You would think it would be seared into your brain if you were the aged care minister – how many people had died in aged care during the pandemic. But Richard Colbeck couldn’t recall on Friday. He had to be prompted by an official. The answer was 258 in Victoria alone, just for the record.
Anyone can have a memory lapse, particularly when you are tired, and under pressure. I have them frequently. I suspect many of us do. It’s part of being human. It’s not a reason to crucify someone. But Friday’s memory lapse created some memorably bad vision, which will only serve to reinforce public perceptions the Morrison government hasn’t grasped the magnitude of its responsibilities in aged care; that somehow its mind is elsewhere.
Colbeck did apologise on Friday. He conceded the government had not got everything right. He acknowledged the terrible human tragedy. He said he was mortified by the circumstances in facilities in Victoria. He was “offended” by suggestions the government had been missing in action.
He clearly was all these things. But the minister also persisted with the strange official passivity qualifying the various acknowledgments. “We are not happy that some things haven’t worked out as we might have hoped, or we have encountered circumstances that none of us had anticipated,” Colbeck said at one point, rendering himself a bystander.
It is reasonable to say that at a certain point in a pandemic, the virus can overwhelm all the plans you’ve put in place to try to prevent the outbreak. That’s a real-world risk that you don’t have to be an epidemiologist to comprehend.
But the government persists in arguing that some of the events in Victoria were unforeseeable, which seems hard to comprehend, given what has happened in aged care overseas during this pandemic, and given the previous incidents in Australia. When this was put to the acting chief medical officer on Friday – whether these events were actually unforeseeable – Prof Paul Kelly told the reporter “that was getting into the pedantics of words”.
The pedantics of words wasn’t really the issue. At issue was testing the validity of the explanations.
Colbeck on Friday also continued to put Victoria in the frame by stating that during a pandemic there was “a combined federal government-state government responsibility for public health”. Which is both true, and a transparent attempt to make sure you are not alone at a reckoning.
This is infuriating. Surely all Colbeck or Scott Morrison needs to say is something like this: “We run residential aged care. We worked very hard to put safety plans in place for this pandemic, but clearly there were problems. There are some overlapping responsibilities in aged care. It is complex. But we accept what happened in Victoria wasn’t good enough. We accept that the commonwealth is the leader in aged care, so ultimately this is on us. We will work to improve our performance and work with the states to do better because that’s what voters expect.”
It’s important to apologise like you mean it for two reasons. The first is telling the truth is important. It’s just the right and honourable thing to do. The second reason is truth-telling gives the public a level of comfort that governments are prepared to learn lessons, that they have the humility and the wisdom to critically examine their own performance.
The prime minister has spent much of the past week trying to change the subject from aged care. He wants Australians to feel hopeful. He wants people to know that a vaccine is coming and that better news is emerging from Victoria.
I think Morrison’s desire to project hope is absolutely genuine. The country needs hope. It has been a miserable year, full of stress and anxiety, and the future is highly uncertain. Things fall apart when there is an absence of hope.
But hope isn’t an abstract quality. It can’t be summoned by prime ministerial command or through substituting good news for bad news. It doesn’t happen by obviously changing the subject when the scrutiny feels a bit too ferocious.
Hope comes from confidence and trust. It comes from people having confidence in the strategies and the governance, whether it be in aged care, or the economy, or public health.
It’s pretty simple really. In order to hope, people have to be able to trust you when you tell them hope is possible.
