What does a community do when it has the land, a viable business plan, half a million dollars in local pledges, and the highest cohort of over-70s in its municipality, but the government won’t let them build a place to grow old?
In the rural Victorian town of Wedderburn, the answer is a grueling, 15-year community battle that exposes the rigid, unyielding carapace of Australia’s aged care legislation.
The story of Wedderburn, championed by the local Lions Club, is not a failure of community effort. It is a regulatory framework that appears poorly equipped to accommodate community-led models in thin regional markets.
When aged care legislation has no category for rural innovation
The Wedderburn Lions Club’s journey began in 2011. Initially pursuing a standard federally funded 30-bed standalone facility, they secured gifted council land and interest from a private provider. When the provider sold its portfolio, the allocated bed licences transferred with the organisation.
Nearly a decade prior, the town’s bush nursing hospital was closed, seemingly standard for a small rural posting. Later the community realised it was actually a death knell for traditional, state-backed aged care integration. It appeared that standard government funding for aged care in Wedderburn would not be forthcoming.
Refusing to give up, the community pivoted to a state-regulated Supported Residential Services (SRS) model. They designed a community-run, not-for-profit system tailored to the town’s specific demographics. Unlike a residential aged care home, an SRS operates under a different regulatory model centred on accommodation and personal support, rather than continuous nursing care.
A business plan drawn up at considerable local expense proved the model’s viability: running at just 75% capacity, the facility would generate a $200,000 annual surplus to reinvest directly back into patient care.
Jude Raftis from the Wedderburn Lions Club said they then hit the ultimate regulatory “chicken-and-egg” wall.
“We went to do the registration process, and of course you can’t register if you don’t have a build – and we don’t have a build. And so now it’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation… no one is going to give us money to build something that we don’t have approval to run.”
One difficulty is that no single agency appears to own the approval pathway. SRSs fall under Victorian regulation, while Commonwealth aged care funding and provider regulation sit under separate legislative frameworks
The bureaucratic silence facing rural aged care
As a result of her experience, Raftis holds the opinion that the current system demands that a community must either raise an estimated $20 million plus for a speculative capital build without operational approval, or wait for a philanthropist to drop from the sky.
When answers were sought from the administrative systems governing these decisions, none were presently received.
Local Member for Ripon, Martha Haylett, was sitting in parliament and was unable to provide comment. Multiple local council representatives were contacted but did not reply.
This extended right up to the specialised oversight bodies.
The Rural and Remote and First Nations Aged Care Service Delivery Advisory Platform (SDAP), the Remote Accord, and the Victorian Health Building Authority (VHBA) were all contacted for comment. None responded by our deadline.
“We’ve pretty much hit a brick wall. We’ve really got nowhere else to go. We’ve done everything that we could possibly do in that 15 years and now it’s a bit like, well, what else do we do? We can’t do anything else,” said Raftis.
This lack of administrative response perfectly mirrors the frustration felt on the ground in Wedderburn. The result is that the project remains stalled while responsibility appears dispersed across multiple agencies. If the box isn’t ticked, the project simply stays stuck in the grey space.
The power of sustained external pressure
Wedderburn’s experience proves a frustrating truth about regional social infrastructure: the system does not self-correct, it only shifts under immense, sustained external pressure.
For a decade and a half, this town of 850 people has refused to let the issue slip from the political agenda. They have lobbied marginal seat representatives, kept the regional media spotlight burning, and kept the community unified.
This multi-decade groundswell culminates on Friday, 9 October, when the town hosts the Wedderburn Community Aged Care Forum from 2pm at Wedderburn Mechanics Institute Hall.
The forum is no longer just about begging for a capital grant. It is a strategic mechanism to force administrators to confront the reality of current legislative shortcomings. The Lions Club is pushing for a legislative pathway or a “Specialised Rural Pilot Model” that allows communities to secure provisional SRS or aged care operational registration before turning a single sod of soil.
“Surely someone from government can look at this model and see that it’s a great model for rural towns. It’s sustainable. The government will not have to pay to run it… It’s a bit of a no-brainer,” says Raftis.
What is the aged care system for?
As Raftis notes with understandable weariness, “you shouldn’t have to make money out of looking after your elderly.”
If legislation cannot accommodate a financially viable, community-backed model without compromising safety or accountability, policymakers face a broader question. Is the purpose of regulation to prevent poor models from operating, or to create safe pathways for good ones to emerge?
