Yesterday the long-awaited Aged Care Act completed its final hurdle and was passed by the Australian Parliament - from 1 July 2025 the basic rights of older Australians will become law. The new Act lays the foundations required to deliver the care, dignity and respect, that the Royal Commission’s envisaged was needed to stop the neglect of older people in aged care.
It is a significant reform which we believe will improve the safety and quality of aged care services. Importantly, the new Act is rights based, providing a much stronger foundation for the focus being on the older person, rather than the service provider.
For many, it has been a long road over the last six years since the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality & Safety commenced. I wanted to once again thank each of you who spoke about your experiences, commented on our work and helped pushed for reform.
Thanks to your voices, MPs and Senators from across the political divide, engaged and listened to older people in debating and passing the Act and for that we thank them.
I’m not going to pretend that the new Act is everything you told us you wanted. We worked with the Parliament to get amendments that improved the Act including:
- The removal of caps on gardening and cleaning services at home;
- A new Statement of Rights that is enforceable along with a better, independent complaints process;
- Being able to always have a visitor of your choosing in residential aged care; and
- Preventing providers from being able to require you to pay for higher everyday living services (currently known as additional services) as a condition of entry to residential care.
You can read a fuller list of the changes and amendments we were successful in achieving through this process HERE.
However, despite our best efforts we were unable to:
- Stop criminal penalties from being removed from the Act;
- Have showering moved to the ‘free’ clinical care service category;
- Get clearer and stronger recognition of diverse populations; and
- Legislate better hardship protections for individuals.
Between now and March 2025 the Government will release subordinate legislation – sometimes called the Rules – which will include the next level of detail, and we will be actively responding to these. In a good move, all Rules will now be automatically considered by the Senate Community Affairs Committee – so some of the issues we raised during the parliamentary process may yet be addressed in the Rules process.
And so, the work to get our aged system right continues!
Aged Care Transition Taskforce - an opportunity to share your views.
COTA Australia has been appointed to the Aged Care Transition Taskforce, giving us the opportunity to share your experiences as the reforms roll out, as well as raise issues and propose solutions. I’d like to congratulate COTA Australia National Policy Council member and current Chair of the Council of Elders Anne Burgess AM for her appointment as Chair of this Taskforce. We look forward to working with Anne and our colleagues at Dementia Australia and the Older Persons Advocacy Network (OPAN) to make sure your voices are heard.
We are also looking for opportunities for older people to have early input on the next stage of the Support at Home Program design, due to be introduced in 2027, to ensure that individuals get the services they need and important local community services are maintained to ensure people are well supported in their local communities.
We hope you’ll continue to share your thoughts and experiences with us. We already know that you’re worried about what the new fees and charges regime will mean for you individually, the prices that are still to be set by the independent pricing authority and whether the new Support at Home service list will mean you can still get the services you need. We will push these things forward, and more, as well as the need for more tailored information about how these changes will affect your circumstances.
We will keep you informed along the way and continue to seek out your views and experiences as we develop submissions, including on the review announced last week on changes to the Star Ratings system in residential care.
