『Deaths of older Australians on the home care waitlist jumped by a third. It took two Senate orders to get the number』のカバーアート

Deaths of older Australians on the home care waitlist jumped by a third. It took two Senate orders to get the number

Deaths of older Australians on the home care waitlist jumped by a third. It took two Senate orders to get the number

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The data arrived months late and almost unannounced, after the Senate ordered it twice and the government missed both deadlines.Six thousand, four hundred and thirty-six people died in 2025-26 while approved for home care but were still waiting for the funding to arrive.The figure only became public after the government missed two separate Senate deadlines to produce it.The Department of Health published the number on 8 October, without a press conference or a dedicated government announcement. Independent Senator David Pocock said the data had been released “quietly, and in a way that’s difficult to find.”The sequence behind the release matters as much as the figure itself. On 20 August, the Senate ordered the government to produce 2025-26 death data for people on the waiting list for home care.The government did not comply, saying the figures still needed validating.A second order followed on 9 September, this time seeking the documents, briefings and emails behind the number. Minister Jenny McAllister, standing in for Aged Care Minister Sam Rae, told the Senate the required searches were “expansive” and could not be completed by the 14 September deadline.The figure surfaced almost a month after that deadline passed.Read against the past two years, the trend is consistent. In 2023-24, 3,383 people died waiting for their assessed level of home care, a figure disclosed at Budget Estimates.Appreciate the newsletter but aren’t ready to pay for a subscription? Grab us a beer or snag the exclusive ad spot at the top of next week's newsletter.In 2024-25, that rose to 4,812, a 42 per cent increase, as disclosed at Additional Estimates in February. The government did not volunteer either figure; both were extracted under parliamentary questioning.This year’s 6,436 continues the same climb, roughly a third higher again.The Department of Health has noted that the two most recent years are not directly comparable because the system changed partway through, from the former National Priority System to the new Support at Home programme.That caveat is real, but three consecutive years of rising deaths, spanning a system change meant to fix exactly this problem, is not something that caveat resolves.Shadow Aged Care Minister Anne Ruston said the figures showed the government had tried to conceal the scale of the problem.“Everybody on the wait list is a person; they’re not a statistic or a number,” she said. “The extent to which the government tried to hide this information from the public is appalling.”Minister Rae rejected the framing. He said the death rate among people on the waitlist was “significantly lower than the rate of death for older Australians in the broader population.”He pointed to 83,000 additional home care places delivered in 2025-26, with a further 32,000 rolling out this year. “Every single death of someone who is waiting for care is a tragedy,” he said.Council on the Ageing Australia chief executive Patricia Sparrow called the figures “an absolute tragedy” and said people should receive their package within about 30 days of assessment, not months or years later.A separate backlog figure sits underneath the death toll. The government’s own count put the home care waitlist at just over 106,000 people as of 30 June.A Four Corners investigation in August, using a different counting method, put the number waiting for full funding at almost 154,000, a gap of roughly 48,000 people who do not appear in the official figure.The department has not disputed that the counting method changed, and has not explained on the record why the new method counts fewer people as waiting than the old one did.The pattern of data emerging only once challenged is not new to this portfolio. In May, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese described the state of aged care as “not good enough,” after a report found patients were waiting an average of a year for services.Critics said that report was released quietly during the May budget lock-up, before the current figures emerged the same way.What the data does not establish is intent. There is no evidence that any individual decided to delay the release deliberately, and the government’s own account, that validating national mortality data took time, is a plausible explanation on its own.What is established is the incentive: an agency holding unfavourable figures in the lead-up to a mid-year budget update already framed around finding savings has every reason to let that number sit, regardless of whether anyone intended it that way.One case illustrates the stakes behind the aggregate figures. A Hobart man with Parkinson’s disease and cancer waited more than 12 months for his home care package. It was approved three days before he died.The release lands in a week when the government’s own financial position is already under scrutiny. Treasurer Jim Chalmers told the ABC the mid-year budget update will be shaped by “the need to find more ...
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