Is the disability support sector due for a shake-up? Social entrepreneur and product designer Melanie Tran wants to disrupt traditional models of support. And she’s helping bring together young people from around the country to help make that happen.
“We believe that if Oliver had not have had the labels of autism and intellectual disability attached to him, he would absolutely have not have been prescribed psychotropic medications,” McGowan said.
Australia needs to remedy its flawed interpretation of the UN’s Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) which is allowing human rights violations to occur, a new research paper says.
Two people from Western Sydney have been jailed for a combined 9 years and 6 months as the result of a National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) Fraud Taskforce investigation into $1.5m of fraudulent claims against the NDIS plans of Australians living with a disability.
The scandal-plagued disability sector will get $22 billion from the federal government this financial year, but an independent review found the system left vulnerable people open to harm and neglect. Mr Shorten said NDIS Minister Stuart Robert had presided over a “toothless and sleepy” watchdog that in reality is “more like a very expensive purse poodle”.
Australian Greens Disability Rights and Services spokesperson Senator Jordon Steele-John has labelled reports that the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission has fined just one provider, despite receiving more than 8000 complaints, as deeply concerning but not surprising.
In a recent decision the Administrative Appeals Tribunal has commented on the NDIA’s use of an independent assessor, stating “this type of therapist is not appropriately qualified” and that the assessor’s understanding was mistaken.
The government’s recently announced plans to roll out independent functional assessments went down about as well as a sneeze in a Melbourne supermarket does right now. In response, many community groups have launched campaigns urging the Agency to re-think this endeavour. But last week there was a new voice entering the debate that nobody saw coming: the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT).
As the panel discussed social fragmentation, Ms Kayess agreed it could lead to loneliness and said those living with a disability were highly exposed to it. “That specific [physical] segregation is structurally embedded for people with disability, the way they’re segregated in education, the way they’re segregated in terms of residential care and services,” she said.
The International Paralympic Committee (IPC) and the International Disability Alliance (IDA) are to sign a historic Co-operation Agreement to advance the rights of persons with disabilities and jointly commit to use Para sport as a vehicle to drive the human rights agenda forward.
Bendigo resident and NDIS participant Liz Wright believes the reform will increase the scrutiny participants and applicants already face in the process. Ms Wright, who also had a long history working in advocacy, said it was “wearing and exhausting” for people with a disability to have to repeatedly disclose intimate details to receive the appropriate support. “We don’t need layers of scrutiny around participants, we need scrutiny around organisations for overinflated invoices for work they don’t do, for support they don’t give,” she said.
Have you ever wondered how planners decide how much Support Coordination funding goes into a plan? At times the process seems about as random as throwing a dart at a board and seeing where it lands. Now an internal NDIA Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) titled “Include Support Coordination in a Plan,” has been obtained under Freedom of Information (FOI), and sheds some light.
On an episode of the ABC’s Q&A dedicated to loneliness last night, Ms Kayess revealed she had a visceral reaction when she examined how COVID-19 patients were being triaged for treatment. “It was such a visceral reaction that I had. It was so in my face that I was dispensable … that my life wasn’t valued. And I was dispensable.
On Friday, hundreds of people gathered at virtual and physically distanced “snap action” events across the country, calling on the government to throw out plans that will force NDIS participants to undergo mandatory independent assessments. Some protesters climbed out of their wheelchairs to crawl on the ground during the snap action to highlight the demeaning nature of the proposed changes
The government is appointing independent assessors to review everyone on the National Disability Insurance Scheme to ensure the funding is fairly distributed and not just given to “those who can pay the most for a report”.