The Commonwealth Ombudsman has issued a stark warning to the Albanese Government that its plan to slash $35 billion from the National Disability Insurance Scheme could risk a repeat of the Robodebt scandal. Source: Canberra Times.
The legislation would enable the National Disability Insurance Agency to remove at least 240,000 participants from the scheme and cut support for many who remain, which Health Minister Mark Butler says is necessary to slow the scheme’s growth and make it sustainable.
In a submission to the Senate inquiry into the proposed new laws, Iain Anderson – the independent ombudsman tasked with ensuring that federal agencies act with integrity and treat people fairly – said that improving the efficiency and integrity of the NDIS “is a worthwhile goal”.
But he warned of the dangers of automated decision-making that would be enabled by the bill.
“As the Robodebt scheme illustrated, efficiency gains are fundamentally flawed if they come at the cost of integrity,” Mr Anderson wrote.
This could lead to “negative impacts on the people the system is supposed to assist and a significant waste of taxpayer resources spent unravelling a system found to be unfair or unlawful.”
The government’s NDIS bill, which needs the support of the Coalition or the Greens to pass the Senate, would enable the NDIA chief executive or delegate to automate administrative decision-making (ADM) in relation to preparing participant plans and payments, if the minister of the day deems this appropriate.
The chief executive would be able to review and substitute automated decisions if “the administrative action taken by the operation of the computer program is not correct or preferable.”
But, the ombudsman said, this “does not replace the NDIAs responsibility to ensure that its use of ADM processes is lawful as a starting point.”
Robodebt was an unlawful automated welfare debt recovery scheme implemented by the former Morrison Government from 2015 to 2019, which calculated “debts” using income averaging, and was found to have caused severe psychological harm to hundreds of thousands of Australians.
A government spokesperson said automated decision-making would mean “that our public servants can focus on more of the sophisticated tasks that require genuine human interaction and people can be supported in a more timely and consistent way.”
FULL STORY
‘Substantial risks’: Robodebt 2.0 warning as Albanese govt pushes to slash $35 billion in spending (By Dana Daniel, Canberra Times)
