When HelloCare published its first investigation into the Maggie Beer Foundation last year, the response from inside the aged care sector was immediate and striking. Not in the comments section, where readers were vocal enough, but in the private messages, the emails, and the quiet conversations at industry events.
People who work in aged care every day, providers, clinicians, advocates and front-line staff, reached out to say the same thing: thank goodness someone said it. What a rort.
That article was followed by reporting in The Age by Clay Lucas, which took the story further into the mainstream. The picture that emerged was of a celebrity-fronted foundation receiving millions in public money while delivering boutique results in a sector with catastrophic, systemic problems.
That picture has not changed. In fact, it has just got $7.2 million more expensive.
The 2026-27 federal budget has quietly allocated a further $7.2 million to the Maggie Beer Foundation, buried within a broader $565.1 million aged care quality and workforce package.
That brings the foundation’s total government funding to approximately $14.7 million since 2019.
And the questions that were unanswered when HelloCare first raised them are still unanswered now, with one significant new question added to the pile: who exactly is running this organisation, how did they get there, and what does their journey tell us about how this money keeps flowing?
Best use of $7.2 million?
Before getting to the governance questions, it is worth pausing on what $7.2 million means in practical terms for older Australians.
The Support at Home program, which provides in-home care packages to older Australians, has a chronic waitlist problem. The program’s eight funding classifications range from $10,731 to $78,106 per person per year, with entry-level support starting at just over $10,000 annually.
A rough and conservative calculation suggests that $7.2 million directed at entry-level Support at Home packages could have provided meaningful in-home support to more than 670 older Australians currently waiting, people who cannot shower safely, cannot manage their medications, cannot get to medical appointments.
Instead, the government has allocated that money to a training program that, after years of operation and millions already spent, has reached just 5 per cent of aged care homes.
The foundation’s Trainer Mentor Program, the centrepiece of its government-funded work, had reached 135 aged care homes as of August 2025. Australia has 2,700 residential aged care homes.
That is 5 per cent. The foundation’s broader programs, including online learning modules and its professional community, have touched a larger number of facilities, but the depth of that engagement varies enormously and the foundation itself has declined to define precisely what “meaningfully reached” means.
In 2022, correspondence cited in previous reporting included a pledge to reach “way over 2,000 homes.” When HelloCare asked the foundation directly what happened to that commitment, the response did not acknowledge the pledge had ever been made. It described the delivery model instead.
Dietitians Australia argued in 2023 that a previous $5 million grant to the MBF would have been better spent employing dietitians to oversee menus across the sector. That argument has not been engaged seriously by the government then or since.
The evaluation that has not happened yet
Here is a fact that should stop anyone in their tracks. The independent evaluation of the Maggie Beer Foundation’s programs is not due until November 2026. The government allocated a further $7.2 million in May 2026. In other words, the decision to spend nearly a third of the foundation’s total lifetime public funding was made before the evidence base for doing so exists.
When HelloCare asked the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing to explain what evidence of program effectiveness was considered before making that decision, the department did not answer the question. In fact, across seven specific questions sent to the department, not one was answered directly. The response received was provided on background, meaning the department did not want to be quoted, which is itself an unusual posture for a government body responding to questions about public expenditure.
What the department did say, in carefully constructed bureaucratic language, was that the new funding “will be rolled out in accordance with the Commonwealth Grant Rules and Principles 2024” and that the foundation “will need to submit an application detailing the activities it will deliver to achieve the outcomes.”
Will. Future tense. The money has been announced. The outcomes criteria have apparently not yet been written.
When this was put back to the department in a follow-up inquiry, HelloCare asked directly: did the outcome criteria and assessment guidelines exist at the time the budget decision was made? If not, on what basis was value for money assessed? The department has not responded to those follow-up questions at time of publication.
The foundation, for its part, leans on a Year Two evaluation conducted by HealthConsult Pty Ltd, which it says confirms measurable improvements. The evaluation is published on the foundation’s own website. Its headline findings are that 92 per cent of staff reported improved ability to prepare nutritious food, 91 per cent said they could apply new skills, and 89 per cent reported increased confidence.
These are staff satisfaction metrics. They measure how workers feel about their training, not whether residents are better nourished. When HelloCare asked the foundation to point to sector-wide data showing reductions in malnutrition rates attributable to its programs, the answer was candid: “There is currently no national dataset capable of isolating the impact of any single program on sector-wide malnutrition prevalence.”
They cannot show that the money is working. And the government funded more of it anyway.
The Jane Mussared question
This is where the story becomes more than a debate about program effectiveness and value for money.
Jane Mussared is the current chief executive of the Maggie Beer Foundation. Before taking that role, she served as an adviser in the office of then-Health and Aged Care Minister Mark Butler from September 2022 to April 2024. Before that, she was a board member of the Maggie Beer Foundation.
To be precise about the sequence of events: Mussared was on the board of the Maggie Beer Foundation. She resigned from that board before joining Minister Butler’s office in September 2022. During her time as a ministerial adviser, the Labor government was administering the $5 million grant it had committed to the foundation as an election promise before the May 2022 election. Mussared left the minister’s office in April 2024.
She subsequently became CEO of the Maggie Beer Foundation, the organisation she had previously served as a board member, and which received its significant government funding during the period she worked for the minister responsible for aged care.
She then began lobbying her former ministerial colleagues for more money.
FOI documents revealed a November 2024 email from Mussared to the minister’s chief of staff that framed the foundation’s funding request in explicitly political terms: “We’d love to be part of an announcement about refunding it ahead of the election,” she wrote.
When HelloCare asked the foundation whether it was appropriate for a charity to frame its request for public funds as a political opportunity for the government of the day, the response was: “Yes. We made a pitch to both sides for funding.”
When we asked whether Mussared had been involved in any briefings or decisions relating to aged care food and nutrition funding during her time as a ministerial adviser, the foundation’s response was that “all ministerial advisers operate under strict governance and conflict-of-interest obligations.” That is a statement about the existence of rules. It is not an answer to the question.
The department was asked the same questions. It did not answer them either.
HelloCare is not suggesting that any rules were broken. We are noting that the questions of what rules applied, whether they were followed, and what conflict of interest declarations were made, have been put to both the foundation and the department and have not been answered.
In a matter involving the allocation of nearly $15 million in public funds, those are not unreasonable questions. The refusal to answer them directly is not reassuring.
What is documented is this: a person moved from the board of an organisation, to the ministerial office responsible for funding that organisation, and then back to lead that same organisation, while millions of dollars flowed in the same direction throughout.
Whether that sequence of events reflects poor governance, a conflict of interest, or simply an unfortunate optic that nobody thought to manage carefully, is a question the government has so far declined to answer.
The grant process nobody wants to explain
The original $5 million grant to the Maggie Beer Foundation in 2023 was awarded on what GrantConnect, the government’s official grants database, describes as a “closed non-competitive” basis. The justification given was that the foundation’s engagement was an election commitment.
Election commitments do allow governments to bypass competitive tender processes under Commonwealth grant rules. That is a legitimate mechanism. But it is worth understanding what it means in practice: no other organisation working on food and nutrition in aged care was assessed.
No dietitian-led organisation, no university research body, no allied health provider was given the opportunity to put forward a competing proposal for how $5 million might best be spent improving food in aged care. The decision was made before the government was elected, announced as a commitment, and administered without competitive scrutiny.
HelloCare asked the department who within the government first proposed the foundation as the recipient of that commitment and when. The question was not answered.
The department has described the new $7.2 million allocation as a process that will comply with Commonwealth Grant Rules going forward. When asked whether the previous funding had complied with those rules, and if not, which provision authorised the exemption, the department did not answer.
The bigger picture
Malnutrition in residential aged care remains a serious and underaddressed problem with direct consequences for resident health, quality of life and mortality.
The question was never whether the problem is real. The question is whether a celebrity-fronted foundation with boutique reach, unanswered governance questions and no demonstrated sector-wide impact is the right answer to it.
The aged care sector has a workforce crisis, a malnutrition problem, a bed shortage and a funding model that still leaves too many residents eating food that falls well short of basic nutritional standards. None of those problems are solved by sixteen days of chef mentoring at 5 per cent of facilities.
In the meantime, the $14.7 million question remains unanswered, and the department responsible for answering it has so far chosen not to.
