Aged care has again been in the media for all the wrong reasons. Two failures are attracting particular attention.

A repost from 25 September 2025.

One is the waiting time to receive aged care at home, with 200,000 people waiting in the queue. The other is the excessive charges that the government is proposing to make older people pay to receive support at home.

Support at Home is a new program meant to support older people to live at home and to prevent or delay admission to residential aged care. It was announced in 2024 along with the introduction of a new Aged Care Act. Both the new Act and Support at Home was to go live on 1 July 2025.

There are aspects of the reforms that were welcomed, especially the long overdue new Aged Care Act and the announcement of an additional 83,000 home care (Support at Home) packages. However, the government was warned repeatedly that its proposed reforms would merely patch up the system and not actually fix it and that it needed to make significant changes. It studiously ignored such warnings.

Several major problems were immediately obvious. The new Support at Home program and other major changes were dependent on the Commonwealth implementing a new IT system that would include a centralised consumer registration system, income assessment and payment claims system. This was an ambitious project even for a corporation with a good track record. It was inevitable that the Commonwealth would not have the system ready for a 1 July 2025 start date.

After being warned that it did not have its own IT systems in place in time to go live on 1 July 2025, it backed down at the 11th hour and on 4 June, it announced that both the Aged Care Act and the Support at Home program would be delayed until 1 November 2025. It blamed providers for not being ready. While it did not make it explicit at the time, this delay included the planned release of the 83,000 new community aged care packages.

Waiting for support at home

The delay in those packages caused considerable outrage and led to a Senate Inquiry into Aged Care Service Delivery. That Senate Inquiry will report on 1 October, a month before the new system is rescheduled to go live. Giving the timing, nothing in that report will change what happens on 1 November.

But the Inquiry managed to reveal the real waiting list for a home care package, something that the government had been less than honest about, and it had a powerful, if short-term, win. It discovered that more than 200,000 frail older Australians are waiting for the services they need to live safely at home. Most (120,000 people) are waiting to get assessed so they can get onto the waiting list. They are in the queue behind 90,000 other people who have already been assessed, approved and are waiting for a package. Up until then, the Minister for Aged Care and Seniors, Sam Rae, had claimed that only 90,000 were waiting and that the proposed release of 83,000 new packages would effectively solve the problem.

Before the Inquiry had even been completed, the government backed down to demands from the crossbench and the opposition for the new packages to be released. It announced........

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