Australia’s new Aged Care Act promises a future built on rights, safety, and dignity.
While it’s a positive move away from transactional care models toward a system that recognises older Australians as citizens with entitlements rather than passive recipients of services, unless we address the deeper operating system that underpins how we think about ageing, dignity will remain an aspiration rather than a lived reality.
That operating system is ageism.
It shows up in policy language, care pathways, triage decisions, workforce assumptions, product design, and even public discussion.
The debate about whether ageing should be classified as a “disease” is evidence of how consistently we frame ageing as something going wrong.
The idea that ageing might be a disease is revealing in itself. It suggests that unless we treat ageing as pathology, we do not know how else to talk about it.
Philippa Lewis is a director at the Global Centre for Modern Ageing and a health-tech entrepreneur.