Aged Care Legislation Amendment (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Aged Care Commissioner and Other Measures) Bill 2026
Ms AMBIHAIPAHAR (Barton) (10:47): I rise today to speak on the Aged Care Legislation Amendment (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Aged Care Commissioner and Other Measures) Bill 2026. Before I begin, I want to acknowledge the traditional owners of the lands on which Parliament House and the surrounding areas stand, the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples, and the traditional owners of the land I'm so proud to represent, the Bidjigal people, the community that Barton spreads across.
I pay my respects to elders past and present and to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who call my part of Sydney home. This bill does a number of things. It makes technical and minor amendments to keep the Aged Care Act 2024 running smoothly.
It removes the elected members of local government from the definition of responsible persons under the act, bringing their treatment into line with how we already treat elected members of state and territory governments. It also locks in on a permanent footing the system modification rules that have kept the sector steady since the act commenced. All of that matters, and I will come to that a bit later on.
The core of this particular bill and the part that really made me want to speak on this piece of legislation is the establishment of a permanent, independent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander aged-care commissioner. I want to spend a bit of time talking about that. I think it's easy, particularly in this place, to let a change like this pass and not give it the attention it rightfully deserves.
This reform delivers on one of the central recommendations of the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety. That royal commission heard, in painful and specific detail, that older Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have been navigating an aged-care system that was really never built with them in mind. It's a system with rules, forms and assessment processes designed around a Western urban English-speaking default—a default that leaves out people caring for elders on country, people whose families and communities carry the caring load in ways this building sometimes forgets to count.
The introduction of a permanent commissioner has been developed in consultation with older Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, communities and leadership. It attracts overwhelming support and it is something that this parliament must implement. Between 2011 and 2021, the number of older Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people aged 65 years and over almost doubled.
Over the next decade, the number is expected to increase by another 67 per cent. Therefore, the passage of this reform is not only urgent but also absolutely central to making sure that the system serves our Indigenous elders. We know that older Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are far less likely than the general population to access aged care services relative to need.
We know they often reach out for support later, when their needs are more acute, because the system in front of them has not felt safe, familiar or theirs. We know that cultural safety is not a nice-to-have, tethered to the edges of some care plan. It is the difference between an elder feeling seen and an elder disengaging altogether.
That is what this commissioner is for: not some committee, not some working group, but a standing independent statutory position sitting within the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission, whose job it is to keep advocating for older Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people long after this debate concludes here. The commissioner will set strategy and give direction to the system governor.
They will maintain direct, ongoing partnership with community and with the sector; not a once-off consultation, but a genuine, continuing relationship. They will assess and benchmark culturally safe training so that 'cultural safety' stops being an expression in a policy document and starts being measurable with a standard providers are held to. They will support provider registration and build the workforce programs we need on the ground.
They will gather and hold the data and evidence this country has never properly collected on ageing and aged care for First Nations people because, for too long, decisions have been made about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ageing without the evidence to back it. I think about the hard work that the inaugural Interim First Nations Aged Care Commissioner, Andrea Kelly, did in her 2½ years in the role as she travelled over 70,000 kilometres across the country to visit different types of Indigenous communities, meeting more than a thousand people by doing so.
In her own words: Many people invited me into their homes and workplaces and shared stories of what mattered to them: family, community, connection to Country and culture. So what does this mean for the electorate of Barton? Barton is not a remote electorate.
We don't have the vast distances or challenges that some of my colleagues across the parliament speak about. I want to be honest about that rather than borrowing someone else's story. But Barton is home to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families and elders—in Hurstville, in Kogarah, in Rockdale, in Carlton—and their experience of ageing and aged care is shaped by the same gap this bill is trying to close.
Urban invisibility is its own kind of barrier. When people picture the need for culturally safe aged care, they often picture remote communities, and rightfully so, but they don't always picture a Koori elder in Kogarah trying to get an aged care assessor to understand why family, not paperwork, is how care decisions get made. They don't picture a Torres Strait Islander grandmother in Hurstville, whose extended family provides most of her everyday support in a system that still measures care mostly by what a provider bills for.
Local Aboriginal community organisations across the St George and Canterbury region—and services under the Minister for Social Services, the member for Sydney—do extraordinary work holding these gaps together in my community. Honestly, they are stretched quite thinly, and often underfunded for cultural work they end up doing anyway because someone really has to do it.
A permanent commissioner backed by a mandate to build workforce capacity and benchmark cultural safety training gives organisations like these something they have not reliably had before. This is a direct line into the system, a system that is finally required to listen back. From a personal perspective, members of this place might know that, before I came into parliament, I spent over a decade as an employment industrial relations lawyer representing both workers and employers in a variety of sectors.
I spent time in the court system advocating for people navigating systems that were not built with them in mind, sometimes. I say that because I recognise that pattern in this bill. Good systems fail people, not usually through malice or intention but through design and defaults that quietly assume everyone looks the same, speaks the same and organises their family and their care in the same way.
We are seeing the aged-care version of it here. The fix is the same in both cases. You fix it by putting a permanent, resourced and independent role inside the system with real authority to hold the rest of the system to account.
This is exactly what this bill does. To break it down, schedule 1 establishes the statutory office of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Aged Care Commissioner within the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission, with the function and powers to strengthen the provision of culturally safe and equitable aged care for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
In turn, the amendments construct an effective and responsive office by making sure that the office is independent and enshrined in statute so that it can strongly advocate for culturally safe, trauma-aware and responsive aged-care services. It also establishes distinct functions to drive systemic improvements to aged-care systems, enables the independent advice, oversight and accountability to the system governor and provides for an annual work plan and reporting mechanism.
Finally, it also enables the commissioner to access capacity-building and educational functions of the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission to support culturally safe and responsive care as a separate, functionally independent office. All of this is to make sure that the office can become a long-lasting and successful institution within our aged-care system, benefiting those that need care now and into the future.
I'll briefly go to the other measures in the bill, particularly removing the elected members of local government from the definition of 'responsible persons' under the act, which responds directly to advocacy from local councils and their respective peak bodies. It removes a disincentive that was quietly deterring local governments that support aged-care services from staying in the aged-care space at all.
I want to be clear about what this change does not do. Non-elected local government officials who are actually involved in delivering aged-care services remain squarely within the scope of this 'reasonable persons' definition. This is not watering down of oversight.
It is keeping full accountability where the actual service delivery decisions are made. The bill also makes permanent the sunsetting system modification rules made under the Aged Care and Other Legislation Amendment Act 2025. Anyone who has worked through a major legislative transition knows that sunsetting provisions can create uncertainty for a sector trying to plan for the future, and locking these modifications in permanently gives providers, workers and older Australians that legal certainty they need without the cloud of that expiry hanging over those arrangements that are already working.
Finally, the bill makes a series of technical and minor amendments identified earlier in the operations of the Aged Care Act 2024—the kind of tidying that does not make headlines. It's not sexy stuff. But it keeps a major reform aligned with its policy intent and with the IT systems that older Australians and providers actually have to use day to day.
At the centre of this is the promise the royal commission asked us to keep—that older Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people would have a permanent, independent voice inside the aged-care system, not just mentioned in some founding piece of legislation. It says to those elders of the electorate of Barton, who have spent a lifetime building community, often without the recognition they deserve along the way: 'Your experience will no longer sit at the margins of these systems.
Your knowledge, your culture and your right to age with dignity will be built into the way aged care is really governed here in Australia.' Before I end, I also want to acknowledge that this bill will be supported by the coalition, which was so well explained by the member for Berowra. I'm pleased that such an important reform for our aged-care sector and for Indigenous Australians will receive the full-hearted support of the two major parties in this House.