Bill Shorten has accused the states of underspending on disability, saying the national disability insurance scheme should be reserved for “the most profoundly and severely impaired”.
On Thursday the government services and NDIS minister signalled that the cost of supports for children needs to change to keep the scheme sustainable, suggesting that state schools could play a bigger role.
Shorten also flagged a crackdown to fight “inflated” invoices from providers seeking to rort it.
Before the budget Shorten revealed that the NDIS is set to cost $50bn by 2025-26, prompting calls to find major savings in administration, payment integrity, eligibility and funding responsibility.
In opposition, Labor had pushed back against Coalition attempts to set up independent assessments to limit eligibility and save on ballooning costs.
Labor’s October budget identified the NDIS as one of the five fastest growing areas of spending, second only to interest repayments on government debt. The scheme is under review, with a report to be handed to disability ministers by October 2023.
On Thursday Shorten said the scheme hadn’t been well managed for the last nine years, blaming “clunky decision-making within the organisation” and a “lack of attention on the payments side”.
“In other words, what service providers are charging, who’s taking the scheme for a lend,” he told ABC radio’s RN Breakfast.
“My focus is not that people with disabilities, profound disabilities, are doing the wrong thing. They’re not. I do think there is rent-seeking behaviour by some providers … and it is a problem, there are rorts out there.”
Shorten acknowledged that the number of participants was increasing – particularly the number of children joining the scheme is higher than forecast, though they tended to be “pretty minimal cost”.
“I also think there’s a challenge with the states. What’s happened is now the NDIS exists, everything becomes an NDIS matter. It can’t afford to be the only lifeboat in the ocean for people with a disability.
“It was designed for the most profoundly and severely impaired Australians, not for every person with a disability.”
Asked if some kids should not be on the NDIS, Shorten replied: “I don’t blame someone for seeking to get support for their child. What it does make me wonder is, are the state school systems providing the support for kids with developmental and learning delays, are they doing enough?”
“This is the challenge: we live in a federation. Originally, when the NDIS was created, it was to be a 50/50 split between the states and the federal government. At the moment the federal government is paying 64% to 66% of the scheme and states are paying in the mid-30s.”
Shorten said the states had been “more adept negotiators than my predecessors” – suggesting that the federal government under the Coalition had taken on the lion’s share of ballooning costs.
He said the NDIS helped hundreds of thousands of people but “for other people in the scheme it’s been bogged down in courts, stuck in hospitals – decisions do take an inordinate amount of time”.
He blamed the Coalition for imposing a staff cap of 4,000 employees at the National Disability Insurance Agency, the authority that runs the scheme, back when there were 180,000 participants. As it grew to half a million people the agency had relied on contractors and labour hire.
“The scheme hasn’t been, in my opinion, well-supervised and well-loved …
“And as a result … I don’t think there’s sufficient scrutiny on the invoices that get submitted for services which are provided.”
“We’re going to have to put more effort into payment integrity, more effort into monitoring the invoices.”
Shorten said service providers could put in invoices and the NDIS has no idea if the cost was inflated.
He said he would start with “low-hanging fruit, of waste and fraud” but did not rule out diverting people on to other supports to limit growth in participants, particularly of children.
“There is clearly a role for provision of services outside the NDIS.”
Shorten, who helped establish the NDIS as a parliamentary secretary in the Gillard government, also stressed the benefits of the scheme, which he said had improved the quality of life “of hundreds of thousands of people and their families”.
The scheme should be seen as an investment, he said. Good returns included children getting better results in education, and more people with disabilities belonging to the workforce.
“There’s half a million people who for the first time in many cases, most cases, are receiving support, which previously fell to a crisis-driven system.”
