Anthony Albanese’s aged care plan lacks funding transparency, experts say

Aged care experts have criticised Labor’s plan to tackle the growing crisis in aged care for failing to include a crucial safeguard.

Anthony Albanese’s $2.5 billion plan to solve the aged care crisis is flawed if aged care providers are not required to prove how the money is spent, experts say.

Corporate tax analyst Jason Ward said there was no question the sector needed more public funding, but if providers were not independently audited then the problems may not be solved.

“Currently there’s hundreds of millions of dollars going into the system that are not accounted for,” he said.

“There’s no requirement to report how it is spent.

“Transparency is the first thing that needs to be done.

“It’s madness to put water into a leaky bucket.”

Labor leader Anthony Albanese visited Bolton Clarke Fairways Retirement Living and Residential Aged Care in Bundaberg, Queensland on Good Friday. Albo holds the hand of resident Lynda. Picture: Toby Zerna

This week Mr Albanese pushed his party’s five point plan to fix aged care, which included deploying a nurse to every nursing home 24/7, offering better food and nutrition for residents and increasing wages for sector workers.

“We want to make sure every single dollar that goes in we know where it’s going,” he said during the first leaders’ election debate.

Labor’s five point aged care plan included making the sector more accountable with mandatory reporting on expenditure into categories such as care, food, accommodation, maintenance and administration.

Although there was no mention of independent auditing.

Dietitians Australia chief executive Robert Hunt said some aged care homes could not be trusted with public money.

He said aged care providers already had to self-report on food budgets and it had been proven that the Morrison Government’s $10 a day food supplement for every aged care resident was not always being spent on improving meals.

The average spend was now $12 a day, but there were still 50 organisations spending just $6 a day, despite the additional funds.

Jason Ward, tax expert, at a senate committee at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture Kym Smith

Mr Hunt said the latest quality indicator also revealed that the number of residents who suffered unplanned weight loss had increased again during the last quarter.

“Throwing money at it is not the point,” he said.

“We need to bring experts in to audit and evaluate these processes.”

Mr Ward, whose latest report on aged care spending for the Centre for International Corporate Tax Accountability and Research, found that some aged care providers were making huge profits that were going overseas, while others were setting up private businesses.

Mr Albanese visited a Bolton Clarke home in Brisbane on Friday.

Labor leader Anthony Albanese with partner Jodie Haydon and staff at Bolton Clarke Fairways Retirement Living and Residential Aged Care in Bundaberg, Queensland on Good Friday. Picture: Toby Zerna

Mr Ward said that Bolton Clarke, a not-for-profit had found $700 million to buy another provider recently, and had private business ventures, including in China, which it admitted had lost money.

“We need a government regulator that protects the residents instead of protecting operators,” Mr Ward said.

A spokeswoman said Bolton Clarke never had or would use “federal funds received for the purposes of delivering care to support any other aspect of our operations”.

Meanwhile, Professor David Brown, from the University of Technology Sydney, said accountability costs money.

“How do we measure how many minutes an individual person gets with a nurse?” he said.

“The more bureaucracy, the more it costs to run the organisation.

“There’s always a cost-benefit trade off.”

A spokesman for Shadow Minister Aged Care Clare O’Neil said reporting would be made public so people could compare performance for themselves and providers “could be audited”.

Originally published as Anthony Albanese’s aged care plan lacks funding transparency, experts say