We’re proud to welcome Irene Blackberry, John Richards Chair and Director of the Care Economy Research Institute at La Trobe University to one of Australia’s most important conversations on care, support, and the future of the care sector.
We talk about the care sector as an industry. But it is something far more fundamental than that.
The care economy is the infrastructure of human life itself the systems, the services, the professionals, and the unpaid carers who make it possible for people to be born safely, to grow and learn, to recover from illness, to live with dignity in older age, and to be supported through the most vulnerable moments of the human experience.
It is also one of the largest, fastest growing, and most persistently undervalued sectors of the Australian economy.
And yet the research foundations that should be driving smarter policy, stronger investment, and better outcomes across the care economy remain underdeveloped relative to the scale and complexity of the challenge and relative to the tens of billions of dollars of public investment flowing through the sector every year.
That is the gap Professor Irene Blackberry has dedicated her career to closing.
As the John Richards Chair and Director of the Care Economy Research Institute at La Trobe University, Irene leads one of Australia’s most significant centres of care economy research bringing rigorous, evidence-based analysis to bear on the questions that matter most to policymakers, providers, carers, and the people who depend on care services every day.
Her work spans aged care, disability, carer support, workforce sustainability, and the economic dimensions of care connecting the lived reality of people receiving and delivering care to the research evidence that should be shaping the systems around them.
This is not research for its own sake. This is research designed to change the way Australia thinks about, invests in, and delivers care at every level of the system.
She brings to this conference a perspective that sits at the intersection of evidence, policy, and practice:
✅ Care economy research what the evidence tells us about what works
✅ Aged care quality and outcomes research informed approaches to improvement
✅ Workforce sustainability and the economics of care sector employment
✅ Carer health and wellbeing the evidence base for better support systems
✅ Policy translation turning research into practice and practice into reform
✅ The future of the care economy demographic trends, investment needs, and opportunity
The care sector cannot be reformed on good intentions alone. It must be reformed on evidence — rigorous, independent, and unflinching evidence that tells us where the system is working, where it is failing, and what it will take to make it genuinely better. Professor Irene Blackberry is generating that evidence. And at this conference, she brings it to the national conversation.
National Care & Support Sector Conference 2026
Friday, 28th August, 2026
8:00 AM to 5:00 PM
Join In-Person or ONLINE, Pullman, Albert Park Melbourne,VIC
Know a leader in aged care, disability, carer support, community services, or social policy who needs to be in this conversation? Tag them below or share this post they should be in the room.