Submission to the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment

        (Getting the NDIS Back on Track No. 1) Bill 2024

                                                             12 July 2024

                                                                 Stephanie Travers

To the Hon Senators,

My name is Stephanie Travers. I am an NDIS Participant that lives with Spina Bifida and Psychosocial Disability. I have been on the NDIS for 8 years, am a Disability Advocate having led a Peer Organisation and previous member of the NDIS Participant Reference Group 2018-2020.

My submission is very simple and straightforward. I believe this legislation is a covert attempt to rewrite the NDIS Act in its entirety and not purely an attempt to deal with fraud or rorting. The amendment does not simply cover powers to regulate fraud, but seeks to overturn previous Tribunal and Federal Court determinations of both who can have Access to the Scheme and what is deemed ‘Reasonable and Necessary.’ Individual Participants, Advocates, Tribunal members and Judges have spent nearly 10 years now determining these cases, and a large amount of case law is based upon the current wording of the legislation. Many spent years in court fighting for their rights to basic supports to live their lives, and robust case law now exists to provide a road map for what can and can not be funded by the scheme. This Act ‘wipes the slate clean’ on those decisions and determinations. It is over 200 pages that both restricts the right of certain people to access the scheme, narrows the scope of funded supports, removes the right to Reasonable and Necessary supports and does all this and more with yet to be determined NDIS Rules and Regulations.

If the Bill was designed to purely deal with fraud and rorting, I would support it, but this is not the case. It is also being presented without alternative support options such as Foundational Supports and the Navigators system being both designed, implemented or in place. This puts People with a Disability in tremendous risk.

We are currently already seeing the powers of the CEO and the role of NDIS Rules being used in compliance measures to circumvent legislated appeals processes. This Bill would enable them to employ even more yet to be released NDIS Rules to strip power from participants. Current ‘compliance’ activities are being currently undertaken by the NDIA to deny claims, under the guise that the support is not ‘reasonable and necessary’ or an everyday expense. These have been everything from denying transport to see family that they deem to be not necessary, to the refusal of respite and in my case it was refusal of claim to help unpack boxes and the decluttering my home to make it safe to live in. These compliance activities are NON REVIEWABLE decisions, and they are currently being done in increasing

• numbers due to a loophole that allows the agency to deny claims without appeal. I fear this Bill further empowers the agency to do this, targeting compliant participants to claw back pennies on the dollar, instead of scrupulous providers where the true waste and fraud of the scheme is occurring. It is causing undue stress and anxiety to participants and their families, and they have no right to review any of these arbitrary decisions. This was not the spirit of the scheme.

The current government states these measures will be implemented with a system of co- design. The Minister has continuously expressed examples of co-design in the last few weeks such as the Town Halls and meetings he has had since the NDIS Review. What the Minister is referring to is NOT co-design. In fact, the Town Hall meetings were conducted so that only questions given with advance notice and pre-screened were allowed to be asked. The community is currently being ‘talked to,’ rather than ‘talked with’ in the design of these changes. Even recently, the co-design groups that were announced through the Participant First Scheme referenced 8 groups, where only 2 participants would be on each working group, that would meet 4 times over 12 months. So for all of these legislative changes, only 16 participants would be participating in co-design over 4 meetings. This, in light of legislation that would have drastic effects on the lives on 640,000 Australians and affect hundreds and thousands of hours of support enabling them to live a full and productive life. The co-design efforts here are tokenistic, the Disability Community can clearly see this, and it is why the Community is currently so vocal that they are not being involved in changes and decisions that affect their lives.

We have spent 10 years learning this scheme, for many participants and their families it has been a hard system to learn and navigate and is akin to learning another language. We know the terminology, we know our plans, we know what the LAC role is, what a Plan Review etc and while it is not perfect, it is the scheme we have, and we have adapted our lives to suit the supports we have been funded for within it. For many of us, including myself, it has been life changing.

When we voted for the current Labor Government, many of us met with the Minister in the years prior in Opposition and expressed what we saw as failures in the scheme from the then Liberal Government. These referred to things such as long wait times for Reviews, having to go to Tribunal to fight for basic supports, having to fight each year at Plan Review and not being able to see draft plans. None of this has changed since the current government took office, in fact, it is worse. Wait times are now the worst they have ever been, some taking 9 months for basic Change of Circumstances, still no draft plans, the LAC role has been removed and due to low staffing the majority of people aren’t even being Plan Reviewed at all and just rolled over year upon year upon year. Plan ‘Check-In’ phone calls have caught participants unawares, new plans appear a week later with slashed support budgets. This is NOT what the community asked for. We asked for the current failures of the scheme to be rectified alongside input from the Community.

rewriting plans without official review, how can we entrust them to the powers affirmed by this legislation. We cannot simply hand over rights to the CEO to ascribe Rules, simply because they have said to trust them on co-design. The current behaviour does not warrant trust.

Many People with a Disability and their Families, including myself, are extremely worried and concerned about the proposed changes in this Bill. And many of them have not fully read it, nor have the capacity to understand exactly what the legislation allows for. If they did, I think all participants would be concerned. This legislation is not about fraud, it is about re- designing the scheme, limiting the flexibility of supports, limiting ability to appeal decisions, limiting access to the scheme without alternatives in place first, cutting billions in dollars from plans and putting more power in the hands of the agency to ascribe new rules and regulations to do the above.

I ask that the Senate does not pass this Bill.