Australia is on the cusp of dismantling one of its most cost-effective social programs at precisely the moment it needs it most. A landmark audit report released this week by the Australian National Audit Office has laid bare both the strengths and the administrative failures of the Commonwealth Home Support Program, and in doing so has quietly strengthened the argument that folding it into the new Support at Home program could be one of the more expensive policy mistakes of the decade.
The numbers tell a stark story. The CHSP currently supports 838,694 older Australians at an average cost of around $3,927 per client per year. It delivers 115 million service sessions annually through 1,273 providers, many of them not-for-profit community organisations that rely heavily on volunteers.
Meals on Wheels alone mobilises 35,000 volunteers nationwide. The program costs the federal government $3.1 billion a year, which sounds like a lot until you consider that total aged care expenditure in 2024-25 was $38.87 billion. The CHSP accounts for just eight cents in every dollar spent on aged care while supporting the largest number of recipients of any program in the system.
Compare that with the Support at Home program, which operates on a fee-for-service model designed for people with more complex care needs. Health economists and sector experts, including those behind the newly formed CHSP Alliance, have calculated that an equivalent hour of Support at Home costs between 30 and 50 per cent more than the same hour delivered through the CHSP.
The Alliance, which counts among its 40 foundation members organisations like Dementia Australia, the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation, Carers Australia and Meals on Wheels Australia, has been blunt in its assessment: absorbing an efficient program into a more expensive one and calling it reform is not a sound use of public money.
The ANAO audit, which was tabled on 14 May 2026, does not make a recommendation about whether the CHSP should be merged into Support at Home. That is a policy question beyond its remit. But the picture it paints of a program that is both genuinely valued by the people who use it and chronically under-administered by the department responsible for it gives serious ammunition to those arguing the merger should be paused or reconsidered.
What the audit actually found
The ANAO surveyed more than 10,000 CHSP clients and found that 65 per cent were satisfied or very satisfied with the services they received. Among providers, 87 per cent agreed their services were of high quality. The program is, by the measures available, doing what it is supposed to do for the majority of people who access it.
But the audit also found that the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing has no robust methodology for measuring unmet demand, no end-to-end monitoring of how long people wait from first contact to receiving a service, and has never conducted a comprehensive evaluation of whether the program is meeting its objectives in the decade since it was established.
The department has one public performance measure for the CHSP: the number of people accessing services. It has been hitting that target. But counting clients tells you nothing about whether their lives are actually improving, whether they are staying out of residential care longer, or whether funding is reaching the communities that need it most.
Real-dollar investment in the program peaked in 2021-22 and has been declining since. Meanwhile demand has grown, driven by an ageing population that the Australian Bureau of Statistics projects will see a 60 per cent increase in people aged over 80 by 2035.
The ANAO found that 51 per cent of clients said it was difficult to receive services when they needed them, and 51 per cent reported a time when they could not access a service they needed at all. The most common reasons were that local providers were unavailable or not accepting new clients.
This is what underinvestment looks like from the inside. Not a program that is failing, but a program that is rationing.
The hidden cost of transition
Against this backdrop, the plan to transition the CHSP into Support at Home no earlier than July 2027 carries significant financial risk that has received relatively little public scrutiny.
The CHSP’s efficiency is not accidental. It is structural. Grant funding allows providers to pool resources, cross-subsidise thin markets in regional and remote areas, and mobilise community volunteers at a scale that a fee-for-service model simply cannot replicate.
When a Meals on Wheels volunteer delivers lunch to a 92-year-old woman living alone in a small country town, that service is not just a meal. It is a daily welfare check, a social connection, and a reason for that woman to stay in her home rather than entering residential care. The cost of that residential care placement, should it come earlier than necessary, runs to tens of thousands of dollars per year.
The ANAO audit noted that available data shows a downward trend in the use of residential aged care over the period that CHSP and other home care programs have been operating. While the audit is careful to note that causality cannot be established without longitudinal research, the directional signal is consistent with what aged care researchers have long argued: keeping people well-supported at home delays and in some cases prevents residential care admission altogether.
If the CHSP’s grant-funded, community-based model is dismantled and replaced with a fee-for-service system that costs significantly more per hour of service, one of two things will happen.
Either the government pays more to deliver the same volume of services, adding billions to aged care expenditure at a time when the budget is already under pressure. Or it delivers fewer services to fewer people, pushing the unmet demand that already has 51 per cent of clients struggling to access care into genuinely dangerous territory for some of the most vulnerable Australians.
What needs to happen
The CHSP Alliance has proposed that CHSP be reconceived as the primary tier of a three-tiered aged care system, sitting beneath Support at Home and residential care much like a GP sits beneath specialist and hospital care. Under this model, low-intensity preventative services would remain grant-funded, community-based, and accessible without the full individual assessment process that currently creates bottlenecks and delays.
The ANAO’s nine recommendations, all of which the department has accepted, focus on fixing the administrative failures: building demand forecasting, establishing a stakeholder engagement plan, creating a proper assurance framework and commissioning a genuine program evaluation.
These are necessary and overdue. But they address governance, not the more fundamental question of whether the program’s architecture should survive the transition to Support at Home.
With the May 2026 federal budget approaching, the government faces a choice. It can proceed with a merger that its own audit office has implicitly flagged as poorly planned, that its own department cannot demonstrate will deliver equivalent outcomes, and that sector experts broadly agree will cost more to run.
Or it can use the ANAO report as the prompt it clearly was intended to be, pause the transition, and work with the sector to design something that actually builds on what the CHSP does well rather than replacing it with something demonstrably more expensive.
Australia cannot afford to get this wrong. With 800,000 older Australians depending on the program today and that number set to grow sharply over the next decade, the cost of a poorly managed transition will not be measured only in dollars. It will be measured in meals not delivered, homes not maintained, and older Australians not supported to live with the independence and dignity they have every right to expect.
