Independent Assessments are dead, long live the… ?
With IAs officially scrapped, Sara explores the road that got us here and looks to where things may be heading.
By Sara Gingold
Jul 15, 2021Article updated Apr 15, 2024.
Wow.
Who saw that coming?
As you have probably heard by now, months of stubbornly insisting that Independent Assessments (IAs) were essential for the survival of the NDIS culminated in Minister Linda Reynolds announcing on Friday evening that the program has officially been scrapped. Her press release followed the Disability Reform Ministers meeting with the states and territories, in which she was seeking in-principle support for her amendments to the NDIS Act. The fact that the states and territories denied that support is unsurprising. But the commonwealth’s surrender to the “states’ revolt” was slightly more unexpected.
But how did this happen? And most importantly, where to from here?
To get some answers, we examine the swarm of important reports released in the lead-up to the decision and look at what they tell us about what might be next.
Independent Advisory Council (IAC) advice on scheme reforms
Last Wednesday, the IAC, a council consisting of people with lived experience of disability which reports to the NDIA board, broke its public silence on IAs and other proposed Scheme reforms. Its report, arriving two days before the ministers meeting, appears to have been hugely influential on the meeting’s outcome. In her press release, Reynolds noted that the advice had been well received by all the ministers and thanked the IAC for their “hard work, frank advice and professionalism.”
The mandate the IAC was given was to recommend “specific changes to the access and planning proposals, including independent assessment” but not to comment on “whether these changes should go ahead.” Those frustrating parameters basically asked council members to tell the government what they really think but nothing the government really didn’t want to hear. Regardless, the report’s first and probably most significant recommendation was that IAs should not proceed in the form they took in the pilot. Reynolds’s press release cited this as a reason for the government scrapping the program.
Importantly, the report did not just cover IAs. Some of the broader recommendations should definitely remain on Reynolds’s to-do-list, including:
Investing 1% of the NDIS’s annual spend in Tier 2 of the Scheme, covering people with a disability who are not eligible for individualised NDIS packages.
Adjusting provider registration requirements, requiring providers to avoid client capture (except in exceptional circumstances), avoiding SIL and Support Coordination being provided by the same provider, and becoming accountable to participant outcomes and have people with disability on the board.
Moving people from group homes to community living options.
Rebuilding the trust of the disability community through transparency and genuine co-design, which will be a challenge if ever I’ve seen one.
It’s unclear yet which (of any) of the IAC’s broader recommendations the Agency or government will act upon. However, given the emphasis on the council’s influence in the decision not to proceed with IAs, it might be politically difficult for the government to simply walk away from the rest of the report.