I live in Melbourne and am the parent of 3 children who are NDIS participants. I have been through several planning meetings, and reviews, on behalf of my children and I would like to submit my thoughts re: the planning process, in particular:
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the review process and means to streamline it; and
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the incidence of appeals to the AAT and possible measures to reduce the number;
My three children have autism spectrum disorder, and have all made considerable gains with intensive ABA therapy (26 hours per week). My son’s first plan (received in January 2017) did not have adequate funding to cover an intensive programme, so I submitted an application for a Section 100 review. After many months, and thanks to intervention from my Federal MP, I was finally contacted in July 2017 by the planner who was going to conduct the review. I asked the planner if there was further information she would require – extra reports, etc. and she told me it wasn’t necessary. A month later she contacted me to say the application for extra funding had been unsuccessful. In the decision letter it said there was a lack of new information to support the claim, even though I had previously offered to supply extra reports. I considered this to be an incredibly disingenuous, and convenient, response. Unless there’s a bandwidth limit for employees of the NDIA, or they don’t have access to a telephone then they should not be able to reject reviews on the basis there is not enough information, if they haven’t made any effort to establish if the required information is available.
I have recently had a Section 100 review completed for one of my other children, with a similar outcome, whereby the planner called me during the process to ask some questions about my daughter’s progress. When the decision letter came back denying an increased level of funding, the planner cited lack of evidence, but this was not something she had addressed during our phone conversation. She never gave me the
opportunity to provide the extra information she was looking for.
Having been through the review process twice, in my experience it is very much a wasted step in the process. Given the lack of communication from planners conducting the review, it seemed there was no real interest in trying to fairly assess a participant’s needs. In both cases, in citing “lack of evidence”, without ever looking for it, it seemed the reviewers were eager to look for any excuse to reject the claim. It seemed they wanted to lob the ball back into my court, with the possible hope that I would be too dispirited to continue the fight to the AAT.
The AAT process is long – my son’s matter was recently settled twelve months after the application was first made. During this time, I had to pay for my son’s therapies out-of-pocket which put a huge amount of financial stress upon my family. I drained my savings account, and delayed things like getting my car serviced (to the point where my mechanic told me I’d been driving around on unroadworthy tyres for the past 6 months). But for participants who are unable to scrounge up their out-of-pocket costs, then it would be very difficult to go through an AAT appeal. It is a tier-two system, where only those with money, and energy, will be able to proceed. Many people with a disability already live in poverty, so the decks are already stacked against them.
If the NDIA want to reduce the number of cases going to the AAT, then first of all they’ve got to want to do that. If rejecting a review is a deliberate strategy to hopefully cull those participants who cannot financially or emotionally endure the twelve month (plus) long battle at the AAT, then obviously they have no reason to change what they’re doing.
If, however, this is not the case, then the Section 100 review process has to be more effective. There needs to be communication between the participant and the planner who conducts the review. If a planner is going to reject an application on the basis of there not being enough information, there needs to be a process where they have shown exactly what information they were lacking, and the steps they went to in order
to find the information. Perhaps there needs to be some kind of right of reply from the applicant, before the review is finalized. In the interests of an equitable system for all, the internal review process needs to be more than just a rubber stamp upon a previously made decision.