Ambulances on ramps and older Australians on waitlists: Daniel Gannon wants governments to connect the dots

The image is hard to shake. Ambulances stuck on ramps outside hospitals in every major Australian city. Inside those hospitals, aged care beds that don’t exist. Inside aged care, people who could have lived well in a retirement community – if one had been available.

Daniel Gannon, Executive Director of the Retirement Living Council, can trace the line from one end to the other. And his frustration isn’t directed at the sector. It’s directed at the people who still don’t see the connection.

“Right now, aged care facilities are full,” he told us at the close of this year’s National Retirement Living Summit in Brisbane. “Because they’re full, our hospitals are full. And because our hospitals are full, we’ve got ambulances stuck on ramps in every major metro city across the country.”

The case for essential infrastructure

The summit drew 800 people – a record – and the dominant theme wasn’t operations or design or finance: it was recognition. Specifically, the argument that retirement villages aren’t just a lifestyle choice for older Australians. They’re infrastructure, and they should be treated as such.

South Australia has started to act on this. The state government recently recognised retirement villages co-located with aged care facilities over $10 million as essential infrastructure within its planning framework.

“That’s the type of thinking that we’re wanting to export into every jurisdiction around the country,” Gannon said. “Because when you think about what retirement villages actually provide – not just for people, not just for consumers – we know that these communities are making people healthier and happier. That’s leading to fewer trips to the GP, shorter stays in hospital, delayed entry into aged care facilities. And of course, all of that leads to 14,000 avoided hospitalisations across the country every single year.”

The SA move matters because planning approval has historically been one of the biggest structural barriers to getting new stock built. Calling something essential infrastructure changes how it gets assessed, prioritised and funded.

“Unless governments are willing to recognise these assets as essential social infrastructure, there’s going to be that gap that still remains.”

The go-kart metaphor that explains everything

A few weeks before the summit, Gannon found himself at a go-karting track with 25 residents from Ao Bayview Gardens.

“Some of them needed assistance getting into their go-karts,” he said. “These things are barely an inch off the ground. There was one guy who did need support hopping in. But once he was in, he was away.”

The man left everyone for dead. Afterwards, Gannon learned why. “He said to me, look, I used to be a former rally car driver back in the sixties.”

It’s a small story, but it carries the weight of the sector’s entire value proposition.

“The help is there when you need it, so that you can operate under your own power.”

That’s what Gannon wants people to understand about retirement living — and what he says some government ministers still don’t. “We like to view care as infrastructure so that independence can remain as the outcome.”

The supply crisis

The 2025 census data is stark: almost 14,000 Australians are on a waitlist for a retirement village home. The development pipeline has been deferred by two to three years. And for the first time in a decade, the average age of someone entering a village has risen from 75 to 76 – a sign that people are waiting longer than they should.

“Demand is through the roof,” Gannon said. “People are wanting a place where they can remain healthier and happier for longer. But if that deferral of more stock is being pushed down the road by two to three years, that is a massive short-term challenge.”

The causes are structural: construction costs, land scarcity, supply chain pressures, patchy planning systems. They’re not unique to retirement living, but the consequences – people staying too long in large family homes without adequate support, more falls, more GP visits, earlier entry into aged care – land squarely on a health system already under strain.

“Some people are being trapped in the big family home for too long. And we know when that happens, that can lead to more trips and more slips, which then leads to someone seeing the GP too often. And of course, premature entry into aged care facilities. And right now, there’s just no beds available.”

What good looks like

At the summit’s awards night, Gannon saw the best of what the sector is doing. Wellness programs. Allied health on site. And something that stuck with him: an intergenerational initiative at a vertical retirement village where an early learning centre operates at the front, and a resident workshop sits at the back.

“These kids bring in their broken wooden toys, and then some of the residents go to the workshop out the back and fix the toys for the kids.”

It’s the kind of thing that doesn’t show up in a planning framework or a census, but it illustrates something that data increasingly backs. 

Research from the Retirement Living Council shows that compared to people not living in a village, residents are 41% happier, 15% more physically active, twice as likely to catch up with family and friends, and five times more socially active – with reduced rates of loneliness and depression.

“At the same time that the World Health Organization has declared loneliness as a global public health concern, we have this amazing housing value proposition in every suburb right across the country, hiding in plain sight, keeping people healthier, happier and connected for longer.”

The gap to close

Eighty-two percent of retirement villages now provide federally regulated care and support services. Sixty-five to seventy percent offer wellness programs. The net promoter score for the sector sits at +57 – comparable to your GP or dentist.

But Gannon is clear-eyed about where the floor still is. The Retirement Living Council represents about 60% of all independent living units nationally. The operators who join peak bodies tend to be the best performers. The ones who don’t are the challenge.

“A rising tide lifts all boats, but it’s those people and operators who aren’t involved in best practice that we need to ensure are actually lifting the game.”

One signal of where the sector has genuinely shifted: contract terms. Six in ten contracts now set the exit fee based on the ingoing price, with operators absorbing refurbishment costs and any capital gains or losses, giving incoming residents “total transparency, clarity, and certainty around what they will walk away with at the end.”

“No operator these days wants an unhappy resident leaving their community.”

Looking to Adelaide

The 2027 summit moves to Adelaide for the first time, leaving Queensland after five or six years. Gannon is bringing a clear agenda for what he wants to have shifted by then.

At the top of the list: Commonwealth Rent Assistance reform. Currently only 3.2% of homes in retirement villages are eligible for CRA, because of purchase price caps that, in Gannon’s words, “just don’t make any sense in a contemporary housing market anymore.”

“We’re going to be working very closely with people like Dee Bok” – a resident from an ECH village in Adelaide who spoke at this year’s summit about the lived reality of CRA failing to keep up with cost of living – “to ensure that consumers and operators are singing from the same hymn sheet.”

The sector’s momentum heading into Adelaide is real. But so is the gap between what’s possible and what policy currently allows.

“We didn’t come together to dwell on the negativity. We didn’t come together to whinge and moan about how tricky things are right now. And they are. But the industry came together to work on solutions to some of these really big challenges, to make sure that we can get ahead of this curve.”