NDIS overhaul will ‘harm’ Australians with disabilities, government’s own committee warns

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Some of the proposed changes will allow the NDIS minister, Mark Butler, to progressively reduce social participation budgets for participants by 50% and tweak the meaning of permanence to confine NDIS access to participants who can first show they have exhausted “all appropriate” treatment options.

Key to reducing the scheme to about 600,000 participants by 2030 – the scheme supports about 770,000 people currently – will be the introduction of a standardised, evidence-based tool to determine a participant’s “substantially reduced functional capacity”.

Butler has described the plans as “hard decisions” but ultimately “unavoidable and urgent”.

The Australian Human Rights Commission said a two-week consultation period was “wholly inadequate” and that more time was needed to understand the “significant implications for people’s rights, lives and livelihoods”.

Its submission, written by the disability discrimination commissioner, Rosemary Kayess, concluded the NDIS was set up as a “human rights-based scheme, ensuring that people with disability have access to individualised supports that enable dignity, autonomy, independence and participation in the community”.

“The proposed reforms raise significant concerns about the extent to which this framework is being preserved,” Kayess said.

Advocacy groups in rural and remote areas, such as those supporting Northern Territory communities, are also worried about swiftly passing new laws without considering the impact on some of the country’s most vulnerable.

The submission from Disability Advocacy Service Inc, Integrated Disability Action Inc and Darwin Community Legal Service warned that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander participants in regions with limited or no access to mainstream support services would feel the brunt of the impacts.

“In the Northern Territory, the consequences of getting this balance wrong are not administrative or procedural,” they wrote.

“They are direct and foreseeable impacts on housing stability, health, safety, community participation, and, in some cases, life itself.

“Reform must not proceed on the assumption that unsupported participants will be absorbed by systems that do not yet exist at scale.”

The bill will also introduce the ability for the NDIS to automate certain administrative decisions.

The commonwealth ombudsman said improving the efficiency of the NDIS was a “worthwhile goal” but said it needed to be balanced with integrity.

“As the robodebt scheme illustrated, efficiency gains are fundamentally flawed if they come at the cost of integrity – resulting in negative impacts on the people the system is supposed to assist and a significant waste of taxpayer resources spent unravelling a system found to be unfair or unlawful,” the submission said.