The national disability insurance scheme minister, Linda Reynolds, has played down the surge in people filing legal appeals against cuts to funding packages, saying that the amount is still a “minuscule” proportion of overall participants.
The latest statistics, released on Friday, show the number of people appealing NDIS decisions to the administrative appeals tribunal increased by 244% in the March quarter, compared with the same period in 2021.
In a rare interview during the election campaign, Reynolds was asked what she would do to address the growing number of people “going to the courts so they can get the support they need”.
The host of the “Reasonable and Necessary” podcast, the disability rights advocate Dr George Taleporos, said he had been “shocked” by the increase and noted the process could be “very traumatic” and “quite expensive”.
“It’s obviously very topical at the moment,” Reynolds said. “I think the context of this is really important … Remembering we’ve got half a million people now on the scheme, the overall percentage of people who are going through to the AAT appeals process is still minuscule.
“And most of those people who do go to the AAT, well over 90% of those are settled as part of the early AAT process. It’s important that people have an avenue to appeal to the AAT … Again it’s a tiny fraction, still.
“Because we’ve gone up to half a million [participants] now, proportionally you’d expect the numbers going to the AAT would correspondingly increase.”
The latest NDIA quarterly report said on Friday there were 4,265 open AAT cases at March 2022, compared with 518,668 participants in the scheme.
However, while the number of AAT appeals made up 0.42% of all participants in March 2021, that has risen to 1.24% in the latest March quarter.
Specifically, the report showed there were 1,583 cases in the March quarter, a 244% increase on the 460 cases in the 2021 March quarter. In the December 2021 quarter, the rise was even larger, with the 1,871 appeals representing a 366% on the 401 cases filed in 2020.
The disability community have argued the AAT process can be traumatic for people with disability and on Sunday, Guardian Australia revealed a case in which a New South Wales man in his 20s spent his last months fighting in the AAT for denied supports.
Reynolds said the government had recently provided an extra $100m to disability advocacy services to better assist people going to the AAT.
Some advocacy organisations have said they were unable to take on more clients due to the unprecedented demand. Taleporos said they were “overwhelmed”.
Reynolds also denied Labor claims of cuts to the NDIS, and noted the government had pledged an extra $157bn in the most recent budget to “fully fund” the scheme.
Labor claims an increasing number of people are facing arbitrary cuts to plans, pointing to anecdotal cases and the experience of advocacy services.
Among its policies it claims will “fix” the scheme is a crack down on spending on external lawyers and the introduction of an as yet unspecified new “review” process to keep cases out of the AAT.
