Aged and disability care provider Annecto announces closure
Annecto Incorporated operates in 19 locations in Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland and the Australian Capital Territory.
It has branches in Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra, Mildura, Ballarat, Bacchus Marsh, Mornington, Dubbo and Kempsey.
In a statement released on Wednesday the charity said the decision was made due to "financial challenges".
"This decision was not made lightly," Annecto chair Colleen Furnaletto said.
The charity has more than 1,000 employees and 4,400 clients, according to its 2024 report.
The report shows the charity had revenue of $85.9 million in the 2023-24 financial year and expenses totalling $84.9m.
"The control of our labour costs combined with a healthy growth in our revenue led Annecto to report a net surplus result of $993,000 for the 2023/24 financial year," the report said.
Annecto said it would work with the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, the National Disability Insurance Agency and the Department of Veterans' Affairs to transition its clients to other providers.
The Department of Health, Disability and Ageing has been contacted for comment.
If you're unable to load the form, click here.
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles

The Australian
an hour ago
- The Australian
Clarence Valley council finds a perfect one-stop solution
Clarence Valley Council's landmark alliance with TechnologyOne has turned years of asset management frustration into a model for digital transformation, giving the council unprecedented visibility over $2bn in assets spread across 10,000sq km. The Northern Rivers region of NSW has endured a spate of natural disasters in recent years, from bushfires of 2019-20 to the February 2022 floods. For many councils in the area, such conditions have significantly strained already limited resources and exposed the inefficiencies of paper-based or siloed technology systems. Clarence Valley's answer has been to modernise and integrate by adopting TechnologyOne's Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) system. Within its first month of going live with TechnologyOne's Asset & Operations Maintenance (AOM) module and Field App, the council seamlessly recorded about 500 defects across the Clarence Valley, a 'staggering' jump from previous months. AOM gives full visibility into the cost and performance of every asset. The Field App also brings administration into the field, letting crews work offline and automatically sync data back to the EAM platform. Together, they have given Clarence Valley a single source of truth for all asset operations. Manual paperwork has been replaced by synchronised tablets in the field, allowing crews to receive real-time job updates and saving hours of travel and administration work as data is handled seamlessly from the field straight into the database. The impact has been dramatic: a bridge crew completed its entire annual program in six months instead of the planned 12, enabling more projects to be handled in-house and reducing reliance on contractors. Clarence Valley Council lead analyst Kate Maginnity said the council's transformation addressed long-standing fragmentation issues. 'We found that within each asset class we had multiple systems. I could talk to four different teams that had four different management techniques, processes and strategic plans,' she said. 'As of today, we class all elements that are made for a pedestrian to walk on as a footpath rather than dividing them out and this is where we will see efficiencies going forward. Through this approach we now understand the primary purpose of assets and have a system in place that can help us mitigate complex processes. It means we can stop reengineering the same thing and it assists us in applying consistent asset management practices, helping us get the most out of our large asset base.' TechnologyOne's executive vice-president for local government, Ben Malpass, said Clarence Valley Council had previously purchased TechnologyOne Financials, HR and Payroll. 'So EAM was the next significant step in Clarence Valley's digital transformation,' Mr Malpass said. 'Being able to implement our Asset & Operations Maintenance (AOM) along with the Field App has been a big game changer for them.' Before AOM and Field App, Mr Malpass said crews were bogged down in paperwork. 'Clarence had to manually process something like 3000 different timesheet entires per week,' he said. 'So if you were a field crew staff member, and you were out there working all week on projects, you would have to finish on the job early on a Friday because you needed to fill in your timesheets and associate each of the jobs that you were working on throughout that week to a specific cost code and to a timesheet. 'If you are a crew worker, that is not time well spent and the last thing anyone wants to do on a Friday. So by implementing the Field Apps capability, all that has been completely automated for them. Crews now check into a job on their device, they check out of a job once completed and that records how much time they are working on a job, as well as all the consumables they use. 'So the next week, the truck is filled with the right consumables for the following week. Field App eliminates all those manual tasks that councils need to operate under becoming a real game changer for the council staff. 'Enterprise Asset Management also enabled Clarence Valley to be far more proactive in the management of assets for residents where they are identifying issues and defects, whether it is a pothole or a signpost that has fallen down, or a park barbecue that's not working. 'Councils can record, manage and communicate back to the community to say, 'Hey, we've picked up on an issue and going to be fixing that in two weeks' time, and this is the schedule.' Then once it is fixed, it's automatically communicated back to the community.' Alongside the implementation of Asset & Operations Maintenance and Field App, Clarence Valley Council has also launched a new initiative called 'An Asset is an Asset, is an Asset', and this has become ingrained within workplace culture and processes. This initiative assists in improving asset management understanding across the workforce and simplifying how an asset is classified, as well as determining subsequent asset componentisation, recognition, lifecycle and condition attributes. 'Information at your fingertips and real-time data means we are better at making more informed decisions, quickly,' the council's Ms Maginnity said. TechnologyOne believes the implementation of EAM highlights not only the community benefits of proactively managing council assets, but the benefits to revenues and profits. 'There is an obligation to the community to actually engage and manage the resources that the community are asking for as effectively as possible,' Mr Malpass said. 'But councils are also financially strained. 'They are trying to become more productive and efficient with systemising technologies. Enterprise Asset Management has a potentially huge impact on their bottom line.'

ABC News
5 hours ago
- ABC News
Bigger properties occupied by smaller households in major housing mismatch, Cotality finds
In a reminder of how broken housing affordability and access is, new analysis highlights a major mismatch between the size of Australian homes and the number of people living in them. While the vast bulk of Australian housing is built for larger families, property research firm Cotality has found more than 60 per cent of households are made up of just one or two people. It reveals a misalignment between "who lives in our homes and the kinds of homes we're building", Cotality's head of head of Australian research Eliza Owen said in the report. "Of the lone-person households in Australia, the data suggests around 40 per cent are aged 65 and over," Ms Owen said. "The highest share of households is two people, but the highest share of housing has three bedrooms. "While there's nothing wrong with more bedrooms than people in a dwelling, there could be some inefficiencies in the way housing is being allocated," Ms Owen said. "After all, a 'traditional' family of four may have more need for a three-bedroom dwelling than a household of two people." The report cited data from the 2021 Census, which showed there were more two-person family households in three-bedroom dwellings (about 1.3 million), than three or four-person family households (about 1.1 million). Ms Owen has suggested a way to fix the "efficiency question", which she knows is not politically appealing — send a price signal. "Governments could make it more expensive to have more housing than you need, and cheaper to live in smaller housing," she wrote in her research note. She said that logic often leads to calls for tax reform including abolishing stamp duty to cheaper to move between housing, replacing it with a broad-based land tax (which raises costs the more land you own). "These options are both politically difficult as it would involve moving from a tax that applies to a small amount of voters each year who purchase property to one that will tax two thirds of voters (property owners)," she noted. Independent housing researcher Cameron Kusher, speaking to The Business in July, argued high transaction costs, namely stamp duty, discourage moving to a "better sized property" and can lead to people purchasing larger homes than they need to begin with. "People just feel like if I can get a better and bigger home sooner, that's a better outcome," he said. "If we look at what is being built, it's usually very large houses, four or five bedrooms, taking up most of the land on these new housing sites," Mr Kusher said. "A lot of it comes down to how much a piece of a property, [and] how much the land and the house, costs. "I think a lot of people are building bigger homes, thinking 'I'll spend a little bit more up-front and my family will grow into this home'. "It might just be a couple grandkids, or they're planning to have a couple of kids." He noted the effects of rapidly increasing property prices, which can leave people priced out of re-entering the market, and the fact that larger properties can be more likely to appreciate in value at a faster pace. Cotality's Ms Owen said other policy options to encourage people to move into appropriately sized homes could include reforming pension asset tests to include the value of the family home. "Strides are already being taken on the supply side to establish well-located apartments in our larger cities, that can accommodate smaller households. "But shifting demand through tax reform could help the take-up of these new homes." The government has accepted it is not on track to meet the target to build 1.2 million homes in five years, but Treasurer Jim Chalmers has stood by the ambition, despite Treasury advice it would not be met. In another recent note, Ms Owen questioned the focus of state and federal governments on speeding up building approvals to boost housing supply, warning that the construction industry simply cannot keep pace. "With completion times already above average and construction costs elevated, it seems an odd time to be incentivising more dwelling approvals and commencements," she said. Cameron Kusher argued past experience could be a guide on how to approach today's housing problems and ease the construction crunch. "Maybe we need to go back to how things were 30 or 40 years ago, where you have smaller homes and you make them easy to renovate," he told The Business. "Over time, people can actually add bedrooms, bathrooms, car parks, verandahs and all these sorts of things to add value to the home.

ABC News
8 hours ago
- ABC News
Productivity summit ends day two with progress on rules changes to boost housing supply
Rules holding back superannuation funds from investing potential billions of dollars into housing and renewables projects could face a shake up, after broad agreement at Canberra's productivity roundtable that there is a need for change. Super funds are required to meet a "performance benchmark", under laws designed to ensure funds are performing and maintaining the retirement savings of their members. But critics have said the rules around those benchmarks discourage investment in some assets, including a rule that requires stamp duty to be disclosed as a fee in a way that they say discourages housing investment. The government flagged it was seeking to rewrite the benchmark after a 2023 review similarly found it could unintentionally be discouraging investment in some assets. Rebecca Mikula-Wright, who heads the Investor Group on Climate Change, said there had been broad agreement at this week's summit that changing those rules could accelerate housing and renewables investment. "The Your Future Your Super performance benchmark was discussed a lot in the session I was in yesterday, and really around how that is constraining the ability of super funds to invest in higher risk projects they really want to invest into," Ms Mikula-Wright told the ABC. 'The treasurer did indicate he is likely to revisit those reforms." After a day of talks focused on finding agreement on one of the thorniest issues impacting housing and the environment — Australia's "broken" environmental approvals process — Treasurer Jim Chalmers expressed his pleasure at the "real prospect of a useful consensus" emerging on some of the country's key economic challenges. "Day two of the reform roundtable was really dominated by how we can boost housing supply, how we can responsibly reduce and improve regulation and speed up approvals," Mr Chalmers said. "I'm really encouraged by the consensus in the room for economic reform in these areas, and we're enthusiastic about some of the policies that participants put on the table." Ms Mikula-Wright said there had also been good support for a Productivity Commission recommendation to establish a "strike team" that could land faster approvals for key infrastructure projects, particularly around renewables. "We're competing with markets that are getting projects up faster and cheaper, so we have to do the same. Then we can attract more capital and get those projects rolling out," she said. After warnings from Housing Minister Clare O'Neil that red tape was dragging down housing approvals — and leaked Treasury documents indicating the government was considering a pause on the National Construction Code — attendees also agreed such a move should take place. The National Construction Code lays out minimum requirements for buildings on everything from fire exits and accessibility to insulation and capacity for electric vehicle chargers. But while changes to safety standards could continue, attendees discussed possible pauses on "non-essential" rules of the construction code, such as new requirements to lift energy efficiency standards. New South Wales Treasurer Daniel Mookhey said a pause on the code was needed, though the finer details were being worked through. "The pause is something that is where the conversation was concentrated on. In terms of how long it needs to be paused, who would do the review, what's the terms of reference, that work can be pursued," he said, "I think we will have a few more conversations at the roundtable and beyond to sort out those levels of detail." The ABC understands the government hopes to move fast on a pause, and not have discussions drag out for several months. After two successive terms of government failing to find a path through the thicket of reform on Australia's Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, attendees of today's roundtable were cautiously welcoming what appeared to be some progress. The complicated laws govern the environmental approval process for major projects, such as energy and mining projects, as well as housing and other developments where they potentially impact threatened species or significant cultural sites. But a major review of those decades-old laws published in 2020 concluded that they were no longer working for business or the environment — a view that today's roundtable attendees were agreed on. However, attempts under former environment minister Tanya Plibersek to update the laws were abandoned before the federal election — with a key sticking point being a plan to introduce a federal watchdog that could independently monitor EPBC approvals. Mining and other business groups did not support that proposed Environmental Protection Agency. But after extended talks today, they left saying they would be prepared to support an EPA, with a caveat that the final say would rest with the environment minister. There are still devils in the detail, including a desire from environment groups to see the EPA also given final approval powers on projects. But it marks the first significant advancement in EPBC discussions since they stalled last term. Australian Conservation Foundation chief executive, Kelly O'Shanassy, said there was agreement in the room that an EPA was needed but there remained different views on how it should operate. "There is a lot of support for efficient decision making, transparent decision making, accountability — that is not the current process," Ms O'Shanassy said. "You need to have an independent regulator that is held to account for the speed of its decisions and the quality of its decisions." Business Council of Australia chief executive, Bran Black, said a federal EPA should effectively be set-up in the same way as existing state-based authorities. "We take the view that it's really important to have a separation between the entity that is ultimately responsible for compliance and the entity that's ultimately responsible for approvals," Mr Black said. "In an ideal world, we wouldn't need to go down the path of creating multiple bodies at all [but] the government has committed to a new EPA. It's made it very clear, that's a point that it's taken to two elections now." "The question then is: what does this EPA do?" Environment Minister Murray Watt said, however, there was strong support around the table for "stronger" environmental protections and "faster and simpler" project approvals, through a more transparent process for businesses. "These are objectives our government supports, but we will ultimately need support across the parliament for reform. It was therefore very useful for the shadow treasurer, as a roundtable participant, to hear the depth of support for change," Senator Watt said. Opposition Leader Sussan Ley said the Coalition was willing to work constructively with the government to see reforms to the environment laws passed.