Collective impact
Introduction
I would like to begin by acknowledging that we are meeting today on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, the Traditional Custodians of this place.
This land we are on – the area we now know as Surry Hills – was, and remains, part of Gadigal Country. Long before it became an urban landscape, it was shaped by sandhills, wetlands and gathering places, connected to pathways of food, knowledge and community.
I pay my respects to Gadigal Elders past and present, and I acknowledge the enduring connection of Aboriginal people to this Country, despite the profound disruption, dispossession and loss that followed colonisation.
In a conference focused on collective impact, it feels especially important to acknowledge a history in which survival itself was an act of resistance, and where continuity was sustained through collective care, advocacy and insistence on dignity.
I extend my respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people here today, and to those whose advocacy has shaped a more truthful understanding of this Country and its history.
Thank you so much for inviting me to be with you as you mark 40 years of Seniors Rights Service.
I want to start by naming the argument that runs through my little ditty today. It sits at the heart of your work as advocates.
Independent scrutiny and advocacy are not adjuncts to the system. They are its moral infrastructure.
Aged care does not reform itself from within. Change happens because someone keeps insisting on dignity when it would be easier to look away.
Everything I want to say to you today flows from that belief. It explains why advocacy matters even when progress feels slow. And it explains why collective impact does not mean consensus or softness, but alignment around values that do not bend with convenience.
I want to use this time to reflect on what 40 years of SRS advocacy has made possible, together with your advocacy colleagues around this nation
And I also want to reflect on how much of my own work has been predicated on what advocates like you have told me, and why I believe – deeply and without qualification – that, despite how you might feel from time to time, you are being heard. Your day-to-day, every day, means something very profound.
Forty years of insistence
So, 40 years of SRS! 40 years of insistence. Forty years is a long time to keep insisting.
It is long enough to have seen governments change, laws rewritten, systems restructured and promises repeated under different banners.
And it is long enough to know that endurance in advocacy is not powered by optimism. It is powered by the organisation’s moral compass.
Seniors Rights Service has existed through periods when older people were largely invisible in policy. Through times when abuse, neglect and exploitation were treated as private misfortune rather than public failure. Through eras when complaints were the only door available and many people were simply unable to walk through it.
You have kept insisting for each and every one of your clients. And now look where we are today.
That insistence is not incidental to reform. It is the precondition for it.
If I look across just the last couple of years alone, I can clearly point to legacy, generational change, that your insistence - your advocacy – has made possible.
Advocacy does not just expose failure. It changes outcomes. And even just in my time as Inspector-General, and on the board of ADA I can see outcomes your advocacy has changed.
I know it doesn’t always feel like it happens quickly enough or cleanly enough. But we can point to really clear examples of your collective impact that are real and measurable in people’s lives.
I want to give you two concrete examples, because these are not abstract victories. They are the direct result of advocacy organisations doing exactly what you do every day.
Removal of co-payments for essential personal care services under Support at Home
The first is the Government’s recent decision to remove co‑payments for essential personal care services under Support at Home. Help with showering. Dressing. Continence support.
This did not come from nowhere.
This shift followed years of advocacy organisations amplifying the voices of hundreds of older people who told you, and through you told government, what co‑payments would do, and were now actually doing in their lives.
People choosing between eating and washing.
People going without continence supplies and feeling humiliated to leave their homes.
People becoming sicker because they could not afford the care that kept them well.
Those stories were not outliers. They were patterns.
They did not reach government because older people en masse, individually navigated policy submissions or media cycles – although there are certainly some very articulate, passionate, clever people, who were fortunately able to do so. But collectively – these stories reached government because advocates carried them there – and pressed the point in the halls of power over several years.
In welcoming the Government’s decision, I said publicly that this was an important and life‑changing decision, and that it reflected the Government listening to the pleas of older people, their families, and advocates across the sector.
That confirms something fundamental about how reform actually happens: Policy shifts when lived experience is made impossible to ignore.
Advocacy is essential to making that happen. In my view, that is collective impact in action.
Statement of rights
The second example is the inclusion of a Statement of Rights in the new Aged Care Act.
I do not want to understate how significant this is.
For the first time, the Act sets out clearly what older people are entitled to expect from the aged care system. Dignity. Respect. Autonomy. Safety. Equality.
That Statement of Rights now sets the compass for the entire system.
We can be honest that implementation has not yet caught up. In many places, practice still falls short to say the least; in places I see the rights being actively undermined.
But the fact it is there – not just as aspiration – but codified into law, is no small thing.
Legislative recognition of rights changes the terms of the conversation.
It gives advocates a reference point that did not previously exist. It gives lawyers a foundation to argue from. It gives oversight bodies a benchmark against which to measure failure. And it gives older people language to describe what they are experiencing not as bad luck, but as a breach.
That did not happen by accident.
The Statement of Rights exists because advocacy organisations, consumer groups, survivors, and families refused to accept a system built solely around services and transactions. They insisted on a system oriented toward people.
In my own work, the Statement of Rights has profoundly shaped how I think about scrutiny.
It means the question is no longer simply, was the rule followed? It is, was the person treated with dignity?
I reckon that’s huge.
Both of these examples tell the same story.
Change happens when advocacy organisations translate individual suffering into collective truth.
When they aggregate what the system would prefer to treat as anecdotal.
That is why, when advocacy work feels slow, it is worth remembering that some of the most consequential shifts in aged care have come not from inside the system,
Advocacy as moral infrastructure
When we talk about aged care systems, we often focus on structures. Regulation. Funding. Providers. Legislation. Standards.
All of those things matter. But systems do not function on structure alone; they function on what they are willing to see.
Every system develops blind spots. They are not always malicious. Sometimes they are the product of scale, pressure and distance. And it’s true that sometimes that the product of what feels like indifference. But blind spots become dangerous when no one is authorised or resourced to stand in them and say, this is not acceptable.
That is what advocacy does.
Advocacy supplies the moral infrastructure of the system. It carries the values that cannot be embedded once and left alone: all those beautiful and indispensable sentiments in the Act: dignity, respect, safety, voice, agency.
You actively uphold those values; case by case, story by story.
Without scrutiny, failure becomes procedural. Without insistence, people learn to live with things they should never have had to accept.
This is not abstract. I have seen it over and over again.
Aged care does not reform itself
Sadly one of the most pressing lessons I have learned over a decade of being an oversight body, and most particularly as Inspector General, is that:
Aged care does not reform itself from within.
Left alone, any large system will prioritise stability over justice, process over people, and risk management over moral responsibility.
That is not because the people working in the system do not care. Many care deeply. But systems are shaped by incentives, by power, and by what they can get away with.
Change comes from outside pressure.
It comes from advocates who escalate what is minimised. From lawyers who transform harm into legal consequence. From oversight bodies that refuse to sanitise findings for comfort. And a media who see these things as vital to put in the public consciousness
And all of that comes from collective insistence that certain things are simply not acceptable in a society that claims to value older people.
The central role of insistence
I want to dwell for a moment on that idea of insistence. Because it is not glamorous. Actually it’s tiring.
Insistence – in our case – is repeating the same arguments long after rooms have grown quiet. It’s explaining yet again why a problem that is perceived to affect only a few people still matters.
It’s resisting the pressure to be pragmatic when pragmatism means silence.
Insistence is also relational. It often happens one person at a time.
Someone sits with an older person and listens long enough to understand what is really happening. Someone believes them when they are dismissed. Someone holds their story steady until the system is forced to respond.
That is where reform begins.
How my work has been predicated on advocacy
Now I want to tell you how so much of my work as Inspector‑General of Aged Care has been predicated on what advocates have told me.
Advocates are often the first to see patterns before they are visible in data. You guys hear the stories early. You notice when the same harm appears in different forms.
You understand how policy intent dissolves at the point of delivery.
Many of the issues that my Office has reported on, did not originate within government. They emerged from conversations with advocates who said, 'this is happening, and it is not being taken seriously'.
Advocates have told me where complaints systems fail people who are frightened, cognitively impaired, traumatised or isolated. You have shown me how rights that exist on paper evaporate in practice when exercising them requires extraordinary resilience. And they just shouldn’t have to.
You have explained, patiently and persistently, how older people are often asked to navigate complexity at precisely the moment they are least able to do so.
That knowledge shaped my priorities. It informed the questions I asked. It sharpened the findings I refused to soften.
Oversight does not operate in a vacuum. It relies on advocacy to illuminate reality.
Rights without enforcers are fragile
One of the strongest messages I have carried into my public work is that rights are inherent, but systems have a remarkable capacity to violate them quietly unless someone brings those violations into the light.
Rights are thwarted by silence. Without advocacy, their breach is too easily normalised.
In aged care, we have relied far too heavily on complaints‑based systems as our primary protective mechanism. We have assumed that if rights exist, people will activate them.
But many older people cannot.
They are afraid of retaliation. They are dependent on those who mistreat them. They are exhausted. They do not know how the system works. They may not even recognise what is happening as something they are entitled to challenge.
In those circumstances, a right that depends on self‑advocacy. And indeed, self-efficacy is a very fragile right.
Advocacy steps into that gap.
You translate rights into action. You reduce the burden on people who are already carrying too much. You ensure that the system cannot say, no one complained, therefore there is no problem.
Trauma and the limits of bureaucracy
Another thread that runs through my work is a deep concern about trauma and how poorly bureaucratic systems respond to it.
Many older people engaging with aged care carry lives marked by violence, institutionalisation, discrimination and loss. Forgotten Australians. Stolen Generations survivors. People who have lived through war, abuse, displacement and profound marginalisation.
Trauma does not announce itself politely. It does not align with procedural timelines. It does not respond well to repetition or disbelief.
Advocates understand this.
You know that listening is not passive. It is an intervention. You know that bearing witness is not inefficiency. It is repair.
Too often, systems treat trauma as an inconvenience rather than a context and I am passionate about the fact that advocacy refuses that framing.
When you insist on trauma-aware responses, you are not asking for special treatment. You are asking for realistic policy. And it is a legislated obligation
Collective impact reconsidered
I want to return briefly to the theme of this conference: collective impact.
This phrase is used often, sometimes loosely. It can be misunderstood as meaning uniformity or compromise.
That is not how I understand it.
Collective impact does not require everyone to speak with one voice. It requires people to refuse to walk in different moral directions.
Advocates, lawyers, oversight bodies, providers and policymakers all play different roles.
Advocates agitate. Lawyers codify. Oversight escalates. Policy eventually responds.
Collective impact occurs when our roles remain distinct but aligned.
When advocates do not soften their message for the sake of access; when lawyers do not detach law from lived experience; when oversight reports what is true, not what is comfortable: that alignment is powerful.
And you can see from history, and from contexts outside of aged care, it is what bends systems over time.
The weight of advocacy work
Now I want to talk about something often left unspoken: advocacy work is emotionally heavy.
I know you sit with suffering that does not ease for your older people, and the stories don’t leave you when you jump back in the car from work. You see harm that could have been prevented. You invest in outcomes that sometimes dissolve after you leave the room. And often these are your local communities or your mob.
That weight accumulates; and I know that sometimes there are days when you must feel like, ‘how do I go on?'
But please, just remember this: the fact that we now openly talk about dignity, rights, trauma and older people’s voices is not accidental. It is the result of decades of advocacy like yours.
Forty years ago, many of these conversations were marginal. Today they are unavoidable.
Progress has not been linear. It has not been sufficient. But it has been real.
What advocacy prevents
Advocacy is often judged by what it achieves. Less often by what it prevents.
You guys prevent people who are isolated from becoming invisible. You guys prevent harm from being dismissed as inevitable.
Much of that never appears in reports or statistics.
But systems are shaped as much by what they are prevented from doing as by what they are compelled to do. And you need to know that is it deeply felt – right across this state.
Looking forward without illusion
As you look to the next decade, I think we all know that the need for independent advocacy and scrutiny will only intensify.
As systems become more complex, the distance between policy intent and the lived reality widens. You guys - your advocacy – closes that distance.
And as older people are asked to navigate markets rather than services, inequity can deepen. That is what advocacy can interrupt.
A personal reflection from me
As many of you know, I will be stepping away from my role as Inspector‑General later this year.
If there is one lesson I will carry with me, it is this: Roles end. Titles change. Institutions evolve.
But the work endures because people individually commit to something bigger than any one position.