Jordon Steele-John (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

[by video link] The work that has been done by the Joint Standing Committee on the National Disability Insurance Scheme as it has considered its report into the government's so-called independent assessments proposal has been, I think, some of the most important work done by a parliamentary committee in recent times. It was a very long and thorough investigation that benefited tremendously from bringing in the voices and experiences of disabled people across our community and, indeed, across our country as we analysed and examined in detail the proposals and assumptions being put to us as a committee in relation to one of the most significant changes in the NDIS's history. In fact, I would argue it is the most significant proposed change to the NDIS since its creation nearly 10 years ago.

Let's just recap what was being put to us as a committee. We were asked to explore a proposal, placed in front of us by the government, that spoke to a plan, which had been formulated, that in many ways constituted a fundamental change to key aspects of the scheme and key principles upon which the scheme was founded. The NDIS was created to ensure that disabled people are able to get access to the supports and services that we need to live our lives just like everybody else, and those supports are to be guided by the key elements of our lived experience, the information and evidence provided by our trusted healthcare and support professionals and the goals that we have set, as disabled people, as participants in the scheme within the plan.

The proposal put before us by the government was one where those principles would be undermined and shifted so that, instead, the amount of money that you receive, the amount of money that is allocated in your plan, would be determined based on the outcome of an assessment by a so-called independent assessor, who would be somebody whom you have never met, somebody whom you may not meet in person, somebody who may have no relevant experience, no prior experience with you and no relevant expertise in relation to the disability or impairment that you have. Based on their singular assessment, information would be fed into a so-called budgeting tool that would then result in a pot of money with which you would have to make do and mend as a disabled person. It was a disastrous idea, one which was opposed from the very beginning by disabled people. It was in that context that we began our investigation. All these many months later, I'd like to draw the Senate's attention to some key aspects of what we, as a committee, discovered through the process of our investigation.

First of all, I think it's probably evident to many people that, in putting forward this proposal, the government and the NDIA demonstrated a complete institutional failure to consult and engage with disabled people on nearly every aspect and element and moment in the creation process. The design, the trialling and the attempted implementation of this policy were completely out of touch with what the community expected or needed. The outcome of this failure of a process was the causing of great distress to thousands of disabled people across the country. Basically, after spending as much time as we did as an inquiry looking into this proposal, it seemed pretty clear that the government was attempting to shift the result of its own mismanagement of the NDIA—the result of the failure to lift the staffing cap, the result of poor training among planners and officials provided by the agency and the result of directives, implicit or explicit, to reduce plans. All of these things were coming together to create an NDIS experience that was bad for people. The result of that was then attempted to be shifted onto the participants themselves.

It has to be noted that, through the course of the inquiry, we, as a committee, were presented with a picture of an inquiry of an agency that was almost institutionally unwilling to be open, transparent and accountable to the people that it serves. It became very clear that, instead of genuinely engaging with and codesigning the biggest reform in the scheme's history, the NDIA and the government took a forceful top-down approach that not only wouldn't work, but would also go on to exacerbate existing inequalities within the scheme and force people to be subject to deeply inappropriate and unsafe assessment processes. Not only was the proposed assessment process and the tools selected for it rejected and opposed by disabled people and their families, but it was seriously scrutinised and rightly critiqued by the very sector expected to pick up this workload, the allied health profession.

We heard evidence from the community that spoke to the inequalities experienced by people accessing the NDIS or attempting to access supports for the NDIS. Importantly, we heard very clearly the connection that was being drawn between these experiences and the solutions that were proposed as being solutions by the government. The oversimplified, to the point of being wrong, approach that the government took when designing this policy fix relied on deeply flawed data that reduced the diversity of people's experiences within the NDIS, the average statistics that poorly reflected the reality of the lives of the people within the scheme.

We know that there are big balances to overcome to ensure that the scheme is equitable, but at no point throughout the process was the government's proposed solution the obvious and logical answer. In fact, it was found to be the antithesis of progress in the scheme. The crux of the evidence we heard and the findings made throughout the inquiry can be boiled down to a very simple message: disabled people led the push for the creation of the NDIS, disabled people are the experts who understand how the scheme should operate and disabled people are the ones who should lead any reform process that occurs.

Before concluding, I will bring the Senate's attention to a very concise diagram created by the committee to illustrate the differences between how the agency and the government approached this process of reform versus how they should have done. It is listed, I think, in chapter 4. We laid out very clearly that a proper policy design process for the NDIS should involve a process by which we go first to policy design, then to extensive consultation, then to revised policy design, then to trials and pilots, then to revised policy design and finally through to the announcement of the decision. This logical co-design based process stands in direct contrast to what the agency and the government ended up doing, which was to design a policy, make an announcement in relation to the decision that the said policy would go ahead, implement trials, then consult on the results of those trials, followed by a kind of surface redesign, which ended up with the proposal being dropped. The result of this broken policy creation process was that many disabled people during one of the most stressful periods of recent years for us, going through the COVID-19 pandemic, also had to fear what would be next in relation to our NDIS, whether we would keep the supports that we so desperately need. This must never happen again, and as we move forward with the NDIS, we must cling to the principle of 'nothing about us without us'.