If you are one of the one-in-five Australians living with disability, a family member, or you care for a person with disability, I want to say something to you right now.
The National Disability Insurance Scheme is here to stay.
It is not going away.
But – and this is important – we need to get the NDIS back on track.
And that will not be easy.
It will take time and require the kind of collective effort you showed during the campaign to fight for the NDIS in the first place.
But – and this is important, too – I will work with and for you every step along the way.
With that in mind, I want to brief you and the nation on the work that must be done to secure the future of the NDIS.
I want to explain why we created the NDIS.
And explain how the NDIS lost its way.
And I want to explain why we need to reboot the scheme and disability services and supports.
You could call this a ‘state of the union’ address on the NDIS.
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How the NDIS lost its way
One of the measures of a great reform is that it outlives its government.
Medibank, for example, didn’t outlive the Whitlam Government – although it was resurrected as Medicare by Bob Hawke.
The NDIS outlived the Rudd-Gillard-Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison Governments.
A testament to the strength of the reform – and the strength of the community support.
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The fact it managed to survive is a credit to the dedication of people with disabilities and their families and advocates and allies and the never-to-be-underestimated decency of the Australian people.
But the hard truth is this: the NDIS is not what it should be.
It is not delivering the outcomes Australians with disability need and the Australian public expects.
And that is why, to enable the NDIS to reach its potential, we need to – in essence – reboot.
Let me explain what I mean.
Rebooting Disability Services and Supports
The Albanese Government was elected last May.
Since then, we have worked hard to get the NDIS back on track.
Last October, I appointed an expert panel to conduct an independent review of the NDIS.
That panel – co-chaired by Bruce Bonyhady and Lisa Paul – is consulting widely and will report back to me this October on:
The design, operations and sustainability of the Scheme;
And what needs to be done to build a more responsive, supportive, and sustainable market and workforce.
But that doesn’t mean we’re sitting on our hands until the final report.
For instance, last October we created a Fraud Fusion Taskforce.
Currently, the Taskforce has 38 investigations underway, involving more than $300 million in payments.
It has uncovered and is investigating criminal syndicates that have taken advantage of the Coalition’s shoddy administration.
Last month alone – the Taskforce received more than 1,700 tip-offs about people trying to rip off the NDIS.
Obviously, I can’t go into detail about ongoing investigations, but I can say this.
It is sickening that criminal syndicates are stealing from people with disability.
I am determined that every dollar of NDIS funding goes to people with disability.
And that is why we want to follow up every tip-off and prosecute every criminal.
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Another area we couldn’t wait until October to act on concerned the warehousing of NDIS participants in hospitals.
In 2021, a Victorian Government analysis found that, on average, it took 160 days to discharge NDIS participants after they were medically ready.
Imagine that was you: You’re ready to go home but have to spend another 160 days in hospital.
That was not just an immense waste of hospital resources, it showed that, under the Coalition, we had a return to the Dickensian reality the NDIS was designed to end.
That is not just unacceptable. It is an insidious violation of human rights.
That’s why the Albanese Government put people and supports in place to slash the delays in hospital discharges.
We’ve already reduced discharge delays from 160 days to 29 days – and saved the hospital system around $550 million a year.
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Systemic reform
Let me quickly detail the fundamental systemic flaw identified by NDIS participants:
The system is too rigid.
It throws up Kafkaesque barriers to access, lacks empathy, gouges on prices, is too complex, and often traumatising to deal with.
As a consequence, people with disability often feel they are caught between some predatory providers on one hand and an impersonal government agency on the other.
That must change.
We must improve the participant experience, we must make people’s lives easier rather than harder – because, in the process, we will reduce waste, inefficiency, and inflationary costs.
In other words, we must ensure that every dollar in the Scheme gets to the people for whom the Scheme was initially created.
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I’ve already spoken about the Fraud Fusion Taskforce.
The elimination of unethical practices in the Scheme goes beyond tackling criminal syndicates.
It’s also about – through a renewed focus on evidence and data – getting rid of shoddy therapies that offer little to no value to participants or desperate parents.
Unethical practices include:
• pressuring participants to ask for services or support ratios they don’t need;
• spending participants’ money contrary to their plan;
• asking for or accepting additional fees for a service; and
• offering rewards for taking particular services not on a participant’s plan;
There are many great service providers from long-standing, not-for-profits to new family-run, small businesses.
But untrustworthy providers taint the reputations of quality service providers who work hard to support participants, and are meeting their registration and compliance obligations.
Participants who have been preyed upon by these unscrupulous types have reported feeling ‘de-humanised’, exploited as ‘cash-cows’.
We need to have more NDIA staff in place with the skills to ensure providers deliver outcomes and don’t over-charge.
The bottom line is I want to maximise the benefit of every NDIS dollar we spend.
