Put your money on Bill Shorten’s new National Disability Insurance Scheme laws to be green-lighted this week, with the support of the Coalition. The opposition has made the NDIS Minister squirm for a couple of months, but the need for a new regime to rein in the $42bn scheme’s cost growth is now beyond politics.
Well, not quite. There is still a demarcation dispute between Canberra and the states as to what disability support will sit outside the NDIS after the changes and who funds them. These “foundational supports” are still being negotiated, and while most of it has been behind closed doors, the division has slipped out into the public arena several times in recent months.
Grey areas include how hundreds of thousands of children with autism and developmental delay will be supported inside and outside the scheme. The nexus between mental health support and the NDIS is also a point of contention. Both are causing much angst among the disability community, who fear the political-finger pointing will see vulnerable people left unsupported and scrambling for a seat on that NDIS lifeboat.
Despite foundational supports not being explicitly mentioned in the bill, the states have argued it shouldn’t be passed until they are agreed.
The states don’t get a vote in Canberra. Shorten is a known negotiator, but has said he will “rip the band-aid off” if necessary on the legislation, meaning he will put it up and navigate arrangements with the states later.
The Getting the NDIS Back on Track Bill legislates some of the priority recommendations of an independent scheme review last year, recommendations the government recognises will take years to fully implement.
It provides the “scaffolding” for a system that ensures the NDIS is covering only those Australians with profound disabilities, using a new framework to determine an allocated budget to cover “reasonable and necessary” support.
Critically, that budget no longer breaks down supports item by item.
And once a participant has a budget, they will be required to stick to it rather than allowing them to spend their year’s allocation within months then receive a “top-up”, a practice that has been a big driver of the blowout in scheme costs.
The other major change in the bill is to make clear what is and isn’t an “NDIS support” that the scheme will fund.
White goods, holiday packages, smart watches and club memberships are just a few of the many “outs”. Most are self-evident, but the lists are by no means uncontroversial. Disability advocacy groups have labelled them “highly problematic and ill thought through”, pressing Shorten to ditch them altogether.
The NDIS is a beast of a social insurance program, funding 660,000 people currently and rising. It is profoundly changing many lives. Even bringing cost growth to 8 per cent a year from recent years when its been as high as 20 per cent will still see the current $42bn bill rapidly rise. The bill at least puts in place a system to start that process.
Shorten is losing his lustre with the disability sector in making the changes, and still has a job of work to do to get the states to reinvest in disability services in mainstream settings after putting all their eggs in the NDIS basket. Expect more wheeling and dealing on that front in coming weeks.
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