Inheritance Impatience and Why the Government's 10-Year Plan on Elder Abuse is Too Late

The Predator on the Couch and Why the Government's 10-Year Elder Abuse Plan is a Decade Too Late

(FYI: Elder Abuse is Everybody's Business)

It's another uniquely Australian ritual: to assume the worst only happens to someone else. We watch the evening news, see a story about a family home being swindled and stolen from an older person, and think, 'That would never happen in our family.'

But here’s the uncomfortable truth: you don't need a stranger to steal your foundation. Sometimes, the threat is sitting right there on the couch, drinking your tea.

The government has just announced the National Plan to End the Abuse and Mistreatment of Older People 2026 to 2036. It is a well-intentioned ten-year roadmap. But in the trenches of financial risk management, we know a hard truth. A ten-year plan is a response to a terminal condition. It is a decade too late.

Let's Not Make the Same 'Stranger Danger' Mistake Again

For decades, our primary strategy for protecting children from abuse was a well-intentioned, but fundamentally flawed, campaign known as 'stranger danger'. We taught a generation to fear the shadowy figure in the park or the unmarked van, building an imaginary perimeter against an ever present external boogeyman. Yet, the devastating reality, which child protection advocates spent years trying to illuminate, was that the vast majority of predators were not strangers at all. They were trusted individuals already inside the family circle: relatives, close friends, and respected authority figures.

By focusing all our educational anxiety on the improbable stranger, we unintentionally provided a cloak of invisibility to the abusers sitting at our own dinner tables, leaving the most vulnerable without a vocabulary to name the threat, in their own homes.

It's a tragic history lesson we seemingly haven't learned, because today, we're repeating the exact same structural error when it comes to safeguarding older Australians. Right now, government warnings and bank alerts are hyper-focused on the modern equivalent of the stranger in the van: the overseas hacker, the anonymous online scammer, (perhaps a romance scam) and the sophisticated phishing email. While these external threats are real, our absolute fixation on them creates a dangerous diagnostic fog.

We are once again looking out the window, while ignoring the threat already inside the house.

We have built an entire national narrative around securing our financial foundations against strangers, leaving us entirely blind and unprepared to recognise 'The Predator on the Couch'.

The Uncomfortable Truth of 'Inheritance Impatience'

In Australia, we don't wait for a stage-four melanoma to become visible before we teach new sun-smart behaviours to our children, and model ourselves. We look for the 'pre' identifiers. We look for the constantly irritated mole, the unusual spot, the early warning signs. We pre-screen because the 'pre' is curable, while the metastasis is a tragedy.

Financial Pre-elder Abuse Follows the Exact Same Biological Path

It rarely starts with a grand, cinematic theft. It begins as 'financial sunburn': small, unreturned loans, a mysteriously lost debit card, or a child insisting they become the sole point of contact to 'take the stress out of the bills'.

If left unchecked, these behaviours can metastasise into a condition we call 'Inheritance Impatience'. This is the quiet normalisation of a scavenger mentality, where family members treat an Enduring Power of Attorney document, not as a protective shield, but as a socially permitted siphon to access capital early. They hide behind predatory, dismissive statements like, 'It is going to become mine at some stage anyway.'

• We call this 'Financial Grooming', and our current legal frameworks are completely blind to it. By the time the system officially recognises the 'abuse', the family home has often been liquidated, and the older person has become systemically invisible.

The Human Cost of Convenient Silence

In my work as a specialist risk adviser, I see the aftermath of this conversation avoidance. I see smart families who did everything right, except for one thing: they trusted generic, simple legal (often downloadable) templates to do the heavy lifting of complex family dynamics.

Current state-and-territory-based Enduring Power of Attorney frameworks fail because they are designed to respond to overt theft, not to subtle behavioural grooming. The existing jurisdictional lottery creates a playground for the professional scavenger, allowing them to bypass local safeguards and operate in a diagnostic fog.

We cannot wait until 2036 to fix a structural engineering failure that is destroying lives today.

The 2026 Mandate: A Manual Override is Needed

At Sapience Financial, we are calling for a manual override of the government timeline. We have submitted a formal response to the Attorney-General, advocating for a 2026 mandate to shift our national focus from delayed response to primary prevention.

To properly protect older Australians, we must harden the system. Here is what our proposed manual override requires:

• The National Online Register: We need a single source of truth delivered by 2026. A secure, real-time database of all Enduring Documents will eliminate the jurisdictional lottery and provide immediate validation for banks and medical professionals.
  • Like the nationwide PEXA (Property Exchange Australia) electronic conveyancing platform, already in place.
    
    
• Mandatory Forensic Screening: We must adopt the national child protection blueprint for mandatory reporting. Professionals, including financial advisers and lawyers, must be legislated as mandatory interveners required to ask prescribed 'awkward questions' in private consultations. This strictly excludes children or potential scavengers from the room.
  • Like the National Quality Standard (NQS) for childcare benchmark across Australia, already in place.
    
    
• Documenting the Bank of Mum and Dad: The days of the handshake loan must end. Without a formally documented loan to family agreement, the law assumes a transfer of money to a child is a gift. Documenting the debt is the only forensic shield against structural theft.
  
  
• Friction by Design: We must move away from 'simple' legal templates in favour of high-tensile documents that include specific, non-optional protective clauses. We need to introduce deliberate friction to stop the siphon.

Are You Too Close to Your Problem?

When it comes to taking risks, human nature reminds us that we are often too close to a problem to see it clearly. We avoid having difficult conversations with our adult children because we fear the conflict.

• Avoiding these conversations allows a problem to loom too large. We become apathetic, unconsciously looking for ways to avoid the friction. But a life well lived is about how you manage risks with intentionality.

This is not about fear; it is about foresight. It is about demonstrating grace under pressure by having the difficult conversations before they become desperate ones.

• Building a secure future for your family requires a solid foundation.
• Don't wait until the financial water is rising around your ankles to ask if your legal documents will actually hold up.

Sapience has made a formal submission to the Government's Attorney General about this report. 

Drew Browne
CEO & Senior Financial Adviser (Risk Specialist)
Sapience Financial