NDIS Minister Linda Reynolds must tear up the compulsory assessment contracts with the Government’s friends and stop demolishing the NDIS.
 
Speaking to the National Press Club, Labor’s Shadow Minister for the NDIS, Bill Shorten, proposes a way forward to fully support people with a disability in Australia.
 
A Labor Government will:

• bolster lived disability experience on the NDIS board.
• strengthen the disability watchdog and put it to work and say no more NDIS participants need die through neglect or due to bureaucratic bastardry.
• introduce greater accountability of how money is spent in the NDIA and the NDIS.
• secure the long-term financial future of the Scheme by reinvesting any money not spent.
• lift the cap on public servants in the NDIA and develop a workforce plan to engage the sector.

The promise of the NDIS has been betrayed. Not yet fatally. But still substantially.
 
But today we show Labor has a plan.
 
We are learning in real time that expecting a Liberal Government to properly manage a scheme like the NDIS is a disaster for people with a disability.
 
If Minister Reynolds wants to salvage some form of relationship with the disability community, she must stop following the playbook of her predecessor, Stuart Robert, who was on a mission to demolish and privatise the NDIS.
 
If Minister Reynolds wants us to believe she is not simply out of touch and imperious, she must: cancel the contracts and scrap the mandatory assessments plan in its current form and go back to the drawing board.
 
The Morrison Government has signed a contract worth half a billion dollars for eight companies to undertake its so-called compulsory ‘independent assessments’.
 
The contract was handed to the Liberal’s friends, including a company run by the former boss of the National Insurance Disability Agency, after a sham pilot.
 
Those contracts should never have been entered into and must be thrown out.
 
After eight years of vandalism, the ongoing existence of the Scheme as we know it is at risk.
 
Under the Morrison Government it is presently at risk from gross neglect, and worse, direct attack.
 
Those currently in charge of the Scheme see people with a disability as numbers on a page, data in a system. We see a thriving and resilient community who know their experience better than anyone.
 
Hand Off Our NDIS.

MEDIA CONTACT: ANTONIA MAGEE 0409 339 989