NDIA Accountability Project

Impacts on choice and control for people with psychosocial disability

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Submission to the Senate Community Affairs Committee

July 12, 2024

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

Dear Senate Community Affairs Committee,

Thank you so much for the opportunity to pass further comment on the NDIS Bill and its amendments.

We wish to introduce ourselves as the Australian Psychosocial Disability Collective, a grassroots lived-experience systemic advocacy group campaigning to protect the rights of people with psychosocial disability in the context of the NDIS. We are a group of first-hand NDIS participants, who experience daily severe and enduring struggles of psychosocial disability, and we are facilitated by a lived experience advocate-ally.

Based on the APDC’s assessment of the legislation, and amendments, contained in the Bill (Getting the NDIS Back on Track Bill 2024), we believe that this legislation is deeply flawed and harmful to disabled people.

These changes to the NDIS Act are an attack on the core principles of the NDIS.

These principles are:

  • Choice and Control
  • Reasonable and Necessary Supports
  • Being enabled to live an ordinary life
  • Use of the social model of disability
  • The human rights of disabled people are upheld

Many of these are things which ordinary people take for granted, but which are particularly essential for disabled people. Firstly, to survive, and secondly to have anything like an ordinary life. The amount of control and coercion we have to navigate and survive in order to live our lives is generally unfathomable to non-disabled people.

Much of the current debate being driven by Minister Bill Shorten seems to focus on fanning ignorance around how disabled people use the NDIS, and has moved away from any form of legitimate debate. No examples nor information about the incidence of alleged funds misuse is offered in this narrative. One example is somatic therapy, which has been publicly mentioned at least twice as if it is something wasteful or terrible (and equated with crypto currency). Yet it is a well-documented, valid form of therapy based on neuroscience, and recognised here in Australia. Somatic therapy can be particularly helpful for capacity building.

Key concerns held by the APDC about the NDS Reforms

Key concerns held by the APDC about the NDIS Reforms, as outlined in the Bill, include:

  • Losing the right of having your needs properly assessed, rights to appeal if the assessor gets it wrong
  • The right to have an ordinary life, based on your personal goals
  • The dismantling of choice and control for participants
  • The right for NDIS plans to include the complexity of individual’s disability needs and lives
  • The processes by which plans are calculated and funded are dramatically changed; moving from reasonable and necessary supports to reasonable and necessary budgets is not a slight change - it’s huge
  • The introduction of classes of participants, which is mentioned throughout the legislation, opens the door to discrimination and neglect based on subjective treatment of disability type and or other demographics
  • These changes that frame people into classes and disability types dehumanises people with a disability, and abandons a rights-based approach towards disability more broadly
  • The policy segregation of people with a psychosocial disability through the creation of a specific early intervention pathway
  • The enablement of a legalised Robodebt style approach being used against significantly disabled people, who are arguably far more vulnerable than general social welfare recipients (some of whom appallingly died after being targeted)
  • The significant and arbitrary narrowing of what is defined as an NDIS support
  • Changes to the legislation which grant immense and unprecedented powers to the NDIS Minister and NDIA CEO, to impact and control disabled people’s lives (ironically something the current minister fought vociferously when he was in opposition)
  • Reducing choice and control of supports which disabled people need to live is a regressive change, and is a return to the very things the NDSIS was set up to address

People accessing NDIS for support know very well that reform of the Scheme is badly needed. However, focus needs to be on the waste and complexity experienced within the NDIS rather than the current focus which seems to be more on reducing support and funding to participants, and how plans are calculated and funded.

Disabled people know how desperately the NDIS needs meaningful change, both for its sustainability and accessibility. This is about our future. We want meaningful progressive change with our human rights at its heart - and this is not it.

In the original Bill as tabled

Nearly every measure has the potential to curtail choice and control, and significantly change participants’ experience of NDIS for the worse. Added together they completely dismantle disabled people’s choice and control in the scheme. The amendments do not fix this curtailment, even if that was their intention.Whilst the new bill is an attempt to get the NDIS “back on track”, it is not fixing the NDIS - it is eviscerating it.

We ask that this harmful Bill be withdrawn, and any new legislation be written with the specific input of a broad range of NDIS participants.

Sincerely, Australian Psychosocial Disability Collective (APDC, about us: https://www.apdcollective.net/about-us)

Reference for concerns about the Bill: https://jec.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/24.07.05-Explainer-on-NDIS-Bill-Amendments.pdf