Aged care providers in Australia are facing significant change in 2025, as they approach the July 1, 2025, implementation of their country’s new Aged Care Act, passed into law in November 2024. The new Act replaces the previous Aged Care Act, which dates to 1997.
Staff of Ageing Australia, the country’s only national association for the aged care sector, are busy preparing to help their 1,000-plus provider members prepare for the changes wrought by the new Act. The association, which is an active peak association member of the Global Ageing Network, represents providers offering retirement living, senior housing, residential care, home care, community care, and other services. (Formerly the Aged & Community Care Providers Association, Ageing Australia adopted its new name on January 30, 2025.)
Tom Symondson, Ageing Australia’s chief executive officer since 2022, serves on the Australian Government’s Aged Care Transition Taskforce, charged with helping Australian providers prepare for the July 1 implementation of the Aged Care Act.
Symondson responded to Global Ageing Network’s questions about the Aged Care Act, its changes to the financing and operating of aging services in Australia, and its likely effect on older adults and Ageing Australia members.
Global Ageing Network: Ageing Australia has named the country’s recently passed Aged Care Act as a significant advocacy priority. What are the major features of this Act as they affect your members and the aged care system in Australia?
Tom Symondson: The aged care sector in Australia has suffered through decades of under-funding. In the last few years alone, providers have lost more than $5 billion dollars caring for older Australians.
The number of Australians aged over 80 will double in the next 20 years, but at a time when we should be building more beds, we’re actually going backwards, because banks won’t lend money to organisations that lose money hand over fist. Waiting lists for home care have blown out to more than 80,000, and many wait more than a year for services.
The new Aged Care Act promises to go some way to alleviate this problem and help spur investment for the future. The Australian Government will continue to be the primary funder of aged care, but the new act will introduce increased consumer co-contributions [a.k.a., means testing] for those who can afford to pay towards their own care, to increase the total pool of funding and hopefully fix the sustainability of the sector going forward. The changes also contain a pretty generous safety net for those without the means to pay because we are a very fair-minded country that believes nobody should go without services based on ability to pay.
Global Ageing Network: What are your advocacy and policy priorities on workforce issues?
Tom Symondson: Unfortunately, we face chronic workforce shortages and challenges attracting and retaining workers on top of financial sustainability pressures.
There is an estimated shortage of 4,043 registered nurses in aged care alone. That figure is set to blow out to 17,550 by 2035. There is also currently an expected shortfall of up to 35,000 direct care workers. The problems are worse in regional and rural Australia, and given we have one of the lowest population densities and largest areas of any country in the world, we have a lot of incredibly remote communities that need services, too.
We continue to advocate on issues related to workforce. That means better access to education, more housing for care workers, particularly in rural areas, easier migration routes for overseas workers, and direct funding of targeted aged care workforce programs. We have also been calling for the introduction of a specific visa to bring skilled migrants into aged care to help our members meet mandatory staffing requirements amidst the workforce crisis, particularly for regional providers.
Global Ageing Network: What are Ageing Australia’s advocacy and policy priorities in access to aged care? Will the Aged Care Act make care more accessible?
Tom Symondson: Aged care reform is so important to the national agenda that we were able to secure incredibly rare bipartisan support for the new act in the Australian Parliament last year. … It needed to be above party politics and the election cycle to ensure it wasn’t just repealed as soon as another party took over. Fortunately for Australia, both our government and the opposition heeded our calls and put short-term political gain behind long-term benefit to older Australians.
The number one recommendation from the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety (2018) was to enshrine the rights of older people in legislation. This means putting them front and centre, not as passive recipients of care but as individuals with agency and dignity. When rights are enshrined in law, governments are held to account for proper funding, and providers are similarly measured by the way they treat people rather than just the number of services they provide and at what price.
I hope the financial reforms under the new act will increase investment and capacity in residential aged care and retirement living and alleviate waiting lists for home care, making aged care more accessible for everyone who needs it.
We’ve clearly come a long way in the past few years. We’ve rebuilt confidence in our sector after a bruising Royal Commission and the terrible impacts of COVID-19. We’ve brought in a new act that should set us up for the future. We’ve seen the implementation of individualized funding for older people so they have choice and control—funding isn’t owned by providers any more as in previous decades, but by the client themselves. And we’ve seen the establishment of an independent arbiter on funding so governments can no longer raid aged care funding in the background to pay for election promises when they think nobody’s looking.
Of course, there’s still so much to do—fixing financial viability, getting providers building and growing again, improving access in rural and remote communities, and solving the workforce crisis. But we have plenty of reasons to be optimistic that we can achieve those things and more on behalf of older people across the country.
Tom Symondson will be a featured speaker at the Global Ageing Network Summit in Boston in November, discussing public policy and advocacy with a group of panelists. Registration for the Summit is now open for non-U.S. participants.
