National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Getting the NDIS Back on Track No. 1) Bill 2024 [Provisions]

Submission 164 - Supplementary Submission

Submission regarding the updated proposed Section 10

for the “Getting the NDIS Back on Track 1” bill.

Please accept this supplementary submission on the changes to Section 10 that the government released on Wed 22nd May, after the closing date for the original submissions had ended.

NDIS Supports

With the new version of Section 10 released the week after the submission date closed, the only way for a support to be classified as an “NDIS Support” is for that support to be written on a whitelist by the minister in a Rules instrument.

This completely destroys the ability to innovate, because you cannot legally access an innovative support - you can only access a whitelisted support.

What this also means is that 28 days after this bill is ratified, it becomes illegal for any NDIS participant to spend a cent of their NDIS funding, because there will be no valid “NDIS Supports”.

The Rules with the whitelist of “NDIS Supports” are not yet written, and this modified version of Section 10 sets up the situation that they will have to be written as an emergency action - many participants will die due to inability to access essential disability supports otherwise.

This emergency action will mean that there is no time for co-design to occur, and sets up the situation where the minister can force unreasonable rules through by withholding essential disability supports until the unreasonable rules are accepted with them.

I cannot trust that co-design can occur when Section 10 effectively makes all disability supports illegal as the start point for co-design. Holding participant’s lives as a threat so that the community –– just rubber stamps emergency rules to prevent their deaths is not and never will be representative of co-design.

UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

The new Section 10 does specify that the minister has to consider the UN CRPD when deciding if a support is a valid NDIS Support. This is an improvement on the original version which was leaving out a significant number of UN CRPD supports.

However, there are still a significant number of issues with Section 10.

• There is no limitation on banning supports that are supposed to be provided under the UN CRPD. When adding a support to the blacklist proposed, the minister can ignore the UN CRPD entirely, therefore enabling them to ban access to disability supports that ought to have been available.

• There is no requirement for the minister to actually look at all of the UN CRPD supports. While they must consider the UN CRPD when adding a support, they don’t have to consider it when choosing which supports to add in the first place. In effect, this means that it would be perfectly legal to only add a quarter of the supports that the UN CRPD enshrines while completely ignoring the other 3/4 of them.