A State perspective

Speech given at the Australian National University, Canberra, June 19, 1986 by Adam Graycar, Commissioner for the Ageing, Adelaide, South Australia. Also published in Foster, C. and Kendig, H. (1987). Who pays? Financing services for older people. Canberra: Australian National University, pp.83-103. This speech is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/The argument in this paper is that in Commonwealth/State relations the Commonwealth has the bulk of financial resources at its disposal and allocations to the states are fraught with technical and distributional issues. The states have a limited and shrinking tax base and alone are not likely to be able to fund major age care services. Nevertheless the State Governments are major providers and in addition have an interest in all services for aged people, whoever provides them - Commonwealth, State or local government, voluntary agencies or the commercial sector