E&OE TRANSCRIPT
MATTHEW PANTELIS, HOST: Changes went through to the NDIS late last week through Federal Parliament. The aim is to save a lot of money because I was staggered to read at $49 billion, the NDIS costs more than the aged care system, around $36 billion, Medicare at $32 billion, funding for hospitals, federal government, $30 billion, the PBS Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme around $20 billion, and the NDIS sitting at just under $50 billion. That is unreal. You've heard many times about rorts in the system and people claiming things that shouldn't, you'd argue, be claimed. Cruises, sex work, that sort of thing costs in terms of making claims, things that might cost you far less if it wasn't NDIS related, the same item costs three, four, five times more or more. And we wonder why it's blowing out. Bill Shorten, Federal NDIS Minister. Minister Shorten, good morning, thank you for your time. Obviously, these changes much needed.
BILL SHORTEN, MINISTER FOR THE NDIS AND GOVERNMENT SERVICES: Yes. I mean, without being pedantic, it's still a big amount of money. The Scheme is probably going to cost under $42 billion this year. We've managed to reduce projection, but having said that, it's a Scheme that's changing lives. So, when it works well, which it does for a lot of people, it's doing great. But basically it's been allowed to grow like topsy without proper payment scrutiny, with insufficient sort of legislative swim lanes, if you like, and what we're putting in place after a 12 month review with thousands of people and, you know, recommendations to improve the quality of the outcomes for participants, make sure that the people for whom the Scheme was designed are getting the right support. But also, I want to make sure it's there for the future. And so I've got to get rid of the rorters and the shonks. Now, a lot of service providers are good people. Before they start following me on social media and saying I'm being mean about all service providers, but let's just tell the truth, some people are having a lend to the system and that's not what it was for.
PANTELIS: No, absolutely. And you've made that point, if these changes don't go through, and this is in response to the Greens saying it's despicable what's been done, the Greens spokesperson for disability claiming people will die as a result of these changes. Is that fair?
SHORTEN: No, that's not fair at all, and to the Greens, they live in this marvellous world where money just grows on trees and actually, they're doing a disservice to people with disability in two ways. I mean, there's three options for this Scheme, scrap it, do nothing or do what we're doing. And the Greens, basically, it's all just too hard, reality. They just say, oh, well, any change is a sellout. Well, that's not right. I helped set the Scheme up, helped campaign for the Scheme to be created. But I'll be honest, in the, from 2013 to 2022, there are no proper payment systems, checking of invoices. You wouldn't have a $40 billion organisation where 92% of the people submitting the invoices, the service providers, are unregistered and we don't know who they are.
PANTELIS: Yeah, yeah. So, under the changes now, there are a list of, for instance, prescribed items that can be claimed. If somebody needs something outside that is that, do they have to prove they need it?
SHORTEN: What they, well, first of all, the Scheme isn't designed that you can have anything you want. If there’s things which you would just acquire in the ordinary line of business, in the ordinary business of life - no, you don't get it, it doesn't pay for your school fees or your groceries. It was never meant to do that. The other thing is, you don't use the NDIS if there's another service system providing support. For instance, if you need a snoring, a CPAP machine to help you with snoring, that's a Medicare item. If there's something where, if you need to go, the outpatient's ward at the Adelaide Hospital, that should be dealt with by the Adelaide Hospital. So, there's things which other systems provide which were never intended to be covered. There's things in the ordinary course of life which you were never meant to get. The aim of the items you get is the things which help you adjust because of your disability. So, we put in a clause once we, amendment, because that's how the parliament works, you debate ideas, that it is possible in certain circumstances that something which is prohibited, you might be able to argue is value for money, and it delivers the same thing. I mean, the sort of example I'm thinking of, but I don't want this to be subject to litigation, but to illustrate for listeners, is you might have to get very expensive shoes because of the nature of the disability with your feet, but it might be that you just need six pairs of runners across a period of time which is actually cheaper than some very special bespoke shoes. So, common sense will prevail based on evidence. But this Scheme was never intended, once you've got a severe and profound disability, to pay for everything. It's to pay for your carers, it's to pay for your assistive technology, it's to be things which allow you to participate in society and not be locked away and hidden away.
PANTELIS: Yeah. You know the rorts on this, and there'd be so many examples, but I heard one the other day, a man called Stefano told me just on Sunday about his son. His son has downs. He's an adult now, but would go on camps with a leading disability provider. And the camp, it was a Friday night. You go a Friday afternoon, get picked up Sunday afternoon, back home, two nights away. $200 was the weekend, with the NDIS that cost over $2,000.
SHORTEN: Yeah, that drives me wild. I've already put in, I didn't need this legislator, I put in, I sat down with the Australian Competition Commission, ACCC and we found some budget from. It is now illegal to charge a person for a service on the NDIS more than you would charge for that identical service for a person without an NDIS package. That is now illegal. And I've written to every participant, you know, I got some service providers who said that I'm, you know, demonising them. I'm not. But please, if, if a mum has to cancel an appointment, you know, three days out because her child's not well and he's got a severe disability, don't charge them a higher cancellation fee than they would for you or me cancelling.
PANTELIS: Yep.
SHORTEN: That sort of petty venality is taking advantage of people with disability and the taxpayer and gives it a bad name, and that’s what your describing.
PANTELIS: Absolutely, yeah. 100%. You've foreshadowed more reforms. What are they going to be?
SHORTEN: Well, one thing I will say to the disability sector, because some of them are being whipped up by, you know, a few of the Greens and whatever stuff they spout, is that we do a lot of co design. The Insurance Scheme is run by the National Disability Insurance Agency. We've got 23 co design groups. What we're going to do is we're going to say. We said that, okay, we want to do a new way of preparing your budget, which is more flexible, gives person more choice and control. It's going to take us twelve to 18 months to design that and we've got to talk to people with disability. We want to look at a various range of how we assess someone's needs. We're going to need to train up the workforce for that. There's a lot of homework to be done with people with disability with the service providers, some of the things which change soon. We want to just be clear and help people on the Scheme know what you can and can't spend money on. But we also want to make sure that our payment system, we have the power where there's a tiny minority of plans being generally manipulated by some intermediaries. We don't have the investigative powers, which we should have, to get to the bottom of it. People literally don't have to answer our phone call after months and years, and that's not on. We propose that a claim, if it's older than two years, will now no longer get paid. You've got two years to put your claim in, but no longer. We're also saying that what we're seeing is this pattern where, and I think it was, sometimes we get an initial plan wrong and people, or sometimes your electric wheelchair just breaks down and you need to ask for a variation within the life of the plan. The money gets expended more quickly than you expected. But sometimes what we're seeing is that it's almost like an automatic top up, that if you spend all your money, we just have to top you up. We're presented with this fait accompli. Oh, well, the plan manager, the money's gone. You can't leave this vulnerable person on their own. But we get sort of almost this situation where the money goes quickly, it hasn't been well managed, and then all of a sudden we said, well, you can't let this person to their own devices. So, we want to have more ability to work in real time with people so we can see what's happening and why, so we don't get to these dreadful situations. One good thing we're doing is, there's some story in one of the papers today saying, oh, there's the NDIA, the agency's raising about $65 million in debt. That's out of $40 billion. So, excuse me, we're not exactly, you know, we're not exactly the ruthless sort of debt police here. And in our budgets, we don't budget for recovering debt, but there's probably a few hundred people who spend it on the wrong thing or are given wrong advice. And we've, we haven't had the criteria, though, in the past to take account of a person's disability. If someone's got a serious psychosocial condition and they make a mistake, we haven't been allowed to take into account their disability. Now we can. So, some of the naysayers really need to stop catastrophisng and recognising the biggest catastrophe for the NDIS is if we don't stop the rorts, if we don't stop the people having a lend of it, demand better outcomes for the money that we're paying. We want better quality outcomes for people.
PANTELIS: Otherwise it won't exist long term if you don't do this sort of thing.
SHORTEN: That's right.
PANTELIS: Do you think, though, the changes raise concern amongst recipients, people who can qualify for it? What does this mean for me moving forward? And you can understand the nature of that.
SHORTEN: Listen, I probably should have said that at the very outset. I understand that if you're a person with a disability, if you're a family, raising a person with a disability, like life's not straightforward. And when people talk about change, they hear, I'm going to lose something. And life in many cases has been a battle. Can I just reassure those people? One, we are budgeting that even with these improvements, the Scheme's still going to grow by about 8%. We are assuming in all our forecasts that more people will go on the Scheme. What we're trying to do is slow the rate of growth. It's not a cut. In the last year of the Libs, the cost of the Scheme blew out by 23%. We've got it down to increasing by only 18%, but I still need to get that down. The number of people who went on the Scheme increased in the last year of our predecessors by 15%. The number of people going onto the Scheme now is increasing by only 8%. We want to make sure the service providers, and there's many good ones, that we know what they're doing and that we know what we're paying for. We've got to make sure that people know the rules and we've also got to make sure that we're focusing a lot more on the outcome of the supports than perhaps has been given attention to in the past. And we want to get rid of the crooks.
PANTELIS: Absolutely. Childhood autism, where does that sit in? Because that's been one of the areas of growth, hasn't it?
SHORTEN: It has. And we're getting to know about autism more. Again, a couple of bits of the misinformation. There's some people on the fringes who say, somehow the Government's saying we can cure autism. Autism is a fact of life. I'm not trying to cure anyone. We're just trying to provide the best interventions. What we know, and Australia is a leading nation in research and early intervention, we're very lucky to have that sort of level of research, is that the earlier we can identify a precious baby's having a non standard developmental journey, the more that we can offer them support. But what we want to do, and Amanda Rishworth's working on this outside the Scheme and Peter Malinauskas has been great, and Nat Cook, for example. So, South Australia is well represented in these debates, is when you realise that your child is perhaps not developing in a standard way. That's when we need to be able to give you help. But when we talk to you about giving you options, we need more options than just the full orchestra of the NDIS. But I will say to parents, if your kid needs the NDIS, then we are committed to that child getting the NDIS. We just want to have some more choices out there. I mean, one of the things which families often tell me when they've got a child with a disability is how isolating it is. But in many ways, the Scheme in the last 10 years hasn't concentrated enough on families as well as the kids. You know, peer to peer support. It's like the sense of relief when a family of a child with particular disability meets another family who is raising a child in the same circumstances. It's a moment of tears because all of a sudden people feel understood and we haven't been doing enough support for families. I also think the earlier that we can see how a child's going, you know, just as you do their immunisations and maternal and child help, the earlier we can identify that just gives us options.
PANTELIS: Absolutely. All right, Bill Shorten, appreciate your time this morning. Thank you.
SHORTEN: No, sir, but thank you very much.
PANTELIS: Federal NDIS Minister Bill Shorten on the NDIS changes that rolled through parliament last week.