E&OE TRANSCRIPT

SUBJECTS: NDIS Section 10 lists; Middle East conflict

GREG JENNETT, HOST: Well, there are more than half a million Australians on the $40 billion a year National Disability Insurance Scheme, but the first major steps to restructure it and to lower the growth in costs have taken effect today. These changes stem from laws passed back in August, and they'll take a while to be fully wound in. Still, there's a level of anxiety among participants and providers, so NDIS Minister Bill Shorten joined us a moment ago to try to settle some of that. Bill Shorten, good to have you back with us once again. Welcome. So, as of today, we have an explicitly clear set of arrangements for what services or supports are covered or are not covered by the Scheme. No doubt this is causing some confusion, at least for participants and providers. What can you say to them to set some of that at ease?

BILL SHORTEN, MINISTER FOR THE NDIS AND GOVERNMENT SERVICES: Well, first of all, I can say that much of what we finally put into one source has been the existing policy for a very long time. So, for most participants, nothing changes at all. For most service providers, nothing changes. I can tell you that as of 2:00pm today, our hotline has had 105 phone calls. That's out of 661,000 participants. No doubt the number will go up and we're just explaining to people as they go along.

JENNETT: That is a relatively low number, isn't it? So, can we talk about the twelve month transition period? What's going to happen during that time? If an unsupported service is billed against a plan? What concessions are you going to make to the introduction of this?

SHORTEN: Well, it depends on what the unsupported service is, like, you're not allowed to use it for drugs, for illicit substances, for alcohol, now, so we're not going to pay it. But what we do have is a transitional provision that if the item is less than $1,500, we will give you a talking to and an education process if you're a participant, twice over the next twelve months. Now, if the amount of money is much bigger than $1,500 and it's not allowed, well, then it's not allowed, but we should be checking these invoices before they get paid if they're a much bigger amount. The other thing is for providers, we'll give them a 30 day discretionary period. But of the 105 phone calls that we've received this morning, some of the stuff that people were asking to be able to still be funded is not on like paying for someone's holiday, it's not on.

JENNETT: Right, so, they were actually phoning, were they, to make inquiries about charging holidays?

SHORTEN: Having booked a holiday, which they weren't allowed to do, they were saying, well, we still got a chance because we booked it. Can you at least pay that? And we're saying no.

JENNETT: What's that saying to you? If this is representative of the sort of hotline inquiries that might come in the weeks and months ahead, what's that suggesting to you? That there's going to be a lot of shocked or disappointed people out there, I imagine.

SHORTEN: Well, the fact that we've had 105 phone calls and calls with disability rep organisations to me doesn't show a giant tsunami of outrage or concern because most participants have got nothing to worry about. What we are doing is making it clear what is an NDIS responsibility and what is not a support when things are not supports, so, there's two sorts of broad categories. There are things which just shouldn't be paid for by anyone, by a taxpayer service, but then there's also services which are rightfully the jurisdiction of either the hospital system or Medicare or the states. Like we're not going to pay for a kid's desk at school to be modified. That's the job of the Education Department. We don't pay for prescription medicine. That's the job of our PBS Scheme. So, I think that the reform is long overdue and we've consulted, we've got 7000 submissions since we said we were going to do this. To be honest, if you hold an Olympics for consultation, whilst there are some people who are unhappy, some service providers and some activists, the reality is most people are happy that we're doing this.

JENNETT: Under what circumstances? If you weren't able to catch a questionable invoice at that kind of filtering stage, under what circumstances might someone over the next twelve months have a repayment charge raised against them or do you rule that out?

SHORTEN: That question is sort of bigger than the Pacific Ocean. You know, there's so many different sets of circumstances. But to be clear, if you are providing, invoicing us for services, for therapies which just have no scientific basis, then you're not going to get them paid. I do say, if you've got something currently in your plan then you can still get it paid up to when your plan expires. So, we're not going to be throwing - this is not about massive debt reclamation. When Mr Morrison and the Liberals did their Robodebt, they banked billions of dollars. They alleged that welfare recipients had these big debts. We haven't forecast a single dollar coming back in terms of debts. This is just about straightening the Scheme up for the future.

JENNETT: Ok, and as part of that straightening up, do you anticipate the number of service providers will shrink as all of this is bedded down? In other words, is it deliberate to drive out dodgy people operating dodgy services?

SHORTEN: There are two questions now. The first one is, will the overall number of service providers decline? I don't expect that, no, but we do want to drive out the dodgy service providers, yes. All right. This is a growth industry. I've got to say that this is part of a whole lot of strategies we've put in place since we were elected two and a half years ago. But I think most people, either on the Scheme or people, you know, catching the train home tonight, if it's put to them that at last there's a list, what you can use is supports for and what you can't. I reckon 99% of people will say, not that we're going too quickly, but why didn't this happen five and eight years ago?

JENNETT: That might be the case. That's not all that kicks in from today, though, is it? It's not just about the schedule and the list. There is also this different pathway, created, at least by the legislation from today, whereby new early intervention supports could be offered to some people as the system is developed. But there's also another part where existing participants, upon eligibility reassessment, could also be put into early intervention services. Can you explain, Bill, the second part of that, how many existing participants do you project over, well let's say the next twelve months, will be reassessed into early intervention programs?

SHORTEN: Probably very few at this point, because we've got to co design the assessment tools. The next - what the legislation did is create the authority to go on this journey. And now what we've got to do is create assessment tools. It could be dozens of them, to be honest. So, again, for early intervention, which we think is a good thing, we've got to co design it with people on the Scheme. We've got to get the experts in. This legislation is like the, if I could use it, the starters pistol being fired, but now we're setting off on the trip.

JENNETT: Yes, there's a lot of detail to get through, but I mean, do you have figures modelled out into the future about the conversion rate to early intervention from existing participants in the Scheme?

SHORTEN: No, we still need to work out what we, how we set up foundational services outside the Scheme that's being led by my colleague Amanda Rishworth and the states. I can say to you that we're projecting there'll be more people on the Scheme next year than this year. I can say to you that we will be investing more money into the Scheme next year than this year. But what I am pleased also to say is, because we've been straightening up the Scheme, we forecast to spend $42.4 billion up till the end of June this year. It's come in at $41.4 billion, which is still a lot and still doing a lot of good. But it's a billion dollars less than we even forecast. And we can say that whilst the Scheme will grow in the future, when I became Minister in the previous year, it grew at 23%, which is just ludicrous and unsustainable, and we are now seeing growth at 18% and we want to get it down to about 8%. And what we've really done with these laws is set the tram tracks. Now the tram's got to move along.

JENNETT: Yes, we'll look in your remaining months in the job we'd love to keep across this transition that you're entering from today. And we'll keep across hotline call numbers too with you, Bill. Look, just finally, on a totally different matter, but it does relate to Melbourne, Middle East matters, you resigned to the gathering of a vigil being organised in central Melbourne on Monday, of course, coinciding with the October 7 attacks. Does that appear to you unstoppable at present?

SHORTEN: I don't know. I just appreciate that if you're of Palestinian heritage or Jewish heritage, Lebanese heritage, or just someone who's, you know, upset legitimately with the violence and the death which is happening in the Middle East, I can understand why people want to express how they feel. But October 7 was when Hamas terrorists, funded by Iran, crossed into Israel and killed 1200 people. Mass sexual assaults. They took hundreds of people hostage. I think that if you want to persuade people about your cause, holding it on the anniversary with the greatest massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust, to me, is completely counterproductive. And to be honest, holding a vigil, which you feel because your pain that you feel is more meritorious than the pain that other people are feeling from Israel or the Jewish community. This is not a competition of pain. And I've, you know, no one's stopping people protesting, but I think on the 7th I would respect the pain of the Jewish community. And that doesn't mean people don't have pain in all the other points of view. And of course, they've got other days to do that on.

JENNETT: No, thank you for covering that one off with us, too. We will wrap it up there. Time is up today. Bill Shorten, appreciate it, as always.

SHORTEN: Thank you very much, Greg.