In March 2022, co-contribution in aged care was unthinkable, said nearly every CEO and adviser.

Today, after many warnings that the countdown was on for the new Aged Care Act to pass Parliament this year, the Government and the Opposition has come out in support of older Australians with increased contributions to the cost of their aged care accommodation and daily living expenses.

This is genuinely exciting: providers can at last look forward with optimism and older Australians are likely to have the resources available to care for them as they age.

Credit to the Government and the Department of Health and Aged Care for establishing the Aged Care Taskforce.

Credit also to Grant Corderoy and the StewartBrown team who backed our Plan B initiative in March 2022.

DCM Group conceived the Plan B strategy because there was no ‘Plan A’ on how to take the sector out of the red and into the black.

At our LEADERS SUMMIT in 2022 when we introduced Plan B, Grant presented the graph below as the potential that co-contribution could deliver, and that potential has now eerily become the basis of the Taskforce recommendations.

He roughly calculated then and more accurately calculated now that once fully implemented, the Taskforce recommendations would deliver a combined total of $3.76 billion a year to residential aged care and home care within three years.

While the full impact of the Government’s response will need to be assessed, the commitment of the Government and the Opposition to ensuring a sustainable aged care system should be enough to kickstart activity in the sector.

This will be new cash coming into the system.

For the first time in six years, executives in the sector will be able to look forward, not thinking about how to keep the doors open, but how they can create a better future for their clients and residents, their staff and their employer.

That’s real co-contribution.