The parents of two boys with disabilities say they were shocked with how the NDIS responded to their request for funding for basic equipment. “I didn’t realise we’d have to walk over 10 kilometres of broken glass just to try and get a couple of things to help.”
Closing date: June 15, 2018
The Other Film Festival (TOFF) is Australia’s leading disability film festival. TOFF prides itself in showcasing the very best, contemporary stories of the disability and Deaf communities locally, nationally and internationally. People with disability are still largely unseen and misrepresented by the mainstream film industry. TOFF challenges this by providing a platform to counter the … Continued
People with disabilities, families, friends, support organisations, community groups, services and policy makers are invited to participate in this grassroots campaign to ensure NDIS delivers on the promise to Revolutionise Disability Services. The campaign is based on active groups in each of the 150 federal electorates in Australia. The aim is to influence each politician in Canberra to press for implementation of the 15 reforms that have arisen from the deliberations of people with disabilities, families and friends, support organisations, researchers and policy makers over the past two years.
Closing date: June 3, 2018
The Commission is looking for an experienced professional to lead a dedicated and dynamic policy and research team. The Head of Policy and Research will report directly to the Commissioner and will play a key organisational role as part of the Commission’s senior leadership team. The role involves developing and leading best practice research, strategic policy development and advocacy in relation to equal opportunity and human rights issues across Victoria.
In 2017-18, twenty-eight members of the Australian Network on Disability benchmarked their inclusion of people with disability as employees customers and stakeholders. Using the the Network’s Access and Inclusion Index these organisations gained insights into their strengths and maturity on their journey to be accessible and inclusive.
The South West Advocacy Service, the regional organisation funded to handle appeals against NDIS decisions, said it had been kept busy with clients who had problems with the new system. Its executive officer Adele Markwell said it appeared there was little consistency in decisions about who qualified for an NDIS plan. Some people qualified while others with similar issues did not, she said. “There are a lot of people out there with mild disability who have had support workers for many years and are now being told they are on their own,” Ms Markwell said.
Her son’s claim has been under review for 15 months and she said the experience had caused “momentous stress”. “The wheels began to fall off” when she was told she would only receive funding for one of her son’s disabilities.
But the Adelaide mother was left feeling “absolutely awful” after a review of her eight-year-old son Samuel’s funding National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) plan. “[The NDIS representative] more or less said, ‘by my sixth child I should know how to be a parent and how to look after my children’,” Mrs Ludlow said. All but one of her children sit on the autism spectrum.
The Turnbull government has accidentally published details of changes that would deny a huge number of autistic children direct access to the national disability insurance scheme, causing “outrage” among autism groups.
Bureaucrats are reportedly working on a strategy to curb costs by tightening up the eligibility requirements after a blowout in the number families seeking NDIS support packages for people with autism.