Disabled ‘hindered by lack of accountability’

A disability expert says the NDIS will exacerbate the lack of accountability in the intellectual disability care sector.

A senior government disability expert says the lack of accountability in the intellectual disability care sector when it comes to teaching skills and independence for clients will be exacerbated by the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

Flinders University professorial fellow Richard Bruggemann yesterday told a Senate inquiry there was little incentive for service providers to help ­people become independent ­because they would lose clients or funding.

He said there was no accountability on meeting broad promises to improve the wellbeing of clients or allow them to make choices about activities or treatment. “Our system has almost a ­degree of magical thinking ... this is a sector that measures, monitors and reports nothing,” he said.

Professor Bruggemann said the $15 billion system’s lack of ­social welfare checks and balances would be equivalent to education providers failing to produce results showing how their students were performing.

Professor Bruggemann, who is also the senior practitioner in the South Australian government’s Communities and Social ­Inclusion Department, said Australia had created a generation of people with cognitive disabilities that had been made more dependent than they needed to be ­because they were not given ­choices about their lifestyle.

“When we think of abuse, we largely thought of the physical, sexual abuse that you’ve no doubt heard a lot about in your inquiry, but I think there’s such stuff as subtle abuse,” he told the inquiry into violence, neglect and abuse against people with disabilities in institutional and residential care, which sat in Adelaide yesterday.

He said there should be an ­independent disability commissioner who would hold organisations to account for the care promises they made, and to have an oversight of the NDIS.