A South Australian senator has fiercely criticised a $2.7 billion budget allocation, labelling it a “slush fund” after health department officials could not explain how the money would be used.
Senator Ruston’s Concerns
Senator Anne Ruston interrogated bureaucrats from the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing during the first day of a Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee hearing. She expressed being “horrified by the responses” when officials described the $2.7 billion as a health “saving” that would be “reinvested”.
“Mr Comley, I don’t know if I’m not understanding or your officials are being a bit tricky,” she said to department secretary Blair Comley. “This is $2.7 billion worth of funding, half a billion every year, and you cannot provide me with anything apart from a very wishy-washy non-definitive answer. At the moment it just looks like a big slush fund.”
Officials’ Responses
Budget strategy assistant secretary Kelly Fisher stated that “it has all been reinvested within this budget context”. However, when pressed for specifics on which programs would receive the reinvestment, officials could not provide details. Senator Ruston concluded, “If programs are being underspent, you must know what they are.”
This exchange follows Senator Ruston’s previous questioning of health department officials in December last year regarding vulnerable Australians left in public hospitals, a situation states and territories attributed to chronic underfunding of aged care services. She had then questioned the department’s ability to track individuals under Commonwealth care after being assessed for aged care support, stating, “You have no clear definition of who’s responsible. So this seems to me like a failure of federal policy and failure of the department to actually be on top of an issue that has been publicly described for quite some time.”
Mr Comley disagreed with that characterisation, noting the department had been working “very intensively” with states and territories. “I just don’t accept the characterisation that we’re not taking this seriously in engaging seriously with states and territories,” he said. “I also just want to add that the characterisation that is made – that it is solely a result of commonwealth policy that this occurs – I don’t think is correct.”
Senator Pocock’s Queries
Later in the hearing, Senator David Pocock questioned the department about clinician involvement in the algorithm used to classify and prioritise home care patients. “So this algorithm that’s being rolled out, you haven’t actually given a whole bunch of outcomes to clinicians who then independently assess the needs of older Australians to check that, yes, the algorithm is actually giving the right level of support to keep these older Australians safe at home,” he said.
Health department first assistant secretary Greg Pugh responded that “the department validates it”. He detailed a three-year consultation and trial period for the algorithm and integrated assessment tool, noting that “the department ran the classification algorithm through a process of refinement on more than 200,000 completed assessments over 2024/25 and we did the same thing for the prioritisation algorithm over 100,000 completed assessments over 2024/25.”
Senator Pocock countered, “What I didn’t hear is the current algorithm being used has been clinically assessed.”
