Prime Minister Scott Morrison is holding firm against calls for the royal commission into aged care to investigate abuse in the disability sector.

Mr Morrison expects to announce the commissioner and terms of reference in coming weeks, but is adamant disability providers won't be captured.

"We need to ensure the royal commission needs a clear focus and it can't be a royal commission into everything," he told ABC radio on Friday.

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"If it becomes that it loses its ability, I think, to be quite targeted in the recommendations it can make."

Mr Morrison is determined to restrict the commission to in-home and residential aged care, including young Australians living with disabilities inside those centres.

"The royal commission needs to be focused for it to be effective," he said.

Greens senator Jordon Steele-John has made emotional pleas to the major parties, calling on them to support his motion in the upper house to widen the commission's scope for to cover all people with disabilities living in institutional and residential care.

The government is in the process of finalising the terms of reference for the inquiry, a process Prime Minister Scott Morrison has said could take a few weeks.

AAP

Labor say they will establish a separate inquiry into the treatment of people with disabilities if elected.

Senator Steele-John earlier in the week accused the government of inhumanely ignoring people with disabilities who died through abuse and neglect.

"You hide behind your politicians' words. You hide behind your excuses. The disability community will remember your cowardice, and you will pay for it," the West Australian told parliament before his motion was voted down on Wednesday.

On Tuesday night, Senator Steele-John was moved to tears as he listed the names of people with disabilities who have died in institutional and residential settings in recent years.

He described the speech as one of the most difficult of his life.

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"Those names needed to be put on record and brought to the attention of a political leadership which has so far managed to ignore them," Senator Steele-John told ABC radio.

"I'm trying to break the inhumanity of silence."

Among the victims was a seven-year-old girl with severe autism who died from starvation.

Senator Steele-John, who is the first person with a disability to sit in the upper house, said the deaths filled him with an iron-clad determination.