MELISSA CLARKE: Jenny McAllister, thanks for speaking to AM this morning.
JENNY MCALLISTER: Thank you for having me.
MELISSA CLARKE: Now, can you give me an example of someone who's an NDIS participant today who wouldn't be eligible when the new system's in place?
JENNY MCALLISTER: What we want to do is make sure that the Scheme operates as it was intended. It's a real human rights achievement. Australians are incredibly proud of it, but they do think it's off track and so do we. So would like to return the Scheme to its original purpose, which was to provide support for people with significant and permanent disability. There's never really been a definition provided for that and our intention is to build a definition. We'll do that using advice from a technical expert working group but we also, of course, want to talk with people with disability, their families and provide a community.
MELISSA CLARKE: So it's not about what condition you have, but how severe that is in terms of how it impacts you.
JENNY MCALLISTER: That's exactly right and we talk often about functional capacity. So the kinds of things that might be explored in a functional capacity assessment might be how easily do you do your own laundry? Do you need help doing certain kinds of activities in your home? That's more significant in terms of how much support a person needs than a particular diagnosis that might have have been given to them by any particular doctor.
MELISSA CLARKE: So a big question for a lot of current NDIS participants will be who gets to make that decision about what their level of function is?
JENNY MCALLISTER: We'll work that through with the Technical Advisory Group. We do need to make some decisions about how this will be rolled out and we need to roll it out in a way that is sensitive to participants. We've worked with participants before on the support needs assessment and often that involves a lot of practical testing, a lot of talking with people with disability. We want to make sure we get this right.
MELISSA CLARKE: Will participants or potential participants have a say in who gets to do that assessment?
JENNY MCALLISTER: We'll work that through with the community. We want to be upfront with people. This is a task that was recommended to us back in 2023 by the Independent Review. We want to get started on this work. We've tried to be clear about the reasons for it and we've also tried to be clear about the fact we'll work with others in stepping through it.
MELISSA CLARKE: There were attempts back in the Morrison Government to introduce independent assessments to try and do what sounds like very similar to what you're doing now. There was a big backlash from the community at that point because there wasn't enough of a say for participants in who would conduct those assessments. Are you going to face the same issue again?
JENNY MCALLISTER: We're a long way from where the Morrison Government was. The Morrison Government didn't have the benefit of an extended review, the Independent Review which spoke to thousands of people with disability. It didn't have the benefit of the work that we've done so far to understand the nature of the system and the recommendations from the Royal Commission. We're really confident that we can work through this in a way that respects the rights of individuals with disability but also returns us to the core purpose of this Scheme.
MELISSA CLARKE: But you are trying to do the same thing which is limit the eligibility of the Scheme, have some kind of external assessment, make a call on who is eligible and you're not giving any guarantees that participants will have a say in who gets to do those so I'm not sure that it is that different from what was, what was attempted in 2021 is it?
JENNY MCALLISTER: I think that the Morrison Government moved unilaterally without engagement with the community. That's not the approach we're taking. We’ve taken advice from the Independent Review, that was a really significant piece of work, spoke to many, many 1000s of people. We're really confident we can do this in a respectful way that respects people's human rights.
MELISSA CLARKE: Another key change will be the social and community participation, given that that's been identified as a key area of a problem. Can you explain how that will change?
JENNY MCALLISTER: Social and community participation is designed to help people participate more fully in the community. It's one of the parts of the Scheme that has grown incredibly rapidly. It now costs in order of $12 billion a year, and that's projected to rise to $20 billion. It's an area where we do think that we need to return the expenditure to something more manageable for the Australian public, and we expect that that will see the average spend in participants' budgets reduce back to something like where it was a couple of years ago.
MELISSA CLARKE: Because, on average, we're expecting the average cost of a plan to come down in real terms, if this plan is implemented as intended, right?
JENNY MCALLISTER: That's correct, and it's not something that we do lightly. The other thing we're interested in is the quality of community participation experiences that people have and we've announced a $200 million Community Inclusion Fund that's designed to provide resources to community organizations so that they can offer genuinely inclusive communities. One of my concerns is that people are engaged in, sometimes their social and community participation budget is being deployed in ways that I don't think are adding a lot of value to the lives of people with disability. I want them to have access to sport, to art, to genuine connection with other people, not merely trips to public places, and we're quite keen to make investments with the community sector in programs of that kind.
MELISSA CLARKE: Jenny McAllister, thanks very much for speaking with am this morning.
JENNY MCALLISTER: Thanks, Melissa