The package of new laws responds to last year’s NDIS review, which said the scheme needed to return to its original purpose of providing for Australians with permanent disabilities, while state and territories must step up their offerings for people with less intense needs.
Under the reboot, people will have to complete a needs-based assessment and their budgets will be calculated with a new methodology. All 646,000 NDIS participants will move to those “new framework plans” within five years, although there is scope in the legislation to change that timeline.
In a major reform to reduce plan inflation, people will then receive a capped budget that lasts up to five years but has strict limits on how much funding can be spent annually, with the money released in intervals.
The new laws will also enable the government to create an explicit list of NDIS supports that are “in or out”, which will narrow the scope of support that the Commonwealth is obliged to provide.
That list will soon be designed with people with disabilities and state and territory governments. But the document said it would exclude things such as holidays, groceries, utility bill payments, online gambling, perfume, cosmetics, standard household appliances, and white goods.
The agency will be able to take over someone’s plan if it suspects they are mismanaging their spending, while in a separate reform, participants will be issued a written note when they enter the NDIS that specifies why they are receiving support: for a disability, early intervention, or both.
This will have no immediate effect on how participants get support, but it creates a structure for five years’ time when children with developmental difficulties will be funnelled out of the NDIS and into a separate early intervention pathway once the new system being worked out with the states is ready.
That system will be “designed specifically to support children and their families who would benefit from early intervention to improve lifetime outcomes”, the document said.
Another new provision will allow the agency to request information from people to reconsider whether they should be on the scheme. “Currently, there is no ability for the CEO to request information for the purposes of considering the revocation of a person’s status as a participant,” the document said.
It said this was particularly important when it came to children who receive funding for early intervention because the concept assumes a benefit from treatment and that the support required will change over time.
Former agency board member Martin Laverty said it was a wise amendment. “When the NDIS was started 10 years ago, we should have given the NDIA the ability to gather all the information it needs to make sure supports are effective and essential. The bill is simply correcting a mistake from then,” he said.
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He also said the laws would also stop the NDIS funding products and services that were never intended. “This is getting at price gouging, fraud and junk services that no person who supports the NDIS wants to see continue.”
Shorten promised all changes would be better for participants. He promised to co-design them with people with a disability as well as state and territory governments, which escalated their concerns about his plans this week. “There remains an enormous amount of work to do together to implement the reforms,” he said.
Source Agencies
