Concerns NDIS watchdog will be overwhelmed by reforms

0:00As the dust settles on the federal government's proposal to reshape the National Disability Insurance Scheme, the work of the body enforcing standards in the system is coming into focus. The government wants more NDIS providers to be registered, but some disability groups are worried this could overwhelm the Scheme's Quality and Safe Guards Commission. Rebecca Sharky is the independent federal member for Mayo in South Australia. It's an electorate with a significant number of NDIS providers and Rebecca Sharky joins me now. Welcome back to breakfast. Good morning, Sally. Good to be with you. How? Concerned to you about the ability of the NDIS Quality and Safe Guards Commission to not only do its day job, but to deal with increased registrations. Honestly, I don't know how it can. And I think, you know, listen to Mark Butler's speech last week at the press club.

1:01There's no doubt that the NDIS is growing at exponential figures and that the government is seeking to rein in that overall cost. But when we have 320,000 providers for the NDIS, I just don't know. And I don't understand why the government is not looking at that when 95% of them are unregistered. I mean, how can any department manage that volume of providers? And of those providers that are registered, only a very small amount are accredited. And I would have thought that it would be from a management point of view and ensuring that we can have the best quality services for people living with their disability, that the government would want to go down the path of perhaps reducing that number of providers and ensuring that all are accredited, not just registered. So and run by feet and proper people with qualified skills and who have staff that are qualified boards.

2:09A real professionalisation, I guess you could say, I've been ensuring that the highest quality services are provided to people living with the disability. If I look in my electorate, I actually have both whether we're looking at the Flurio and Kangaroo Island or looking at the Adelaide Hills, I have more providers than I have participants. It's what's happening with that situation in your electorate? Why do you think that is? Well, look, I mean, perhaps I have providers living in my electorate who then also service down in the metropolitan areas. But I mean, if you've got a system where you've got 320,000 providers for currently 760,000 people who are on the scheme, I mean, you've effectively got only two and a half clients per provider. And so what we've seen is widespread fraud. We know the minister himself said that only around 10% of the invoices have eyes on them.

3:11And so far what we're hearing in the media is that the focus is on reducing the number of people on the scheme by 160,000. Now that has caused so much fear in my electorate for families in particular who have for years had to go in and battle again and again to get a good plan for their child. And so I would just urge the government. I mean, I'm I and I'm sure, you know, many in the parliament want to work with the government to make sure that this scheme is sustainable. But how can you truly have a system where there's 320,000 providers? And most of them are not even registered providing what sort of services who knows? I mean, you just can't manage that as a department. So what's the answer to that in terms of just the numbers of providers? Are you talking about almost super providers to bring together some of those individuals who are

4:12providing services? In in my world prior to being a member of parliament, I did a lot of tender writing in the NGO space. I if I was the minister, I would local government area by local government area, tender to deliver services and ensure that there's that choice and control for people who are living in that local government area to have a choice of higher quality providers to seek services from because the widespread writing we're talking about $5 billion a year, perhaps more. You just I just don't understand. I can't see how a system could be fixed unless that's addressed. And I think you kind of needs to be built from the bottom up again. But there needs to be comfort provided to families and to individuals living with disability that they're not going to be left out of this system because at the moment, I think that that's

5:13where certainly the focus has been around reducing the numbers of people who are participants in the system. And I'm just hearing from families who just have had a 10-year battle and are just absolutely worn out of sitting in front of plan managers and decision makers going through to the AAT and having to sit there and really give the most difficult day of their lives for themselves or indeed for someone that they're in their family to try and make sure that they can keep the funding in their plan. As I said, when I look at the numbers of providers in my electorate, why are we not looking at that bigger number of how many providers there are? There's around a thousand providers that deliver support at home for aged care. There's around 1,400 in Workforce Australia, a national program that assists people who are looking for employment.

6:17Each one of those providers had to demonstrate to the government with Workforce Australia through a tender process that they have aboard, that they're audited, and importantly, that a government department could walk in and audit them on the spot, can check their invoicing, their bank statements. None of that can really happen at the NDIX when you have 320,000 providers. Rebecca Shaki, thank you very much for joining me this morning. Thank you.