The serious design flaw in the aged care taskforce – having Aged Care Minister Anika Wells as its chair – is coming home to roost.
It was always going to cause problems and now, as the federal budget approaches, it’s clearly becoming an issue for the Albanese government.
It was created to provide the government with “advice on funding arrangements for aged care to ensure that the aged care system is fair and equitable for all Australians”.
Key to this is whether older Australians with the means to do so should be paying more out of their own pockets for elements of aged care currently funded by taxpayers – things like accommodation costs in nursing homes, food and other non-care services like cleaning and laundry.
The clear answer is yes. The taskforce seems set to recommend this, with the minister giving broad hints she is open to it.
A rapidly ageing population and the taxpayer burden of supporting the nation’s older citizens demands nothing less.
But with the taskforce having handed down its final report to government on December 19, in accordance with its original timetable, the delay in making it public is fast becoming embarrassing for the minister.
Wells pulled together the taskforce in June last year, looking for a quick turnaround.
It included key aged care advocates and experts such as HammondCare chief Mike Baird, COTA Australia head Pat Sparrow and peak provider spokesman Tom Symondson.
A cynic might say putting a policy taskforce together with most of the top sector advocates effectively gags them from commenting on some of the most contentious issues swirling in the sector. There has certainly been pressure to keep the work, and the outcomes, in-house.
Assuming the intention was pure, to develop the best future aged care policy, the structure was wrong.
In taking on the chair, Wells is effectively reporting to herself. And she, of course, is beholden to both Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers for any budgetary implications of the taskforce recommendations.
There are the significant political implications as well. How will a plan to push older Australians to pay for more of their aged care go down in various electorates? What do the party hard-heads say about that?
One recent theory is the taskforce report was held over to let the Dunkley by-election go by, as any suggestion an older cohort might be asked to dip more into their own pockets may not have played out well.
Dunkley has been and gone, and still there’s no sign of it.
The big offices in the government will be running a fine-tooth comb over the report, which they have now had for nearly three months.
If an independent chair had been appointed to report to Wells, this would have given her the ability to reject some of those thornier proposals. But as chair, she is going to own any problem the final report creates, on the one side with her bosses, and on the other with advocates looking after the interests of millions of older Australians.
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