Kristy Trajcevski NDIS Bill Submission
My name is Kristy Trajcevski. I am 44 years old and an NDIS participant since about 2014. I live in what used to be an NDIS trial site. This means that I was lucky enough to experience the NDIS pretty early on.
I have also been fortunate to not have had my access to the scheme questioned. My disability is such that I feel pretty confident that it would be referred to as ‘significant’. I guess you could say that I am lucky to be in this cohort.
I was going to write a submission pointing out all the ways the draft legislation is wrong. However, I believe that you know that this is wrong. I believe you know that whatever the legislation says about definitions of ‘functional capacity’ and ‘reasonable and ‘necessary’ that it will need to be tested in Court to work out what those terms actually mean.
I believe that you know we will fight. That’s why you are stripping our right to review away. You are hoping that we will eventually give up. You are wrong about this too. Maybe that is why you are rushing this through without consulting us.
You claim that the NDIS has lost its ‘social licence’. I do not agree. The government has lost its nerve. If the government was worried about making this thing sustainable it would have made it so that disabled people had access to properly funded disability advocacy so that when they were faced with problems the advocates could help solve the problems, without having to seek administrative review. The government could have done a lot more in the beginning to identify shonky providers offering shonky programs a lot sooner.
The NDIS was never going to make every problem for disabled people go away. There were problems before, and there will most definitely be problems after. I think that what the disabled community hoped for when we proposed making ourselves commodities was that service providers would actually begin working with us to meet our needs. I think that we hoped that they would recognise that they actually needed to supply individuals with a service that we wanted to ‘buy’ from them.
Instead, what has happened is that most providers changed their marketing, added the words ‘choice and control’ to every thing while begrudgingly allowing us to switch providers (but not without heavy fear mongering first about what the new provider will or will not be able to provide) and just continued on in the way they did before. These services that fear monger are completely missing the point that the client would not be choosing to switch
providers if they had been providing good service in the first place.If service providers have only changed their marketing, then it is no wonder the same problems persist.
That participants have Choice and control in all aspects of services that they receive for me is the most important feature of the scheme. Knowing that I can control how, when, where what and who provides my services allows me and my family piece of mind. To have this control taken away from me will be detrimental to my life and mental health as well as that of my family, who will have to pick up the slack, like they did before the NDIS.
It amazes me that the government is using the fact that there are bad support workers in the industry as a justification for these changes. Of course there are people who are bad at support work in the industry. There are people who are bad at their jobs in every industry! Support workers are more noticeable now I think because they are everywhere and that is because NDIS participants can be everywhere now. Do you know what though? The community noticing bad behaviour by support workers is actually a good thing because those support workers might be noticed and they can lose their jobs. This protects disabled people. This is what the NDIS was designed to do.
In addition to the above point, I would also add that to most people who have not had much interaction with disabled people support work looks like an easy job. It is true that the certification requirements are not very onerous currently and because of this lots of people can get qualified that are not suitable for this type of work. There’s a lot that the general public do not see that goes on behind the scenes before a person goes out to the shopping centre for that coffee usually.
Also, someone in the community might see a worker sitting on their phone ignoring the client. That could be the case for some support workers, although there are lots of reasons why that support worker might be on the phone. For example, googling a topic of conversation, writing reports, looking up movie times. As one of my support workers always says ‘it’s an easy job if you are bad at it’. The good support workers need respect and recognition. All providers need to improve their hiring and training processes and practices. It is not the fault of the scheme that this perception of support work being easy exists and that companies are hiring people who are the wrong fit either for the industry entirely, or for a particular client. This goes back to provider hiring and training.
Do you remember how it was during Covid? Where we were not allowed to go very far away from our houses for very long? Sure, we are not at risk of being fined if we are a bit late back from running an errand, but it is the same in the sense that we are restricted in what we can do in a day because we have to live within our means as far as a community participation budget goes (actually we have to live within our means in all NDIS budget categories). These
restrictions mean that most of our lives are really scheduled. We have to be ok with this arrangement because without community participation funding, many of us are unable to go out to do all the things that having a life requires, be they work, dog walking, doctors/therapist’s appointments , holidays or dinner with friends. I am sure having experienced lockdown most of you can appreciate the mental load it will create if too many restrictions are placed upon our community participation, not to mention the economic and social impacts in the community if most disabled people are restricted to their homes.
The most significant misconception about NDIS though is that it is easy to get, stay on, and that disabled people can get more funding easily. I think it needs to be remembered that NDIS is a government scheme with all the inherent requirements that government has to access government money. I said above that eligibility has never been questioned for me but this is because I was already eligible for state government support when I started on NDIS, but I hear of many other people with less obvious disabilities having to continually prove eligibility. Now I am not arguing that access to the scheme should be easy but I am saying that this public perception that anyone with any disability is eligible is ludicrous. In order to be eligible a person has to show that their disability severely affects their daily lives.
In order to assess continuing needs the NDIS asks for a functional capacity assessment done by an Occupational Therapist. The Occupational Therapist then needs to write a report for the NDIS making recommendations on the support needed by the person. I have just gone through the process myself , it was very detailed and covered all aspects of my life, including questions like , how many times per day do I go to the toilet and how long does it take? Can any of you answer those questions? Do you even think about that? I am not arguing that this is inappropriate, my point is that most disabled people accept that there needs to be more scrutiny into how they live their lives because they need this funding. I am appalled that the government is using arguments like not having enough evidence from disabled people and having to justify having NDIS.
In closing, I do agree that this scheme needs some change in order to be sustainable, however the sustainability should not be at the expense of people with disabilities, their families and dedicated support workers who try to uphold the rights of people with disability.