The Aged Care Program Serving Over Half The Sector On 8% Of The Budget Is Being Phased Out
16mins | Premiered Aug 23, 2026
Australia's Commonwealth Home Support Program supports around 840,000 older Australians. That is more than half of the entire aged care sector. And it runs on roughly 8% of aged care spending.
By any measure of value for money, that's the most efficient program in the portfolio. So naturally, it's being phased out.
This isn't a political rant. It's the same shape Emeka showed you last eisode in housing. Different department, different rulebooks, identical dead end. A builder trying to print a house couldn't prove it without building it, couldn't build it without financing it, couldn't get financing until he proved it. A provider trying to keep an 89-year-old safe in East Arnhem gets paid $138.96 an hour for care that costs $350 to $550 an hour to deliver. Every visit runs at a loss. Not because anyone's inefficient, but because the model was built for a suburb and applied to a country where the next client is a charter flight away.
Then the reporting system breaks, payments get held, an internal approval sits on a desk for weeks, and the small regional providers fold. When they fold in a remote community, no competitor replaces them. The service just disappears.
Nobody had to conspire. Every one of those rules was proposed sincerely, debated properly, passed legally. Incentives did the rest. That's the whole thesis of this two-parter, and it's why Emeka ended up making a submission to the Senate committee about it.
