Mary Sayers, chief executive of Children and Young People with Disability Australia, said the organisation was calling for federal funding for the plan to be created and rolled out over a decade.
Our new research found specialist housing, that incorporates technology and communication tools, improves independence, health, well-being and community integration. New disability housing has enormous potential to improve the effectiveness of paid support and address housing and workforce issues.
There is a matching furore over aged care. The levels of disillusionment in both aged and disability care focus on standards, conditions and regulation, or the lack of it. Despite endless scandals and expensive reports and inquiries, the structural flaws in both sectors – now dependent on a hybrid private/government system – are set to continue, particularly in the “for-profit” sector.
“We have to go for an internal review and if that’s not successful, we will have to go to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. More costs, more stress, more waste, more cost to taxpayers to try and squash us, and more exhausting rage.”
“This is the latest in a string of attacks on people with disability that stops them from accessing NDIS support and their right to choice and control. The NDIA is being run by a bunch of bankers who are obsessed with boosting KPIs rather than running the scheme as it was intended,” Mr Shorten said in a statement.
Fictions and omissions have distorted and weaponised commentary over the NDIS in this election period, and in fact since the scheme was established. Here we see the greatest fiction told: that the participant is at the centre of the NDIS.
Ms Foreman has been involved with Every Australian Counts since the beginning and was one of the first people in Australia to receive an NDIS plan. She says one of the reasons the cuts and plan changes are so damaging is the lack of explanation around why the decisions were made. “I’ve had issues, I think we’ve all had issues under the NDIS, like for instance I have got a Specialised Disability Accommodation house but it’s taken me over three years to get one in the plan,” says Ms Foreman.
Naomi Anderson, principal solicitor at Villamanta Disability Rights Legal Service in Geelong, said calls to the practice about “significant and unexpected cuts” had ramped up over the last six to eight months. “We’re talking the Hunger Games, effectively, of who can highlight the most risks, who can explain the reason why they should be heard first, why they should have a directions hearing urgently so that their matter can be dealt with more quickly.”
“We did have to make some decisions about which therapist to cut,” Yeoman told the Sydney Morning Herald. “We’re looking down the thing and we’re like, does he need to be toilet trained or does he need to speak — these were the decisions we had to make,” she said.
Young people with a disability are among the most disadvantaged when it comes to securing work. The political parties vying for election are being asked to commit to improve the employment system for them.
However, Dr Charlton now reckons it has far too much independence from government, which has far too little control over its spending. Unlike most other taxpayer-funded agencies, the NDIA sets its own budget and reports to a board, not to a federal minister. “The fatal flaw in the NDIS: It cries wolf but has no shepherd to control its spending,” he wrote in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age last year.
Some NDIS participants aren’t having their most basic care needs met, such as assistance to get out of bed each day, because of a shortage of disability workers. Others cannot access assistive technology or other allied health assessments to achieve their goals for social or work participation.
But those who receive services and assistance through the NDIS want it to function in the way it was intended: namely, with sufficient funding for them to make their own choices about the treatment and support they want.
“He doesn’t have to tell the most vulnerable and intimate details of his life repeatedly to complete strangers and then rely on them to accurately convey their needs to another set of complete strangers, waiting months sometimes for an answer, in order to access the basic equipment and support he needs to be able to leave his home in the morning. That is privilege.”
We need more people in Parliament with lived experience of disability; who understand what the disability community needs because they’re literally a part of it. We need the disability minister to be a disabled person.