Report on Government Services 2025

Main aims of services within the sector

Community services provide support and assistance to individuals, families and groups to maximise their potential and enhance community wellbeing.

Services included in the sector

In the context of government service delivery, 'community services' include services providing assistance to specific groups with an identified need for additional support. This may include children and young people, families, older people and people with disability. Community services can overlap with other sectors, including health and early childhood services.

This report provides detailed performance information on the equity, effectiveness and efficiency of the following community services:

• Aged care services
• Services for people with disability
• Child protection services
• Youth justice services

Information on other related service areas is available elsewhere in this report (Part E Health, including Services for mental health and Part G Housing and homelessness).

Government expenditure in the sector

Total government expenditure for the community services in this report was around $94.6 billion in 2023‑24, a real increase of 65.0% over the past five years, primarily due to increases in expenditure on the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). For the 2022-23 financial year (the most recent financial year for which data are available across all sections), the community services sector represented around 20.9% of total government expenditure covered in this report.

The most significant component of community services expenditure was on the NDIS and specialist disability support services ($46.7 billion, table 15A.1), followed by aged care ($36.4 billion, table 14A.4), child protection services ($10.2 billion, table 16A.8) and youth justice services ($1.5 billion, table 17A.10).

Flows in the sector

The community services sector is diverse. Some services are funded and provided by governments, while others are funded by governments but provided by the not-for-profit or private sectors (for example, private residential aged care services and private providers under the NDIS).

Governments regulate the quality and safety of services across the sector (for example, the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission, the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission and various state and territory entities). Selected information on complaints, service quality and safety are available in service-specific sections.

Although this report presents aged care services, services for people with disability and child protection and youth justice services as separate sections, these sections are interconnected and related to other sections in the report, for example:

• the disability sector is linked to health services as some long-term health conditions might cause disability, and disability can lead to health problems (for example, disability may limit participation in social and physical activities) (AIHW 2022)
• the aged care sector is linked to health services. High demand for these services can result in challenges with appropriately meeting consumer needs. For example, the limited availability of residential aged care places can affect the demand for public hospital beds. Australian, state and territory governments offer transition care programs to minimise inappropriate lengths of hospitalisation for older people (Australian Government 2024)
• there are interactions between homelessness, child protection and youth justice services. Young people experiencing homelessness have disproportionate contact with the criminal justice system, and housing insecurity on exit from youth justice detention is associated with recidivism (Almquist and Walker 2022). A study also found that young people leaving the child protection out-of-home care system were more likely to experience homelessness than young people who have not interacted with the child protection system (Chikwava et al. 2024)
• there are interactions between child protection and youth justice services. The majority of children who have contact with the child protection system do not progress to youth justice system involvement. However, a large proportion of children who offend and have contact with the youth justice system have a history of abuse and neglect. One study of children involved in the Victorian criminal justice system found that almost one quarter had current or former involvement with child protection services (Baidawi and Sheehan 2019). Another study found that almost 2 in 3 young people under youth justice supervision (65.4%) during 2022–23 had an interaction with the child protection system in the past 10 years from 1 July 2013 to 30 June 2023 (AIHW 2024).

Challenges of an ageing population on the sector

Australia’s population is ageing due to increasing life expectancy and declining fertility rates. The 2023 Intergenerational Report notes the ageing population as Australia’s greatest demographic challenge (Australian Government 2023). The median age is expected to increase by 4.6 years to 43.1 in 2062-63. The share of the population aged 15-64 will fall by 3.5 percentage points to 61.2% between 2022-23 and 2062-63. In the same period, the share of the population aged 65 or over is expected to increase by 6.1 percentage points to reach 23.4%. These changes will increase demand for government services and have implications for government expenditure.

The community services workforce

Estimates of the community services workforce are difficult to derive due to overlapping occupations and industries (for example, health and welfare support in education and childcare settings). According to the 2021 Census, of the 12 million people aged 15 years and over who were employed, around 11.5% worked in the occupation ‘community and personal service worker’, up from 10.8% in the 2016 Census (ABS 2022). This occupation group includes  'personal carers and assistants', which comprises ageing and disability support workers and child or youth residential care assistants, and 'welfare support workers', which comprises youth workers and family support workers. The 2021 Census showed that 3.0% of employed people worked as ageing and disability support workers, up from 1.2% in 2016. Welfare support workers rose from 0.5% of employed people in 2016 to 0.9% in 2021.

The role of informal carers across Australia

Carers play a vital role in supporting older people and people with disability to remain in their homes and communities. Although some care is provided formally by paid personnel, it is often undertaken informally by friends and family. According to the 2022 ABS Survey of Disability, Ageing and Carers (SDAC) (ABS 2024, ABS 2019), there were 3.0 million carers nationally in 2022, representing 11.9% of all Australians living in households (up from 2.6 million carers or 10.8% in 2018).

The 2022 SDAC reported that around 1.2 million people (4.5% of the Australian population aged 15 years and over) were primary carers of people with disability or older people, providing support in one or more core activities of self-care, mobility and communication (ABS 2024). This compares to the 2018 SDAC of 861,600 people (3.5% of the Australian population aged 15 years and over) (ABS 2018). In 2022, two-thirds (67.7%) of primary carers were female, decreasing from 71.8% in 2018 (ABS 2024, ABS 2019). In 2022, there were 383,600 secondary carers and almost 1.5 million other carers, showing the breadth of caring responsibilities in the community.

Section 14 of this report includes further information on carers of people 65 years or older and Section 15 of this report includes further information on carers of people with disability under 65 years.

References

ABS (Australian Bureau of Statistics) 2024, Disability, Ageing and Carers, Australia: Summary of Findings, https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/health/disability/disability-ageing-and-carers-australia-summary-findings/latest-release (accessed 3 September 2024).

—— 2022, Occupation (OCCP) by employment (EMFP) and Age (AGE5P) [2016 and 2021 Census TableBuilder] (accessed 18 October 2022).

—— 2021, Unpaid work and care: Census, https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/people-and-communities/unpaid-work-and-care-census/latest-release (accessed 2 October 2023).

—— 2019, Disability, Ageing and Carers, Australia: Summary of Findings, https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/health/disability/disability-ageing-and-carers-australia-summary-findings/2018 (accessed 3 September 2024).

AIHW (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare) 2024, Young people under youth justice supervision and their interaction with the child protection system 2022–23, https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/youth-justice/young-people-youth-justice-supervision-2022-23/report-editions (accessed 2 October 2023).

—— 2022, Health of people with disability, https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/australias-health/health-of-people-with-disability (accessed 2 October 2023).

Almquist, L and Walker, SC 2022, 'Reciprocal associations between housing instability and youth criminal legal involvement: a scoping review', Health and Justice, 10 (15), https://healthandjusticejournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40352-022-00177-7 (accessed 2 October 2023).

Australian Government 2024, Transition Care Programme resources, https://www.health.gov.au/our-work/transition-care-programme (accessed 3 January 2025).

—— 2023, 2023 Intergenerational Report, https://treasury.gov.au/publication/2023-intergenerational-report (accessed 2 October 2023).

Baidawi, S and Sheehan, R 2019, Cross-over kids: Effective responses to children and young people in the youth justice and statutory child protection systems, Report to the Criminology Research Advisory Council, https://www.aic.gov.au/crg/reports/crg-315-16 (accessed 2 October 2023).

Chikwava, F, Cordier, R, Ferrante, A, O’Donnell, M and Pakpahan, E 2024, ‘Trajectories of homelessness and association with mental health and substance use disorders among young people transitioning from out-of-home care in Australia’, Child Abuse and Neglect 149, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2024.106643.