National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS)

While hundreds of thousands of people with disabilities will now get services they have never had under the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), we must closely examine how the scheme is being implemented. The public should demand nothing less in return for the $22 billion of public expenditure and the vulnerability of the recipients. But that is not happening. The NDIS is brilliant for people with physical disabilities, but the scheme risks further marginalising thousands of people with profound intellectual disability.

Socialist councillor Sue Bolton convinced Moreland Council on July 13 to reinstate the after-hours Aged and Disability Home Support Services for existing clients as well as new ones. Bolton said she was enormously grateful to the parents of children with disabilities who spoke up on behalf of all the parents who were unable to come to the meeting or who didn’t think it was possible to fight the cut. “Those parents put a human face on the implications of a very bureaucratic cut: their stories had an impact on the other councillors”, Bolton told Green Left Weekly.

A disability working group said at least 45,000 people with disabilities will remain in unsatisfactory housing, including nursing homes, living with aging parents and homelessness under the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). While the key aim of the NDIS is to provide participants with independent living, most of the people with disabilities will not receive housing support. Housing experts believe 110,000 people need appropriate accommodation, meaning about 40% will miss out on the help they need.

Hundreds of disability workers rallied in Melbourne on December 14 against attempts to privatise the rollout of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) in Victoria.

Two hundred Public Service Association (PSA) members were joined by people with disabilities, their relatives, friends and other trade unionists in a protest in Newcastle on November 4, as part of a four-hour strike against the privatisation of disability services. The Baird government is using the introduction of the National Disability Insurance Scheme as a cover to sack 13,000 workers in public disability services and gift state assets to private providers.