NDIA Accountability Project

Neurodiverse Australians denied rights under proposed NDIS reforms

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Submission 2199

  • I was horrified and triggered to the point of a panic attack by the announcement that neurodiverse people were going to be removed from the NDIS.
  • This is wrong and discriminatory
  • I believe that the Australian Government must act for ALL Australians and not create two classes of Australians: the acceptable, privileged and healthy and the despised and disabled. This is Nazi Eugenics territory and I can not believe that an ALP Government – the party which has traditionally claimed to be the friend of the financially and socially insecure - could even contemplate attacking and impoverishing its own citizens.
  • Neurodiverse Australians and Australians on the Spectrum matter. They have fundamental rights and should not be treated as an expense or a problem. The targeting of the neurodiverse in proposed models of reform is a massive denial of basic human rights to one major large subgroup of Australians. It is a clear message that you - as a neurodiverse person - have no value to the Australian Government and the Australian Government does not act on your behalf or in your interest.
  • Other groups who have expressed concern including the vision impaired, Australians with MND, culturally and linguistically diverse Australians and Australians with invisible disabilities. All of these groups - and many more - will be targeted for no fault of their own due to scammers and dishonest people who intentionally rort or overcharge the NDIS for the profit of themselves and their associates.
  • A campaign of misinformation has suggested that many essential services offered to and used by a wide range of disabled people are trivial and frivolous. These services include supports that offer social integration via a diverse selection of life experiences, services that provide means of and tools for connectivity and communication with others, services that provide enrichment of everyday life and enhance quality of daily life experiences, including travel, eating, recreation, exercise, workplace participation, real-time employment, cultural life and entertainment and mental robustness. All of these services make a vast improvement to the personal experiences of people with disabilities. A humane and empathic disability support system would recognise this fact as being paramount. Such a system would also be designed with the input and advice of the end users, who are far more aware of the logistics of the experience of disability and what is needed to achieve equity and access, than any pen pushers or public servants and certainly more than any accountant and cost cutter. The key factor is to enable people with all ranges of disability and health challenges to take a meaningful part in the greater spectrum of the Australian community. NOTHING HAPPENS WITHOUT US.
  • The system should be client-focussed and human-centric. Assessments should be made by qualified professionals with real experience within the relevant sector. People who are known to and worked with the client need to able to inform or challenge decisions. AI-driven models of assessment should not be employed.

Submission 2199

Robodebt demonstrated the shortcomings of any automation of assessment. Despite the clear evidence of Robodebt’s systemic failure and the human cost borne by its victims, the new provisions seem determined to make the same mistake over again, without any learning from the previous and total failure. AI serves nobody except its vast global parent companies such as Palantir.

  • The NDIS certainly does have issues with ongoing economic sustainability, BUT firstly we are putting in effect a use-value and a price on the head of vulnerable Australians. There needs to be more robust policing and investigation of scammers and poor service. Excess profits need to be confiscated and poor providers need to be banned from working in the sector and setting up companies that operate in the sector in the future. Overseas citizens operating and profiting from fraudulent schemes should be deported once charged. There needs to be investigation of the links between disability support companies and organised crime who see the NDIS as easy money. Real people are not lucrative budget lines for criminals.
  • There needs to be more money put into better training of health professionals and indeed more places available for training health care workers and disability support workers to a truly professional level instead of relying upon untrained people and random “aides”, often newly arrived in Australia with little literacy or qualifications and English as a 3rd or 4th language (which impacts on the quality of both care and communication they provide). This reliance upon an army of unskilled, underpaid support staff on precarious part time contracts is part of the greater issue of the ongoing dysfunction and deskilling of the health industry in Australia, including disability support, aged care, childcare and mental health care, due to the for-profit model and corporate interests running the system, and consolidating the provision of services through the access granted by their dependent companies and lobbying successive Federal governments to set up a system that meets the needs of profit- driven health-care corporations and not the needs and expectations of the clients who have direct experiences of living with disabilities and long term impacted health. The commercial health care system has fostered a reliance upon cheap overseas labour and it also welcomes poor regulatory regimes and low levels of scrutiny as high levels of accountability eat into profit margins. We as the government of Australia need to pay for professional level of services and we need to reform education around health care to offer the level of support that people on the NDIS need.
  • Punishing the end users and clients for the greed and bad actions of fraudulent service providers seems to be a perversely back to front response to a major crisis in disability support. I can not understand why we have ended up with such an inverted solution to a clearly visible and understandable problem. We need a system and a government and an economy that has the well-being of ALL Australians, not just the wealthy and healthy, as its central guiding principal.

  • If a humane and caring Australian system of public governance and a generous and relevant scheme of provision for funding disability support is seen as unaffordable, IT IS TIME TO PROPERLY TAX AND EXCISE THE RESOURCES SECTOR THAT PARASITES OFF THE AUSTRALIAN PEOPLE, ESPECIALLY DISABLED, PHYSICALLY AND MENTALLY IMPACTED AUSTRALIANS. THEN THERE WOULD BE FUNDS ENOUGH FOR THE NDIS to sustain itself into the future.

  • I can not believe that an ALP government could seriously plan for and organise a system in which people with a legitimate need are denied appropriate services and support.