Schemes haven't always had the best wrap. Whether it's pyramid, ponzi or Snowy Hydro 2.0.
But back in 2013 one scheme, the NDIS promised to transform
Australian lives for the better
This new scheme
Will give people like me
And families like ours
The support we haven't had before.
Disability Care Australia is being introduced progressively in various
locations from the 1st of July.
This is Jeremy Hawks. Now remember him for later.
Despite all of these promises complaints about the scheme have reached record
levels with over 4,000 in the first three months of this year. Four thousand
and one if you count the NDIS complaints officer complaining about the number of complaints.
And it seems many of finding the NDIS impossible to access.
None of Jan Pike's achievements in the sporting world could prepare her for her
transition to the NDIS last year
Penny and Leigh are pleading with anyone who will listen.
They want to find their daughter a safe place, close to home
where she'll be looked after.
We're just getting sick of jumping through hoops
all the time and not getting anywhere.
If the NDIS sounds hard to navigate you
should see their offices. Not a ramp in sight. Outrageous. Now recently we've
heard about haphazard decision-making on individual cases ongoing computer system
problems and the government imposed staffing cap that will see 70% of jobs
outsourced to contractors and that is bad news if you're seeking specialist assistance.
I talked to some people that run the call center out of Melbourne
she's a manager that she's worked there for three years
guess how much empathy training and disability training she's done? Not a
second and she's begging for it because people call up and they talk about their
disability and she has to google it to understand.
That it's terrible and if
you've ever googled a medical issue you know there's only one way that ends...
You're going to die.
So the NDIS has problems, but don't worry
the government is on the case.
A new task force will target criminals trying to
rot the National Disability Insurance Scheme.
These gangs or these criminal groups if they do turn out to be groups according
to the news that I've read this morning some of them seem to perhaps originate
from the Middle East and maybe even some African countries?
That's a suggestion that's being put around by the government.
African gangs?
That is a terrifying suggestion. Just how big is this suggested problem?
What's the assessed
scale of risk or even fraud known to be happening on the NDIS right now?
So at this stage the fraud known to be happening is minimal but as you say the
risk there is is quite large.
Minimal fraud? Oh man, just as I was looking
forward to getting all worked up about gangs of able-bodied African youth
hooning around in stolen wheelchairs on the taxpayers dime.
Now maybe we should be more concerned at reports of a plan to restrict access to the scheme.
Thousands of people with autism who rely on the National Disability Insurance
Scheme could be cut off from benefits if a redesign of the NDIS is successful.
You can't just go from being disabled to being not disabled overnight. It's not
the Best Actor category at the Oscars. The NDIS was meant to include people in
society but it's become a scheme that excludes many from the help they need in
fact remember Jeremy Hawks? The smiling face of the NDIS ads?
This year he applied for NDIS support himself but despite being one of the faces of the
campaign he was rejected.
Jeremy's Parkinson's made him disabled
enough to be in the ads for the NDIS, but apparently not disabled enough to get on
the actual NDIS. So here's an idea before we worry about African gangs rotting the
NDIS maybe, maybe we should make the NDIS a scheme that's worth rotting in the
first place.
you