After sustained pressure from aged care providers, advocates, and community campaigners, the Commonwealth has backed down on changing entry level home care for older people. The Commonwealth Home Support Program (CHSP) will not be merged into the troubled Support at Home program. Instead, it will be extended as a standalone service until 30 June 2029, providing security for older Australians who depend on it. It is the Commonwealth’s intention to make this decision permanent.
For residents of Daylesford and Hepburn Springs currently receiving CHSP services through Benetas or Central Highlands Rural Health, this decision means continuity. Their meal delivery services, home help, allied health support, and community access programs won’t be disrupted next year by being absorbed into a system that, according to recent investigation, is failing many of the people it’s meant to help.
But the extension also masks a more troubling reality: the Support at Home program, which was supposed to replace CHSP and offer a modern, streamlined aged care support system, has developed serious problems that critics say reflect deliberate cost-cutting rather than genuine care.
What’s Wrong with Support at Home?
In August this year, the ABC’s Four Corners program investigated the Support at Home system and found alarming flaws:
The Algorithm Problem: The program relies on an automated assessment tool (the Integrated Assessment Tool, or IAT) that clinicians can no longer override. This algorithm processes over 500 assessment questions but “reads only a fraction” of them, effectively ignoring most clinical information about an individual’s needs. According to researcher Professor Kathy Eagar, the system “needs to be scrapped entirely” rather than merely fixed.
Extreme Wait Times: While the government reports a median wait of 36 days for assessment, the reality is far grimmer. The actual median wait from application to receiving approved care is ten months. More disturbingly, over 4,800 people died in 2024-25 while waiting for funding they had already qualified for.
Systematic Under-prioritisation: Only 88 people out of over 100,000 on the waiting list are classified as “urgent”—a staggering failure to distinguish genuine emergency need from routine requests.
Shifting Goalposts: The government changed the way it counts waiting people, removing interim-funded recipients from the figures. Using the previous counting method, the waiting list exceeds 150,000, not the 100,000 figure currently cited.
Appeals and Dismissal: Formal appeals against the algorithm’s decisions increased sixfold to approximately 1,000 annually. When asked about this surge, Aged Care Minister Sam Rae dismissed it as “relatively tolerable”—a response that rings hollow for older Australians trapped in the system.
As well, the Support at Home Program has seen a dramatic increase in out of pocked costs for home care for older people. Even full pensioners are now paying thousands of dollars a year for basic cleaning, meals and housekeeping services. Fully self funded retirees are often paying well over $10,000 per year.
The system is opaque, bureaucratic, slow, fragmented and even when people get services, they have to carefully check and monitor their services to manage out of pocket costs. Agencies providing services have massively increased administrative costs and not all of their costs are adequately compensated.
Cost Containment, Not Care?
Hellocare, a well respected publication on aged care describes the system as “cruel by design“—not a bug in the system, but a feature. The suggestion is that the Commonwealth has built an automated machine specifically designed to say “no” to funding requests, increasing fees and reducing services through mechanical denial rather than clinical assessment.
These criticisms are not unjustified. By removing clinician override, weighting assessments to minimise funding allocation, and making urgent classification virtually impossible to achieve, the system achieves cost savings on paper—but at the expense of vulnerable older Australians. The deaths of 4,800 people awaiting approved funding are not outliers in a system that works most of the time; they’re evidence of systemic failure.
A Two-Year Window for Reform
The government has signalled its intention to make CHSP permanent beyond 2029 and is consulting on this possibility. But the two-year extension is also a design window—time for the Commonwealth to address Support at Home’s fundamental flaws before consolidating the programs.
Whether it will actually do so remains an open question. The Senate has already passed a bill to restore assessor override authority in Support at Home, but the government rejected it. That suggests resistance to the kinds of reforms critics say are essential.
What This Means Locally
In Hepburn Shire, Benetas and Central Higlands Rural Health continue to deliver CHSP services. These services—reliable, community-based, delivered by organisations with longstanding connections to the region—now have security through 2029.
But the decision also reflects the limits of what the current Support at Home system can deliver. For older people in the region who might have been pushed onto Support at Home had the merger proceeded, the extension of CHSP is genuinely positive news.
The Pressure Continues
The Commonwealth Government and the Minister Sam Rae remain under pressure to redesign the Support at Home program to make it easier to access assessments and services, reduce waiting times and out of pocket costs, reinstate the capacity of human assessors to over ride automated assessment and reduce the administrative burden on users and providers. The outcomes remain to be seen.
