The government’s own inspector: the aged care ‘transformation’ has not been achieved

Who is saying this, and with what authority

The Inspector-General of Aged Care is not a lobby group or an opposition spokesman; the office was created by the Inspector-General of Aged Care Act 2023, on the Royal Commission’s recommendation, precisely to audit whether the reform program delivers what the Commission demanded. The Act required two progress reports, delivered to the Minister by 1 June 2024 and 1 June 2025. The 2025 report, 218 pages assessing all 148 Royal Commission recommendations, went to the Minister on schedule and became public on 4 September 2025 once tabled in Parliament. We downloaded the full report and its summary and every quotation in this piece is transcribed from those documents.

What the report credits

The report is deliberate about fairness. The Inspector-General writes that it “has not been written with the intention of finding the ‘gotcha’ moments”, and its findings open with credit: “for the most part, government reforms have strengthened the aged care system and moved the sector closer to the model of care Commissioners envisaged”. It lists the funding increases for residential and home care, the wage supplementation for the workforce, the Complaints Commissioner and Interim First Nations Aged Care Commissioner appointments, and navigation supports such as Star Ratings and care finders as successful initiatives. The “most significant achievement” is the Aged Care Act 2024 itself: a rights-based, person-centred legal foundation containing the Statement of Rights and a statutory definition of high-quality care.

What the report finds wanting

Then the assessment. Beyond the verdict quoted above, the report finds “no evidence that any policy logic or ‘theory of change’ approach was developed to underpin a roadmap to the change envisaged”, and concludes: “What has been achieved falls short of the transformation envisaged by the Royal Commission.” In the foreword, the Inspector-General puts the forward question plainly: “Can we be confident that the government’s policies, processes, systems and indeed culture will deliver the ‘high quality care’ and human rights as envisaged by the Act? On the current trajectory, I am concerned we do not have some of the fundamental mechanisms in place to deliver this vision”. The report describes itself as “a clarion call”.

Five areas carry the sharpest concern:

• Rights without machinery. The report questions “the sufficiency and scope of mechanisms” for delivering rights-based care, and urges mechanisms that “do not solely rely on a person raising a complaint” to enforce their rights.
• Co-payments in home care. The new Act introduces co-payments for non-clinical Support at Home services. The report calls this “inconsistent with the Royal Commission’s vision” of universal entitlement, and warns: “co-payments could see vulnerable older people forgoing essential personal care due to the cost, or perceived cost, potentially hastening their entry into residential aged care.” It flags the fiscal irony that this “has the potential to come at a greater cost to taxpayers”.
• First Nations care. Mainstreaming Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community-controlled services for at least four years risks, in the report’s words, “a decline in the number of community-controlled services providing aged care and fewer Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander elders receiving the care and support they need”. The short-term recommendation is to pause the mainstreaming while a pathway is co-designed.
• Disability parity. People moving from the NDIS into aged care lose access to specialised supports, a gap the Royal Commission had already identified and which the report says will persist without action.
• Workforce. The report backs mandatory training (particularly in cultural safety and dementia care), minimum qualifications, screening and registration, and warns that inadequate worker protections “will result in premature departure of workers from the sector”.

Why this report matters more now than when it appeared

The report’s assessment date, 1 January 2025, predates the Act’s commencement; its concerns were about trajectory. Almost a year into the new Act, the live policy questions have moved exactly onto the ground it marked out. The co-payment concern is now the pricing argument playing out around the deferred Support at Home price caps, where the consumer peak OPAN reports members “reducing their services due to unfair price increases”. The workforce chapter’s subject gets its final wage instalment on 1 August. And the office’s separate final review of My Aged Care (November 2025) found the system’s front door in serious need of an overhaul, with seven recommendations.

The next test is procedural and dated: the two statutory progress reports are now delivered, and what continues the cadence, and whether the Government formally responds to the 2025 report’s short-term recommendations, are checkable events we will report as they land. On this masthead’s reading of the documents, the Inspector-General has done the sector a service by writing down, with statutory authority, the difference between passing good laws and running a transformed system; the distance between those two is now the beat.

Primary sources

1. IGAC, 2025 Progress Report collection page (published 4 September 2025).
2. The full 2025 progress report (PDF, 218 pages).
3. Summary of the 2025 progress report (PDF).
4. IGAC, reporting obligations (statutory basis and cadence).
5. IGAC, final My Aged Care review, 27 November 2025.
6. Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, About the Aged Care Act 2024.

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