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

NDIS participants should be valued and respected as experts in their own experience and deserve to have their needs met under the very scheme that was designed to do just that. Healthcare professionals' advice that disabled people rely on for their NDIS applications should be valued and respected as the product of expert work done by professionals. These are simple and basic propositions. However, the NDIA, under the leadership of this government now for more than two years, has consistently ignored the expertise of disabled people and ignored the reports and advice of healthcare professionals. What is the NDIA, under the leadership of this Labor government, focusing on instead? Still we see a focus on reducing people's plans and giving people the runaround through the AAT.

Every week, my office receives calls from disabled people, and I want to take the Senate through the journey that so many are still experiencing at the hands of the culture within the agency even two years in to this Labor government. Disabled people are still being required to submit endless reports from healthcare professionals, doing so at great personal expense. After gathering these reports they submit them to the agency to support their application or change-of-circumstances review. The agency is then too often either not reading or disregarding the reports provided, sometimes even the ones that agency representatives themselves have asked for. It is just so frustrating.

Just this week my office received calls for help from participants who have had funding slashed by more than 50 per cent despite the evidence that they submitted. This results in a continuation of fear because the agency is cutting people's plans against expert advice, denying disabled people choice and control and forcing them to appeal to the AAT. Speaking of the AAT: let us discuss and explore what a costly, wasted exercise this process often is for people. Too many people are still ending up at the AAT. Too many participants do not have the luxury of expensive legal representation and face adversarial barriers from lawyers representing the agency, who treat the AAT like a courtroom and disabled people like criminals.

Of course there is a great personal cost to a disabled person challenging a decision at the tribunal, but let's for a moment face the wasted of taxpayer money in this process too. I'll give you an example. A participant requested a support from the NDIA that was calculated to cost around $29,000 in one year. So far, in fighting that request over a three-year period involving 19 direction hearings, the agency has disclosed that it has cost them no less than $109,000. This does not make sense. Another example I can give to the Senate is of a participant who fought the agency for two years at an overall legal cost to the agency of $186,000. This participant was eventually awarded almost every support that they had requested through the review. That was more wasted public funds fighting disabled people for support that they should have received.

This situation has been laid bare by the independent reviewers appointed by the government as part of a process announced after the election. They are so alarmed by what they found they have made their own submission to the NDIS independent review, stating, 'Many decisions that we reviewed were based on decision-makers focusing on the cost to the scheme rather than the valid request of supports according to the law. In many cases t there appeared to be a failure to follow the evidence in expert reports and listen to lived experience.' This is a product of a broken culture that is still being promoted by this government, a culture which treats disabled people as though we are trying to get a support that we are not entitled to. This needs to end.