**CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY**
Thanks Lee.
I want to begin by acknowledging the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, the Traditional Owners of the land we are meeting on this morning, and pay my respects to Elders past and present, to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people here today, and to the older First Nations people all your services look after.
For tens of thousands of years, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities have held deep knowledge of care, kinship, and ageing. As we look to the future of aged care, we have so much to learn from these traditions of respect, intergenerational responsibility and community wellbeing.
It’s wonderful to be here - and honestly, you couldn’t have timed your conference better.
Now is the perfect time to come together after, as you know, the Government announced last Thursday that the Commonwealth Home Support Program will be extended to 30 June 2029.
Minister Butler and I also made it clear that it is our view that, in the long run, CHSP should remain a standalone program.
I wanted to be here to say that in person - and more importantly, to tell you why.
Our government inherited from the former Government a commitment to bring CHSP and the Home Care Packages Program together.
Over the past year we looked very closely at what that transition would look like, and how we could keep all the elements of CHSP that both providers and participants really value. We have been listening closely to what you – providers, peak bodies and older people themselves – told us about it.
You told us that CHSP’s entry-level care does a different job for a different group of people. Block funding is what makes it work, particularly in small communities. And you told us that folding it into a program built for something else would break the parts of CHSP that work the best.
Well – we agree with you.
I’m preaching to the converted here, but I do want to take a second to talk about why CHSP matters so much - because I don’t think it gets said often enough beyond rooms like this.
Almost 40 per cent of the people who rely on it live outside our major cities, and in a lot of those communities, you are not the best option available. You are the only option available.
The things you do sound small: a hand with the shopping. A lift to a specialist appointment. Someone mowing the lawn. But what this also provides is a social outing, an inside joke or a companion for a cuppa - community connections that are sometimes lifelines for older people.
We all know that for an enormous number of people, it is the difference between staying in their own home and not.
The funny thing about this program is that its real value shows up as things that do not happen. The fall that didn’t happen. The hospital admission that didn’t eventuate. The move into residential care that happened three years later than it might have otherwise.
Early intervention is very easy to undervalue, because it’s hard to see. But our Government understands what you are preventing, and we value it deeply.
In the last twelve months, I’ve been to kitchens in Adelaide, I’ve delivered meals around Cairns, I’ve been to a gym in Ballarat that is keeping people mobile, active and social.
To my mind, the value of CHSP is evident – and that’s why it will stay.
Now: what happens next.
I know, and you know, that the decision we made last week won’t solve everything.
We’ve given a clear direction of travel, and laid out a runway to get there, but we still know that there is a gap between what CHSP looks like now, and what an ideal program of entry-level support looks like.
The extension until 2029 will stop organisations having to make decisions in the dark, and gives us all the time to design the next phase properly, and together.
So here is how we will use that time.
The Department h [sic] will write to every CHSP provider setting out the process and timing for extending your grant agreements, so you can get on with your planning.
Then, consultation on the long term future of entry level in-home care will begin imminently – in the next month or so.
It’ll be open and transparent consultation, so you have a genuine opportunity to tell us the things that work and the things that need reform.
The focus of consultation will be on delivering a holistic home support system that just makes sense.
A system that older people find easy to navigate; one that doesn’t add pointless layers of cost and of bureaucracy.
We’ll look at what a sustainable funding model looks like, about where in Australia there is unmet demand and who is suffering as a result, and about how we can support providers to deliver these services in the long run.
We also recognise that CHSP is not perfect, and we will work to understand what more is needed to help it to achieve its promise – informed by the recent report of the Australian National Audit Office, and of course, the Royal Commission.
While we’re not rolling CHSP into Support at Home, that is absolutely not to say we don’t want older people to have a simpler, smoother experience when moving between the two systems.
We are not blind to the issues identified by the Royal Commission when it recommended that the aged care system be delivered through a single program.
And while, as I mentioned, we believe a standalone CHSP should be preserved, we also want to deliver on the spirit of the Royal Commission’s recommendation for a comprehensive program – one that delivers consistent access and availability, as well as choice and flexibility for older people.
For example, we know some providers are seeing older people on CHSP declining Support at Home services – maybe they prefer the CHSP services they are used to; maybe the community-based services just seem more attractive to them. This creates bottlenecks that just aren’t in the community’s interests.
Ultimately, there are services just not well suited to individualised, package-based funding models. Cottage respite and group social support are two obvious examples – services we just can’t afford to lose because it gets “too hard” to figure out how to fund them.
And of course, we know that volunteers across the country do amazing work in a range of CHSP programs. It would be a crying shame for that not to continue.
So – as we start to gear up to make CHSP as strong as it can be, there are two things I would ask of you:
First - if your organisation has been considering withdrawing from CHSP, or has given notice, please come and talk to us before you finalise anything. The uncertainty that drove a lot of those decisions is gone.
Your contracts will continue without interruption to 2029. The door is open, and I would rather have that conversation and explore how we can support you in this evolving system than read about it later.
Secondly, once the consultation opens, I’d encourage all providers to bring us your data. Bring us the real numbers on what it costs you to deliver, in each of your unique communities, with your workforce.
Once we have that, we’ll be able to plot a path to a system that works for decades to come.
We said we would listen before we made decisions about the future of this program. Last week, we showed you we meant it.
Before I finish, I want to acknowledge the important role of stakeholders in helping us to understand the value that CHSP brings, and the importance of keeping what works.
I particularly note the role played by Ageing Australia, who put the case for preserving what works in CHSP very early and very consistently.
Similarly, COTA and OPAN have – as always – kept the voices of older people in the centre of these conversations, and I’m grateful for their characteristically thoughtful advice to make sure we deliver the best version of these programs.
And finally, to Paul Sadler for his advocacy in stressing the importance of genuine choice so older people can get the right support at the right time.
Our conversations with those organisations – but also with providers – particularly councils, with not-for-profit organisations, with older Australians themselves and with community groups that are delivering these vital services – and really are the beating hearts of towns and regions across Australia – that made the case for this decision.
We heard what would happen in your communities if entry level care stopped looking the way it looks now, and the pressure that could put on the rest of the system.
Now I’m looking forward to working with each of you to design the next twenty years of it together.
Thank you.