NDIS founders lash ‘mishandling’ of scheme

Two NDIS founders lash the government and the scheme’s agency for mishandling the $25bn a year scheme.

Former National Disability Insurance Agency chairman Bruce Bonyhady. Picture: AFP

Two of the founding fathers of the National Disability Insurance Scheme have lashed the federal government and the scheme’s agency over how they have mishandled the $25 billion a year scheme, leaving hundreds of thousands of people with disabilities insecure about their coverage and millions more out in the cold in terms of support.

John Walsh, an architect of the original NDIS, and a former board member of the National Disability Insurance Agency that runs it, will tell a disability conference on Thursday that while all governments, state and federal, had botched the scheme’s implementation, the federal government bore particular responsibility.

“Australian governments, collectively, have let down people with disabilities,” Mr Walsh said in a pre-recorded interview.

“I can’t begin to express the combination of arrogance, incompetence and power that the Commonwealth government brought to this - it’s a pretty nasty combination. It has cruelled the opportunities for people with disabilities.

“I don’t think the NDIS, as envisaged, has ever been implemented. I look at it as a lost opportunity,” he said.

And Bruce Bonyhady, the inaugural NDIA chairman and another deeply involved in the scheme’s original design, said the sector had lost trust in the agency he formerly oversaw as it sought to rein in costs.

“The NDIA has had excessive fixation on the management of scheme administration costs,” Mr Bonyhady told The Australian ahead of his presentation to the Disability Services Consulting “Where To From Here” conference on Thursday.

“Rather than accept the complexity inherent in the case of each NDIS participant, they’ve gone for short cuts, which are counterproductive, penny wise and pound foolish.”

The disability sector has been in uproar since the Morrison government sought to bring in a new form of assessment for NDIS packages for those 460,000 currently on the system and another 80,000 expected to become eligible in the next two years.

Rather than relying on a participant or applicant’s own health team’s assessment and other expert reports of need in terms of “reasonable and necessary” NDIS supports, the plan was to use independent assessors appointed by the NDIA.

The proposal, which disability advocates worried could see people qualified in physical disabilities attempting to assess need for those with psychosocial disabilities in just one interview, was dumped in an extraordinary meeting of commonwealth and state disability ministers earlier this month.

Federal NDIS minister Linda Reynolds had put the proposal on hold in March in the weeks after she took over from former minister Stuart Robert, promising to consult the sector on the issue.

Senator Reynolds has now committed to co-designing a new assessment method with participants and the states, but insists reform is required to ensure scheme sustainability given its rapidly rising cost, projected by the NDIA to exceed $40 billion a year by 2025.

“The costs of the NDIS are now on a trajectory far greater than was foreseen when the Scheme was designed and legislated,” Senator Reynolds will tell the conference in a keynote speech.

“The average payment per participant has increased by 12.5 per cent per year for each of the past three years. This is much greater than both wage inflation and the assumptions in the 2017 Productivity Commission report which were about 2.5 per cent per annum in per participant costs.

“Put simply, when costs are going up at 12.5 per cent a year and we were expecting and budgeting for 2.5 per cent, we must carefully examine cost drivers to ensure the NDIS can endure,” Senator Reynolds said.

“While the Commonwealth Government is committed to fully funding the scheme, we all know that for any taxpayer funded scheme, demand driven cannot mean unlimited.”

But Mr Bonyhady said co-design was problematic when trust in the NDIA was irreparably broken with those in the sector.

“You cannot co-design or sustain a successful system when you’re fundamentally distrusted by the people you exist to serve,” he said. “The Agency must urgently rebuild trust.”

Mr Walsh said he remained concerned the answer to cost sustainability would be to deny reasonable and necessary services to people with disabilities.

“In the absence of a consistent and equitable way to allow entry to the scheme and allocating packages I think government will strangle approvals so it will become a much more difficult scheme to negotiate,” he said.

He and Mr Bonyhady have both raised concerns that the overall National Disability Strategy embarked on 10 years ago to improve the accessibility of mainstream services for the more than 4 million Australians living with disability was neglected in order to roll out the NDIS.

In addition, the $200 million a year Tier 2 program providing capacity building of people with disabilities through peer support networks and disability support organisations was absorbed into the Department of Social Security.

“The NDIS has become an oasis in the desert – while roughly 500,000 people are accessing supports – those outside get very little or nothing,” Mr Bonyhady said.

“You’re either in or you’re out. It’s deeply inequitable. We need to build up the supports available to those not eligible for the NDIS.”

Senator Reynolds will offer some hope in her address.

“A functioning community-based support system (Tier 2) would contribute to the sustainability of the NDIS by ensuring people with disability have improved access

to community and mainstream supports as their first point of call,” she said.

“It would be a tragedy for all four and a half million Australians with disability if the NDIS became their only option.

“The services specifically for people with disability, through the NDIS and otherwise, are not and should not be the only focus for improving the lives of people with disability.”