The Senate Community Affairs
Legislation Committee review of
the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Getting the NDIS Back on Track No.
1) Bill 2024
Community Affairs Legislation Committee submission email: community.affairs.sen@aph.gov.au
DATE: 12 July 2024
Touching Base Inc
Why we are writing
Touching Base members are infuriated that Minister Shorten has used inflammatory rhetoric around sex workers as a stalking horse for bigger changes to the NDIS - when in the past he explicitly warned others of this tactic when prior NDIS Minister Stuart Robert tried the same puritanical trick.
Judging from the significant pushback from the disability community and our allies in righteous response to his odious hypocrisy, it is obvious he has misread where the community stands on this and he is flogging a dead horse.
Key Points
- Touching Base remains deeply concerned about how aspects of the amended NDIS Bill before the Senate represents a power grab by the Federal Minister to remove significant decision making powers from the Disability Reform Council.
- As it stands the Bill will also unacceptably erode the rights of people with disability to exercise choice and control. The Minister would gain other powers to directly override the choices and options of NDIS participants in many ways; whilst reducing opportunities for a review of decisions being made.
Gaslighting
There has been gaslighting going on with views being expressed that it was never the intention to include NDIA funding for access to sexual services. This is disproved by deferring to the first Liberal NDIS Minister Mitch Fifield, who when asked about this at The National Press Club in 2013, said:
This issue has come up before. When the Senate was having public hearings into the NDIS legislation, this particular proposition was put: would the sorts of services that you mentioned qualify as reasonable and necessary? I’m not going to, I guess, give an on-the-spot ruling, but what I will say is the NDIS isn’t there to provide a range of things which individuals, whether they have a disability or not, might seek to have as part of their life. It’s there to provide supports so that they can do and achieve things which are made a little more difficult because of the disability that they had.
I’ll leave the comments there. Partly because, you know, I don’t want to have a headline that says, you know, “Minister says x, y, z is in, shock horror”.
So I’m going to leave it there because the essence of the NDIS is working on a plan for an individual. Is: what are the goals, what the plans, what are the objectives for an individual? And each plan will be different, each plan will be personalised, and I’ll leave it at that.1
Fifield’s position is consistent with the objects of the NDIS Act, as opposed to
more recent Ministers. We have also been reliably informed by someone who was in
the room, that in earlier days the Disability Reform Council also determined to
include sexual supports under the scheme.
The issue of sex services is again being used as a red herring. What is required to
address this issue properly is to follow the longstanding request of over 40
organisations for the NDIS to develop a Sexuality and Relationship Policy in
conjunction with the disability community2.
Please block the bill
On reflection, this Bill has been put through a rushed legislation drafting process that
makes a mockery of proper process.
The replacement bill must include a mandatory requirement for co-design for any nsignificant changes to what supports are to be funded and have clearly defined principles of co-design entrenched in the legislation that must be adhered to.
We implore you to block this Bill and send it back to the drawing board where proper community consultation can take place.