Independent Member for Kooyong Dr Monique Ryan has called on the Albanese Government to address fundamental flaws in its NDIS reform legislation before it is debated in Parliament next week, after community consultation revealed widespread anxiety about its potential impact.
This week, Dr Ryan conducted two community consultation sessions, involving more than 70 local NDIS participants, carers, families and disability service providers based in the Kooyong electorate. More have provided feedback by phone or email.
Participants identified a fundamental shift in the character of the scheme, away from a rights-based model grounded in inclusion and dignity, toward a systemic focus on cost-containment. Key concerns included:
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Reforms are moving too fast, with insufficient consultation and transparency.
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Funding changes are already causing increased isolation and risk for people with disability.
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Inadequate alternative support pathways for children, and for people with fluctuating needs and/or psychosocial disability.
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Decisions being made without appropriate clinical input or understanding of individual need.
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Concern about the use of new assessment tools which do not yet exist and will likely be automated.
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Ministerial discretion being expanded at the same time that parliamentary oversight and merits review are reduced or abolished entirely.
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Provider and workforce sustainability is under serious threat, particularly in thin markets.
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The fraud narrative is stigmatising and does not reflect the lived experience of participants or providers.
Dr Ryan will move several amendments to the Bill in Parliament next week, targeting the need to have alternative supports in place before key eligibility and funding changes commence, and stronger safeguards for ministerial power to change participant eligibility. She is also challenging restrictions to the right for review of NDIS decisions and the new, broad-ranging ministerial powers to restrict access to specific services, cut individual packages, and to set arbitrary prices for supports.
Quotes attributable to Dr Monique Ryan:
"There is universal agreement that the NDIS needs to be sustainable and that fraud must be addressed. But there is also increasing concern that the government is citing fraud, rorting and waste, for which it should be taking responsibility, as an excuse for far-reaching cuts enacted without adequate consultation or engagement with the disability community. People are already experiencing funding reductions. They believe this legislation is about cost-cutting, not care."
"Australians with a disability are not asking for special treatment. They are asking for the principle the NDIS was built on, 'nothing about us without us', to be honoured. That principle has been disregarded in the drafting and rushed presentation of this legislation."
"The NDIS has real problems; with fraud, with waste, with regulatory failure. Those problems have been building for 13 years, and successive governments bear responsibility for them."
"But this Bill asks people living with disability to pay the price of failures that were never theirs to own. My amendments are about restoring the transparency, accountability and rights protections that the disability community deserves, and that the Bill currently strips away."
Contact details:
Rosie Leon-Thomas
[email protected]
0455 657 546