Labor aged-care fix still needs work, tax analyst says

OPPOSITION Leader Anthony Albanese’s $2.5bn plan to solve the aged-care crisis is flawed if aged-care providers are not required to prove how the money is spent, experts say.

Corporate tax analyst Jason Ward said that there was no question the sector needed more public funding, but if providers were not independently audited then the problems might not be solved. “Currently, there’s hundreds of millions of dollars going into the system that are not accounted for,” he said.

“There’s no requirement to report how it is spent.

“Transparency is the first thing that needs to be done.

“It’s madness to put water into a leaky bucket.”

This week, Mr Albanese pushed his party’s five-point plan to fix aged care, which inplan cluded deploying a nurse to every nursing home 24/7, offering better food and nutrition for residents and increasing wages for sector workers.

“We want to make sure every single dollar that goes in we know where it’s going,” Mr Albanese said during the first leaders’ election debate.

Labor’s five-point aged-care included making the sector more accountable with mandatory reporting on expenditure into categories such as care, food, accommodation, maintenance and administration.

Dietitians Australia chief executive Robert Hunt said some aged-care homes could not be trusted with public money. He said aged-care providers already had to self-report on food budgets and it had been proved that the Morrison government’s $10-a-day food supplement for every aged-care resident was not always being spent on improving meals.

Mr Hunt said the latest quality indicator also revealed that the number of residents who suffered unplanned weight loss had increased again during the last quarter.

“Throwing money at it is not the point,” he said. “We need to bring experts in to audit and evaluate these processes.”