Hollie Hughes (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Mental Health and Suicide Prevention) Share this | Hansard source

Minister, just to get some more clarity around this, you made reference then to functional assessments to access the scheme and that parents currently pay for that. Parents don't currently pay for a functional assessment. They pay for paediatric appointments, sessions with the occupational therapist and sessions with a psychologist, and they pay for reports from allied health or medical providers to then access the scheme. If there is a move to a functional assessment, we don't know what it's going to look like and we don't know who's going to deliver that. For example, are they disability specific or are they age specific? We don't know what those functional assessments will look like.

Will the scheme only be accessible by a functional assessment? I ask that because what I'm concerned about is what happens when parents are trying to ascertain what is going on with their child. We're not talking about kids who are born vision impaired or hearing impaired or have Down Syndrome whose disability is quite easily defined from birth. We are talking about kids that are diagnosed with profound autism—and even the kids that are diagnosed with a global developmental delay that is not a permanent and lifelong disability—and intellectual disability. Those things don't tend to be able to be diagnosed, in many cases, particularly for those at the more profound and severe end of the spectrum, at around 1½ or two years, at the very early mark. Up until around three years of age is when you're sort of capping it off—kids that are at that very profound end usually have a diagnosis. But, to get to that diagnosis, there are appointments with GPs, there are appointments maybe with maternal nurses, and there are appointments with paediatricians to try to work out what's going on. A lot of parents, first-time parents—my son was my second born, and I was just told, 'Don't worry; he's not speaking because he has got a sister who talks for him.' I think it took us four or five paediatric and psychology visits to do the assessments that were global best-practice assessments—not determined by government; determined by international bodies—to review his cognitive impairments or cognitive capabilities and his autistic traits and to look at and monitor his behaviour. So there was a significant cost outlay to get to the point of diagnosis that said he had classic autism, intellectual disability, global developmental delay—hello, hello, hello!

But we had already spent thousands and thousands of dollars in travel costs—because we were based in regional New South Wales—to Sydney to see a specialist. There were multiple specialists that were required to be seen—all of those things. After a family spends thousands and thousands of dollars in trying to ascertain what is going on with their child, diagnosed with these sorts of disabilities, is it then going to be the case that the NDIS says: 'That's great; you've been diagnosed with level 3 autism, intellectual disability, blah, blah, blah. Now, here you go—go and find someone who provides functional assessments. Go do that, pay for that, and then we'll decide whether we let you into the scheme'? Are we, in effect, in some ways, doubling the cost of what families are going to pay to access the scheme?