Page 2407 - Week 08 - Thursday, 5 August 2021
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not collaborative or in the spirit in which the NDIS was created. The independent assessment was to be conducted by an allied health professional who had never actually met the participant. The process was to involve working with a checklist to verify that the plans were appropriately funded over a period of up to three hours.
Mr Assistant Speaker, my office has had a front row seat to the devastating consequences of these sorts of cost-cutting measures by the federal government. Any money saved by undertaking this kind of cost-cutting policy has come at enormous cost to NDIS recipients’ mental, physical and fiscal health. I cannot tell you how many times I have received calls from deeply distressed ACT residents who have just been informed that their plan no longer covers a critical service, this being after a short meeting with an often unqualified and inexperienced assessor they have never met or heard from before. Many times the meeting would be a quick phone conversation with a subcontracted employee in a different state who did not even have access to all the relevant information. These occurrences clearly did not happen under the independent assessment scheme, as it never got off the ground. However, policies of this ilk have already existed to a lesser extent within the NDIS for a long time.
The process of appealing decisions made by assessors becomes an even greater bureaucratic nightmare than navigating the scheme as it is, butchered by the federal Liberal government. People are often made to wait months for a notice of outcome—support without which people cannot survive. Participants in the NDIS should not have to routinely approach their state or territory government just to get a notice of receipt when they attempt to lodge an appeal.
The unfortunate state of affairs is that one of the most vulnerable demographics in the nation are routinely being traumatised by their experience with the NDIS as a direct result of the commonwealth’s decision to penny-pinch resources for the Australian disability community. This penny-pinching attitude also has a significant impact on NDIA staff and those who are contracted, mostly via labour hire enterprises, to do NDIA work administering NDIS plans.
The understaffing at the NDIA is at a critical level. The agency’s staffing cap sits well below the actual need of the agency and this is not conducive to the complex work that the agency does. Administering this kind of scheme should not be taken lightly and is undercut by the federal government’s wish to claim that they have reduced the number of public servants in the APS. This is exceedingly evident by the cohorts of labour hire employees who do NDIA work. They have often been paid below their directly employed counterparts and have little to no job security or anything like sick or annual leave.
Due to both the insecure work and experience of overwork due to staff shortages, turnover of staff is very high. This is bad for the workers and subsequently bad for participants. There are too many inexperienced staff and staff often turn over too quickly to be properly trained. This does not lead to a well-functioning administration. This is to the very large detriment of the principles outlined in my motion and makes it even more difficult for the agency to operate with those principles front of mind. What’s more, the manner by which these employees are engaged to do this work
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