ABC interview: Co-operative Care Wagin is a community-driven model for regional health services

In the media

7 February 2025

ABC WA Regional Mornings’ Peter Barr interviewed Melina Morrison, CEO BCCM, about the Care Together program’s first registered co-operative, Co-operative Care Wagin, formed to coordinate social care services in the Western Australian wheatbelt, on Friday, 7 February.

Listen to Melina’s interview (39:27 – 46:30)

Read more about Co-operative Care Wagin in our project synopsis.

Media enquiries

Sue Frost, P&L Corporate Communications 0409718572

Transcript

Peter Barr

Let’s go to Wagin in the Great Southern wheatbelt region and agricultural town, population around 1,800 people. And a co-op has been established there to help residents access essential care services and although federally funded, this relies on the local community to pull resources and make the management of health and care more accessible for all. Called the Care Together Program, it’s an initiative of the Business Council of Co-operatives and Mutuals, which was given $7,000,000 in funding to educate the folks and support this program. Wendy Pederick is the convenor of Co-operative Care Wagin and spoke to ABC Great Southern Breakfast earlier.

Wendy Pederick

It’ll be a co-operative. And it’ll be member-owned, and member driven, and so the members contribute, and they benefit from the co-operative like a co-operative of any sort. Really, it’s for the members and the members have power and autonomy and control over the decision making of the co-operative. But the purpose of the co-operative is to help people with health and social needs be able to access those needs within an accepting community.

Peter Barr

The Business Council of Co-operatives and Mutuals is the governing body overseeing the implementation of the program across nine locations. Wagin is the first.

Melina Morisson is CEO of the Business Council of Co-operatives and Mutuals.

Good morning, Melina.

Melina Morrison

Good morning, Peter.

Peter Barr

What are you hoping to come from the Wagin experiment.

Melina Morrison

Well, it’s really giving agency to people in regional and remote areas across Australia, just like Wendy and her team in Wagin, to be able to manage and control and have ownership over how they get their services delivered to them, or how they deliver them to themselves.

Peter Barr

How significantly different should it look from what’s been happening so far?

Melina Morrison

Well, a number of royal commissions and inquiries and indeed the experience of everyday people. We don’t need an inquiry to tell us that there are difficulties, particularly in remote and regional areas where services are really stretched and there are major difficulties attracting and retaining skilled care workers. And even the issue of housing for care workers arises. And we’ve heard from the Royal Commission into Aged Care [that] a sorry state of neglect is the result where services failed to meet the needs of local people.

So, this is an idea to prove an age-old way of working together, cooperating together, as a business model that can be used by communities to trying design care around their own local needs.

Peter Barr

Kind of like, going back to village life, isn’t it?

Melina Morrison

It’s back to the future Peter and you’re in the wonderful state of Western Australia, people mightn’t realise that some of those well-known co-operatives that serve the Western Australian economy like CBH Group and Geraldton Fisherman’s Co-operative, Capricorn and even the RAC, is a co-operative, these are all models of member-owned businesses and they work just as well in care. So, we’re bringing this model to regional communities to help them to address their own local needs.

Peter Barr

Why Wagin is the first of the rank?

Melina Morrison

Well, they are just great Western Australian spirit and look, this is really work that was being done by the community already. What we’ve done is come and assisted the community to explore if a co-operative business model, which is a legal model, it’s a company model that they can use, would work for their own community endeavours. So, I have to say that Wagin, through the leadership of people like Wendy and her team, had been working for many years at the grassroots to try and provide the type of social care network that is now formally registered at a Western Australian co-operative. So, they will first cab off the rank, but we are working with communities right across Australia on similar initiatives, you know, we’ve got projects right up in Northern Queensland in Bowen, across South Australia, New South Wales, several projects right across the nation. The same issues arise where you’re in a regional or remote regional setting where services are really stretched.

Peterv

Is there potential for most expansion in WA Melina?

Melina Morrison

Absolutely, these are models. What I’d like to see with Wagin it’s really a model that could work for small towns, in other part of the states and other parts of Australia, where they’re starting with a networking concierge service if you like, but their long term goal is really to set up a multi-disciplinary care model of social care that could be primary healthcare but very much focus on aiming to let people age in their own home by helping them to access services, so they’re setting up something long term, sustainable and resilient and it can be copied in other communities.

Peter Barr

So, you’re overseeing the implementation of the program through the Business Council of Co-operatives and Mutuals, some funding available, what do you need to see from Wagin to consider it a successful program?

Melina Morrison

Well, what we want to see, as with any community-owned business, a co-operative, it needs to be sustainable, so it needs to have an operating business model that allows it to be sustainable through time, through its turnover. So it needs members, that’s what we want to see, and help these people drive, first of all, is more and more members to the co-operative because they collectively own it, and control and govern it. And that means that people are working together, purchasing and using the co-operative services that would then create the turnover income and that is 100 per cent reinvested back into the purpose of that co-operative. We have great hopes for Wagin, I mean this is, we are not doing it for them, they’re doing it for themselves, this is just a with and by thing, and we’re building and helping get capacity but the people of Wagin will make this a success, and that’s what we’re going to see in other parts of Australia.

Peter Barr

We’ll see what happens, I look forward to seeing it roll out, thank you for your time.

Melina Morrison

Thank you very much Peter.