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

The Joint Standing Committee on the National Disability Insurance Scheme has been meeting for 10 years now, and in that time it has completed 20 inquiries into the scheme. I have loved being part of this committee and having the opportunity to work with its members and the secretariat to scrutinise the policies and processes of the NDIS to make sure that they work for my fellow members of the disability community. I give special thanks and send my deepest respect to the disabled community, who have added incredible amounts of value to the committee's work over 10 years. Your knowledge, your expertise, and your lived experience of how this scheme works and how often it does not work has been invaluable to our work as a committee and has improved the quality of reports that we've been able to make to the parliament in an unparalleled way. Thank you for consistently showing up to inform us.

In reflecting on what we have heard as a committee over the past 10 years, a few main points continue to emerge that still need to be genuinely addressed. It has become crystal clear to the committee that harnessing the lived experience of participants and their plan nominees—their intricate knowledge of how the NDIS operates in a critical context—is absolutely essential to being able to properly reflect in our reports and in our work the way in which the scheme needs to work for people. This means, to put it simply, that the agency needs to engage in genuine collaboration, or co-design, with participants in both defining the problems and designing the solutions, and in so doing avoiding harm to participants through policy failure which then ultimately results in additional costs to the scheme and negative impacts for participants. It is vital that participants are actually leading the co-design processes rather than just being consultants within it.

The independent-assessments debacle was a shining example of government failure to engage in genuine co-design. This harmful trial should be a lesson to any decision-makers about the future of assessment and access processes. The Productivity Commission specifically recommended a needs-and-aspirations-based assessment, rather than a purely functional assessment, to identify an individual's reasonable and necessary care and support needs across a broad range of life, including their aspirations and the outcomes that they wish to achieve. This has been echoed time and time again by participants themselves, because the absence of these processes causes great distress when required supports are not funded.

In 2020, the committee recommended that the NDIS:

… provide fully costed, detailed draft plans to participants and their nominees at least one week prior to their meeting with an official with the authority to approve the plan.

'Draft plans'—that is such a simple change that would make a transformational difference, giving each participant the guarantee that they would actually have the opportunity to see their plan, to read it in detail, to think about it and to consider it before it is approved. My God! Nobody in this space would buy a garden shed without having the opportunity to look at it properly first, yet the agency continues, to this day, to deny participants the uniform right to see a draft plan. We are still waiting for this recommendation to be implemented, and every member of the committee will continue to press the agency to make this change.

Disabled people have the right to choice and control over their lives and to be able, as necessary for them, to determine their goals. These rights are enshrined in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, a convention to which Australia is a signatory and that the NDIS Act itself explicitly references, so any policies and any changes or modifications to regulations, rules or guidelines of the NDIS must be compliant and consistent with the UNCRPD. This also means making broader funding and budget changes in line with the UNCRPD.

We often hear in the media about the so-called cost of the scheme. We rarely hear about its incredible benefits for disabled people, our families and our communities. The committee has often heard of those positive impacts of the scheme, but the full extent is not well understood. We need comprehensive research about the full extent of the positive impacts of the NDIS, along with the negative impacts that would occur if funding to the scheme were to be capped or reduced. The only research conducted that gives us even half of the information that we might need was commissioned by National Disability Services in 2021. This concluded that in relation to the NDIS and NDIS funding—I will quote it, and I will quote it again and again during the course of future months as we debate incoming NDIS legislation—decisions must be:

… based on sound, transparent and publicly-available analysis, not made behind closed doors based on secret modelling.

Now we are back once again at a moment in time under another government where such documents are being withheld from this very Senate, despite those documents having been repeatedly requested. This is despite the government winning an election partly because they pledged to the disability community that they would not repeat the same practices of secrecy so modelled by the previous coalition government. Yet week after week, month after month, the Senate returns and requests those documents and the government refuses to cough them up.

The NDIS joint standing committee, its members and the disability community have a critical role in ensuring the transparency that participants and their family members need in relation to the NDIS. I will continue to play my role in this place, alongside colleagues, in ensuring that the committee plays that role and that those pieces of vital information are delivered to the public.

Question agreed to.