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

Submission 274

As I sit and ponder what specific elements of the “Getting the NDIS Back on Track #1” Bill 2024, I am faced with 2 very distinct realisations, firstly that my health I currently in a bit of a dip, which has significantly reduced my capacity to produce a document up to my usual standards and secondly that this could be my last opportunity to provide input into a piece of legislation that if passed will functionally end the NDIS that I and so many others spent years fighting for. With those rather stark realisations front and centre in mind, I wish to spend what little energy I have explaining why I and hundreds of thousands of other people do not want this Bill to pass.

The Bill has serious structural issues that cannot simply be addressed with a few amendments, and despite the significant number of amendments already made, the core issues remain untouched. Just a few of the serious concerns:

• The Bill fails to ensure adequate protections from the God Powers granted to the minister and the CEO, particularly around information gathering and the ability to kick someone out of the scheme if they fail to respond and the debt recovery measures
• The Bill fails to ensure co-design with disabled people is a legislative requirement for any future minister seeking to change the rules
• The proposed budget setting and needs assessment processes MUST be known before the bill is allowed to proceed, and such is the critical nature of these 2 processes; they MUST be contained within legislation and not left to the Rules.
• Many of the changes enacted in this bill are a direct response to the NDIS Review’s recommendation to, in effect, make changes to prevent our external review rights from being maintained. Any reduction in our ability to seek arbitration or external review up to and including the highest court in the country can only be seen as a direct attack on the rights of disabled people and must not be allowed to proceed.

We can all concede that the NDIS is not currently functioning as well as it could, nor is it successfully achieving the deep transformational change needed within the wider population so that some of the long-term hurdles are reduced. In doing so, it is helping to spread some of the long-term budgetary pressures across other areas and, indeed, into the private sector. Equally, there are cases where criminal elements have taken advantage of vulnerable individuals, and the systems currently in place have failed to adequately address such issues to better protect those who need it most, but as I have addressed in this submission and my previous submissions, the current failings are not a result of inadequate legislation but rather governments and bureaucrats who have failed to share the vision of what the NDIS could truly be if it had been given the chance and the profound changes that would have resulted if the NDIS had been allowed to grow and mature, led by disabled voices along with a government that shared the vision in a deep and enduring spirit of true co-design. The problems the NDIS currently faces are not a result of a failure to legislate but rather a mismanagement and white-anting by a decade of governments that do not share the vision, a failure to ensure that disabled voices are leading the direction the scheme moves in, failure by numerous bureaucrats that have not shared the vision and not being led by a minister or a government that shares the vision have utterly failed to implement and operationalise the legislation in the way necessary to achieve the outcomes this scheme was capable of. So now, as the government seeks to “Get the NDIS back on Track”, the government seeks to do what it knows best by using the legislative equivalent of a sledgehammer rather than making the effort to acknowledge how we got here and seeking to restore the scheme to its original path. Rather, this legislation turns back the

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

Submission 274

clock on disability rights and leaves us in frankly a worse mess than where we were a decade ago at the start of the NDIS trial sites. This legislation is fundamentally flawed at its very core, conceived by people who do not share the vision of what the NDIS should have been (and with a government willing to make the right moves, it is still capable of becoming). This legislation is not written with a mind to upholding the rights of people living with disabilities, nor was it written by people who truly understand what is needed to implement the UN CRPD and the UN’s 2030 Noone Left Behind agenda. This legislation will not address fraud, will not better protect NDIS participants from those who may seek to do them harm and while it may have some general downward pressure on the operational budget envelope, it will do so at the cost of ensuring that Australia once again plummets to the bottom of the OECD pack in it’s treatment of disabled people while simultaneously thrusting innumerable numbers of disable people and their families back into crisis which will result in higher unemployment as disabled people are no longer able to work due to lack of proper supports, family members will be once again forced to leave paid employment to take up roles as around the clock carers for their loved ones and just when we had a glimpse of a real opportunity to end institutionalised disability care for good, we will see the massive efforts since the deinstitutionalization movement began in 1974 laid to waste. Not only does this bill fail to set us up to meet our obligations under the UN CRPD and the 2030 agenda, it will ensure that another generation of disabled Australian’s are shoved away, out of sight, told that their future and their right to be seen as equal with their non-disabled peers does not align with Australia’s budget aspirations. Rest assured, there is another way: we can have our cake and eat it too, but it would require a government with the kind of vision not seen since the Rudd / Guillard / Rudd years that gave us the NDIS in the first place.

Thank you for your consideration in this most important matter. My future, and the future of hundreds of thousands of other people, quite literally depends on what you do next.