Growing Old in a Second Language, Inside a System Not Built for Them

In a residential aged care home in Melbourne’s outer south-east, an elderly woman pushes away a plate of roast meat and boiled vegetables. She spent six decades cooking dal and rolling roti by hand. This kitchen does not know her food. The staff are kind, but none of them speak her language. Her children visit when shift work and the school run allow, and in the hours between she sits in a common room where the television plays programmes she cannot follow. The days blur into a quiet that has a clinical name, social isolation. No single family is named here. The scene has become common enough to belong to thousands at once.

That opening is a composite. It is also where Australia’s largest and fastest-growing migrant community is heading, and the aged care system is not ready for it.

A young community that will not stay young

For most of the past two decades, Indian migration to Australia has been a story about the young. That is starting to change. In April 2026 the Australian Bureau of Statistics reported that, as of 30 June 2025, 971,020 people born in India were living in Australia. For the first time on record they were the largest overseas-born group in the country, ahead of England. The India-born population had grown by around 522,000 people between 2015 and 2025, the biggest increase of any birthplace group across that decade. And yet the median age of that group was just 36.1 years. Most Indian-Australians are decades away from a nursing home.

The pressure sits in the near future. Research on older migrant populations, published in the journal Genus, projected that the number of people aged 65 and over born in Southern Asia would climb from around 50,000 in 2016 to about 156,400 by 2036, and 520,400 by 2056. On those numbers, Asia-born groups would go from roughly 6 per cent of the older population to close to a fifth. The students, nurses and technology workers who arrived in the 2000s and 2010s will reach aged care in the 2030s and 2040s. No ethno-specific service has been built to absorb them in those numbers.

What the Royal Commission already knew

None of this is a surprise. The Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety handed down its final report, Care, Dignity and Respect, on 1 March 2021. It ran to 148 recommendations and followed more than two years of hearings that exposed neglect across the sector. On cultural diversity the language was blunt. The existing system, the Commissioners found, was “not well equipped to provide care that is non-discriminatory and appropriately tailored for people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds”. They argued that “diversity should be core business in aged care” rather than an optional extra. They called for mandatory training in cultural safety for every worker in direct contact with older people. Since then, progress reporting by the Inspector-General of Aged Care has kept tracking how slowly that ambition has moved from paper into practice.

A new Act, and the gap between a right and a meal

The government’s headline answer is legislative. The new Aged Care Act 2024 commenced on 1 November 2025, alongside a new regulatory model, strengthened Quality Standards and an in-home care program called Support at Home. At its centre sits a Statement of Rights, and for culturally diverse elders the wording matters. It entitles older people to have their identity, culture and diversity valued, and to receive safe, equitable and culturally appropriate aged care services. The first strengthened standard promises that a person’s identity, culture and choices will shape how services are delivered. The Department of Health, Disability and Ageing has committed to a fair, culturally safe single assessment framework at the front door of the system.

A right written into statute and a right delivered at a dinner table are two different things. Whether a Gujarati widower is offered vegetarian food, whether a Tamil grandmother reaches an interpreter during her assessment, whether a Sikh man has somewhere to say his prayers, all of it comes down to staffing, funding and provider will. The Act guarantees none of that on its own.

The peak body’s warning on language

That gap is where FECCA has done much of its lobbying. The Federation of Ethnic Communities’ Councils of Australia is the national peak body for multicultural communities. In its submission on the Act, it pressed the government to guarantee free access to language support and inclusive communication for older people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, across navigation, assessment and complaints. The need is not marginal. About half of people born in North-East Asia who use aged care require a translating or interpreting service, and culturally and linguistically diverse Australians already make up roughly a third of people aged 65 and over. FECCA also warned that ethno-specific providers have to stay viable and able to expand, so that these elders are not left without a choice. One more figure sat in its submission, a strength the system rarely rewards. About 35 per cent of the residential direct care workforce identify as being from a culturally diverse background.

The providers trying to fill the gap

Some of the most concrete answers are coming from the community itself. MiCare is a not-for-profit provider whose clients speak more than 53 languages. It is developing what has been billed as Australia’s first Indian-specific residential aged care home, a 108-bed, five-storey building at Noble Park in Melbourne’s south-east. The cost runs to around 35 million dollars, and the plans put a vegetarian kitchen and four prayer rooms in from the start. Petra Neeleman, MiCare’s chief executive, put the project plainly. She said that “when we get to the end of our life all we have is our story”, and that the Indian home would be the first the organisation had purpose-built for another cultural group.

The idea did not appear overnight. Vasan Srinivasan, a long-time Indian community leader in Victoria, campaigned for such a facility from 2011. He had “knocked on every door, on both sides of politics”, he said. The Victorian government, separately, secured land at Cranbourne East for a home for at least 90 older Indian Victorians. The then state Minister for Ageing, Anthony Carbines, said “we know it’s hugely important for people to remain connected to their culture”.

Family, duty and the limits of care at home

For most Indian families, residential care is a last resort. The first line of support is the household itself. Many older parents arrive late in life on contributory parent visas, sponsored by their adult children, and they bring an expectation of care within the family that runs deep in South Asian tradition. The new Support at Home program, which replaced Home Care Packages, is meant to keep people in their own communities for longer. For culturally diverse elders, that model fits cultural preference. Home care already serves the most diverse cohort in the system. National data show that 31 per cent of home care users were born in non-English-speaking countries. But family support has a fragile underside. Adult children work long hours. Some move interstate for work, and a parent who cannot drive, bank or see a doctor without a translator can end up housebound inside a busy household.

The quiet epidemic of isolation

The cost of getting this wrong can be measured. A scoping review of ageing among culturally and linguistically diverse people in Australia, led by Nichole Georgeou and colleagues, was published in The Gerontologist in 2023. It found that a plethora of studies confirm that isolation, including practical, social and emotional loneliness, depression and stigma, is a common outcome for older culturally and linguistically diverse migrants and refugees. The review drew on earlier work that described ageing in the wrong place, growing old in a country whose systems were never designed around a person’s language, faith or food. The national figures show the scale. Of Australia’s 4.4 million people aged 65 and over, about 35 per cent were born overseas, and 16 per cent speak a language other than English at home, according to census-based aged care data.

The reckoning ahead

The India-born generation now filling Australian universities, hospitals and technology firms will not be young forever. Their parents are ageing now. Their own turn will come, and it will come with a demographic weight the sector has never carried. The response exists on paper. There is a rights-based Act, there are strengthened standards, and there are a handful of community-built homes with vegetarian kitchens and prayer rooms. Whether any of it is funded and staffed before the numbers arrive is the open question. What culturally safe aged care asks is fairly modest. People who spent their working lives building this country should be able to grow old in it without giving up their language, their faith or the taste of their own food. The community that will need this is already counting the years.

Images in this article are AI-generated illustrations.