‘NDIS failed him’: sister seeks action

The sister of a man left to die alone in his apartment wants his death examined­ alongside that of another NDIS recipient.

David Harris, who passed away and wasn’t found for two months at his home, was kicked off of his NDIS payment in 2019. Picture: Roy Van Der Vegt

The NDIS is at the centre of a widening scandal over neglect and mismanagement, with the sister of a Sydney man who was left to die alone in his apartment demanding that his death be examined­ alongside that of Ann-Marie Smith.

While Smith spent the final months of her life wasting away in a wicker chair inside her Adelaide home, David Harris, who lived in Sydney, was kicked off his National Disability Insurance Scheme support payments last year and forced to care for himself.

Harris, who had acute schizophrenia, was unable to do so and two months after his payments were cut, police found him dead in his Parramatta home last July.

Superficially, there are many similarities between the deaths of Smith, 54, and Harris, 55, with Smith — unable to care for herself on account of her cerebral palsy — developing bed sores and malnutrition, and Harris unable to feed himself once he had been removed from any form of care.

But Harris’s sister, Leanne Longfellow, says her brother’s case is even more alarming as it points to systematic failures and a lack of co-ordination, meaning people “fall through the cracks”.

“What happened to Ann-Marie is just horrific but it’s a very different situation to what happened to David,” Ms Longfellow told The Weekend Australian.

“For the last year of her life she was basically tortured, and there is now a police inquiry and other inquiries under way into the quality of care she was receiving and the oversight provided for that care. The scary thing about what happened to David is that there isn’t a bad person to blame, but a bad system.

“My concern is that if the inquiries­ that are under way into Ann-Marie just look at her case with a very narrow lens, it can lead to conclusions that do not apply in other cases such as David’s.”

Ms Longfellow, who lives in Adelaide and has a daughter with disabilities, said the NDIS was only one part of a series of failures involving axed mental health services in NSW, where the level of support provided to her brother gradually receded to the point where he was completely isolated from any form of care.

“Nobody would have known about the death of my brother if I wasn’t basically harassing people about it to find out if he was still OK, which he wasn’t,” Ms Longfellow said.

She said the process of following up on her brother’s death had been “horrendous” and she had major misgivings about the manner in which it had been handled by NSW police and the NSW coroner. “I have been given a number for his case by the NSW Coroner’s Court, but I still don’t know whether they will be holding an inquest,” she said.

“It really isn’t very pleasant, him being reduced to just a number­, and me being told to ring in to check where the case is at. Every part of the system has let him down.”

Federal NDIS Minister Stuart Robert and NDIS Commissioner Graeme Head have so far resisted calls for any broadening of the Smith inquiry to include­ the circumstances surrounding Harris’s death.

An NDIS spokesman said the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission had investigated the matter involving Harris and concluded “there were no breaches of the code of conduct by the provider”.

But ALP government services spokesman Bill Shorten backed Ms Longfellow’s call and said he also feared the inquiry into Smith’s death alone was too narro­w ­in its scope.