NDIS gets $1b injection to slow growth even as budget slides into deficit

Shorten said the expanded assessment team was good news for recipients who had to pay practitioners for lengthy reports – some of them up to 80 pages – to make their cases. “This new workforce of 1000 dedicated support needs assessors will put participants’ needs at the centre and improve the NDIS experience for people with disability,” he told this masthead.
“On the flipside, this will also free up allied health and medical professionals’ time to deliver supports, significantly reducing waiting times across the country.”
The spending includes $280 million to fund 1000 staff to conduct assessments. There is another $503.5 million to support current NDIS participants, $143.9 million for the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission and $110.4 million to boost fraud-detecting systems.
The changes add to months of uncertainty for participants as agency officials say they have been able to escalate efforts to reassess people’s eligibility since Shorten boosted staffing numbers last year.
The agency is reassessing about 1200 participants a week, with almost half of them moving off the NDIS as a result. Most are children, and officials say almost 80 per cent of children are exiting the scheme when they’re reassessed, easing a massive source of budget pressure.
A further $4.5 million in Wednesday’s budget update will go into designing an early intervention pathway for the NDIS so that children with mild autism and developmental delays are more easily identified and moved onto supports outside the scheme.
Skye Kakoschke-Moore, head of Children and Young People with a Disability Australia, said children were being kicked off the NDIS before a new system of supports across schools and childcare centres had been established.
“Because they have more staff to process claims, there’s a higher volume of children being exited from the scheme than we’re used to, and foundational supports aren’t there to capture those children and ensure they won’t fall through the gaps,” she said.
Jeff Smith, from the Disability Advocacy Network Australia, said people were anxious about Labor’s reforms. “That is why it’s important to move more slowly, explain what the changes mean, and build trust in the community,” he said.
The government will unveil savings in Wednesday’s mid-year economic and fiscal outlook, including $5.2 billion from aged care outlays to help pay for separate changes to the aged care system.
Loading
The government will also claim to have “reprioritised” $1.6 billion in defence spending and $7.8 billion in other savings, with the money put back into federal programs.
“We have worked hard to find responsible savings while also dealing with the significant spending pressures we are facing,” Gallagher said.
As well as the NDIS investment, the government is spending $3.6 billion to increase pensions in line with living costs and putting $3.1 billion toward childcare subsidies, as announced in the lead-up to the budget update.
There is also a $2.6 billion spending boost for schools, another $2.3 billion for Medicare and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, and $1.8 billion in additional funding for areas hit by natural disasters.
Cut through the noise of federal politics with news, views and expert analysis. Subscribers can sign up to our weekly Inside Politics newsletter.