Mandatory reporting won’t fix elder abuse. Boards still need to answer for it.

A recent OPAN webinar reframes elder abuse as a systems failure. Patchy screening, no national Human Rights Act, and a mandatory reporting debate operators can’t afford to sit out.

Beverly Baker has heard the same story so many times she can predict its shape. An older woman answers a question at a medical appointment. Before she finishes, someone else – a carer, an adult child – answers over her.

“They feel absolutely devalued,” Baker, president of the National Older Women’s Network (NOWN), said at OPAN’s 21 July webinar on elder abuse. “That seems to be the starting point of everything.”

It’s a small moment. But according to the panel – which also included Celebrate Ageing CEO Dr Catherine Barrett and Darwin Community Legal Service CEO Rachael Bowker – it’s exactly these small moments that operators, boards and policymakers routinely miss, because elder abuse rarely announces itself as abuse.

The governance gap

Baker’s most pointed comment wasn’t about individual mistreatment, it was about infrastructure. “We have no underpinning Human Rights Act in Australia,” she said. “We rely on laws contained in other areas for that protection.” 

She linked this to recent work overseas on a UN convention for the rights of older people, framing Australia’s current approach as reactive and fragmented, rather than rights-based.

For providers, that fragmentation shows up operationally. Bowker noted that financial abuse often hinges on enduring powers of attorney enacted while the older person still has capacity, which is a governance failure that sits squarely inside provider and family decision-making processes, not just criminal conduct. “The adult child is saying that they are the authority… even though that person has capacity,” she said.

Mandatory reporting: no consensus

The panel was notably split on whether mandatory reporting is the fix. Barrett was blunt: “Mandatory reporting has values, but I don’t think it’s the fix for the system.” Her argument was that reporting duties don’t address the underlying driver: ageism, embedded in how services, funders and researchers already think about older people.

Bowker’s caveat is one operators should note directly: physical abuse – the kind mandatory reporting frameworks are built to catch – is the least common form. Financial abuse, coercive control and neglect dominate, and they don’t leave the kind of evidence a bruise does. A reporting framework calibrated to visible harm will miss most of what’s actually happening.

Baker landed closer to a middle position: mandatory reporting where evidence is concrete (hospital presentations, bank account irregularities) but not as a blanket substitute for relationship-based disclosure.

Screening as an open question

Barrett raised a comparison operators should sit with: a Working with Children Check-style scheme for paid carers and tradespeople, backed by a registering body. Her rationale was continuity of record, referencing cases where a service provider “moves from state to state and is not held to account because the records aren’t shared and there’s no registration anyway.” 

No such national registration scheme currently exists for aged care workers in the way it does for those working with children.

The access problem

Bowker’s Northern Territory perspective added a structural dimension often absent from capital-city coverage: remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities frequently have no local aged care service, no legal service, sometimes no police presence. 

An older person wanting to leave an abusive situation may have no option but to leave the country entirely. “They’re going to probably die in Darwin,” she said, describing the near-impossible choice this creates.

What this means for operators

None of this is abstract for providers. The panel’s cumulative picture highlights unregistered workforce screening, an underfunded emergency accommodation system for older women leaving abuse, and unresolved debate over reporting obligations. This describes real exposure for boards: workforce vetting practices, complaints-handling design, and how “dignity of risk” is documented when a client chooses not to report.

The rights framework may still be catching up. The operational risk isn’t waiting for it.