Labor keeps CHSP after months of pressure, but Sam Rae won’t budge on the algorithm

The Albanese Government has confirmed the Commonwealth Home Support Program (CHSP) will be retained as a standalone program until at least 30 June 2029, ending nearly a year of uncertainty for the 830,000 older Australians who rely on it and the roughly 1,300 organisations that deliver it.

The announcement, made late last week by Health and Ageing Minister Mark Butler and Aged Care Minister Sam Rae, reverses a decision by the former government to fold CHSP into the newer, individualised Support at Home program. That merger, originally slated for no earlier than July 2027, had been paused by Labor pending review. Today’s press conference put the question beyond doubt, at least for the next three years.

Butler was blunt about his own scepticism of the merger, telling reporters he had “been pretty sceptical about that for some time” because CHSP and Support at Home “deliver quite different services, drawing on quite different capabilities in the communities and serving quite distinct needs.” He pointed to the risk that folding CHSP’s block-funded model into a more individualised program could hollow out organisations like Meals on Wheels, which has delivered services in local communities since the 1950s.

Rae framed the decision as the product of listening to the sector. “Over the last months, we’ve been listening. And what we’ve heard is how much the CHSP means to older people, to their families, and to our communities,” he said, describing CHSP as “the entry point for aged care services in our aged care system.”

Under the extension, council contracts across the CHSP system will continue without interruption through to 2029, giving local government providers, many of them the only service available in regional and remote areas, certainty to keep operating. Consultation on the program’s longer-term future, including how block funding will work and how CHSP integrates with Support at Home, will begin later this year.

A win years in the making

Today’s backflip follows sustained, organised pressure from across the aged care sector.

A coalition calling itself the CHSP Alliance, co-convened by Meals on Wheels Australia chair Paul Sadler and health services researcher Professor Kathy Eagar, spent much of the year publicly campaigning for exactly this outcome. The Alliance, which drew in more than 40 national organisations including Dementia Australia, Carers Australia, National Seniors Australia and the Older Persons Advocacy Network (OPAN), argued the merger would dismantle one of the only consistently well-functioning parts of the aged care system.

Sadler did not mince words about the proposed merger, calling it “poor policy” driven by what he described as “a bureaucrat’s fantasy of a merged home care program.” The Alliance pushed instead for CHSP to be rebuilt as a genuine primary tier of aged care, with older people able to choose between community-based, block-funded support and individualised packages.

That pressure was reinforced by a Greens-chaired Senate inquiry, which found in a consensus report that scrapping CHSP would push more older Australians into an already strained Support at Home system. Greens Senator Penny Allman-Payne, the party’s spokesperson for older people, welcomed today’s reversal but was pointed about the cost of the government’s delay, saying it had “not come without cost, leaving older people and providers in the lurch for far too long, forcing some of them to leave the system entirely for fear of losing their block funding.”

Greens leader Larissa Waters called it “a massive win” for the 830,000 people who rely on CHSP, while arguing it should never have been in doubt.

OPAN, which had appeared before the Senate inquiry, also welcomed the decision. Chief executive Craig Gear said the move gives “providers certainty, allowing them to remain in the market and plan their services into the future,” while noting that funding shortfalls remain a live problem, with advocates continuing to hear from older people who have been approved for CHSP services but cannot access them because providers’ books are full.

The algorithm question Rae still won’t answer

The CHSP announcement landed only days after ABC’s Four Corners aired The Waiting Game, an investigation that put Rae and the government’s separate assessment system for higher-level home care squarely in the frame. The program examined the Integrated Assessment Tool (IAT) and the classification algorithm that now determines funding levels for the Support at Home program, a decision clinicians can no longer override.

At today’s press conference, journalists pressed Rae directly on the fallout from that investigation, and his answers tracked closely with the deflections that drew criticism in Monday night’s Four Corners investigation. Asked about concerns that the algorithm is “defying common sense” in some assessments, Rae repeated that the IAT is “a component of the single assessment system,” a key Royal Commission recommendation, and insisted it was delivering “fairer and more efficient outcomes” and shorter wait times.

Pushed on why it remains so difficult for people to get reassessed despite what he acknowledged was “widespread support across parliament for change,” Rae again pointed to falling median assessment wait times, before adding that a rapid review already under way would focus on improvements to the “prioritisation mechanism.”

When a reporter put it to him plainly that the lived experience of older Australians has been “horrific” under the algorithm, Rae did not engage with the substance, instead noting that a quarter of a million assessments were conducted in the first half of the year and that reviews were sought for “less than 0.5 per cent” of them, a figure he offered as evidence the system is broadly working.

Consultation on CHSP’s long-term future starts this year. Whether the same public pressure that forced today’s backflip will do anything to shift Rae’s position on the IAT remains, for now, an open question he was not willing to answer.