Aged care royal commission shows politicians can’t be trusted

While the aged care royal commissioners Tony Pagone and Lynelle Briggs differ over their funding and governance recommendations in their final report, they make clear exactly where responsibility lies for the catastrophe that is Australia’s aged care system: the neoliberal obsessions of successive governments.

And neither trust government to fix the problem. The main area they differ is just how fundamentally they want to get politicians and the bureaucrats they control out of aged care.

The report outlines how, for decades, governments have refused to fund our aged care system to provide quality care for seniors. Instead, successive governments considered aged care as “a form of welfare for the very needy, to be provided to the bare minimum extent required”.