The Senate has voted to demand the Albanese Government abolish its Integrated Assessment Tool (IAT), the algorithm used to determine funding and priority for older Australians seeking in-home aged care, in the latest parliamentary blow to Labor’s aged care reforms.
The motion, brought by the Greens, was agreed to on Tuesday afternoon without a vote being recorded, after the Coalition and crossbench had already backed a Greens motion to suspend standing orders so the matter could be debated. It calls on the government to abolish the IAT, replace it with a system designed with clinical experts, put the rights of older people first, and restore human override so clinicians can again intervene in assessment outcomes.
The vote follows Monday night’s Four Corners investigation, “The Waiting Game”, which examined the IAT’s “classification algorithm” in detail. According to the program, applicants are scored across three areas, functional ability, unmet need and “compounding factors” such as frailty and cognitive decline, before being sorted into one of eight funding levels. Health services researcher Professor Kathy Eagar, who reverse-engineered the algorithm, told the program the compounding factors are weighted so late in the process that they barely affect the final result. She also noted that although each assessment includes more than 500 questions, including over 100 free-text fields for clinical notes, the algorithm reads only a fraction of them. Professor Eagar said the tool should be scrapped rather than fixed.
The same Four Corners investigation reported that the true number of people waiting for full in-home aged care funding stands at almost 154,000, not the roughly 100,000 officially reported, after the government changed its method of counting the waitlist. Aged Care Minister Sam Rae, interviewed on the program, maintained the waitlist “has always been calculated the way it currently is”, a claim the program disputed.
It is the latest in a run of parliamentary setbacks for the government’s aged care system. Parliament has previously forced the release of 20,000 additional home care packages, pushed Labor to back down on some co-payments, and prompted a rapid review of the algorithm. Last month the Senate, with Greens and crossbench support, passed a bill to restore human override to the IAT, though the government subsequently voted it down in the lower house.
Greens Older People spokesperson Senator Penny Allman-Payne said the tool was “systematically under-assessing need and priority”, leaving people with degenerative conditions without the funding they need.
“The writing is on the wall for Labor’s aged care assessment tool,” she said. “It’s a friendless system that older people, carers and experts have been screaming about for months… Now the parliament has been crystal clear: it’s time for Labor to go back to the drawing board on aged care assessments. Older people deserve a tested assessment system designed by experts that has their rights at its core.”
The full text of the Senate motion notes that the IAT is “untested, structurally flawed and systematically under-assessing the care needs of older Australians, especially those living with mental health conditions, cognitive issues and frailty”, and calls on the government to take immediate action to abolish it.
The Senate vote does not compel the government to act, but adds to mounting political pressure following the Four Corners investigation, which was reported by the program’s journalist Anne Connolly, whose earlier reporting helped trigger the aged care Royal Commission.
