Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee, , 8:04:18 to 8:07:20
Inquiry into the time spent by care managers navigating My Aged Care and the department's efforts to gather data to quantify the sector's administrative compliance overhead.
Topics: Government IT systems, Public service staffing
Speakers: Senator The Hon Anne Ruston, Mr Greg Pugh, Mr Blair Comley, Prof Michael Pervan, Ms Sonja Stewart
Okay. Um can I just ask you? Um Bolton Clark told the Senate support at home inquiry that care managers are are spending approximately one day a week checking my age care for changes. Um has this administrative burden been costed by you?
It's not been raised with us at all, no.
Yeah. Um is it a matter that's been raised with you?
It's not been raised with me personally.
So do you have any idea or any estimation of what the cost of administrative or the administrative cost of compliance in terms of time and money is in the sector? Do you have any idea?
My colleagues, whether there was an impact statement?
I would so we'll ask for the Mr. Buddha comment. Obviously, to the extent they are spending administrative costs, that will feed into the cost data that um Professor Beavan's looking at from the United States.
No, I'm actually asking you, do you know?
Because what I'm I suppose what I'm saying is that the consequence of that is can the is the system viable it will feed into the ANAC price because that's actually what is expended for administration.
No, no, that's that's that's not what I'm asking. What I'm asking you is are you aware of the time cost of administering the departmental requirements of age care services? Are you aware of the time costs?
Uh so Senator, um we certainly talk to representatives from Bolton Clark at my level and aging Australia, we have very regular um contact with them as well. Uh, this is something that they have raised with us on occasion, and we've asked them to provide us with data to support that so that we can actually um provide some robust modelling to actually quantify the administrative overhead.
So they haven't done that?
Um they have um have provided. Well, we don't have enough yet to be able to give you an informed figure uh of what that cost is.
So um the government's um Q3 25-26 quarterly financial sh snapshot um showed age care expenses rising, I think it was about 10% in the year to March 2026, and I think Stuart Brown's figure was higher. Um did you have access to that snapshot, or are you able to use the data of that from that snapshot in your assessment for the 2.55%
yes? But that's that's not the specific age care costs that we use to drive the pricing formula. That's that's all aged care and what you'll find there might even be some general practice costs in there as well.
Okay, so you had access to it, but it wasn't a piece of data that was of s you you were able to use significantly in terms of it?
Yeah.