Questions about the future of Australian care increasingly involve both the availability of support and the way public funding is managed. A 2025 Australian National Audit Office report noted that the National Disability Insurance Agency had estimated losses associated with fraud, non-compliance, and payment errors at between $2 billion and $3.5 billion in 2022–23. That range was forecast to reach between $3.6 billion and $6 billion by 2027–28.
Those estimates should be interpreted carefully. They combine suspected fraud with incorrect and non-compliant payments, meaning they do not suggest that every disputed claim involved deliberate wrongdoing. However, the audit found that the agency’s management of claim compliance was only partly effective. It also reported that the government had committed more than $495 million over eight years to addressing fraud and non-compliance.
Financial oversight represents one part of a much broader discussion. Care systems must also respond to people of different ages, circumstances, and levels of mobility. The Australian Bureau of Statistics found that 15% of Australians under 65 had disability in 2022. The finding offers a reminder that support needs are not limited to older populations.
Progress has been made in reducing the number of younger Australians living in residential aged care, although some people remain in those settings. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare reported that 880 people under 65 were living in residential aged care in June 2025, an 83% reduction from June 2019. For some younger people, appropriately designed community or home-based services may provide a more suitable option.
Glen Roche, founder of Roaming Homehealth, believes these discussions could give more attention to the everyday realities surrounding care. He describes his company as an online directory intended to connect people with providers offering services in their homes. “This is not about me. It is about strengthening support within the community,” Roche explains. “Care needs can arise at any age, so the conversation should extend beyond aged care.”
His perspective has been shaped partly by caring for his wife and mother-in-law. Roche recalls spending extended periods coordinating their needs while moving between rooms and finding it difficult to leave home himself. “I couldn’t leave the building,” he recalls. That experience led him to believe care models should consider the person receiving assistance and the family member or professional responsible for providing it.
Roche believes home support should be understood more broadly than nursing or medical treatment alone. “When someone cannot easily leave home, care may include transportation, meal preparation, cleaning, laundry, lawn maintenance, and personal support,” he explains. “These everyday needs can make a meaningful difference to someone trying to manage life at home.”
Travel may place additional demands on the people providing that help. Roche explains how attending one appointment can involve helping someone enter a vehicle, navigating traffic, paying tolls or parking costs, waiting, and returning home. If an appointment is cancelled, much of the day may still have been consumed. “When leaving home is difficult, people need reliable support that can come to them while still preserving opportunities to participate in community life whenever possible,” Roche observes.
Unpaid carers face pressures of their own. Australia had approximately three million unpaid carers in 2022, including 391,300 people under 25, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. The 2025 Carer Wellbeing Survey found that more than two in five respondents often or always felt lonely. Among former carers surveyed, 31.7% believed greater formal support might have enabled them to continue caring.
For Roche, these findings suggest that discussions about care quality could also consider whether caregivers have reasonable working conditions. “A more sustainable care system should consider the wellbeing and working conditions of those delivering support, including whether they are compensated fairly for their time and responsibilities,” Roche explains. He believes greater control over schedules and pricing could make providing care more workable for some independent professionals, including experienced workers considering whether to return to the sector.
Greater flexibility would still need to be accompanied by appropriate safeguards. Roche explains that his proposed model includes checking applicants against relevant professional registers, worker-screening records, training databases, and insurance information before approving their listings. He does not present verification as a guarantee against every problem, but he considers it an important part of helping families make more informed decisions.
Roche notes that improving Australian care is unlikely to depend on any single model. He believes a more useful discussion would recognise the full experience of care, including travel, household tasks, scheduling, safety, and caregiver wellbeing. “I hope we can give care professionals greater freedom to contribute their skills in ways that work for them and the people they support,” he explains. While that shift would not resolve every challenge, it could bring greater attention to the people whose work makes care possible.
