‘It’s made it worse’: Second aged care insider condemns Labor’s reforms as a failure

Labor has forsaken the wellbeing of older Australians to improve its budget bottom line and its landmark aged care overhaul is in desperate need of fixing, the former interim aged care watchdog says.

Former acting inspector-general of aged care Ian Yates appeared at a Senate inquiry into the government’s Support at Home system on Monday, where he said drastic action was needed to speed up access to the system, fix the “fatally flawed” needs assessment tool, and ensure legal compliance.

“By almost any and every measure, Support at Home has to be judged a public policy failure at this time,” Yates told the inquiry.

“Support at Home was supposed to make the old Home Care Packages program better, but … it’s made it worse.”

Yates follows outgoing inspector-general Natalie Siegel-Brown in warning that Labor’s new system is harming older people, heaping pressure on the government as it tries to constrain the near-$40 billion aged care budget spend at the same time as Australia’s ageing population swells.

Yates, also a former chief executive of the Council on the Ageing, said the government was focused on containing the fiscal risk to the federal budget by opting for a “tightly, financially controlled, rationed program”, rather than a demand-based system as recommended by the 2021 royal commission.

“It is clear to me, both from outside government and from the time I spent inside government, that the constraints on the system relate to budget envelopes,” he said.

How many people are waiting for aged care, and how long they wait on average, is hotly contested as definitions and reporting schemes have shifted in the overhaul which began late last year.

Yates accused the government of playing down wait lists, which he said had blown out to “unprecedented” levels, while the government points to a 47-day drop in the median time between a person applying for care and receiving it.

“It’s scandalous that the government is no longer publishing the numbers and wait times of tens of
thousands of people on interim packages and waiting on reassessments and package reviews,” Yates said.

A spokesperson for Aged Care Minister Sam Rae said the government was making significant progress in driving down wait times, and would continue to build on its changes to the reforms as demand for aged care continued to grow.

“This year, the government will invest $47 billion to keep building and strengthening our aged care system and deliver care to more older Australians than any government, ever,” they said.

Yates said while comprehensive research had not been done on the ultimate economic cost of delaying care, the evidence showed that the sooner an intervention was made, the less support a person needed later down the line.

“I am absolutely convinced that part of the so-called ‘extra demand’ people in the sector talk about for Support at Home is because people haven’t had access to CHSP services for some years,” he said.

“Some people with the capacity to pay will buy those services in the private market, but many others who can’t will then deteriorate and end up being classified as needing higher levels of support at home.”

Yates rejected the government’s argument that those waiting for care could access entry-level services through the Commonwealth Home Support Program, saying that program was at capacity and chronically underfunded.

Labor extended the program’s funding until mid-2029 last week under pressure from the unlikely alliance of the Coalition and Greens, backing away from a plan to absorb it into the Support at Home program.

That reversal has followed a series of concessions from Labor, including agreeing to provide more human oversight to the algorithmic assessment tool, scrapping a plan to make older Australians pay for help to shower, and fast-tracking 20,000 home care packages.

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