TRUDY MCINTOSH, HOST: I’m joined live now by the Aged Care and Seniors Minister, Sam Rae. This seems to be a water cooler topic, everyone’s worried about how this is going to potentially impact them. Is it time for the Prime Minister to start the conversation about what fuel rationing could look like in this country if it comes to it?
SAM RAE, MINISTER FOR AGED CARE AND SENIORS: Trudy, you’re right. I think a lot of working people are wondering about what’s going to happen here, how this is going to unfold. Of course, Australia’s not immune from what’s happening in the Middle East, and we know that that is causing a crunch when it comes to fuel supply. That said, Australia is fuel secure. We don’t have a supply issue at the moment.
HOST: It's the at the moment that scares people. They hear that and they go, what about next month? It's part of the panicking, isn't it, because you think, well, if it's cheaper today than it will be in a month or a week, I need to stock up.
RAE: I think the issue of supply and price just need to be pulled apart a little bit here. We know that prices are pretty high at the moment. We've seen that. But in terms of the fuel that's arriving in Australia, that hasn't decreased in any way. We're still getting the same amount of fuel arriving here in Australia. But we have seen, and you guys have spoken about it already today, we've seen those demand spikes in particular communities around Australia, and obviously that's a problem particularly in regional and remote communities where farmers and other primary producers are relying upon their fuel supplies, and they're in some cases doing a bit of panic buying. We will need to stop doing the panic buying. That's not helping anybody. It's causing those localised outages.
HOST: But it sounds like people are being blamed for what, at an individual level, is quite a rational decision, isn't it? If you are concerned about a price going up or that next week there might not be enough, the number of petrol stations that are out, Chris Bowen has to list the number off every Question Time at the moment. It is a rational concern that people have.
RAE: Well, I think, again, it's important that we be confident about the things that are real and have concerns about the things that we should be concerned about. We've got fuel. That's not an issue.
HOST: So people shouldn't be concerned?
RAE: People shouldn't be concerned that Australia's running out of fuel. We're not running out of fuel. We've got fuel, and we know that prices are higher than any of us would like them. And as I said, we're not immune from those international oil prices. But Australia is fuel secure. Panic buying is not the answer to the challenges that we face. We are looking forward as to how this situation might evolve. It's why we've put in place a range of measures. Of course, one of the issues that we face here is that we've lost some of our capacity in Australia to secure our own fuel supply. We've lost four refineries under the last government out of six – that's a really significant loss of capacity. We shouldn't have been put in that position in the first place.
That said, we've brought Australia's backup fuel supply onshore. Remember that Angus Taylor, when he was the minister, had it parked over in Texas – a fat lot of good that would be doing us right now, having a bunch of fuel parked over in Texas. We have our backup fuel supply here onshore in Australia, and we're putting in place the conversations that need to be happening across the jurisdictions and states and territories to make sure that we've got a coordinated response to help out our economy, help our employers, help our businesses and help our households.
HOST: We'll see what comes out of National Cabinet on that. I wanted to ask you about your portfolio, though, of aged care. A lot of issues are being raised with the new aged care algorithm that helps determine eligibility for home care. There's been a jump in the number of older Australians who are seeking a review since the new system. Do you concede there has been problems with the new system?
RAE: There's a lot of misinformation around about this new system, Trudy, and I think it's always good for us to be able to dispel some of that. The reality is the old system wasn't working. It wasn't serving the interests of older Australians and, frankly, it wasn't serving our community more broadly. We need the assessment system, and that's what this refers to, the assessment system for aged care services. It's got to be fair, it's got to be accurate and it's got to be efficient.
Now, the old system ended up in a situation where we had, in some cases, people waiting 10 months to get an assessment. And by the time we wrapped up the old system, there was $4 billion in unspent funds sitting in people's accounts. That's money that could have been deployed to services to help more people across the community. So the old system wasn't working. The new system, the way that it works, I'll explain. You have a qualified aged care assessor, a person, conduct the aged care assessment. It's a structured approach. They input that data into the Integrated Assessment Tool. There's then an automated component, and this is where the misinformation and confusion is lying. There’s an automated application of the aged care rules. The rules have to be the same for everybody. That's a critical principle of fairness.
HOST: Can they be overridden, though, by a human? This is not a repeat of Robodebt, is it, where it's an algorithm deciding something when a human might be able to look at the situation more clearly?
RAE: The rules cannot be overridden. The rules have to apply to everybody equally. That's how the system is fair.
HOST: But is there an override, break glass- if something's gone wrong, that there can be something above the algorithm? The concern that some people have raised here is that there's a lack of human oversight at the end of the day.
RAE: Yeah, and I think that's frankly, the incorrect part. A human does the assessment, does the clinical assessment. That data is input to the Integrated Assessment Tool. The rules are applied. There's then another human, an assessment delegate, who signs off on the package of care that gets allocated. And then, as you referred to before, we've then got a review process in place where if the person doesn't feel that that's the right outcome, they can then have it referred to a third person for review.
Now, we've had 180,000 assessments completed since November last year and only 800 requests for review. That's less than half a percent of the total number being requested for review. So that suggests that this system is working well.
HOST: Is this about trying to make structural savings in the budget in terms of those cost pressures there? Aged care is one of the big cost pressures on the federal budget. Is this part of that savings effort?
RAE: Well, we've got a big public policy challenge. We've got an ageing population, and demand for aged care services is going through the roof, Trudy. You're absolutely right about that. But this is about making sure that our assessment system is those three things that I talked about before- That it's fair, that it's accurate and that it's efficient. We've got to make sure that we stick to those three principles, and that's what the Integrated Assessment Tool is helping us to do.
HOST: Aged Care Minister, Sam Rae, I really appreciate your time today. Thank you.