Submission regarding Independent Assessments
Thank you for your email and clarification. I certainly would appreciate my correspondence being drawn to the committee’s attention. However, beyond this, the reason for drawing the pre-existing documents to your attention was that given the reports particularly from the company Disability Services Consulting1 I have lost all confidence in the bona fides of the NDIA in relation to consultation over anything.
It is significant that the submission that the agency has provided to the Committee is written jointly with the Department of Social Services. It has also been my observation that NDIS offices tend to be co-located with Centrelink and related welfare infrastructure. Therefore, it is time for the NDIA to stop the nonsense about it being an insurance agency. It is not an insurance agency and it does not deal with people who need insurance2. It deals, rather dishonorably,
2 If the NDIS is insurance, then I must accept a curious fiction that says there was a time in utero when I was neither disabled nor legally human, and then some 40 years later a government decides to ‘compensate’ me for unspecified adverse events in utero, which medical science cannot even fully explain today. How do you put together a risk analysis that is credible? This is where the insurance argument begins to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.
Additionally, I do not pay an insurance premium to the NDIA and, did not come to the NDIA from another insurance firm. Rather, coming as a result of the closure of the NSW Government’s closure of the NSW Department of Disability, Ageing and Homecare and the transfer of all Homecare clients to the NDIA. This was not something I participated in willingly. Transfer to the NDIA was an act done under the duress of knowing Homecare was closing and, given my extent of disability I had nowhere else to go but the NDIA. I submit that this is a point of aggravation for me and others – we just want the services (and constancy of service without the stress) available with Homecare. To the claim that the NDIA represents ‘social insurance,’ this phrase is neither defined, nor does it appear in the legislation.
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with people who need services and care because of permanent disability. We do not need the further complications that independent assessors or further plan reviews would incorporate into our lives. Again, what we need is services. The old state-based system seemed able to do that without annually drowning me in paperwork and repetitive assessments – my disability has not gone missing in 47 years, though I would very much like to.
What the NDIS delivers is paperwork, reviews, stress, and stupidity. Also, I do not need a first-year social worker to tell me what my goals are; neither do I or many others need plans - nor do I need a similar such person to write an inaccurate, condescending and probably illiterate independent assessment (given
But then, there is a lot about this whole Scheme that goes unanswered. One thing that does not go unanswered is the dubious way governments have employed the term ‘insurance’ now and in the past. History is instructive here, because in a major address some years before he became US President, Ronald Reagan said:
Now -- we're for a provision that destitution should not follow unemployment by
reason of old age, and to that end we've accepted Social Security as a step toward
meeting the problem.
But we're against those entrusted with this program when they practice deception
regarding its fiscal shortcomings, when they charge that any criticism of the program
means that we want to end payments to those people who depend on them for a
livelihood. They've called it "insurance" to us in a hundred million pieces of
literature.
But then they appeared before the Supreme Court and they testified it was a welfare
program. They only use the term "insurance" to sell it to the people. And they said
Social Security dues are a tax for the general use of the government, and the
government has used that tax. There is no fund, because Robert Byers, the actuarial
head, appeared before a congressional committee and admitted that Social Security as
of this moment is 298 billion dollars in the hole.
But he said there should be no cause for worry because as long as they have the power
to tax, they could always take away from the people whatever they needed to bail
them out of trouble. And they're doing just that. ( Ronald Reagan, A Time for
Choosing (aka "The Speech"), Air date 27 October 1964, Los Angeles, CA,
[https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/ronaldreaganatimeforchoosing.htm](https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/ronaldreaganatimeforchoosing.htm) and
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=A+Time+for+Choosing+Speech+YouTube&&v
iew=detail&mid=A91A025A52E727C72418A91A025A52E727C72418&&FORM=VRD
GAR (You Tube) as at 15 June 2019)
While this is a US example and Mr. Reagan spoke about the old age pension, apply the same scrutiny to the NDIS and you see it for what it truly is – a welfare program. The NDIS money comes from an additional charge on the Medicare Levy and States have redirected disability support funds to the Commonwealth NDIS Agency. It’s a government agency holding taxpayer money; the NDIS Agency itself is structurally under the administrative umbrella of the Human Services Department. This is the Commonwealth’s welfare department. It was never beyond the decision-maker in my case to look at my Centrelink file; the agencies are not that separate – NDIS messages often come via a Human Services email and weblink, while the NDIS portal is part of MyGov. This Committee can and should ‘pierce the veil’ and look behind NDIS falsehoods about insurance to see the true welfare scheme. This will benefit not only me, but countless other participants as well. 3 See https://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=20903 A longer version of this is presented as Appendix 1.
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The competency and quality noted in prior NDIA plans and planners). Someone seems to have forgotten the adage that life is what happens to you while you are making other plans. Furthermore, this level of planning seems reminiscent of Soviet era planning. It has always been unclear to me why we need to import failed central planning models into Australia. And let us not assume that this plan has much to do with the participant whose name is on it. The document is ultimately approved by the agency.
Disability Services Consulting provided an assessment on its website that indicated the NDIA had virtually ignored all the concerns coming out of its calculation on independent assessors. For my part, I see this proposal as flawed as planning ever was. The independent assessors have a minimum of one-year clinical experience (which is virtually nothing) and come from a range of third-party agencies, which allegedly make them notionally independent from the NDIA as well as the participant. However, as DSC pointed out one of the tenderers is linked to a former CEO of the agency itself. How this cannot be an inherent conflict of interest is astounding. On this basis alone, I have no confidence in the NDIA’s bona fides when it comes to what is really intended with the independent assessors. As I have told the Royal Commission, I agree with DSC’s interpretation of the situation to the effect that independent assessors may not be lawful, given that the legislation has not been enacted yet. It would be my earnest encouragement to the Senate to block any such legislation, so that independent assessors cannot operate.
Please remember that in all of this, it is people like me with disabilities who will have to spend their entire lives in either the disability or the aged care sector. Neither is attractive, indeed after the readers of the Aged Care Royal Commission Report the sector should be described as positively repulsive. Why would you put a dog there, much less a human being you claim to love? In many respects, the same is true of the disability sector, yet our governments, local, state and Commonwealth, continue to provide financial grants and tax holidays to the church and charitable sector. It almost seems as if the NSW Would Royal Commission into Police Corruption, which also considered serious failures in child protection, never happened. Much the same could be said of the McClelland Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Abuse and Neglect – after its findings, I struggle to work out how any responsible government could put vulnerable people be they aged or disabled in the care of the church or charitable sectors.
Yet this is exactly what I face, as do many others, and this is called reform? It seems that independent assessors will make even this harder, because the false insurance imperative requires the agency to continually reduce its costs to supposedly maintain its economic viability. In saying this I point out that should anybody say the NDIS is interested in my human rights they should reflect on the Act itself. All references to so-called human rights are conveniently restricted to the covering clauses4 which means they have little or no relevance
4 See the Objects of the Act (Part 2)
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to the operational and substantive sections of the Act. Not surprisingly the section about financial viability is within the operational sections of the Act. Let us be in no doubt about the true intent of the NDIS. It is to provide the minimum possible to people most in need. Fortunately, that is not me yet as I have a loving family who can still support me (with some assistance) financially and physically. I write acknowledging that not everybody shares my good fortune and, regardless of whether they do or not the thing we all share is that we have been duped. Like any snake oil salesman, the NDIS, its planners, asessors and advocates came along making promises that they could not fulfil. The emergence of this terrible plan for independent assessors is yet another concession about how few of those promises the architects of the NDIS ever intended to meet.
It is time to bring back the old state-based system of government run disability services provision. The NDIS should be declared an absolute failure. The independent assessors will only make my and many other people’s lives worse as we lose more and more access to services. Ironically, if they were to look at my plan, they would find a large amount of money unspent. This is largely because either the services do not exist, or they make it so hard to engage them that you give up in disgust. A clear example of this is that while I receive discrete care services a day, there has been a suggestion that I can also access physiotherapy. As I already access hydrotherapy, the additional value is not clear to me.
And if I did decide to access further therapy it would be down to me to make a claim, find someone to provide a report to the NDIA as to the necessity and, potentially wait many, many, months for the agency to respond. If the agency declined my request, I would then have to launch an internal appeal, followed by an external appeal to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. Having done this twice before, these processes are two-year odysseys. No one really has the time for such a process and, I submit that it is an active abuse for any government to require someone with a disability to go to that extent to claim a good or service.
I want to have time to live my own life, which means I do not want to waste 时间 with all the processes just outlined. For the plan managers, care coordinators and providers, it seems quite clear that they would have me rushing here there and everywhere to fill my days with their services. It is quite clear that that they are servicing their own financial interest and, it has little or nothing to do with my interests as a client.
However, both before and after the NDIS my family and I had our own life, which we are quite happy with. We enjoy things like going to the theatre, are part of several social groups and associations and, are generally content. My mother is also a full-time worker, I work part-time and, also, I am a part-time
5 See Part 6 of the Act (Finance)
- student.
It is another the jungle to manage the demands of the current providers we work with. However, there seems to be in view that the NDIA and its providers must be seen to keep the disabled busy to justify each entity’s eexistence. Keeping me running around on some sort of planning and implementation mouse wheel, while threatening the withdrawal of funds which I use (through the back door of independent assessment) is reprehensible behaviour.
It shows what the NDIA really is and, much the same can be said of their partners cum providers. It is a self-serving malevolent arrangement between the nation’s governments and the third sector to keep us the disabled “in our box and in our place” while they both make money and political capital out of our misfortune. One of these places many of us are kept is in poverty and under the thumb of charity. Any notion of us truly exercising choice was never seriously considered, possibly because those in power knew that if we were ever truly asked what we wanted, the answers we would give had implications that made them uncomfortable or redundant.
Preparing to lose services under the guise of independent assessment is one thing – losing your life due to a lack of care and the NDIA’s lack of oversight is quite another. This is exactly what Anne-Marie Smith from Adelaide experienced,6 as did David Harris.7 However, should independent assessments become the economising exercises that many expect, I anticipate the outcomes will be the same. Sadly, it is unlikely that the agency will be particularly distressed. Everything comes down to the holy dollar.
My preferred route out of the dark, black policy hole that is the NDIS is in Operation Warp Speed Australia. I have unashamedly borrowed that name from the US but the idea is similar. If what has been done to produce vaccines for Covid 19 in about 12 months, why not put the same energy and focus into finding cures and treatments for various forms of disability. This would be based on the same worldwide cooperation and governmental policy focus and funding. I believe this is an emergency because the NDIS looks no better than all of the charitable processes that have proceeded and, references already been made to the various Royal commissions that found the same churches charities wanting in their care and protection of the vulnerable. Why are we making the same mistake again and, funding it with public money?
It may not affect me in my lifetime but ultimately, I would like to know that future generations do not have to go through the lived experience of disability. With cellular and genetic technologies emerging from the lab to clinical trial applications, this is the time to be daring and make plans for the post-disability world. I highlight these hopes in Appendix 1.
Yours faithfully,
Adam Johnston
12/3/21