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

Can I just ask you to clarify? I do hear what you're saying around the fact that the methods that we're discussing haven't been developed. There is a desire from the community, though, to understand, at least in principle, how the government intends to differentiate between relevant and irrelevant impairments, given the amendments that you have now put to the chamber. The language that you have used in item 11 schedule 1, for instance, where, at item 36 on page 29, line 18 after subsection (1), you have inserted, 'including for the purposes of assessing whether a participant's disability support needs arise from impairments in relation to which the participant meets the disability requirements or early intervention requirements'. The effect of adding the words 'arise from' is to create two types of impairments. You've got the types that arise from and then you've got the types for which they met the access criteria in the first place. The small amount of flexibility introduced by the words 'arise from' is welcomed by the community. However, there remains no clarity as to how you will differentiate between 'arise from' and the impairment for which you gained access—irrelevant and irrelevant, for the purposes of the budgetary method.