PRESS RELEASE: Australia’s most vulnerable treated as the vegemite between a slice of State and Federal Government
“While the Federal Government pushes forward legislation to force states into fixing gaps in supports for people living with disability, advocates ask why not plan so it doesn’t end up costing 10 times more”, said Mr Night today, National Disability Sector Advocate and the person responsible for delivering the largest disability events in Australia’s history.
“The real story of NDIS individual plan and budget blow outs is that we removed case management, face to face quarterly accountability, independent oversite and checks, took away the driver at the wheel that made sure things were done well. It resulted in a direct increase in rorting, plans not being correct, over funding and underfunding, people eligible that should not be and treatment of human beings like cars being manufactured in a factory.
“The simple fix that requires zero legislation change is face to face, independent case management, which we have done for decades because it works. That was thrown out by NDIS, even though it is the number one strategy that proactively prevents rorting, budget blow outs and gets things right.
“The current state of things has been created by design, removing professional judgement and trying to simplify decision making for complex cases, not reading professional reports and recommendations, not doing face to face planning, automating decisions and plan roll overs, removing independent safeguards, refusing codesign of policy and procedure with the experts in the field, ignoring every advocacy agency and professional body, and ignoring 80% of the recommendations of a huge Disability Royal Commission.
“It is impossible to ensure services are funded right when you don’t make them sit down in a room, face to face, with participants and stakeholders and have real conversations every 3 months to ask if it is working, are funds right, is everyone doing what they should, what options are being explored outside of NDIS and are we doing everything possible to support people to thrive and become more independent.
“I know people on almost half a million dollars a year of NDIS funding that haven’t seen or talked to a NDIS planner in years and just keep getting their plans ‘rolled over’. The running insanity is that many don’t need the same level of funding and could have their plans reduced by hundreds of thousands of dollars or more because they are doing really well, but NDIS refuses to even have the conversation about saving money. At the same time we see other people dying and fighting for basics.
“The tragedy is that people living with disability are terrified by what is to come, states are not even close to ready or even have a plan of how they will buffer proposed cuts because no one has details. Hundreds of thousands Australian’s are possibly being removed from funded supports and at the same time, NDIS refuses to even have face to face planning meetings and do basic due diligence to fix budget blow outs.
“The fixes to budget blow outs are good, face to face case management, simple, local safeguards and professional decision making instead of tick and flick paperwork. Instead of these fixes the plan seems to be to continue to not do these basics, but to just things poorly for less people to save money.
“The reason for the lack of confidence in the sector right now with our leaders is that we had a huge Disability Royal Commission and an NDIS Review that provided hundreds of recommendations and 80 percent or more of those have not been actioned and have been ignored.
