E&OE TRANSCRIPT
DOORSTOP INTERVIEW
SUBJECTS: ILC rants for disability organisations; NDIS MYEFO funding; music and art supports; NDIS assessments
BILL SHORTEN, MINISTER FOR THE NDIS AND GOVERNMENT SERVICES: [BEGINNING OF SENTENCE NOT RECORDED] Tasmanian specific announcements about the future of disability funding. But before I do that, I might just introduce you to who's here with me today. We've got Senator Catryna Bilyk, who has been Australia's leading advocate for support for people with brain injury. Also, we have Paul Pritchard, who you'll be hearing from a bit later. He's the Ambassador on behalf of the National Card, which we'll be talking about. And we have Marie-Clare Couper, who's the executive officer of Brain Injury Association of Tasmania.
Today, I'm pleased to announce, on behalf of the Government, that 26 fantastic disability organisations around Australia are going to share in $31 million of very important taxpayer funded grant money, to build linkages and capacity building for people with disability on the NDIS and more broadly. Specifically in Tasmania. I'm pleased to announce that the Brain Injury Association of Tasmania will receive a grant over the next 12 months of $727,000, which is going to assist them build individual capacity amongst its members, but also the National Card, which Paul will talk to you in a moment for people with brain injury and autism. The other group who received support today are Disability Voices Tasmania. They're going to receive a grant of $299,000. And I must acknowledge the work of State Minister Jo Palmer in advocating for this group, along with Catryna, who's strongly advocated for support for Brain Injury Association of Tasmania.
These grants are all about building a system to help people with disability beyond the NDIS. The National Disability Insurance Scheme is a world leading scheme which Australians should be rightly proud of. It's now supporting over 680,000 of their fellow Australians, including tens of thousands of Tasmanians. But what we also need to do is make sure that the NDIS is not the only lifeboat in the ocean, so we're trying to build a system beyond the NDIS, with the Tasmanian government.
But important to that are groups such as the Brain Injury Association of Tasmania and Disability Voices Tasmania. That's why these grants, they're relatively modest, but the organisations that are going to are national leading organisations. So, this is good news today for people in Tasmania with brain injury. People who want good advocacy are in terms of disability issues. And what I'd like to now do is hand over to Marie-Clare and then she'll introduce Paul, and then we'll take any questions that you might have on this or other national issues.
MARIE-CLARE COUPER, BRAIN INJURY TRUST OF TASMANIA: Hi. My name is Marie-Clare Couper and I'm from the Brain Injury Association of Tasmania.
JOURNALIST: And would you like to tell us a bit about what this funding means for you?
COUPER: So, the ILC grants are an exceptional opportunity for an organisation such as Brain Injury Association of Tasmania. The majority of people living with a disability in Australia, don't access the NDIS and there are disability services such as ours that provide essential services, really valuable services.
So, the ILC grants are an exceptional opportunity for us to be able to deliver some projects that are reaching beyond just Tasmania and doing some really fantastic work.
JOURNALIST: You've been concerned about your ongoing funding before. Where's that at now and what will this allow you to do?
COUPER: The ILC grants are allowing us to reach into areas that we haven't been able to do before. So, people with disability are constantly giving feedback. They know the areas of difficulty in our communities, they know the challenges they face, and they also know the solutions to those problems. They've been telling us for many, many years what they need. So, these ILC grants are a really fantastic opportunity for us to start creating those solutions to those problems. And the National Assistance Card is a really fantastic example of that where we are able to. Sorry, I'm just having an aura with that light. Can I look at somebody else? Sorry, I just reached a point where I can't do it.
SHORTEN: Let's talk about the grant and how it's going to help.
COUPER: So, the ILC grants are giving us a fantastic opportunity to launch, not just in Tasmania, but nationally, the National Assistance Card. And also, while the card was initially available just to people with brain injury, it's also being delivered now to the autistic community as of 2025.
JOURNALIST: And what's your financial position and funding?
SHORTEN: I'm really keen to do all your questions, but why don't we get Paul, and we'll just get our facts and then we'll go to questions.
COUPER: So, Paul Pritchard is one of the National Assistance Card Ambassadors, and I'm really grateful that he's come today to be able to talk about his experience with the card.
PAUL PRITCHARD, BRAIN INJURY AMBASSADOR: So, I'm Paul Prichard, and I've been living with a brain injury for 26 years now. After a rock fell on my head, I'm here to talk about the National Assistance Card, and I think that the most important thing for me anyway, for the National Assistance Card, is to just have it there in my pocket or in my wallet, just so that if I do have a fit, I live with seizures. If I do have it, then someone will know that that I've had a brain injury.
There's a little video, there's a little QR code with a video that they can scan on the phone that tells everybody about that. But also, well, I use it for education at schools and I also use it for educating the rangers when I was walking the Larapinta Trail recently.
Now, having hemiplegia, which is something that comes with quite often with brain injuries, I can't stand for long periods of time. And so, I often pull it out at airports or in taxi ranks, just to let them know that I might not be able to stand for very long. And so that's a really useful thing to for me anyway. And also, I'm often assumed to be drunk because I fall over quite a lot due to my hemiplegia. And I'm slow and often forgetful and so, just to have that, just to be able to show that card is actually like really important for me as well. Yeah, I think that might be it.
SHORTEN: That's a great job. Thanks. If all our ambassadors were as good as Paul. Okay, now, questions. You wanted to go?
JOURNALIST: Do you mind if we start with Marie-Clare and then go to you.
SHORTEN: Yeah, sure.
JOURNALIST: I think there's only 1 or 2 more. But in terms of your overall financial position and funding certainty now, where's that at?
COUPER: Look, there's a lot to be said – sorry, we are looking at the future of our ILC projects. So, we've just demonstrated the benefit of the National Assistance Card. For example, we'd love to launch that nationally for all disability types. So, we'll be working really closely with federal and state governments to ensure that we're able to achieve that.
JOURNALIST: Does this funding, will this funding just go to specific projects, or will it enable you to keep running Brain Injury Association Tasmania into future years?
COUPER: So currently the projects allow us to complete those project activities, but they do also allow us to keep the organisation running. And we do have other projects and other sources of income. So, we have projects which actually started out under ILC, like our justice program, and that's now transitioned to state government funding. It's a really great example of how the ILC grants have almost been an incubator for really innovative projects. And with that sort of collaboration with state and other sort of finance sectors, with the involvement of state and other financial sources we have been able to find sustainable funding for those other projects.
JOURNALIST: Just how much demand do you see at your association, and what would you like to see moving forward in relation to perhaps more wraparound supports in this space?
COUPER: We see an incredible demand. Our phones ring every day with people seeking support. Often people who aren't accessing – sorry, we have calls every day from people seeking support, whether they're accessing the NDIS or not. So, we're very keen to look at sustainability and stability of funding moving into the future. And so, we're very excited and we're waiting eagerly to hear more about foundational supports and navigational supports, and how organisations such as our own will have a future in that space.
JOURNALIST: Just on the card, so do you think that this could be rolled out nationally? When will we know exactly if it works enough to go national?
SHORTEN: Well, let's get through this 12 months of funding. But I think Paul made a very good case. Australians are not mean by and large, but sometimes they don't know what they don't know. And having that card just allows another bridge of communication. I’d just say to people in shopping queues or in travel queues this Christmas, if you see someone behaving in a manner which you just maybe attribute to their under the influence of alcohol or drugs, or you see a kid yelling out in the shop, it doesn't mean that that person who looks like they're under the influence is actually what you think. And this card helps break down some of those barriers.
When you see a mum struggling with a child who's acting out, don't assume that that's a bad mum. You don't know if the kid's got some sort of developmental delay, which means that they're just overloaded and tired when they're in the shops. I think that what the card does is it just provides us another opportunity to stop and not judge and see how we can help, rather than just thinking don't know, don't care, not my business.
JOURNALIST: MYEFO tomorrow is going to show an extra $1 billion of spending for the NDIS and an extra 1,000 staff, given the NDIS costs are blowing out, is that money well spent and what do we need 1,000 extra staff?
SHORTEN: Well, let's unpick a couple of the words in that question and then I'll give you a short answer. You call the NDIS costs blowing out. I say it's 680,000 people getting personal budgets and supports. The Scheme, before I became the Minister, under the Liberals in the last year of their government, the outlays were growing at 23% per year. That was unsustainable. That was a train headed to a cliff. The Scheme numbers grew by 15%. That was a pretty big jump.
Since we've come in, it's been 930 days since I was your Minister - no one else is counting but me. The point about it is we've been trying to make the Scheme sustainable every day. The growth in the last financial year was down to 18%, just over 18% down from 23%. We're on track for the growth and the outlays to go down to 11% this year, this financial year.
The number of participants joining the Scheme, it's still growing. It's been about 8% last year, not 15% when we came in. The reasons why we're seeing an improvement in the sustainability of the Scheme have been we now have clarified what you can and can't spend money on in your Scheme.
We now intend to register the 90% of service providers who are not registered, or at least most of them. We are now also, working with the states, are making sure the NDIS is not the only lifeboat in the ocean. This Scheme is basically amazing news for people with disability.
Once upon a time in Australia, if your child had a non-standard developmental journey, you're on your own. Now they're not. Once upon a time, if you experienced a brain injury, you'd have to battle for everything. Now you do get a personal budget. The Scheme is not perfect. Mistakes get made. We've got to get rid of some of the overchargers and some of the fraudulent service providers. But most service providers are great. This country, you tell a country by its priorities. The fact that we prioritise people with profound, severe impairment, we want to provide the modest packages of support means that this Scheme can be sustained into the future, so long as the money is getting through to those for whom the Scheme was originally designed. And for the last two and a half, three years, I think the NDIS has been one of the quiet, big achievements of the Government.
JOURNALIST: Given the Government's commitment to balancing the budget. Are you confident that we are on that path to financial sustainability?
SHORTEN: Yes, I am. And you just you did remind me that I should give you the short answer, the actual numbers. The Scheme has been chronically under-administered. Fun fact, in 2017, for 170,000 participants, there were 4,000 people working in the Agency. When I became minister, over half a million people on the Scheme, still 4,000 people in the Agency.
We run this Scheme cheaper than any insurance company runs any insurance business by a really big factor. So, the people we're announcing that we’re hiring means that we can do a lot of the assessments in-house. No longer will people have to pay for their own reports out of their budgets. And what we'll do is, the Scheme is a little bit in danger of being a two-class Scheme. If you're well off, middle class and in one of the big cities on the mainland, you can get your experts, you can get your reports. But if you live in areas where there's not so many, where there's a shortage of skilled professionals by us bringing in-house the assessors, which is what we've essentially announced today for tomorrow's MYEFO or the mid-term, the mid-year budget, it now means we'll have greater quality control, and it means that poorer people, people in regional areas, they're going to get a more equitable access to the Scheme and the assessments than they've currently been receiving.
JOURNALIST: Just going back to the grants, as we heard, these organisations have been waiting a while for some extra funding. Do you owe an apology to these organisations for leaving them sort of in the lurch for a little while, and particularly the organisations that have actually had to close, like Broadmoor Venison's.
SHORTEN: Oh, well, without going into why that organisation closed, because not every organisation has the same balance sheet or same set of circumstances, basically, for about seven years we've been funding what's called ILC or independent linkage capability grants. These grants were never meant to be forever grants. But I think it is fair to say, and I apologise, that the Department of Social Services, sort of without a lot of notice, said to people who'd had two lots of three-year grants, hey, we're going to reshape the Scheme.
When I got involved, because ironically, we took a step back because we didn't want to see the grants being political, we want decisions made independent, I formed the view, and Senator Bilyk deserves a bit of credit here, so does the Tasmanian Government that the decisions to change grants were made too quickly without enough warning. And there were good organisations like the Brain Injury Association of Tasmania and Disability Voices Tassie, who were on the rough end of the pineapple, and we just said no, no, no, no, no. These groups are doing good work. If we want to look at how we build resilience in those organisations, you've got to give them notice. We've got to work with them.
So yes, I'm sorry that it was such a sort of big change too quickly proposition. That's why we've stepped in. The politicians, we’re good for some things and we said, woah, woah, woah, let's just let's walk before we run and let's just work with these organisations. And that's what we're announcing today.
JOURNALIST: Minister, what's the difference between a needs-based assessment done by staff at the NDIA and independent assessments?
SHORTEN: Well, if you're referring to the independent assessments rolled out by the Liberals, the Liberals were banking on half an hour of an assessment by a multinational and one size fits all. We are saying we want a quality control. We will do the assessments ourselves. They won't be done by, you know, contractors working for large companies, working on a clock of half an hour. We will take as long as it needs for the assessment to be done. That's a big difference.
The other difference is this assessment process that was being proposed will be using a range of different tools, which have got to be worked out, which was part of what the review said. So, our assessments will be longer, they'll be individualised. They'll be about the individual and the time resources it takes. Two, this is what the review proposed that we should do. Three, it's government run, you know, and I know that some things when you say government-run, people don't like it. But in something like this - at the moment, if you know a good report rider, you get your assessment. But not everyone in Tasmania has access to some mainland psychologist or OT to just bang out a report. This is providing the same level of service across Australia. Full stop.
JOURNALIST: There are concerns that funding is drying up for music therapy within the NDIS Scheme. Some are even saying that they're finding it difficult to access funding at this point. Is the Government seriously looking at stripping away funding when it comes to music therapy from the NDIS?
SHORTEN: No. Listen, at the moment you can charge a participant $193 an hour. Maybe that's what you all get, I don't know. $193 an hour for a for a music or art therapy session. Some of these therapists are highly trained. You know, they've got master's degrees from La Trobe Uni or Melbourne Uni. Great. But other people holding out their shingle for arts and music therapy would not know as much as you would about music or art, without knowing if you know a lot about music or art.
The point is there's no quality control. So, the Agency made a decision that as of February the 1st next year, that you could claim $68 an hour, but not $193 an hour. Now, this is a change to the business model of some music and art therapists. So, they screamed, you know, they want $193, not $68. And they say, we're doing good work.
I've stepped in and asked the Agency to delay the decision, and instead we've got Professor Stephen Duckett, who arguably is one of the fathers of Medicare, who's been working on the pricing of therapies for 40 years. And I've kicked it to him and said, Stephen, here are all the arguments. You don't want politicians deciding on the evidence. I want experts. So, I've asked him to give a report to the agency and then the new Minister, does this therapy work?
Now, I think it'll come back with a view that in some cases it does, and in some cases it doesn't. But let me be also very clear. When you have music therapy at $193 bucks now, I'm sure it may be helping some kids, but a lot of other people can't afford it in their packages. I actually see that there'll be more access to music and art on the Scheme because more people will be able to afford $68 bucks an hour to pay someone than $193. I'll be guided by the evidence. I'm going to leave it to the experts. I think there's legitimate debate on both sides of this argument, and I'm smart enough to know what I don't know. So, I'm going to ask someone to weigh up all the evidence. That is not a prejudgment of anything.
JOURNALIST: Is there a timeline that you have in mind?
SHORTEN: Mid-March.
JOURNALIST: Can you confirm that 1,200 people are being assessed each week in the NDIA, and that half of them have been children who are then kicked out of the Scheme?
SHORTEN: And when you say kicked out, no. Let me say, first of all, I confirm this. There's 680,000 people on the scheme. Most people have annual plans. Plans get reviewed all the time. Like, I don't know if everyone who's making these statements, oh, there's 1200 assessments going on. There should have always been 1200 assessments going on. The reality is, we didn't have enough people in the organisation to do these assessments. When you get early intervention, specifically with kids, that's sort of, the tip is in the expression of early intervention.
There are some kids born with disability who will stay on the NDIS for their whole lives, but in the case of other children with developmental delay, early interventions demonstrated they don't need it by the time they go to school. We are just checking in. This is what I would call it, it's a check in. If you keep needing the NDIS support, you're going to get it. And we are budgeting on an increase in the Scheme every year for the future. But what we're not going to do is have kids given hour upon hour of therapy in their school years when frankly, it's not making a difference and the school system should be supporting them.
We're not going to let any other system off the hook by the NDIS becoming the surrogate school system, or the surrogate hospital system once you're on the NDIS. It's early intervention.
But what I say to any parent is, if your child needs the NDIS under the plans we put forward, you're going to get the NDIS. I was there at the birth of the NDIS; I was there before the birth of the NDIS and now we've done a restructuring which will see this Scheme be sustainable if our reforms are rolled out and they're beginning to.
But I say yes, there will be reassessments and that is the status quo now. But in the future, they won't be done just by any old person. They'll be done by a mix of allied health professionals and people with disability support background. And it will be consistent. And you won't have to use your own money to pay for the reports. And if your child needs ongoing support, they'll get it. But what we're also going to do is build supports outside the Scheme. So, if your child doesn't need the full orchestra of the NDIS but just needs some support, they'll get it.
JOURNALIST: So, there's no deliberate push for reassessments of children, specifically with the guys who are trying to get them off the Scheme.
SHORTEN: No, I just - sorry. I'd be sorry if I'm not being clear. We will be checking in to see how kids are going. And if you keep needing the NDIS, you'll get it. But the reassessments don't prejudge your off. We'll just see how the kids going. We want to see - if you had kids, you would want to know if the therapies they're getting are working or not working. That's it.
JOURNALIST: Will these questions make a difference to the time frames people are waiting to access the NDIS?
SHORTEN: Today's announcement about extra staff is exciting because it will decrease waiting times and it'll increase the equity of access. You shouldn't be able to access the Scheme based on whether or not you live in the inner city of Sydney or Melbourne or Brisbane, based upon, you know, having a tertiary education and knowing lots of therapists. And that's why we want to do the assessments. Thanks.