Jodi Cassar Biography: Age, Career And Appointment As Interim First Nations Aged Care Commissioner

Jodi Cassar PSM is a proud Kamilaroi/Gamilaroi woman who was born on Ngunnawal Country and has lived on Worimi lands in New South Wales for more than forty years. She is a senior Australian public servant who was appointed Interim First Nations Aged Care Commissioner on 23 June 2026, succeeding inaugural commissioner Andrea Kelly and taking on the role at a pivotal moment for First Nations aged care reform in Australia.

She brings more than twenty years of experience delivering complex reform across the federal government, and was awarded the Public Service Medal in 2023 for her leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic. This biography covers her Country, her career, and the significance of the role she now holds.

Quick Facts About Jodi Cassar

Country and Community: The Foundation

Jodi Cassar is a Kamilaroi/Gamilaroi woman. The Kamilaroi are one of the largest Aboriginal nations in Australia, with Country spanning a vast area of inland New South Wales and southern Queensland. She was born on Ngunnawal Country, the traditional lands that encompass the Australian Capital Territory and surrounding regions, and has lived on Worimi Country in the Hunter and Port Stephens region of New South Wales for more than forty years. Worimi Country takes in the coastline, estuaries, and hinterland of the mid-north coast of New South Wales, a landscape of sand dunes, wetlands, and saltwater that has shaped the Worimi people’s culture and knowledge systems over tens of thousands of years.

These two connections, to Ngunnawal Country where she was born and Worimi Country where she has built her life, are not background detail. They are the context through which her appointment as Interim First Nations Aged Care Commissioner makes sense. She is not an outsider to the communities she has been asked to serve. She is a First Nations woman who has spent her adult life on Country, working in government, and now stepping into a role explicitly created to ensure that the voices of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander elders are heard and reflected in Australia’s aged care system.

Twenty Years in the Federal Public Service

Jodi Cassar has spent more than two decades in the Australian federal public service delivering complex reform across a range of portfolios. Her most recent substantive role before her Commissioner appointment was Acting First Assistant Secretary in the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, one of the most senior departmental positions in the Australian public service. In that role she led major national reform initiatives including the implementation of Australia’s Disability Strategy and government reporting on responses to the Disability Royal Commission.

The Disability Royal Commission, which ran from 2019 to 2023, produced 222 recommendations covering the design and delivery of services for Australians with disability. Translating those recommendations into cross-government action requires exactly the kind of complex, multi-stakeholder, sustained reform management that Cassar has spent her career developing. Her work on that implementation gave her the policy sophistication and institutional knowledge that Minister for Aged Care and Seniors Sam Rae cited when announcing her appointment: “Jodi Cassar’s decades of experience driving complex reform across government will be invaluable in turning the findings of a Royal Commission into real change on the ground.”

In 2023 she was awarded the Public Service Medal for her outstanding leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic. The PSM is one of Australia’s most prestigious honours for public servants, awarded for exceptional service to government and the community. Her pandemic work focused specifically on supporting people with disability, their workers and carers, and on helping accelerate vaccine access for vulnerable Australians during the critical early phases of the vaccination rollout. Her capacity to navigate complex, high-stakes government responses affecting the most vulnerable Australians is the consistent thread across her career.

The Role: Interim First Nations Aged Care Commissioner

The position of Interim First Nations Aged Care Commissioner was created in response to a recommendation of the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety, which delivered its final report in 2021. The Royal Commission found systemic failures in the delivery of aged care to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, including a lack of culturally safe services, geographic inaccessibility, and the persistent failure to centre First Nations voices in policy design and service delivery. The Commissioner role was established to address those failures at a structural level.

The inaugural Interim Commissioner, Andrea Kelly, held 135 in-person engagements and met with more than 1,000 people, their families, communities, and service providers across Australia before delivering her landmark report, Transforming Aged Care for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People. Kelly’s report has been described as “deeply informed and grounded in the voices of the people it is written for” and will guide the government’s aged care reform work for years to come. She was due to finalise her tenure at the end of June 2026.

Jodi Cassar was appointed to succeed Kelly on 23 June 2026, taking over at a moment the government described as “pivotal.” The Australian Government has committed to introducing legislation to establish a permanent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Aged Care Commissioner before the end of the winter sitting period, with that legislation also strengthening aged care provider obligations around refunds and giving the regulator stronger powers to determine unreasonable pricing. Cassar’s role in the interim period is to maintain the reform momentum Kelly established, ensure Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voices continue to be heard in the policy process, and guide the transition to the permanent Commissioner structure.

She told the Australian Ageing Agenda: “This is an important opportunity to listen to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities and work in partnership to strengthen aged care so it is culturally safe, accessible and person-centred. I’m looking forward to continuing the work already underway and making sure it delivers real, tangible improvements.” The appointment positions her alongside other Australian public servants navigating significant reform portfolios in 2026, including Tammy Tyrrell, who joined the Labor Party in May 2026 in part to have a greater influence on exactly the kind of aged care and community service policy that Cassar is now responsible for delivering.

Personal Life

Jodi Cassar’s personal details, including her age, date of birth, and family circumstances, have not been confirmed in public sources. She has maintained the relatively low public profile typical of senior federal public servants, whose effectiveness depends on institutional trust and operational discretion rather than media visibility. What is known publicly is that she has spent her adult life on Worimi Country in New South Wales, has built her career within the federal public service, and approaches her First Nations identity as both a personal foundation and a professional mandate. Her appointment as Interim Commissioner is, in one sense, the convergence of those two dimensions: a First Nations woman with twenty years of reform delivery experience taking responsibility for reform that directly affects First Nations communities.

Conclusion

Jodi Cassar PSM arrives at the Interim First Nations Aged Care Commissioner role with a Public Service Medal, twenty years of reform delivery, and the lived experience of a Kamilaroi woman who has spent her life on Worimi Country. Those three things together are precisely what the role requires. The work ahead, transitioning from Andrea Kelly’s landmark consultative process to the permanent Commissioner structure while maintaining community trust and legislative momentum, is exactly the kind of sustained, complex, relationship-intensive reform that her career has prepared her for. She has described the appointment as “an important opportunity.” For the First Nations elders and communities depending on the system she has been asked to reform, it is considerably more than that.

Further Reading

• Tammy Tyrrell Biography: Tasmanian Senator Who Joined Labor to Drive Change From Inside Government
• Allegra Spender Biography: MP for Wentworth and Co-Founder of Community Strong Australia
• Wendy Askew Biography: Tasmanian Liberal Senator Retiring After Seven Years in the Senate