Bans attach to people
A banning order prohibits a named individual from being involved in delivering funded aged care, either permanently or for a stated period. The register we downloaded (current to orders taking effect 10 July 2026) records 454 orders in force and 7 no longer in force; 269 are permanent. By state: NSW 165, QLD 111, VIC 82, SA 52, WA 31, TAS 12, ACT 6, NT 2. The register also publishes known aliases, which is not gratuitous: it exists so that a provider running a name check on a job applicant catches a banned person using another name.
Two things the register will not tell you. First, the published data does not state which statutory ground applied to a given order, so no reasons breakdown is possible from the file and we do not offer one. Second, because bans attach to people, the register says nothing about the quality of any home; a home whose former employee is banned may well have been the party that reported them.
The register is also a clean before-and-after record of the new law. Orders made under the old Commission Act cite section 74GB; from commencement of the Aged Care Act 2024 on 1 November 2025 they cite section 498. The first new-Act order took effect on 5 December 2025, about five weeks after commencement, and the pace has not slowed under the new Act:
Providers answer through different tools
When the regulator finds a provider organisation falling short, the instruments are different: directions to revise improvement plans, notices of non-compliance and to remedy, sanctions, increased supervision, and, for the serious-but-fixable cases, the enforceable undertaking: a legally binding public document in which the provider acknowledges what was found and commits, by name and by date, to fixing it. There is no single downloadable register of undertakings the way there is for bans; they are published per provider.
The Commission has used the tool at scale before: in January 2025 it announced enforceable undertakings with 11 providers across 27 homes that had “fallen well short of delivering their care minutes targets across successive quarters”, publishing the full list of names. (That list is now 18 months old and we treat it as history, not current status; whether each undertaking has since been discharged is a question for the per-provider record.)
A worked example: Havilah, in two documents
What an undertaking actually looks like is best shown with a real one. In October 2025, Havilah Hostel Inc, a Maryborough (Victoria) provider running two homes, signed an 11-page undertaking after assessments between March and May 2025 found non-compliance with several Quality Standards, including a finding that its Havilah on Palmerston home “could not demonstrate that they are meeting their targets for registered nursing minutes or the requirement to have a registered nurse 24/7”. The undertaking, accepted by the Commission’s Assistant Commissioner for Compliance and Enforcement, committed the provider to dated actions: behaviour support plans reviewed by 31 January 2026, a full restrictive-practices audit by 31 December 2025, de-escalation training for nurses by 30 January 2026, revised incident and medication policies, and a framework for high-risk residents.
Then the second document. In the Government’s May 2026 Star Ratings extract, Havilah on Palmerston’s overall rating rose from 2 stars in February 2026 to 4 stars in May, one of only three homes in the country to move two or more stars this quarter. We are careful about what that sequence proves: a rating is not an audit, and we do not assert the undertaking caused the improvement. But the dated public record now reads: findings, a binding commitment with deadlines through January 2026, and a materially better scorecard the following quarter. That is the enforceable undertaking working as designed, in public, and it is a fairer picture of provider-level enforcement than either “nothing ever happens” or a search of the banning register would suggest.
The compliance series that went dark
One more thing we found in the Commission’s own publications, and it deserves to be reported plainly. For years the Commission’s Sector Performance Report tracked the share of homes meeting both care-minutes targets, a series that improved from 32 per cent in early 2023-24 to 60 per cent by the September 2025 quarter. The July to October 2025 edition announced itself as the last in narrative form, with data continuing as “quarterly downloadable spreadsheets” while a new format is consulted on. The first such spreadsheet, covering November and December 2025, carries worker regulation, serious-incident and complaints tables, and no care-minutes compliance series at all.
The timing matters: from April 2026, metropolitan non-specialised homes that keep missing care-minutes targets face funding reductions, which StewartBrown quantifies at up to $33.41 per bed day. In other words, the sector-wide public measure of care-minutes compliance stopped publishing in the same season the financial stakes on it went up. The Commission’s consultation may yet restore the series, and we will report it if it does; until then, the quarterly Star Ratings extract (which is where we computed the 27.2 per cent miss rate) is the only public window on it.
What remains visible in the new-format tables is worth having: in November and December 2025 the Commission issued 13 banning orders, and residential providers lodged 9,605 serious-incident notifications, 48.5 per cent of them for unreasonable use of force and 29.2 per cent for neglect. Government-run homes notified at a higher rate per occupied bed day (11.9 per 10,000) than not-for-profit (7.8) or for-profit (7.1) homes; the report offers no causal reading of that gap, which may reflect reporting culture as much as incidence, and neither do we.
How we worked this out
The banning-order counts are computed from the register’s machine-readable data file as downloaded on 18 July 2026 (461 rows; latest order effective 10 July 2026). “Permanent” versus fixed-term and the s.74GB/s.498 split are read from each entry’s published description text. The register is a live file, so counts will change; the download date is the reference point. The statement that no organisation appears is a property of every row in the file as published, not an inference. Sector Performance figures are transcribed from the Commission’s July-October 2025 report PDF and its November-December 2025 data tables spreadsheet. The Havilah account states only what the two linked public documents record, in date order; no causal claim is made.
Primary sources
- ACQSC, Register of Banning Orders (data file, CSV), downloaded 18 July 2026.
- ACQSC, Enforceable undertakings (explainer).
- Enforceable undertaking, Havilah Hostel Inc, signed October 2025, accepted 3 October 2025.
- ACQSC media release, 13 January 2025: enforceable undertakings with 11 providers over care minutes.
- ACQSC, Sector Performance Report, July to October 2025 (final narrative edition).
- ACQSC, Sector performance data tables, November to December 2025 (XLSX).
- Star Ratings quarterly data extract, May 2026, Department of Health, Disability and Ageing.
- StewartBrown, December 2025 survey, for the April 2026 care-minutes funding consequence.
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