Australia’s new Aged Care Act speaks boldly about rights and dignity. On paper, it signals a generational shift away from a system that has long treated older people as passive recipients of care. But if we’re honest, the Act is being built on top of an operating system that has barely changed at all, an operating system shaped by ageism, and one that disproportionately harms older women.
Ageism is built into the scaffolding of how we talk about ageing, how we fund care, and how we design services. It shows up in the quiet assumptions that older people are declining, dependent, or incapable. It shows up in clinical decision-making, in workforce models, in technology design, and even in the language governments use.
A telling example comes from 2018, when the WHO’s draft ICD-11 included “old age” as a diagnostic category. After global objection, it was revised, but the instinct behind it matters. When the world’s peak health body can mistake a life stage for a symptom, it shows how deeply ageism runs. And once ageing is framed as something to classify or control, policy follows suit: more risk, less autonomy; more restriction, less dignity.
For women,generally, those consequences compound sharply, as they don’t enter older age on equal footing. A lifetime of lower wages, interrupted careers, and unpaid care means they reach their later years with less money, less security, and less recognition. Many live alone. Many fall through the cracks of healthcare. When ageing is framed as decline, the consequences land squarely on them: less autonomy, less visibility, less dignity.
To deliver dignity, the Aged Care Act must confront this structural reality.
What the Act will miss without a fundamental shift
Ageing is universal, normal, and deeply human. It can be a stage of life rich with capability, connection, ambition, and meaning. Yet culturally, we’ve tied ageing to withdrawal and deterioration instead of nurturing the older adult who’s continuing, deciding, shaping their own life.
That mindset shapes everything:
- Health becomes something to manage rather than something to optimise.
- Work becomes something to exit rather than something to adapt.
- Care becomes something that restricts rather than something that enables.
These assumptions are grounded in habit — not evidence – and habits can be unlearned.
The new Act is at risk of repeating the same mistakes if it does not embed real-life, evidence-based definitions of ageing into its rollout. It means moving beyond risk-proofing older lives and designing for autonomy, choice, and capability instead.
GCMA’s new research platform, Lumyn, which will launch Q1 2026 is going to give us a far clearer picture of what older people, especially older women, actually need from the systems meant to support them. It brings together insights that were previously scattered across studies, pilots, and programs, and puts them in the hands of the people making decisions. When you work with research that has evidence grounded in real lives rather than assumptions, reform moves in a different direction: services start to expand people’s choices instead of shrinking them.
Care stops shrinking their world and starts expanding it, and services stop assuming limitations and start enabling choice.
Put that insight into real-world testing and suddenly, home care isn’t a roster of chores; it’s support that lets someone keep directing their own life. Then other aspects start to shift:
- Housing isn’t about “remaining” in place; it’s about belonging somewhere meaningful.
- Health pathways don’t brush women aside; they recognise emotional and cultural needs as part of care.
- Technology stops policing and starts empowering.
- Workforce programs stop defaulting to procedure and start building genuine connection.
That’s what evidence does: it challenges the old assumptions and makes dignity practical, not theoretical. You only get these outcomes when older people – especially older women – are seen as active participants in life.
The Act’s biggest vulnerability is the assumption of ageism
The reform conversation tends to orbit the same themes — accountability, workforce pressures, safety, rights. All important, but none of them touch the deeper assumption shaping the whole system: the idea that ageing is mainly about loss. When that belief sits in the background, even well-intentioned reforms end up narrowing people’s lives instead of expanding them.
The problem is the architecture. Ageism is baked into the everyday mechanics of aged care — the assessment tools, the funding rules, the way staff are trained, even how products and services are designed. It shapes decisions long before anyone notices. And unless we recognise it as part of the system’s structure, not just its culture, the Act will struggle to deliver the dignity it promises.
Policymakers have to rebuild the system on anti-ageist foundations, such as:
- Training that prepares workers to support identity, autonomy, and cultural respect.
- Regulation that rewards innovation built around emotional wellbeing, connection, and lived experience.
- A unified, government-business-community evidence base that drives age-inclusive design.
Women in leadership, across policy, advocacy, healthcare, business, or community settings, have a big role in pushing this forward. Ageism runs straight into gender bias, and older women feel that collision first. When they’re seen as losing relevance, their knowledge gets discounted, their economic role shrinks, and their place in shaping reform gets quieter than it should be. The system stops looking.
Female leaders can redirect that gaze by championing evidence-based definitions of ageing and pushing for design decisions that reflect capability, not decline.
If we get this right, the future is bigger than aged care
By 2050, millions more Australians will reach older age, including women whose lives have been shaped by profound change, in work, rights, technology, and caregiving. They will bring economic, civic and cultural expectations shaped by those experiences, and our systems will need to rise to meet them or fail them.
Dignity isn’t delivered by legislation alone. It is delivered through design, evidence, and the courage to rewrite the story we tell about ageing. If we are serious about reform and gender equality we must recognise that women cannot thrive in a system built on decline.
The Aged Care Act can be the beginning of something transformative. But only if we name the bias beneath it, and replace it with a vision of ageing that sees people as capable, complex, connected, and still in motion.