The right is real
Two submissions to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee point at the same
provision, independently. Pets and Positive Ageing Inc cites the Statement of Rights Para 23 (12)
.
COTA Australia, the national consumer peak for older people, refers to it by name as
Right 12 - Stay connected with “pets”
.
So the Act does not treat a pet as an optional extra. It sits in the same statement of rights
as the rest of what an older person is entitled to expect.
What we could not do is read section 23 of the Act ourselves and quote it to you. The federal legislation register serves its search as a page that assembles itself in the browser, and a plain reader cannot extract the text, so we are relying on two submissions that cite the same paragraph number from opposite ends of the sector. That is good corroboration and it is not the same as reading the section, and we would rather say so.
The service is not
A right to stay connected with a pet raises an obvious practical question for anyone receiving care at home: who walks the dog when you no longer can. On the evidence of these submissions, the answer under the Rules is nobody, at least not on the public purse.
Pets and Positive Ageing puts it bluntly. Under the Rules, it says, the exclusion of pet
care assistance appears under the heading of ’General cleaning’
,
which it argues assumes support for an owner is only about mess. The comparison it draws is
the sharp one: funding for ‘art therapy’ and ‘music therapy’ is allowed but not support for another direct and powerful form of daily therapy, 24hr a day pet companionship
.
Companion Animal Network Australia, submitting separately, reaches the same place and adds
that the exclusion is misleadingly categorised under “general cleaning”
.
Its recommendation is small and concrete: that aged care assessments
explicitly inquire about the presence of companion animals in the home
,
that the answer be recorded, and that pet care assistance be listed alongside the other
support options. Pets and Positive Ageing asks for the same thing in different words: that
assessment teams establish what the animal needs, and that it go into the personal care plan.
Neither is asking for a new program. Both are asking for a line on a list.
The number that is not an advocacy number
Pets and Positive Ageing reports that the Commonwealth has already asked. It tells the
committee that in an August 2022 survey by the Department of Health and Aged Care
about required services in the Support at Home program,
14% of informal carers and 17% of older Australians wanted services not on the standard list and the top request was pet care assistance
.
Treat that with the care it deserves. It is a submission’s account of a government survey, not the survey itself, and we have not read the original. If it is accurate, it means the top thing people asked for that was missing from the list is the thing still missing from the list four years later.
The other figure in the file is Companion Animal Network Australia’s own. Its
2025 Status of Pets in Aged Care Survey drew 2,846 responses
from people receiving in-home and residential care, staff, providers, families and the general
public, and reports that 96% of respondents believe people in aged care should be able to keep a pet
,
with only 1 per cent saying pets should not be allowed. That is a large response and it is an
advocacy organisation surveying a self-selecting audience about its own cause, so it tells you
about the strength of feeling among people who care enough to answer, not about the population.
The warning from the consumer peak
COTA Australia is not a pets organisation, which is what makes its intervention the most interesting one in the file. Its concern is not funding but enforcement: that a right written in the Act can be quietly lost in the Standards that sit under it.
Pets, COTA says,
should have specific reference in the Standards to ensure this right is upheld
,
because the generic reference in Outcome 3.1 to care plan requirements
where pets may or may not be listed in a person’s care plan is insufficient
.
Then the part worth reading twice:
We are concerned that providers could cite clinical grounds (e.g. safety or hygiene) as a reason to not uphold this right
.
That is a specific, testable prediction about how a right fails in practice. Not repealed, just outweighed, one care plan at a time, by a reason nobody can argue with.
Who is not in this conversation
We counted. Across all 48 submissions we could retrieve, companion animals appear in three: the two specialist organisations and COTA. Every provider submission we checked mentions pets zero times, including Ageing Australia, Catholic Health Australia, HammondCare, Australian Unity, Opal HealthCare, Lutheran Services and integratedliving Australia. So does the submission from the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, which runs to some 7,000 words on what the Rules do.
Two cautions on that count, because it would be easy to over-read. Silence in a submission is not opposition: the provider submissions are largely about compliance burden, and an organisation that does not raise a topic has not taken a position on it. And Pets and Positive Ageing tells the committee there is support for the service from COTA and the Older Persons Advocacy Network. COTA’s submission bears that out. OPAN’s submission to this inquiry does not mention pets at all, so we cannot stand up the second half of that sentence from the file.
Our view, labelled as such: the asymmetry still matters. The people who would have to deliver this right, and the department that drafted the instrument, are not discussing it, while the two organisations that raised it are the two nobody has to listen to. That is how a small right stays small.
What this means if it is your family
Nothing here changes what you are entitled to today, and none of it is advice about your own situation. What it does tell you is where to push. The right exists, so it is reasonable to ask that the animal be named in the care plan rather than left to goodwill, and to ask what would have to happen for it to be overridden. If help with the animal is what is needed, that is not currently a funded service, and asking for it is a request for something outside the list rather than something you are being denied.
The committee had not reported when we read the file. Because this is delegated legislation, a service list can be changed without new primary legislation, which is exactly why a line on a list is a realistic thing to ask a committee for.
How we worked this out
We downloaded every submission the committee has published to its review of aged care legislative instruments and read the text of all 48 we could retrieve. One submission is marked confidential and was not read. Counts of companion animal mentions are ours, from a case-insensitive search of the extracted text of each submission for companion animal, pet, pets, dog and cat. That method will count a word in a footnote as readily as in an argument, so treat it as a measure of what a submission raises rather than how strongly.
We checked the apparent exceptions rather than trusting the count. Ageing Australia and Catholic Health Australia both appeared in a first pass for related phrases; reading the passages showed Ageing Australia was discussing care plans generally and Catholic Health was describing a resident staying connected by telephone. Neither is about pets, and neither is counted.
Every quotation was read in the submission itself. The committee serves submission PDFs from a document-store address rather than a plain file link, and its list reports 49 items across three pages while placing only the first 20 in the page source, so a straightforward fetch returns under half the file. We have not read section 23 of the Aged Care Act 2024 or the service list in the Rules first-hand, for the reason given above, and every claim about what those documents contain is attributed here to the submission making it.
Primary sources
- Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee, Aged care - review of legislative instruments, published submissions, 48th Parliament. Submissions closed 23 January 2026; the full list downloaded and read 25-26 August 2026.
- Pets and Positive Ageing Inc, submission 3 (PDF), dated 7 January 2026, read 26 August 2026. The citation of Statement of Rights paragraph 23(12); the exclusion of pet care assistance appearing under the heading General cleaning; the art therapy and music therapy comparison; the account of the Department of Health and Aged Care's August 2022 Support at Home survey and its 14 and 17 per cent figures; and the request that assessment teams establish the animal's needs for the personal care plan.
- Companion Animal Network Australia, submission 16 (PDF), read 26 August 2026. The 2025 Status of Pets in Aged Care Survey, its 2,846 responses and the 96 and 1 per cent figures; the description of the exclusion as misleadingly categorised under general cleaning; and the recommendations on assessment, recording and listing pet care assistance.
- COTA Australia, submission 45 (PDF), read 26 August 2026. Right 12 and the argument that pets need specific reference in the Quality Standards; that the generic reference in Outcome 3.1 is insufficient; and the concern that providers could cite clinical grounds such as safety or hygiene as a reason not to uphold the right.
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