18/08/2026
What an absolute disgrace
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1KZ2aNpETC/
This is Audrey Staniland. She’s 96, blind, has emphysema, uses a walker and lives alone in the Perth house she has called home for 43 years. She knows how to move from room to room in this familiar place, but she needs carers to help her remain there.
When her provider increased its hourly rate from $90 to $115, Audrey had to cut back her hours of care. Her daughter, Jan, asked for her to be reassessed. So a clinician came to Audrey’s home, watched her move around with her walker and recorded the reality of her health and her life.
But the clinician was not allowed to decide how much help Audrey needed. That decision was left to an algorithm, and the algorithm decided that Audrey needed no more funding than she had received nearly 12 years earlier when her last assessment was done.
How can anyone look at a blind 96-year-old woman with emphysema, living alone, and seriously argue that her care needs have not increased in 12 years? An algorithm can.
The government would have us believe that the assessment is all terribly complicated. It isn’t. The assessment asks more than 500 questions, BUT the algorithm ignores most of the answers, including the assessor’s detailed written notes. Important matters such as frailty, cognition and other health conditions are considered so late in the process that they may have almost no effect on the result.
The outrage is that the clinician sitting in Audrey’s home cannot override it. When Jan appealed the decision, Audrey received no response. She was told that if she heard nothing within 90 days, the appeal had failed. Jan requested another assessment. The algorithm rejected Audrey again.
This is an appalling system. The government does not have to explain why its algorithm is right. Audrey and her daughter have to prove that it is wrong. It is Robodebt for older people: the computer makes the decision and the person harmed by it must prove that the computer is wrong.
More than 1,000 people asked for reviews in the first five months of the algorithm being used from November. That is six times higher than the number in the previous financial year. Of about 900 reviews completed, 207 were successful. That is almost one in four decisions overturned among those who managed to challenge them.
The Minister for Aged Care, Sam Rae, dismissed this by saying that requests for review represented less than half a per cent of all assessments. He called that a “relatively tolerable number”.
Audrey is not a tolerable error.
She wants to stay at home, where she feels safe and where supporting her is also far less costly to taxpayers than residential aged care.
Can we please stop pretending this is aged care reform?
Ditch the algorithm. Give the decision back to the qualified clinicians who meet the older person, see how she lives and understand what she needs.
Minister Sam Rae, you are paid $376,850 a year. Do your job, for goodness' sake.
Watch 4 Corners tonight on the ABC for the full story of this ridiculous situation.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-17/inside-the-black-box-aged-care-algorithm-for-support-at-home/107033970
