Federal and state governments must urgently start work on setting up new disability systems for older children, teenagers and adults with lower needs after the Parliament yesterday passed laws that will remove 240,000 people from the National Disability Insurance Scheme. Source: The Age.
Health and Disability Minister Mark Butler said a scheme akin to a “Thriving Teens” program would need to get off the ground within the next 16 months to make sure older children who no longer qualified for the scheme aren’t left in the lurch when eligibility changes start in 2028.
Labor sealed an agreement with the Coalition on Tuesday to pass its contentious NDIS overhaul, which should recoup $37 billion for the federal budget in the next four years, and $150 billion in a decade. The bill passed the Senate with a tranche of amendments on Tuesday night, and returned to the House on yesterday afternoon.
Peak body People with Disability Australia described it as a devastating day for Australia’s disability community.
“People with disability in their thousands provided evidence of what these changes would mean for our lives. We warned about the harm, the injuries, the lost opportunities and lives. Parliament chose to proceed anyway,” acting chief executive Megan Spindler-Smith said.
Mr Butler said federal officials were already designing new NDIS eligibility assessments that will come into effect in January 2028, but there was plenty of work to be done by then so that new systems will be ready to cater to people who no longer qualified for the $50 billion scheme under stricter criteria.
State governments, except for Queensland, have implementation plans ready and to start rolling out the Thriving Kids scheme for children under nine with development delays and autism from October this year, with its complete rollout due by the start of 2028.
Even though it will have taken Thriving Kids four years to have gotten off the ground – counting the time between the first state agreement in December 2023 and its official full launch date – Mr Butler said the government was sticking to its timelines for having all other systems prepared by January 1, 2028.
Mr Butler said the government expected to learn a lot from the Thriving Kids process, which would allow it to more quickly design support schemes for older children.
FULL STORY
As Labor’s NDIS overhaul passes, Mark Butler says states have more work to do (By Natassia Chrysanthos, The Age)
