Every workforce conversation in Australian care starts the same way: with a shortfall. CEDA puts the gap at 30,000 to 35,000 direct care workers a year, rising toward 400,000 by 2050 on current settings. The Commonwealth’s own Nursing Supply and Demand Study 2023–2035 projects an undersupply of 17,551 full-time-equivalent nurses in aged care alone by 2035.

Those numbers are real, and the pipeline work they point to, such as training places, migration settings, wage competitiveness,  matters. But there is a second problem sitting underneath the first, and it gets far less attention.

A meaningful share of the workforce capacity Australia already has is stranded.

What “stranded capacity” looks like on a Tuesday

Consider two providers operating in the same regional catchment.

Provider A has a permanent support worker with capacity on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Not because demand has collapsed, but because a participant moved, a plan changed, or a service was restructured. Provider A carries that worker’s full cost while utilisation sits below break-even. Over a year, across dozens of workers, that gap is the difference between a surplus and a deficit.

Provider B, ten minutes away, cannot fill Tuesday and Thursday shifts. So Provider B goes to an agency, pays a premium, and accepts a worker who has never met the client, doesn’t know the care plan, and won’t be there next month.

Nothing about that arrangement is anyone’s fault. Both providers are behaving rationally inside their own boundary. The waste is structural: there is no mechanism for Provider A’s spare permanent capacity to meet Provider B’s unmet demand. So capacity that exists, is credentialed, and is already paid for goes unused — while the same catchment simultaneously pays agency rates for a worse care outcome.

Multiply that across thousands of providers and the picture is a market missing an essential piece of infrastructure.

Why this is getting worse, not better

Three trends are compounding.

Casualisation continues. Where permanent roles disappear, so does the continuity that quality care depends on, and so does the incentive for anyone to invest in a worker’s skills. The NDIS Review found that 17% to 25% of NDIS support workers leave their job each year — which means many workers move between employers often enough that they never accumulate formal credentials. The result is a workforce that is deeply experienced and thinly documented.

Provider margins are tightening. Price limits are rising, but so are award costs, and the gap between them is narrow. When utilisation of permanent staff becomes the difference between viability and distress, the pressure to convert permanent roles to casual becomes very hard to resist.

Provider failure is no longer hypothetical. Annecto — a 70-year-old aged care and disability provider — ceased operations in July 2025, affecting more than 3,000 clients and over 1,000 staff, and entered voluntary administration owing more than $19 million, including $11.4 million in unpaid employee entitlements. When a provider of that size collapses, the cost is not only financial. Clients lose continuity, workers lose entitlements, and the state absorbs the transition. Every one of those events makes the next provider more conservative about carrying permanent headcount.

The through-line is that our current settings ask individual providers to solve a problem that is only solvable at the level of the market.

The mechanism: brokering permanent capacity, not casual shifts

There is an alternative worth serious examination: a national mechanism through which providers can broker permanent care employees out to, and in from, other providers.

Not a labour-hire pool. Not a gig marketplace. The distinguishing feature is that the worker stays permanently employed — with one employer, one set of entitlements, one career path — while their capacity becomes visible and tradeable beyond their employer’s boundary.

The logic follows directly from the two-provider example:

• Provider A recovers utilisation on capacity it was already carrying, which makes retaining permanent roles affordable.
• Provider B fills shifts with a permanently employed, credentialed worker instead of an agency stranger, at a rate that reflects real cost rather than scarcity.
• The worker keeps permanency, entitlements and a training pathway, with more predictable hours and, potentially, exposure to a wider range of work.
• The client gets continuity of care — a known contributor to quality outcomes in non-acute care, and one of the things participants and families consistently say matters most.

The scale of the prize is worth stating carefully, because it is easy to overclaim here. NDIS expenses are projected at $56.1 billion in 2026–27. If a mechanism of this kind improved continuity and efficiency across that spend by half a percentage point, the order of magnitude is around $280 million a year. And that is the NDIS alone — the same mechanism applies to aged care, so the realistic upside is larger.

Two caveats, stated plainly. Half a percentage point is a deliberately modest assumption, but it is still an assumption: no one has yet measured what a brokering mechanism would actually deliver. And an efficiency gain across total spend is not the same thing as a cash saving to the Commonwealth. So the figure is an argument for investigating, not a number to budget against. What it establishes is that the question deserves a properly funded feasibility phase rather than a shrug.

What would need to be true

We are not suggesting this is simple. Brokering permanent employees across organisational boundaries raises real questions, and the honest position is that several of them are unresolved:

• Industrial. How do award coverage, entitlements and enterprise agreements travel with a brokered worker? Who holds the employment relationship, and who holds the duty of care on a given shift?
• Credentialing. Brokering only works if a receiving provider can trust a worker’s qualifications, screening and training instantly. That points at shared credentialing infrastructure — which is precisely where NDIS worker registration reform and the national skills passport work, advocated by the ACTU and scoped with Commonwealth funding, are already heading.
• Pricing. A brokering rate has to be fair to both providers and cannot become a back door to margin extraction.
• Trust. Providers compete for staff. Asking them to share capacity requires governance that makes participation safe.
• Data. None of it functions unless availability, credentials and rostering data can move between organisations reliably.

Each of these is a design question, not a blocker. And notably, they are complementary to reforms already in flight rather than dependent on them.

Where this sits in the reform agenda

None of this displaces the work already underway. The last decade has rebuilt Australia’s social support landscape — new schemes, new standards, and a genuine digital transformation of the systems that sustain them. A brokering mechanism is only conceivable because of that foundation.

It also aligns with the direction of travel. NDIS and aged care are converging. Allied health professionals already move between hospitals, disability and aged care. The workforce is more shared than our systems assume, and the infrastructure should catch up with that reality.

What’s needed now is a research and consultation phase: model the ROI properly, prototype the mechanism with willing providers, and test the industrial questions with unions and employers in the same room.

Australia has spent a decade building the schemes. The next decade is about making the market underneath them work.