Bill Shorten looks to reassure disabled Australians over NDIS overhaul
Bill Shorten is adamant that changes to the NDIS are necessary and should not be delayed. (ABC News: Ian Cutmore)
NDIS Minister Bill Shorten has sought to reassure the disability community that it would get input into the design of a reformed National Disability Insurance Scheme, amid concerns that fundamental design principles of the scheme would be lost in a legislative overhaul.
The Coalition and Greens combined in the Senate on Monday to stall consideration of legislation designed to overhaul the NDIS until August, complaining that despite a Senate inquiry, the government had not given experts and participants enough time to consider the changes.
A frustrated Mr Shorten accused the two parties of costing taxpayers $1 billion by delaying the changes but also told 7.30 that the legislation was only designed to create the building blocks for a new scheme, and that the details of how new systems in the scheme would work would be developed in consultation with the disability community.
The runaway costs of the scheme have put its viability under pressure and created massive problems for the federal budget.
Allegations of regular and large-scale fraud have also plagued the scheme, with the agency that runs it saying late last year that it had been investigating $1 billion of expenditure in just 12 months.
A task force has been examining how to construct a better system of registering and regulating about 170,000 NDIS providers. It is due to report to Mr Shorten in the coming days.
The blueprint for overhauling the NDIS comes from a review by the man regarded as its founder, Bruce Bonyhady, and former senior public servant, Lisa Paul.
Professor Bonyhady told a Senate inquiry into the NDIS reform legislation last month "the status quo is not an option".
"The scheme, as it is today, is not sustainable. This legislation absolutely needs to pass."
The NDIS has grown into a colossus that has over 170,000 service providers — everything from high-care personal services to lawn mowing — and is funding the needs of a much broader part of the community than had ever been anticipated.
It is subject to regular and spectacular accusations of fraud.
In the May budget, the government announced cuts to the scheme of $14.4 billion over four years — cuts only designed to stop costs blowing out further, not reduce overall spending.
The savings are supposed to be delivered by legislation introduced by Mr Shorten in March.
"I fought to create the scheme, I'm going to fight to make sure the scheme survives," Mr Shorten told 7.30.
"But you can't let this scheme grow like Topsy without putting some swim lanes in place. That's what this legislation is doing. It's the start of a process. But for the next eight weeks, I really don't believe we're going to hear a new argument that hasn't been put in the last six months.
"We've got a cost of living crisis in Australia. A billion dollars of NDIS money would support 60,000 kids on the scheme for 12 months."
One of the senators pushing the delay is Greens disability spokesman, senator Jordan Steele-John. His dissenting report to the Senate inquiry expressed frustration with frequent late government amendments and changes to the bill.
"We need to give the disability community our academics, experts and advocates the opportunity to properly and thoroughly analyse the amendments brought forward by the government to their own legislation," Senator Steele-John said.
"They have dropped large amendments, right before the hearings, or right before the debates which have given no time for legislators or for advocates to analyse whether they address the many concerns that community have about the bill."
Issues of control in play
While politicians tussle over the timeline for the legislation, the proposed changes have unsettled many who appeared before the Senate inquiry.
A fundamental idea in the NDIS has been that it provides support on the basis of what can be argued and assessed to be "reasonable and necessary" to someone's particular needs, rather than generic support.
"The bill proposes a shift from reasonable and necessary supports to a restrictive list of permitted supports, claimable from budgets based on yet-to-be-developed needs assessments," the deputy chair of disability advocacy group Every Australian Counts, Nicole Avery, told the Senate inquiry last month.
"This approach risks denying necessary supports to people with complex needs and lacks the individuality and the flexibility that the NDIS promises."
Senator Steele-John has reservations about new government powers.
"The deep concerns that the disability community have with the bill, and they are concerns shared by the Greens, is that it grants the federal government extraordinary new powers to control the lives of disabled people to decide which supports we can receive," he told 7.30.
"It also removes really important legal protections, which we currently have to challenge agency decisions when they get something wrong.
"And it does all this while also inserting a number of new methods and processes that will decide how we are delivered supports, the amount of money we receive, and the way in which we are assessed for access to the scheme in a way that fundamentally places those methods beyond the review of the parliament and the public."
Politician proofing
Mr Shorten said the aim of the legislation was to "make the scheme politician-proof".
"I want it to be consistent, fair and equitable," he said.
"I know how good it is. But when we hear some of the scaremongering that reasonable and necessary supports will not be provided, that's just wrong.
"When I hear people say, 'There'll be no review of decisions made in the scheme in the future,' that's just a lie."
Mr Shorten said it will take another one or two years to work out needs assessments with people and that finding the right balance is a fine line.
"People say, 'We don't know everything about the future and you won't tell us everything about the future right now, so we won't go forward.' But on the other hand, if we told everyone that we had everything worked out, we'd be accused of not co-designing."
States and territories also have concerns after a key recommendation of the Bonyhady-Paul review was that some of the NDIS workload be transferred back to them.
Senator Steele-John told 7.30 states must be listened to.
"They're being asked by the federal government to begin delivering services and support which they have not delivered for 10 years," he said.
"They have made a submission to the inquiry saying the bill is not what they agreed to."
One common criticism is that the bill has been introduced before the government has even made a formal response to the NDIS review, or to the Disability Royal Commission
Mr Shorten says there may not be one comprehensive response to the review.
"In terms of the NDIS review, we are responding in parts as we go, we'll have more detail on more of the issues," he said.
"This legislation isn't trying to enact the whole review anyway.
"The idea that we wait another couple of years will squander a lot of money, it's going to cause a lot more anxiety, it's going to lead to a lot more unfair outcomes. And it could jeopardise the scheme generally."
Unregulated mess
A separate stream of work has been going on this year which goes to the heart of the question of fraud in the NDIS.
There have been regular accusations of fraud in the scheme, sometimes involving organised crime, with stories of NDIS money being used to buy drugs and alcohol, or expensive overseas holidays and cars.
That's on top of shocking stories of physical and sexual abuse.
Much of this stems from the fact the majority of providers of NDIS services do not even have their most basic details registered with the organisation that runs the scheme.
A task force has been reviewing how to properly regulate the massive NDIS workforce in line with the findings of the Bonyhady-Paul review
"What's emerged over the 10 years since the NDIS commenced is a system which is now largely unregulated," Professor Bonyhady told 7.30.
"There are 160,000 or more unregistered providers. We don't know who they are, what services they provide, whether they've got insurance, whether they've got the necessary qualifications for the services.
"And there are just 15 or 16,000 active registered providers. This was never the intention of the scheme. There was always intended to be minimum quality standards that applied to providers and provided to workers."
No one-size-fits-all approach?
Some disability advocates are unhappy about the idea of a more regulated workforce and Senator Steele-John wants the community to have choices.
"We're talking about people who are required and are supported to play a vital role for disabled people in our families," Senator Steele-John said.
"They're the folks that help us have a shower. They're the folks that help us get out of bed and engage with community. They're the therapists we work with.
"They're an integral part of our lives. And we as disabled people want to retain the ability to decide who comes into our home, and who provides us with those supports.
"And these rights, and I would argue protections, that we desperately need to retain are at risk if we move to a one-size-fits-all approach."
Professor Bonyhady says "the comparison of control and choice and registration is a completely false comparison".
"Having a system where control and choice because there are no checks and balances can lead to participants incurring very large debts," he said.
"[It can lead to them] being subjected to fraud, being subjected to exploitation. It is not a system with the appropriate quality and safeguarding standards that are needed."
The task force is due to hand down its recommendations on the NDIS workforce in the coming days.
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