The proposed NNDIS budget cuts are ridiculous on all levels.

By giving government officials extended control over what functional capacity assessments require, you are dismissing the years of qualifications and experience which the health professionals who produce these assessments undergo. The plan to reduce the consideration of individual circumstances in creating NDIS plans is not only illogical, but in contradiction with the ICF checklist. Finally, the complaints about the cost of the NDIS completely ignore the significant size of Australia’s disabled population, and cruelly dismiss the horrendous impacts of insufficient NDIS funding on a disabled person. As such, the budget cuts should not go forward.

This bill is about reducing access to the NDIS. To do this, you are proposing to tighten the requirements a person needs to meet to be eligible for the NDIS.I understand where you’re coming from. You don’t want the NDIS to be a free money service. I totally agree. If my mother paid less tax to fund services like the NDIS, we might be able to go out to eat more often. Additionally, as an NDIS participant myself, it is essential to me that I do not take more than I need, and that I pay my own way. When you’re disabled and constantly on the receiving end of help, independence and a sense of pride and dignity become vital and on the forefront of your mind. But allowing officials in the NDIS to tighten eligibility criteria is illogical. Whether a person is disabled enough to need help is not up to politicians. You are simply not qualified. To make such judgements is to make a mockery of the years of training which allied health professionals undergo. For my plan reassessment, a fifty page report resulting from almost a year of assessment was submitted. This report was written, reviewed, and reviewed again by many professional NDIS providers with degrees and years of experience.

This report is what defined my eligibility. This report, written by professionals, was a standard and thorough assessment of my functional capacity. The idea that unqualified officials can set standards for how disabled a person must be to receive help is ludicrous and an insult to all allied health providers.

You are also proposing to assess disability in a way which excludes people’s personal circumstances. I am a disabled person. I have chronic fatigue because of my disability. I live with my mother and have no dependents. Providing me with sufficient funding to allow me to support myself and a couple of dependents entirely would be insane. I do not need the funding, and so it would be an utter waste of taxpayer dollars. Alternately, a single parent who, by some impossible magic, had the same exact disability as me (which is impossible, but this is a hypothetical) would need more support. People with disability have the right to live our lives just as able bodied people do, and if our circumstances yield us unable to do what an able bodied person could do, it is the responsibility of the NDIS and its support providers to bridge that gap. To exclude a person’s circumstances from the assessment of their functional capacity would at best lead to ridiculously improper amounts of funding (both too high and too low), and at worst be a statement that the Australian Government

• does not believe that disabled people deserve to live normal lives. It would be a statement that

• disabled people are lesser and undeserving of the opportunities provided to non-disabled people.

Additionally, while the Bills Digest states that the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing and the NDIA stated that bill is an attempt to align Australia more closely with the standards of assessing functional capacity defined by the World Health Organisation, this bill, as stated by the NDIS Reform Advisory Committee does the exact opposite. If you actually read the standards set by the WHO in the ICF checklist, the key for the rating of the severity of an issue is what percentage ‘of the time’ the issue is present. This is obviously not an assessment of how well as disabled person can perform in a vacuum, separated from all outside influences. People do not spend percentages ‘of the time’ in a vacuum. Thus it is clear that the intention of the WHO was for disability to be assessed in the context of the disabled person’s life. Any other form of assessment would be utterly arbitrary. If Australia aims to maintain and improve its compliance with the WHO, and thus its reputation in the international community, it would do well to not pass this bill.

All of these unreasonable propositions are being made based on the fear that the NDIS costs too much, and is ‘not sustainable’. The Bill’s Digest highlights the worries of the government about the large and rapidly growing cost of the scheme. The is no denying that the NDIS requires an extreme amount of money. No one in their right mind would question that. What the government seems to forget, however, is that the disabled population in Australia is not a mere one or two percent. According to the ABS, as of 2022 over 1 in 5 Australians had a disability. Over 20% of the population. Look around you. At least one in every five people you see is disabled. Disability isn’t just this random quirk people have. It’s pain. It’s mind numbing fatigue. It’s light-headedness and stress and isolation. However a person feels about their disability, it, in one way or another, impacts every second of their lives. To you, NDIS funding is a bunch of numbers. To me, it’s the difference between having a life worth living, and just surviving. NDIS funding, and the services I get from it, are the wall between me and agony - real, unbearable, physical agony. The amount of funding I have dictates when I can go out, where I can go, what I can study, how much I can study. It is certainly an understatement to say that my access to NDIS funding determines whether it is worth me even being alive. And my disability is considered ‘mild to moderate’! NDIS participants may just seem like numbers to you, but we are real people. Over a fifth of the population. Every cut to the NDIS destroys a person’s life. Each dollar you save by tightening regulations is another person left in extreme pain, or unable to leave the house or complete basic tasks. More people than you might think sometimes cannot even eat or drink without help. I, someone who can walk and run and jump, fall into this boat. People spend hours upon hours of their lives, hundreds of their own dollars, to get NDIS funding because life without access to the services we can get through the NDIS is horrific.

This is not fun. We do not apply for the NDIS because we are bored. We do not drag our fatigued, aching bodies to appointments and plan meetings because we want to. We do it because we cannot

• go without the funding.

The idea of our funding being reduced is not point of inconvenience - it is a

point of fear. We are not numbers. We are real people. And there are a lot of us.

In sum, the budget cuts are an insult to the expertise of allied health providers, in conflict with the

standards set by the WHO and a cruel punishment to disabled people. They must NOT go forward.