Reimagining the future of CHSP: Fitzgerald
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Speaking at Invox’s CHSP 2025 Conference yesterday, Robert Fitzgerald, Australia’s Age Discrimination Commissioner, warned against repeating the transactional, market-driven model that has dogged the NDIS. He argued CHSP should be rebuilt on relationships and people, not dollars and deliverables.
Lessons from the NDIS
Fitzgerald began by acknowledging the NDIS as a reform he had once helped shape while serving on the Productivity Commission. He reaffirmed his support for its ambitions and successes, but also highlighted its unintended consequences.
Fitzgerald argued that the NDIS has often fragmented individuals into billable activities, reducing people to a series of transactions that often strips away the relational fabric that makes services effective. He stressed that while the sector should take evidence-based lessons from the rollout of the NDIS, it must not replicate its transactional culture. For him, aged care should never be about carving people into service units; rather, it should focus on enabling older Australians to live connected, purposeful lives.
Central to Fitzgerald’s address was a rejection of the assumption that a market-based approach could solve the challenges in CHSP. He stressed that the most effective service delivery will ultimately come from providers based in the community, such as local governments, not-for-profits and neighbourhood centres. These organisations, he suggested, are better positioned to harness trust, relationships and local knowledge - qualities the market-driven model cannot replicate.
Tackling Isolation
Fitzgerald dedicated a significant portion of his remarks to the issue of social isolation. Older Australians, he argued, are increasingly disconnected from each other, their neighbourhoods and community life.
He framed community not as an abstract concept but as a tangible policy lever. Stronger investment in neighbourhood programs, intergenerational initiatives and place-based services could help restore the social connectedness that helps prevent loneliness, protects mental health and reduces pressure on acute services.
Fitzgerald drew a distinction between “person-centred” and “person-led” care. While the former has become common in aged care policy, he suggested it too often leaves the individual at the centre of decisions made by others. Person-led care gives older Australians genuine agency.
Building on this theme, Fitzgerald highlighted the untapped strategic advantage of local connectedness. Providers embedded in their communities are best placed to harness local relationships, networks and cultural knowledge to design services that best meet local needs.
He urged organisations to see themselves not only as service deliverers but as community conveners, organisations capable of knitting together volunteers, families, local communities and grassroots groups in ways that large national players often struggle to achieve.
Putting People First
Fitzgerald acknowledged the immense structural and financial challenges facing CHSP providers as they prepare for reforms, but argued that the true measure of success would not be found in compliance reports or balance sheets. Instead, he maintained that success would be defined by whether older Australians feel connected, respected, and in control of their own lives.
Fitzgerald’s keynote was a reminder that while systems and structures matter, it is values, and the relationships they sustain, that will ultimately define aged care. With aged care policy in flux, Fitzgerald’s message was clear: success will require putting people and communities first.
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