Last night, 60 Minutes aired an investigation into Arcare, one of Australia’s largest aged care providers, alleging the company has extracted more than $100 million from elderly and vulnerable residents through charges for services they did not need, want or use.
The program, titled Age of Greed and reported by Christine Ahern, told the stories of residents including Jan Preuss, an 85 year old Townsville woman charged $6.74 a day for a glass of wine or beer she would never drink, and Dawn Hollingsworth, who paid roughly $30 a day for luxuries she was too unwell to enjoy in the final months of her life.
Perhaps the most striking case was that of Keith, a 92 year old war veteran in Melbourne who was denied a place on an outing to a horse complex, even after offering to pay for it himself, and who spent three months trying to get his facility to let him swap his meal for a bowl of soup because he was having trouble eating.
A class action has now been filed in the Federal Court against Arcare, alleging the company charged residents, including some who were immobile, unable to swallow or cognitively impaired, for services such as exercise classes, bus outings and Foxtel that they had no capacity to use. Lawyer Damian Scattini, who is acting for the applicants, says around 7,500 residents may have been affected over a six year period.
It is a shocking story. But the part of it that deserves far more scrutiny than it is getting is the government’s own role in enabling it to continue.
This is not a case of a regulatory gap nobody saw coming. Arcare’s fee practices were exposed as far back as January 2024, when it was reported that the company had been charging residents for products and services, including a “choice of menu”, that were never actually withheld or that providers were already legally required to supply.
The complaints were not new even then. Families had been raising the same issues for years, including with the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission itself, only to be told, in at least one case, to go and hire a contract lawyer.
The government’s response, more than a year and a half after that exposure, was the Higher Everyday Living Fee, introduced on 1 November 2025. HELF was presented as the mechanism that would finally stop providers bundling luxury add-ons into resident contracts as a condition of entry.
On paper, it did make one genuine change: providers can no longer make signing up to extra services a condition of admission, and the fee has to sit in a separate agreement.
But that is where the reform stops.
The critical flaw in HELF is not that nobody in government had defined what a resident is entitled to.
The Department of Health, Disability and Ageing publishes a Residential Care Service List, which sets out the care and services every residential aged care home is legally required to provide, including meals. That list exists, and it is public.
The real disconnect sits elsewhere, between that legislated services list and the Strengthened Quality Standards introduced alongside the Aged Care Act 2024 and the Aged Care Rules 2025, which replaced the old Quality of Care Principles. Standard 6, which covers food and nutrition, sets out the outcomes a provider must achieve for every resident, not just those who pay extra.
Those outcomes are meant to be delivered through the legislated services already listed, because not every resident can afford, or is even offered, a HELF package. A resident’s right to adequate food and a genuine choice in what they eat cannot logically depend on whether they have signed up to an optional fee.
That is precisely why Arcare’s HELF brochure includes a charge for meal choice, despite meal choice sitting squarely within what Standard 6 already requires providers to deliver through the legislated services list, not as something residents pay extra for on top of it. The Aged Care Quality and Safety Commissioner has since said publicly that charging extra for meal choice is “not optional” and “not an additional service”.
That is not a new legal position so much as a restatement of an obligation that already existed under the standards, applied only after public criticism rather than checked against providers’ HELF schedules from day one.
This is not a new kind of confusion either. It is essentially the same problem that existed under the previous legislative framework, where the boundary between the mandated care and services providers had to supply and the additional services fee guidelines that let them charge for extras was blurred in exactly the same way.
Replacing the Act and the Rules did not resolve that underlying tension. It just gave it a new name.
In other words, the government had the tools to check this. What it lacked, and still lacks, is any mechanism forcing providers to demonstrate their HELF schedules do not simply re-charge residents for outcomes the Strengthened Quality Standards already require them to deliver for free.
It should have been obvious that a provider already willing to charge a non-drinker for wine, or a bedridden resident for outings, would keep doing so under a new label unless somebody was checking. Arcare simply moved its existing Signature Package fees into HELF’s standalone service categories and kept going.
What makes this harder to excuse is the timing of the regulatory response. The Aged Care Quality and Safety Commissioner announced investigations into several providers over their use of HELF only hours after the 60 Minutes promo aired, not after the years of complaints, the 2024 reporting, or the class action itself being filed.
The regulator with the power to act sat on this for a long time and moved only once cameras were involved.
This is a familiar pattern in Australian aged care policy. In September 2018, then prime minister Scott Morrison announced a Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety, an announcement that came one day before the ABC’s Four Corners aired Who Cares, a two part investigation into abuse and neglect in nursing homes.
The timing was widely understood at the time as an attempt to get ahead of the story rather than a response to evidence the government did not already have. Reviews into aged care funding, quality and workforce problems had been underway since 2011.
Seven years on from that Royal Commission, the same dynamic has played out again. A regulator and a government department appear to have been aware of a major provider’s conduct for a long time, introduced a reform with a hole in it large enough for that same conduct to continue, and then acted publicly only once a national current affairs program forced the issue.
If the government wants HELF to do what it was announced as doing, the fix is not complicated. The legislated services list already exists, and so do the Strengthened Quality Standards that tell providers what outcomes they must deliver through it.
What is missing is a requirement that providers’ HELF schedules be checked against both before they are allowed to charge a single resident, along with a Commissioner with the power to reject or unwind a schedule that re-charges residents for something Standard 6, or any other standard, already obliges providers to deliver.
And it would mean genuine, resourced enforcement rather than a complaints process that tells families to engage a lawyer. Until then, HELF is not a correction to the problem 60 Minutes exposed. It is the same problem, with a new name and a government stamp of approval.
