By A Concerned Reader
We don’t need RoboCare deciding older people’s fate. What Australians want – and were promised – is RoboAccountability.
For years, older Australians and their families have asked a simple question: Why can’t we see – in real time, in plain English – the services and charges that home-care providers bill to people’s packages?
It’s not a radical idea.
Banks do it.
Electricity companies do it.
NDIS providers must do it.
The technology is trivial.
And the consumer benefit is enormous.
But aged care still runs in the dark.
No standardised online ledger.
No automatic upload of service hours.
No simple breakdown of fees.
No real-time visibility of travel, care-management time, or surcharges.
Instead, consumers are left with a blizzard of invoices, inconsistent spreadsheets, and unexplained deductions – and assessors are forced to interpret budgets, mediate disputes, and try to decipher which hours were actually delivered.
The Department could automate this today.
Instead, they’ve automated something very different.
Below is a forensic look at why transparency hasn’t been implemented, and why the new Support at Home (SaH) environment makes this gap more dangerous than ever.
⭐ 1. A real-time provider ledger would expose the problems the system has been ignoring for years
Most providers are honest.
Some are not.
And the few who aren’t have made a lot of noise in policy circles about “administrative burden” whenever transparency is suggested.
A standardised ledger uploaded into My Aged Care would instantly reveal:
- inflated travel charges
- double billing
- “bundled admin” disguised as care
- ghost shifts
- mismatched hours
- care-management fees with no activity
- invoice padding
- chronic under-delivery of services
Older Australians wouldn’t need to fight for information – it would be right there on the screen.
The truth is simple: Opacity protects profit. Transparency protects consumers.
Most countries that implemented real-time auditing saw the same pattern:
- industry objection
- political resistance
- then dramatically reduced fraud, fewer complaints, and much higher trust
Australia hasn’t taken that step.
⭐ 2. Full transparency would also expose under-regulation – and that’s politically inconvenient
A proper automated system would reveal:
- which providers consistently overcharge
- which fail to deliver promised hours
- which operate as profit extraction vehicles
- where public funds leak through inefficiencies
- how widespread the problems truly are
Once exposed, the government must act.
Until exposed, the problems can be dismissed as “isolated incidents.”
That dynamic alone explains why Australia lags behind comparable nations in this area.
⭐ 3. Assessors have become the system’s unpaid accountants
This is the part nobody says out loud: Assessors are being used as a human buffer between consumers and the consequences of poor provider transparency.
Instead of using digital automation to audit providers, the system pushes that responsibility onto assessors, who:
- chase budgets
- decipher invoices and line items
- mediate disputes between consumers and providers
- try to interpret fee structures that vary wildly
- decide whether a review is justified without proper financial data
- are blamed when providers mismanage funds
- are expected to do financial oversight without training
It is the single largest administrative inefficiency in aged care – and it is pushed onto the workforce least equipped or resourced to fix it.
A system designed this way is not protecting consumers. It is protecting itself.
⭐ 4. The Department built automation at the wrong end of the pipeline
If you wanted to use automation to improve aged care, where would you put it?
Most experts would say:
- automate billing audits
- automate detection of rorting
- automate comparisons of hours vs charges
- automate alerts for unexplained fees
- automate oversight of provider behaviour
Instead, the Department automated the assessment gateway, not the transparency end.
The new Support at Home system is built around a locked-box algorithm that:
- determines people’s care levels
- cannot be overridden
- restricts access to higher support
- sometimes produces nonsensical outcomes
- is opaque to assessors and families
- is already generating media scrutiny and Senate questions
Meanwhile, the place where millions of public dollars move through private hands – the provider billing system – remains largely untouched.
The irony writes itself.
⭐ 5. Automating provider billing would save money. Automating assessment creates new harm.
A real AI system, deployed where it’s needed, would:
- timestamp every service delivered
- match hours to roster
- auto-flag inconsistencies
- auto-detect service gaps
- expose fee inflation
- detect patterns of rorting
- reduce disputes
- prevent unnecessary reassessments
- dramatically reduce administrative burden on assessors
Instead, automation has been implemented where it hurts consumers most – at the point where they seek access to care.
As one commentator recently put it: “We didn’t build RoboCare to reduce fraud – we built it to ration support.”
That is not the future older Australians were promised.
⭐ 6. Why hasn’t this changed?
Because a real transparency system would:
- reduce provider profits
- expose inconsistent practices
- create political accountability
- enable FOI scrutiny
- strengthen OPAN’s advocacy
- empower consumers
- shrink the murky “grey zone” where unexplained charges live
And it would remove the Department’s habit of relying on assessors to “absorb” complaints and confusion that rightly belong in Canberra’s inbox. So we are left with a system where:
- automation limits access
- but not where automation would prevent misuse
For a sector that spends billions, this is not policy – it’s avoidance.
⭐ 7. We can do better – and the technology is easy
The solution is not complex. Every principle needed already exists elsewhere:
- Medicare’s itemised claims
- ATO transparency dashboards
- NDIS real-time spending tiles
- Open banking standards
- Commercial invoice APIs
- Automated statutory reporting tools
Aged care lags not because the tech is hard, but because the political will has been missing.
Older Australians deserve better.
Assessors deserve better.
Providers who do the right thing deserve better.
A real-time, standardised provider ledger uploaded into My Aged Care should not be controversial.
It should be the baseline for a system funded by taxpayers and trusted by families.
Until it happens, every reform – including Support at Home – will sit on top of the same structural weakness: No transparency where the money actually goes.
Lots of automation where real clinical judgment used to be.
Australia can fix this.
We already know how.
We only need the will to do it.
Here is a Clarke & Dawe-style sketch built around the line: “Australians don’t want RoboCare – we want RoboAccountability.”
🎙️ Clarke & Dawe: RoboCare vs RoboAccountability
Bryan Dawe: Good evening. Joining me is a government spokesperson to explain the new Support at Home reforms. Thank you for your time.
Politician (John Clarke style): Pleasure, Bryan. Always happy to clarify anything that’s been quietly automated without public consultation.
Dawe: Minister, people are calling the new system RoboCare.
Clarke: Incorrect, Bryan. It’s an algorithm. Definitely not AI. Absolutely not. Just a… highly consequential automated decision-making mechanism that nobody’s allowed to see or challenge.
Dawe: So… AI?
Clarke: No, Bryan, it’s an algorithm. AI is when the machine makes mistakes. This is when the government makes mistakes using a machine.
Dawe: I see. And assessors say the algorithm assigns the wrong care level, can’t be overridden, and locks itself before anyone can fix it.
Clarke: Exactly, Bryan. Efficiency.
Dawe: But the public says what they actually want is RoboAccountability. You know – automation used to catch dodgy billing, inflated travel hours, ghost shifts, creative invoicing…
Clarke: No, no, Bryan, we don’t automate that. That’s private enterprise. We only automate older Australians.
Dawe: So we have a robot that decides who gets help – but no robot checking where the money goes?
Clarke: Correct. One keeps the budget down, Bryan. The other might accidentally expose what’s been happening for the last 15 years.
Dawe: Minister… if Robodebt was the cousin who sent Centrelink into a coma, is RoboCare the cousin who’s now turning up in aged care?
Clarke: Yes, but again – not AI. Just a helpful little algorithm making irreversible decisions that humans will be blamed for.
Dawe: Australians say they don’t want RoboCare. They want RoboAccountability.
Clarke: Well, they can’t have it, Bryan. The algorithm has decided.
Dawe: Thanks for your time.
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As a recipient of what used to be known as a ‘Home Care Package’, now the ‘Support at Home’ program this article ticked a lot of boxes for me. The controllers of a person’s funds , the service providers are a varied lot, with many doing the right thing, but others intent on a ‘profit motive’ and everywhere in between.
I had a Level 4 Home Care Package [HCP] [the highest level] and for several years the package did not cover the services I need, which amounts to 21 hours per week – two support workers each morning and one at night, 7 days a week, 365 days a year! For several years I’ve been paying between $1200.00 to $1500.00 a month to cover the difference between what the package covers and what it didn’t.
Since the introduction of the ‘Support at Home’ [SaH] program the hourly rate charged by my service provider has risen by almost 44%. In October this year, the month before the SaH program started the rates were: Monday to Friday – $80.00 / hr; Weekends – $120.00 / hr. Under the SaH the rates are: Monday to Friday – $115.00 / hr; Weekends – $145.00 / hr. public holidays $200.00 / hr [the Christmas / New Year period for me is going to be very expensive].
I still need 21 hours per week of support so in an effort to try and limit the cost I’ve had to make alternative arrangements for the majority of the services I need [13 hrs / week]. My SaH funding covers my service providers costs, 10% for so called ‘Case Management’, which I don’t need and the remaining 8 hours of services I need to get me through the week. Under this arrangement I’ll still be paying about $2100.00 per month out of my pocket and don’t know how long I can keep doing that – residential aged care here I come!
What I’m struggling to come to terms with is how is it that a service provider can increase the charge by almost 44%, one month to the next when nothing has changed.
Sorry for going on so long!
Be sorry for nothing, Robert.
We’re here for people to have a voice. Your contribution is appreciated.
I enjoyed reading your comment, btw.