Aged Care Legislation Amendment (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Aged Care Commissioner and Other Measures) Bill 2026

Mr LEESER (Berowra) (12:27): I'm very pleased to speak on this bill as the shadow minister for Indigenous Australians and to speak in place of my friend the shadow minister for social services the member for Lindsay Melissa McIntosh. I rise to speak on the Aged Care Legislation Amendment (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Aged Care Commissioner and Other Measures Bill 2026.

Let me say at the outset that the coalition will not oppose this bill. We support the sensible measures it contains, and we welcome the establishment of an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Aged Care Commissioner. This bill really does two things.

It legislates a permanent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Aged Care Commissioner, and it makes a long list of operational and technical repairs to Labor's new Aged Care Act. I want to speak about both, because, taken together, they tell you a great deal about the state of aged care in this country. The establishment of an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Aged Care Commissioner is an important and welcome measure, and one which the coalition supports.

It gives effect to a key recommendation of the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety. The coalition welcomes the government finally progressing the establishment of the commissioner as a permanent body but notes that it's taken the Labor government more than four years to act on this recommendation. The royal commission provided the government with a clear roadmap for reform.

Five years on, too many recommendations remain outstanding or have taken far too long to implement. A dedicated commissioner will build on the existing work of the interim First Nations Commissioner and will help ensure the experiences and concerns of First Nations older Australians are properly understood, properly considered and acted upon within the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission.

But I want to be clear about something. Establishing a new offence and amending the legislation must be matched by a real improvement in the care older Australians actually receive. A new title on the door does not, by itself, shorten a single wait.

That is where I want to be honest with the House about what the rest of the bill is and what it is not, because much of the bill is machinery. It's a long list of operational and technical amendments—the kinds of repairs that you make to a system that is not running the way it was meant to. A large part of it simply legislates interim arrangements the government has not already put in place using Henry VIII powers.

Those are the powers that let a minister change the effect of an act by regulation without coming back to this parliament. The government leaned on them to keep the new aged-care system functioning, and those interim powers are due to sunset in October. The government is now here, asking the parliament to write those emergency arrangements permanently into the law before the clock runs out.

On top of that, there are 13 further technical amendments. Changes to contributions, to means assessment, to refundable deposits, to payment methods, to reviews and to the recovery of overpayments—these are sensible fixes, and we support them, but this is a clean-up. It is not a cure.

Here's what the bill quietly admits: Labor's new Aged Care Act commenced in November 2025, and, less than a year later, the government is already back in this chamber patching the holes. Think about that. It is a reform the government spent years promising, a reform it said would make aged care simpler and fairer and more responsive, and, within months of it starting, ministers needed emergency powers just to keep it working.

Now, they need the parliament to make those emergency fixes permanent before the powers expire. That's not the mark of a system that was ready when it began. It's the mark of a reform that was rushed, and older Australians are the ones living with the consequences.

They were promised something simpler. Instead, they and their families and their providers are navigating a system that seems to grow more and more complex with every fix, and, while the bill tidies the paperwork, it does nothing for the older Australians waiting at the coalface. Let's start with the assessment system.

The algorithm driven Integrated Assessment Tool remains in place, still with no ability for the trained professionals to override it. The former inspector-general of aged care has raised concerns about it. So have providers right across the country.

So have advocates, older Australians and their families. The evidence is mounting that this tool is not delivering the right outcomes and that it's putting older Australians at risk, and, still, it runs on unchallenged. Then there's the wait.

More than 100,000 older Australians remain on the national priority waiting list for a Support at Home package. Another 100,000 are simply waiting to be assessed in the first place, and wait times for Support at Home have blown out to 10 months—10 months for an older Australian who has already been told they need care. Then there's home support.

The Commonwealth Home Support Program has been left in limbo. Providers are withdrawing because they cannot see what their funding or their arrangements will look like. Funding hasn't kept pace with demand, and, when the government finally moved on the future of the program, the backflip came too little, too late.

Then there are the beds. Labor's own data says Australia needs to build 10½ thousand new residential aged-care beds every year for the next decade just to keep pace with demand. Let me say that again.

Labor's own data says Australia needs to build 10½ thousand new residential aged-care beds every single year for the next decade just to keep pace with the demand, and yet, in 2024-25, just 802 beds were built. That is well below the 10,500 that their own data suggests need to be built. That's not a rounding error; that's a chasm.

It's why, more than ever, today, 3,300 older Australians are stranded in public hospital beds. There is simply nowhere else for them to go. That number has surged 30 per cent in just five months, and it's costing taxpayers well over $1 billion a year—all to keep older Australians in the one place none of them want to be.

On top of all of that, there's the latest funding increase—an AN-ACC increase of just 2.55 per cent, well short of CPI and well short of health inflation. It's another blow to a sector already struggling to make ends meet and being asked to do more with less. Let me be plain about what the bill doesn't do.

It doesn't fix the assessment tool. It doesn't clear the waiting list. It doesn't fund a single new bed.

It doesn't get one older Australian out of a hospital bed and into the care they need. The coalition will not stand in the way of this bill, but we will not let its passage be mistaken for Labor fixing aged care. The amendments might be technical, but the consequences of this system are anything but.

Behind every assessment, behind every review and behind every funding decision in this bill is an older Australian—someone who's worked hard, who's raised a family and who's built this wonderful country of ours—who's now waiting for a package, for an assessment, for a bed, for an answer. For them, none of this is administrative. For them, it is deeply personal.

The coalition has always believed one thing about aged care above all else: the person must come before the process. That means restoring human judgement to assessments. It means clearing away the bureaucracy that older Australians should never have to fight through.

It means measuring this government now not by how tidy its legislation looks on paper but by whether an older Australian can get the care they need when they need it. We will support this bill. We welcome the commissioner and the sensible repairs the bill makes, but no-one should mistake a clean-up bill for a government that has fixed aged care.

Labor still has a very long way to go. Older Australians deserve a system built around the person, not the process, and they deserve a government that finally delivers the care it promised. Debate adjourned.

Ordered that the resumption of the debate be made an order of the day for a later hour.