Portfolio — 1 July 2026

Minister for Aged Care and Seniors Sam Rae used both an MPI debate and Question Time on 30 June to present a comprehensive account of the government's aged care reform program, with workforce pay the dominant theme across both appearances.

The most concrete announcement was a new wage increase for aged care workers: $85 per week for registered nurses, $67 for enrolled nurses, and $59 for personal care workers [TA-260630-house-1314b1cdbe60:s144]. Rae placed this in the context of a cumulative near-$18 billion workforce investment that has already lifted the average registered nurse's award wage by $28,000 per year [TA-260630-house-1314b1cdbe60:s144].

A further increase for nurses is scheduled for 1 August. The Treasurer and the Minister for Social Services joined Rae at the celebration of the wage announcement, a cross-portfolio alignment Rae made visible in his parliamentary contributions.

On access and wait times, Rae anchored the reform case in findings from the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety, which recorded more than 16,000 older Australians dying each year while waiting for a home-care package in 2018 [TA-260630-house-1314b1cdbe60:s149]. He said the Support at Home program, launched 1 November, has materially cut those waits: standard-priority cases now wait three months less, medium-priority two months less, high-priority one to two months, and urgent cases are funded within a month [TA-260630-house-1314b1cdbe60:s149].

The 83,000 packages already delivered will be supplemented by a further 32,000 new places funded from the $47 billion aged care allocation for the next financial year — described by Rae as the largest aged care investment in Australian history.

In the MPI debate, Rae highlighted structural reforms alongside the spending numbers. The new Aged Care Act, passed with bipartisan support, writes the rights of older Australians into law for the first time [TA-260630-house-1314b1cdbe60:s045]. He noted the Royal Commission itself was established by a coalition government, a framing he used to underscore cross-party ownership of the reform agenda.

Other measures detailed in that debate included more than $1 billion in Aged Care Capital Assistance targeting 10,000 new beds per year, the digitisation of the hardship application process, consumer-protection pricing statements under Support at Home, and the establishment of Australia's first permanent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander aged care commissioner.

The two parliamentary appearances are tightly coherent: the MPI contribution set out the breadth of the reform program while Question Time sharpened the workforce pay message with precise weekly dollar figures and a defined implementation schedule. Rae's consistent use of the Royal Commission's mortality data as the baseline against which current wait-time reductions are measured is a stable argumentative structure across both segments.