Henry Pike (Bowman, Liberal National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I recently hosted an NDIS stakeholders roundtable in my electorate with the member for Deakin, our shadow minister for the NDIS. It was a fantastic discussion reviewing the complexities of the NDIS and the issues that many families and businesses are dealing with. The coalition has supported the NDIS since its inception. It is a critically important initiative for the most vulnerable in our society.

The member for Deakin and I were pleased to hear from local NDIS advocates, behaviour support practitioners, educators and care providers. Among many other areas discussed was the current lack of flexibility for NDIS participants to choose effective, less expensive services, such as educational therapy, to meet their needs, and the failure of state government to honour their commitments for non-NDIS disability support across health, education and housing. A key theme was the areas of failure where the responsibilities of the NDIS don't marry up with the responsibilities of other areas of state or federal government. We discussed the challenging intersection of the NDIS and early childhood education. Similarly, participants are often falling between the cracks of the NDIS and the state health and education systems.

Following advocacy from local parents, I wrote to the minister earlier this year to seek advice on how the government can create more flexibility within the NDIS framework to empower participants to utilise services that best meet their needs, recognising that educational support is critical to the functioning of younger Australians. Within my electorate, child-focused educational therapy is having a very positive impact on the lives of NDIS participants, including many autistic spectrum disorders, sensory processing disorders, intellectual impairment and a range of other developmental conditions.

While I recognise the NDIS is not designed to directly cover education, families of NDIS participants are advising me that one of their top priorities is to access support that will enable success in an educational setting. Many participants in my electorate are getting strong outcomes from services that fall within the other therapies category; however, the quality auditors that assess these services are becoming increasingly reluctant to sign off on any service that is remotely related to educational learning. Families of participants are advising me that they need more flexibility to enable therapists other than speech pathology and occupational therapy professionals to conduct these interventions through the NDIS.

It is important to make the point that I'm not asking for more funding but more opportunity for participants to spend their existing funding as they see fit. I've argued that increased access to educational supports would, in fact, result in long-term reductions in the cost of the NDIS. NDIS participants, parents and stakeholders in the Redlands are holding out hope that the independent review panel's final report, due next month, will effectively address these concerns.