Mandurah Combat Sports Academy

This is Mel's nan. She's not the only elderly person that our government is letting down.
These are real people who have paid their dues to get this country to where it is today and now they are being let down when they need the most support.

This is Audrey Staniland. She’s 96, blind, has emphysema, uses a walker and lives alone in the Perth house she has called home for 43 years. She knows how to move from room to room in this familiar place, but she needs carers to help her remain there.

When her provider increased its hourly rate from $90 to $115, Audrey had to cut back her hours of care. Her daughter, Jan, asked for her to be reassessed. So a clinician came to Audrey’s home, watched her move around with her walker and recorded the reality of her health and her life.

But the clinician was not allowed to decide how much help Audrey needed. That decision was left to an algorithm, and the algorithm decided that Audrey needed no more funding than she had received nearly 12 years earlier when her last assessment was done.

How can anyone look at a blind 96-year-old woman with emphysema, living alone, and seriously argue that her care needs have not increased in 12 years? An algorithm can.

The government would have us believe that the assessment is all terribly complicated. It isn’t. The assessment asks more than 500 questions, BUT the algorithm ignores most of the answers, including the assessor’s detailed written notes. Important matters such as frailty, cognition and other health conditions are considered so late in the process that they may have almost no effect on the result.

The outrage is that the clinician sitting in Audrey’s home cannot override it. When Jan appealed the decision, Audrey received no response. She was told that if she heard nothing within 90 days, the appeal had failed. Jan requested another assessment. The algorithm rejected Audrey again.

This is an appalling system. The government does not have to explain why its algorithm is right. Audrey and her daughter have to prove that it is wrong. It is Robodebt for older people: the computer makes the decision and the person harmed by it must prove that the computer is wrong.

More than 1,000 people asked for reviews in the first five months of the algorithm being used from November. That is six times higher than the number in the previous financial year. Of about 900 reviews completed, 207 were successful. That is almost one in four decisions overturned among those who managed to challenge them.

The Minister for Aged Care, Sam Rae, dismissed this by saying that requests for review represented less than half a per cent of all assessments. He called that a “relatively tolerable number”.

Audrey is not a tolerable error.

She wants to stay at home, where she feels safe and where supporting her is also far less costly to taxpayers than residential aged care.

Can we please stop pretending this is aged care reform?

Ditch the algorithm. Give the decision back to the qualified clinicians who meet the older person, see how she lives and understand what she needs.

Minister Sam Rae, you are paid $376,850 a year. Do your job, for goodness' sake.

Watch 4 Corners tonight on the ABC for the full story of this ridiculous situation.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-17/inside-the-black-box-aged-care-algorithm-for-support-at-home/107033970

Do you want to talk about resilience?

A week ago, my beautiful Nan, Florence Letti Knight (Smith), turned 100 years old. 🩵

Born in the UK, she watched her younger brother, my great uncle Jim, lie about his age to join the war at just 16. The last time she spoke to him he explained why he was doing it and said “I’m not going to let my friends fight and die on their own.”
Jim was later killed in action. It wasn’t until the late 1980s that Nan finally learned how he had died and where he had been buried in Italy, after my cousin Melinda managed to track down his unmarked grave — although there is much more to that story.

During the war, Nan survived the Birmingham Blitz, repeatedly dodging bombs as Hitler’s Luftwaffe devastated her home city between 1940 and 1943.
Then, in 1945, she met my Australian grandfather, Marcus Knight.

My Pop had been released from a German POW camp when the Germans surrendered. During the war, he had escaped from two separate POW camps and is heavily featured in the book Escape to Live, written by RAF pilot Edward Howell. At one point, Pop and a group of escaped Allied prisoners were hiding in the mountains of Greece.
He was eventually recaptured again alongside Edward’s best friend and would spend the final four years of World War II as a German prisoner of war.
When the war ended, Pop was sent to the UK for rehabilitation before returning to Australia.
And that’s where Nan came into his life.

She was a nurse and helped nurse him back to health. They fell in love and married in the UK before Pop was sent home to Australia. Two months later, Nan followed him across the other side of the world to begin their life together.

But life wasn’t finished testing her resilience.

Years later, she watched her son — my Uncle Quenton — be conscripted to fight in Vietnam. Like so many Vietnam veterans, he returned home only to face horrific treatment and abuse from the very society he had been sent to serve.
He eventually volunteered to return to Vietnam.
Years later, Nan would bury him (her only boy) too. She still now calls him "My Quenton"

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www.mandurahcombatsportsacademy.com.au