In the Detail
Topic

Health

2 investigations.

Aged care

Excellent by Default: 77% of Aged Care Homes Hold the Top Compliance Rating While One Home in the Public Data Has Actually Been Graded — and That Home Ranks Below All of Them

Star Ratings' Compliance rating was redesigned from 1 November 2025 to run off graded audits against the strengthened Quality Standards. Nine months in, the August 2026 public extract records a graded assessment for exactly 1 of its 2,600 homes. 2,003 homes — 77% of the extract, 83% of those with a rating — display the five-star tier labelled 'Excellent', which the published methodology reserves for an 'exceeding' audit grade none of them has had. The department's own worked example gives a fully-conformant audited home four stars; the one home actually graded is capped at three. By design, audits arrive with registration renewals that run out to 2029, so almost no home was due yet — but while the Commissioner told Senate estimates that audits are under way and finding non-conformance at 'most places', no count of those audits appears in any source this analysis could find, the regulator's sector-performance data stops at December 2025, and the metric that used to report audit numbers was retired from its Corporate Plan.

Read the investigation
Health

Medicare Now Runs at Two Speeds: 94% Bulk-Billed in the Poorest Areas, 68% in the Richest

The national bulk-billing rate has recovered to 82%, and the government points to it as proof its incentive is working. That single number is now an average of two different systems. In the most disadvantaged areas GPs bulk-bill 94% of visits; in the wealthiest, 68% and falling. The gap has widened from 18 points to 26 in under four years. A targeted incentive producing a targeted result is what policy is meant to do — the finding here is the size of the split, and that a headline number reported as national is no longer descriptive of anywhere.

Read the investigation