FACT SHEET 6
Government support: Care for adults
and support for carers
The universal nature of care
- All Australians will be, at some point in their lives, the receivers of care and the overwhelming majority will also be providers of care.
- Women carers in particular, are often providing care both for older and younger family members.
- Men are more likely to be the carer for their spouse and tend to be older than women carers.
- One fifth of the Australian population is affected in some way by a disability that restricts, limits or impairs their everyday activity and which has lasted, or is likely to last, for at least six months.
- More than one in eight Australians (2.6 million people) provides informal care to a person who needs assistance due to disability, chronic illness or old age. Three quarters of carers are of workforce age.
- Many carers are also combining paid work with caring responsibilities.
- Australia needs a “shared work – valued care” approach to the care for adults which recognises the universal nature of the need for care and provides affordable and accessible support services that allow people with disability and older people to participate as fully as possible in their communities.
Support for carers combining paid work and caring
- Formal care services for adults in Australia have moved substantially towards community based care in recent years with the large scale move towards deinstitutionalisation of people with disability and the re-orientation of community care toward assisting older people to remain in their own homes.
- A “shared work – valued care” approach to care across the life cycle recognises the value of care work, both in a social or cultural sense and in terms of adequate remuneration for formal care. This approach recommends better sharing of the broader costs of care by government as well as individuals.
- Better support is needed to assist carers to manage their caring responsibilities and in particular to combine paid work and caring.
- Support for working carers is important at the workplace level from both management and colleagues.
Supporting the diverse needs of carers
- Some groups of carers experience particular difficulties and challenges, such as men with caring responsibilities, carers with disability, grandparent carers, Indigenous carers, young carers and carers from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds.
- People with disability who are also carers, frequently women, face particular difficulties accessing the support they need to undertake combined paid work and carer roles.
- Flexible arrangements in the workplace to meet individual needs is one of the best ways to better support both the systemic and the individual needs of people with disability who are balancing paid work and family/carer responsibilities.
- In 2003, there were 22 500 Australian families in which the grandparents were the guardians of their grandchildren. These grandparents are not merely providing child care for working parents, but are primary carers of their grandchildren for extended periods.
- There are around 51 600 Indigenous carers in Australia, accounting for around two per cent of carers in Australia and 12 per cent of Indigenous Australians.
- Indigenous grandparent carers can face particular issues and a significant proportion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander grandparents provide care for grandchildren.
- Young carers face specific challenges, particularly in terms of completing schooling and securing and retaining paid employment.
- Carers from CALD backgrounds often face additional issues such as cultural differences leading to misinterpretation and misunderstanding, lack of knowledge of existing culturally appropriate support services and how to access them and lack of access to translated information.
Greater availability of formal care to meet growing need
- Both the formal and informal care needs of older people and people with disability are ballooning in line with Australia’s ageing population.
- Between 1997 and 2051 the proportion of people aged 85 and over is projected to almost double as a proportion of the population aged 65 years and over (from 9.6 per cent to 18.8 per cent).
- The use of formal care services has increased significantly in recent years with relatively fewer older people remaining at home with only unpaid care.
- The rationale for the move towards community care is a cost effective solution for government. Older people and their carers meet a large proportion of the cost of care which would otherwise be borne by the state.
The fact sheet is also available for download in 
Word and 
PDF formats.
