NDIS not a ‘limitless Magic Pudding’ as reviewers suggest major changes

A rebooted Australian disability system should focus on delivering baseline services for all people with a disability and move away from individualised National Disability Insurance Scheme packages, particularly for young children, as cost blowouts threaten the scheme’s future.

Professor Bruce Bonyhady, an original architect of the NDIS who is now co-chairing the government-commissioned review of the $35.1 billion scheme, will say in a series of speeches on Tuesday that the fundamental shift is crucial to curtailing the scheme’s spiralling costs and improving equity for Australians who are being left out.

Schools should provide a foundation level of support to children and individual support packages through the NDIS would then be built on top of that, the scheme’s reviewers say.

Bonyhady will warn that the NDIS is already in danger of overshooting the national cabinet’s 8 per cent growth target and cannot be seen as an unlimited resource.

There were 610,500 NDIS participants in the latest quarter – almost 100,000 of whom are children under seven years old – and the scheme has cemented as the federal government’s fastest-growing budget pressure this decade.

While NDIS Minister Bill Shorten has emphasised the 8 per cent target is not a cap and the scheme will remain open to all Australians, Bonyhady will emphasise that clamping down on costs is crucial to making sure the NDIS remains for future generations.

“Some people seem to believe that rising costs are not as significant as we have been told. I am here to tell you that, if anything, the outlook for rising costs is even greater than you have been told,” Bonyhady will say, according to copies of his speeches.

“Let me put it this way: we must stop thinking of the NDIS as though it is a limitless Magic Pudding … unless significant action is taken, the future of the NDIS will, sooner or later, be endangered.”

One part of the NDIS that requires “a complete an urgent rethink” is how it deals with children, Bonyhady will say.

More than 8 per cent of five to seven-year-olds are on the scheme, while national data shows 20 per cent of children have learning difficulties, developmental concerns or disabilities.

“In other words, learning difficulties and disability are mainstream issues … we want children with developmental concerns and delays to be identified as early as possible in mainstream settings through vaccinations and other check-ups.”

The NDIS review panel, commissioned by NDIS Minister Bill Shorten and co-chaired by Bonyhady and Lisa Paul, is forming a view that interventions for children need to be delivered in homes, early childhood settings, schools or maternal welfare and family centres, rather than clinical settings.

NDIS review co-chairs Lisa Paul and Bruce Bonyhady.Credit: Oscar Colman

It is also concluding that the NDIS will only be sustainable if there is a guaranteed foundation of disability support outside individualised plan budgets, which grew at a higher than expected 19.4 per cent annual rate last financial year.

“What has become clear is that – often without intending to – governments, service providers, and some people with disability and their families, have all started to treat the NDIS as a limitless resource,” Bonyhady will say.

“Ironically, governments – while funding the NDIS and worrying about its increasing costs – keep helping themselves to new slices of the NDIS, rather than, in an era of tight budgets, delivering universally accessible services in areas such as health, early childhood, education, housing, and transport.

“Disability service providers also want more, not to mention the examples of fraud and unethical practices. But the NDIS is not limitless, and we all need to stay within the bounds of those limits. That is why we need to change.”

Bonyhady will say that he and Paul were considering abolishing the three-tier system currently adopted by the NDIS. “That approach prioritises the delivery of individualised support to the minority of people with disability who are NDIS participants,” he said.

“We believe there is a need to prioritise the delivery of universal or foundational supports to the majority of people with disability and to create a joined-up system rather than one which is divided into tiers.

“The NDIS is not working for everyone. It is too inequitable – over-delivering for some, under-delivering for many, and not delivering at all for the majority of Australians with disability.”

That baseline support would include information and peer support for all Australians with a disability, and shopping, cleaning and cooking assistance for those who need it, while children with disabilities or developmental delays would receive help at school, home or early childhood centres.

Individual support packages through the NDIS would then be built on top of that baseline, in a graduated way.

People who continued to qualify for an individualised support package would also be allocated an overall package budget that reflects their needs, rather than the current system in which they negotiate individual supports item by item.

Payment systems and price caps will also be reviewed based on concern they are currently “based on poor or incomplete data, are not transparent, and do not reflect market realities.”

The final NDIS review is due in October.

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