NDIS commissioner resigns as work safety issues brew

NDIS Commissioner Tracy Mackey has announced she’ll leave the scheme in May.

The NDIS commissioner has announced her resignation, opening up a “much-needed” opportunity for change after her continued failure to address work health and safety issues, the union says.

On Tuesday, Tracy Mackey revealed she will step down in May after two years as the NDIS’s Quality and Safeguard commissioner.

NDIS Minister Bill Shorten thanked her and wished her well and reaffirmed his government’s commitment to “protect Australians with disability from unscrupulous actors”.

But the Community and Public Sector Union’s Deputy National President Beth Vincent-Pietsch has welcomed the news.

“Ms Mackey has failed at every turn to provide staff at the commission a safe and respectful workplace,” she said.

“People with disability and their families need the NDIS Commission to be a proactive and powerful body that regulates providers of NDIS disability support services.

“Ongoing mismanagement and an unwillingness to cooperate with those advocating for improvements in the workplace, have compromised its ability to be that.”

The union’s members have consistently flagged concerns about unsafe workloads and mismanagement, and in May 2023 the workplace health and safety regulator issued an improvement notice to the commission over these problems.

Ms Mackey’s departure presents an opportunity to turn all of this around, the union said.

In December, an NDIS quality controller who was suspended and later reinstated claimed he had been made a scapegoat for the commission.

Jeffrey Chan was suspended in November following a report by ABC’s Four Corners, which revealed autism organisation Irabina remained a service provider with the NDIS for around four years after serious concerns were raised about its practices.

In an interview for the episode, Ms Mackey said Irabina’s services under the NDIS had been shut down but soon after it aired, Dr Chan informed Ms Mackey that Irabina had not in fact been shut down, meaning she had unwittingly misled the public.

Dr Chan later became the only person to be suspended over Irabina’s conduct, despite having had limited responsibility for oversight.