E&OE TRANSCRIPT
MOEMINA SHUKUR, HOST, 3ZZZ The Wire: Eleven years ago, then Prime Minister Julia Gillard introduced a bill to create the National Disability Insurance Scheme. But now there's growing anxiety within the disability community about the upcoming changes to the NDIS. Minister for the NDIS Bill Shorten looks back at where it all began and why he wants participants of the Scheme to embrace the changes. He spoke with National Radio News reporter Emma Myers from Canberra.
EMMA MYERS, NATIONAL RADIO NEWS: Why was the NDIS needed in the first place?
BILL SHORTEN, MINISTER FOR THE NDIS, AND GOVERNMENT SERVICES: Because Australians with disability and their families were living lives of virtual exile in their own country from birth to death and at every life stage in between, Australians with profound and severe disability and the people who love them were getting second class outcomes. And I certainly believed when I became a junior Minister for Disability well before the NDIS was created, that what people with disability deserved is to have control over their own lives. And by having personal budgets, they were able to be treated as consumers, not charity. And also, I wanted people with disability to be. We needed to change the model, not be treated as a deficit. And to recognise disability is universal. It could be any of us at any time. But what effectively disables people are the barriers the community puts in their path. And the NDIS is a world leading endeavour, which has been led by Labor, but absolutely supported periodically by other parties to give people disability a fair go in Australia and have fulfilling lives.
MYERS: A lot of people are quite anxious about the proposed changes that are coming up. How different is the new system to the one that NDIS replaced? Are you concerned about the unintended consequences?
SHORTEN: I can respect people being concerned because people are battled so hard to get what they've got. And when people talk about change in the media or in parliament, what people in the Scheme might think is change equals I lose something. That's not what these changes are about. I want to stop money getting wasted. I want to stop a lack of clarity about what you're allowed to use your money on. But if you love the Scheme, you don't tell people nothing has to change. Being told that nothing ever changes is actually dangerous logic. People with disability know that there are flaws in the system. And, you know, I've been the opposition spokesperson since 2019, but before then, I was leader of the Labor party. The reason why we had a disability royal commission is because Labor called for it when I was leader in 2017, or maybe even it was 2016, and when I was first in parliament, we helped set up the NDIs. So, I want the NDIS to be around long after I'm out of politics and long after, you know, even the current participants have, you know, grown up or grown old. I want this around for a very long time, and that means we've just got to make sure that money's not getting wasted.
MYERS: Going into the Disability Royal Commission recommendations, there was a commitment to greater design with people living with disability. But how is that actually happening? Is the Government on track to fulfilling the recommendations?
SHORTEN: Yes. My colleague Amanda Rishworth is coordinating a Government response about the royal commission across areas outside the NDIs. But in terms of the NDIS, we've got 23 co design groups and consultation groups. For me, co design is not a new announcement, it's just a way of thinking. The whole reason why I backed in and was the first politician in Australia to use the terms national disability insurance Scheme was, I'm motivated by empowering people. Like, for me, empowering people means you've got to involve them in the processes. I mean, you've got to get on and do stuff. It's not consultation by exhaustion. At some point, you know, life's not a mirror which we keep looking into. You've got to get on. But co-design is just a fundamental way of thinking. For me, it's the way I view life that you get the best out of people and the best out of situations when people have Agency in their own lives.
MYERS: Sarah on Facebook asks, from a provider perspective, what are the plans regarding education and training local area coordinators and ECEI coordinators to actually understand their participants and find therapies and supports according to the person, rather than their age and diagnosis.
SHORTEN: Yeah, I think part of the problem has been that, I'll be honest, under the previous Government, they increased the scale of the Scheme. That's good. But they didn't want to hire any more people at the Agency. So, they credit all these other jobs, like local area coordinators and support coordinators and specialist support coordinators, and some of them are doing a great job. But the standard say in local area coordinators can vary. There's some really good ones, but there's others who are not familiar with disability. So, the reviews propose that we create a new category of people called navigators, and a lot of these other functions might roll into that, but we've got to make sure we have proper accreditation of people who call themselves advisers and intermediaries in the world of disability. So, there's some great intermediaries, but not all of them have got the same level of knowledge. And I think we do need to, and the Review says that, and we'll spend the next couple of years working on that. How do we better credit people who are saying they're advisors to people with disability to make sure they actually know what they're talking about.