Is aged care still “hot” enough to stay on the political boil?
Most Australians only collide with the aged care system when Mum breaks a hip or Dad suddenly needs care – and they discover there are no Packages, no beds and no obvious way in.
You wouldn’t think so from the mail. A glossy leaflet dropped into my letterbox this week proudly listed “25 ways Labor has delivered for Australians in 2025”. Aged care came in at No. 12 – buried halfway down a long queue of competing promises.
That’s the Inspector-General of Aged Care’s first problem. As we report in this week’s special edition of SATURDAY, Natalie Siegel-Brown’s No. 1 priority is to keep the aged care conversation hot – just as budgets are tightening, Government departments are told to find savings within 12 months, and political attention drifts back to votes, not reform.
The deeper problem is public. Most Australians only collide with the system when Mum breaks a hip or Dad suddenly needs care – and they discover there are no Packages, no beds and no obvious way in.
Until then, aged care is a line item in the Budget, not a barbecue-stopper.
The Inspector-General’s newly released review of My Aged Care is a case in point.
In 2024-25, the My Aged Care contact centre handled over 2.1 million calls across its consumer, industry and parliamentary lines, and the website recorded almost seven million visits. On paper, it looks like a system doing its job.
Yet the Inspector-General found that for many older people, My Aged Care is not a single front door but a maze – hard to navigate, harder to understand, and far too easy to give up on.
Natalie’s mandate isn’t just to write reports; it’s to keep the pressure dialled up so aged care doesn’t quietly slide back to No. 12 on every political list.
“At the end of the day, public accountability of Government is about the community conversation,” she said. “That’s why I exist – to report to the public on the Government’s performance.”
Because while the conversation cools, the problems don’t. Older people just pay for them later – in hospital corridors, long waitlists and “rights-based” systems they still can’t actually reach.
Read our full interview with Natalie in SATURDAY, out Friday at 12pm. Not a subscriber? Take advantage of our Black Friday subscription offer here.
