand why the minister might have been relieved to skip out of the Senate committee - in June last year he admitted to them that he didn’t know how many workers had been vaccinated in aged care, because the government didn't have consolidated data.

10 months earlier Colbeck admitted to the same committee he didn't know the number of Covid deaths in care. That was also the session at which he angrily denied the gov had been "absent" in aged care during the Covid crisis.

Previously, Richard had asserted that the Morrison government had solid worst-case-scenario plans in place for the aged-care sector.

Course, it's possible Colbeck went cricketing in order to see how this whole Covid-management lark is done. After all, when visiting the SCG in his own spare time, the PM did declare 'Strayans were "takin' wickets in the virus!"
Surely at this point we're overdue for a dismissal.