Freedom of Information request — Request consultation process

Thank you for your correspondence of 20 July 2025, in which you requested access under the Freedom of Information Act 1982 (FOI Act) to documents held by the National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA).

Scope of your request

You have requested access to the following documents:

“…All technical advice, official guidelines and assessment tools related to the following:–

Accepted professionals who will be able to complete a Vineland Recognition of allied health professionals not covered by AHPRA including social workers, speech pathologists and play therapists

Official guidance related to the inclusion or exclusion of play therapy in children’s NDIS plans.

Process used in determining the funding periods in plans (monthly, quartely etc).

Justifications and assessment tools used to specify stated therapeutic disciplines within capacity building budgets.

Assessment tools and guidelines used to justify a ‘typical support package’ for a both child under 9 and adolescents with autism or intellectual disability, including internal operational guidelines, advice, memos and staff updates.

Documentation and advice guidelines provided by TAPID regarding assessing access decision, criteria for approving non typical support package for autistic children and adolescents…”

Practical refusal

I am authorised to make decisions under section 23(1) of the FOI Act.

I am writing to advise that the work involved in processing your request in its current form would substantially and unreasonably divert the resources of the NDIA from its other

Why I intend to refuse your request

We have conducted preliminary searches of the NDIA’s systems, using all reasonable search terms that could return documents relevant to your request. In addition, we have consulted with relevant NDIA staff who could be expected to be able to identify documents within the scope of the request, including staff who are knowledgeable about how to conduct searches of the NDIA’s systems. Those searches indicate that the NDIA has a voluminous number of individual documents that may be relevant to your request, with 7 business areas identified as holding relevant documents and an estimated timeframe of 2-6 hours per business area to locate and extract the documents.

On my reasonable estimate, I consider that there is more than 1,000 pages worth of material that falls within the scope of your request as currently worded, not including annexures. At a conservative estimate of 1 minute per page, this would take an FOI officer more than 16 hours to simply review and collate the documents extracted by the relevant business areas to determine if they fall within scope.

The documents that are assessed as being within scope of the request will then need to be reviewed for any sensitivities and possible exemption under the FOI Act and scheduled, we will need to consider any consultations and carry these out if required, a decision will need to be made on each document, and a decision letter prepared. This will significantly increase the hours that it will take an FOI officer to process your request.

As a result, I am of the view that the work involved in the processing of this request would, pursuant to section 24AA(1)(a)(i), substantially and unreasonably divert the resources of the NDIA from its other operations.

Request consultation process

You now have an opportunity to revise your request to enable it to proceed.

Revising your request can mean narrowing the scope of the request to make it more manageable or explaining in more detail the documents you wish to access. For example, by providing more specific information about exactly what documents you are interested in, the NDIA will be able to pinpoint the documents more quickly and avoid using excessive resources to process documents you are not interested in.

To reduce the scope of your request, you might like to consider:

Limiting the request to a single topic; or
Limiting the request to a maximum of two topics; and
Requesting current versions of documents; or
Providing a date range for the versions of documents sought

You have 14 days from the date you receive this letter to contact me and do one of the following:

This is source page 3 of an official document.

a. withdraw your request b. make a revised request c. indicate that you do not wish to revise the request.

During this period, you are welcome to seek assistance to revise your request. If you revise your request in a way that adequately addresses the practical refusal reason outlined above, we will recommence processing it.

Please note that the time taken to consult with you regarding the scope of your request is not taken into account for the purposes of the timeframe for processing your request.

You can contact me by email at foi@ndis.gov.au.

Alternatively, you can reply in writing to the following address:

Freedom of Information Section Information Release, Privacy and Legal Operations Branch Reviews and Information Release Division National Disability Insurance Agency GPO Box 700 CANBERRA ACT 2601

If you do not contact me within this period, that is by 30 October 2025, I will issue you a formal decision letter that confirms my reasons for refusing your request.

Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions.

Yours sincerely,

Rachelle Senior Freedom of Information Officer Information Release, Privacy and Legal Operations Branch Reviews and Information Release Division