Aged Care Amendment (Restoring Human Override for Aged Care Needs Assessments) Bill 2026
Senator ASKEW (Tasmania—Chief Opposition Whip in the Senate) (15:38): I move: That this bill be now read a second time. I seek leave to table an explanatory memorandum relating to the bill and have the second reading speech incorporated in Hansard. Leave granted.
The speech read as follows— AGED CARE AMENDMENT (RESTORING HUMAN OVERRIDE FOR AGED CARE NEEDS ASSESSMENTS) BILL 2026 I rise to introduce the Aged Care Amendment (Restoring Human Override for Aged Care Needs Assessments) Bill 2026. This is not a complicated Bill. It does not ask for anything radical.
It asks for something simple: that when a qualified professional sits with an older Australian, assesses their needs and forms a clinical judgment, that judgment must count. It must not be overruled by a computer. It must not be quietly set aside to meet a Budget target.
No algorithm has ever grown old. No algorithm has ever cared for an ageing parent. No algorithm has ever sat at the bedside of someone they love.
And yet, under this Government, an algorithm now has the final say over the care of older Australians—and no human being is allowed to overrule it. That is what this Bill fixes. It restores human override of the Integrated Assessment Tool—the IAT—for aged care needs and classification assessments.
And the fact that we need a law to put a human being back in charge of a human decision tells you everything you need to know about the direction of this Government's aged care reforms. President, the IAT was introduced under the new Aged Care Act 2024, which commenced on 1 November 2025. It was sold as a tool for consistency and fairness—the promise that an older Australian would receive the same outcome no matter where they live or who assesses them.
That was the promise. The reality has been very different. In the entire year before the algorithm, 170 people asked for their assessment to be reviewed.
In just five months after it, 834 did. That is not a glitch. That is a system buckling under its own flaws.
The nation's peak body for geriatric medicine, the Australian and New Zealand Society for Geriatric Medicine, has called the tool a clinical safety risk. They have pointed to the very things it fails to see—frailty, cognitive decline, sensory impairment, malnutrition and continence needs. The very things that decide whether an older person is safe in their own home.
The Commonwealth Ombudsman has launched a formal investigation. And there has been report after report of older Australians assessed at levels that bear no relationship to their actual needs—including a man living with motor neurone disease whose funding was cut even as his condition was clearly getting worse. Think about that.
A man with motor neurone disease—a cruel, progressive, terminal illness—was told by a computer that he needed less help, not more. And no human assessor was permitted to step in and say: that is wrong. President, this did not happen by accident.
The removal of human override was not an oversight. It was a deliberate design choice—a decision to put a standardised, algorithm-driven outcome ahead of the professional judgment of a trained assessor. So when an assessor looks at an older Australian and says 'this person needs more care', and the computer says no—under this Government, the computer wins.
That is not a care system. That is a call centre with the humanity stripped out. And it does not sit in isolation.
It sits at the centre of a Support at Home rollout defined by delay, confusion and backflips—a Government that had to be shamed into reversing its own decision to strip back showering and continence support, among the most basic things a person needs to keep their dignity. When the tool at the centre of the system under-assesses need, everything downstream fails with it.
At point after point, older Australians are ending up with less than they need. This is not reform that strengthens care. It is reform that quietly takes it away—one algorithm decision at a time.
And the warnings have been impossible to miss. Families have raised the alarm. Clinicians have raised the alarm.
Advocates have raised the alarm. More than 100 members and senators across this Parliament have called for action. And still the system grinds on, flaws and all.
One story in particular has put a human face to this. A woman took part in the early trials of the IAT in good faith, believing she was helping to make the system better. What she was never told was that the one safeguard she was counting on—a qualified human being able to step in when the tool got it wrong—was being removed altogether.
She trusted the system. The system took away her safeguard and never told her. And now she is too afraid to go anywhere near it.
That is what happens when a Government trades trust for an algorithm. At its heart, this is about transparency and accountability. Older Australians have a right to know how decisions about their care are made.
They have a right to know those decisions reflect their real needs. And they have a right to expect that when something goes wrong, it is fixed—not explained away. Instead, we have had delay, partial answers and shifting explanations.
The basic questions still hang in the air: why was human override removed, what evidence justified it, and when will it be fixed? This Bill answers that last question today. It amends the Aged Care Act 2024 so that the professional judgment of an approved needs assessor cannot be displaced by the IAT or any other automated tool.
It makes the tool what it should always have been—a support for the decision, not the decision itself. It restores the authority of qualified assessors to determine outcomes based on their clinical expertise. And it writes that protection into the primary legislation, so that no government can quietly take the human out of the loop again without the scrutiny of this place.
No algorithm has ever grown old. So no algorithm should have the last word on growing old. This Bill puts the decision back where it belongs—with a human being.
This Bill is about balance. It is about technology that supports care instead of constraining it. It is about a simple truth: no algorithm can capture the full complexity of a human life, and human judgment must remain at the centre of decisions about human care.
Older Australians deserve a system that sees them, hears them and treats them as people—not as data points to be processed. Put the human back in charge. Put the care back into aged care.
I commend the Bill to the Senate. I seek leave to continue my remarks later. Leave granted; debate adjourned.