Australians who are blind or vision impaired are celebrating today following an announcement by the Hon Paul Fletcher MP, Minister for Communications, Cyber Safety and the Arts that funding will be made available to Australia’s public broadcasters to implement Audio Description (AD).
NDIS minister Stuart Robert has announced that the NDIS will now fund a new type of transitional housing, Medium Term Accommodation (MTA), designed to support participants as they prepare to move into permanent accommodation.
National Legal Aid chairman Brendan Thomas said the service’s new website would help ensure people and their families or carers could access free, independent advice about engaging with the royal commission.
I have just ended almost four years working in the NDIS environment. Most of them were in the Local Area Coordination environment. I was fortunate to spend some time within the actual NDIA too. I can say, with some authority, the NDIS is an enigma. When it is good, it is very good. When it is bad it is dreadful. When it is very bad it is downright tragic and immensely frustrating.
One of the major issues Associate Professor Davis has encountered with the NDIS planning process has been a lack of communication between practitioners and the scheme, which can result in inefficiencies.
Yet we are seeing markets emerge with insufficient providers or capacity to meet demand and ensure competition takes place. This has led to debates about ‘thin markets’ — a term used in various ways by different stakeholders to describe market deficiencies ranging from low numbers of providers to immature markets to market failure.
But Ms Steggall said the current system has meant “very real discrimination” against older Australians with these support services failing to meet the demands of those in need. “Clearly this arbitrary age of 65 is not working – a lot of people are falling through the gap and not getting the adequate level of care,” she said.
National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) Minister Stuart Robert announced the $105.9 million in funding for 105 organisations under the NDIS Information, Linkages and Capacity Building (ILC) program, to build more inclusive communities for Australians with disability, carers and their families.
Minister for the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), Stuart Robert, today announced the Board of the National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA) from 1 January 2020, with nine reappointments and one new member.
Disability and Community Inclusion professor Sally Robinson told the inquiry residents in group homes were being treated in ways that would not be acceptable for other people. “Residents are expected to be compliant, they’re expected to not know very much about their right to complain … They’re expected to endure it,” she told the commission.
Most experiences were positive, but there were some where I felt like the elephant in the room that people had to tiptoe around or a compassion project where organisations could tick a diversity box by saying they’d taken on a blind intern for a week or two that year.
Look around your office. If one in five of your colleagues are living with a disability, then your workplace is reflective of our broader community. If that’s not the case, your office holds a mirror to a broader societal trend. In Australia today participation in employment for people living with a disability is low and underemployed is high.
Police are investigating a massive NDIS-related financial fraud that used a forged letter purported to be from former assistant minister and Australian Senator Sarah Henderson to convince Korean investors to part with $395 million.
As a blind person I’ve lived through many highs and lows navigating relationships with my support workers. Can you really be friends when your support worker is being paid to spend time with you?
Part of this spend must go towards improving school facilities, especially for students with a disability. In 2017, around 18.8% of school students in Australia were provided with adjustments at school – to participate on the same basis as other students – because of disability. The majority of these attend mainstream public schools.