I'm Ruby Jones and you're listening to seven AM. The federal government says too many children are on the NDIS because there's simply nowhere else for them to go. Health Minister Mark Butler has unveiled a new plan called Thriving Kids, pitched as a way to save the NDIS by bringing back mainstream supports for children with autism and developmental delay
that over time were defunded. But the announcement raises questions who decides what counts as mild or moderate when it comes to these disabilities and the level of care these children need. Today journalist and author Rick Morton on whether Thriving Kids will save the NDIS or just shift the costs elsewhere. It's Thursday, August twenty eight, So Rick. Last week the Minister for the NDAs, So that's Mark Butler. He announced this plan, this new scheme called Thriving Kids.
Children with mild to moderate developmental delay or autism need a robust system of support to help them thrive. A program for Thriving Kids.
And he said that that's a key part of the government's plan to secure the ndas's future. So maybe we can begin by talking about thriving kids. Tell me what you know about what it is.
I think we don't know a lot yet. Mark Butler announced Thriving Kids, much to the surprise of almost everyone who didn't see this coming, including the states and territories with whom the Conwealth is trying to do a deal on this kind of support funding outside of the NDAs. But what we do know is that for a very long time, both the Coalition and now Labor have had what they describe as a problem with the number of
children accessing the National Disability Insurance Scheme. It has always been the case that there were more children approaching the scheme than the initial modeling suggested, either by the Productivity Commission by the allowances made for in the legislation, and governments have struggled to figure out what to do with that number.
Diverting this group of kids over time from the NDIS is an important element of making the scheme sustainable and returning it to its original intent servicing people with permanent significant disability.
There are more than seven hundred and forty thousand people on the NDIS now, and children make up just under half of that number, and the primary disability for those groups. Mary in mind that people could have more than one is autism and developmental delay, particularly for children under the age of nine, and as Mark Butler points out the prevalence of autism and developmental delay, he says across the country, wonning ten six year olds is on the NDAs he
calls that a failure of government. He says, I don't think parents that he says, we don't want it.
Families who are looking for additional supports in mainstream services can't find them because they largely don't exist anymore. And in that all governments have failed them.
And so thriving kids is kind of a throwback to the past where what they want to do, and this is Mark Butler speaking, is to take children with what he calls mild to moderate disability. It's quite a controversial concept.
How do you define what is mild autism or moderate autism and divert them from the National Disability Insurance scheme with lower intensity support, perhaps some therapy, perhaps, as he says, some Medicare line items for allied health, some therapy giving them help that isn't to the same standard and according to the government, isn't required to the same standard as the National Disability Insurance scheme which has as its kind of feature individualized support packages one on one for people
to receive quite intensive assistance with daily living and being able to be in the community.
And frankly, many of those children are being overserviced. The extent of therapy provided to those children now in the NDIS is extremely high compared to anything that you would see in the health system.
Yeah, let's talk about that. What do you think he means when he says that, and is there such thing as being overserviced?
I don't know what evidence he's relying on, but there is a clinical judgment that is made, and a therapy judgment and allied health practitioner judgment that is made where they know they will tell you if they think therapy
is useful or not. I think what Mark Butler was trying to say but did not come out and directly say, was that he thinks that there are some providers who are not expressing that judgment because they're getting paid to see the child anyway via the National Disability Insurance Camp who makes that judgment in terms of the government, And you know, for how many children are they going to say you've been over serviced? I'd like to see the evidence and the assessment on which they base that, because
by their own metrics. The National Disability Insurance Scheme in their last quarterly report has been absolutely crowing about the successes they've had with children in the scheme. It was released just a week before the National Profit Club. They say children between starting school and age fourteen had improvements of more than ten percentage points across all domains. Daily living is the strongest one which helps children in their
kind of day to day life. And so what does overservicing mean and does overservicing also mean that children are faring better?
Can we talk a bit more about what the original vision for the NDAs was in terms of how big it would be versus where we're at now, because obviously we hear all the time that the cost of running the NDAs has ballooned, it's gone beyond its original intent and this is one attempt to save some money. So talk to me about I guess how we've gotten to where we are.
Yeah, it's a great question because there's a little bit of blame shifting now going on, I think between the federal government and what's happened with the NDIS. So when the Gillard government and then the rud government in its second iteration, we're desperately trying to get bilateral agreements approved between each state and territory and the federal government. They made all sorts of deals which I essentially say, yeah, by the way, you can close all your existing community
health support services. They put the numbers in and they said, here's how we're going to pay for it. We'll roll these programs in, and those programs disappeared. The entire Department of Service Delivery disappeared because of the NDS. All of community mental health in Victoria disappeared because of the NDIS. The Helping Children with Autism Commonwealth package disappeared because of the NDIS. I could keep going, better Start for Children
disappeared because of the NDAs. Partners in Recovery disappeared, and the NDAs became as Mark Butler says, the only poured in the storm because of those decisions.
Yeah, it sounds like the problems that we're saying now were not only foreseeable, but were in some ways kind of baked into the system.
You know, every single person that's on the National Disability Insurance Scheme now is there because the legislation allows them to be now the government doesn't like the cost of it,
and the cost of the NDIS has gone up. I mean, you know, the product Committy Commission modeled four hundred and ten thousand participants originally at a cost of about thirteen point six billion dollars a year, and of course, now you know, more than a decade later, we've got a scheme that's forecast to cost about sixty four billion dollars a year. Thriving Kids is a two billion dollar Commonwealth commitment which has to be matched by the states and territories.
So that's a four billion dollar commitment. And so there is still going to be money paid to these children, maybe not quite as much as it would have been in the NDAs, but there will be a whole parallel kind of increase in bureaucracy elsewhere, and increase in funding elsewhere, and increasing gap fees elsewhere, and so you know, it's going to make the NBAS look better in terms of pure numbers, but the numbers are still going somewhere else.
Coming up, how the federal government is strong arming the states on disability funding. Can we talk a little bit more about the relationship between the federal government and the states and territories as they try and get this through. We've now recently heard the Treasurer say that the states need to kick in this funding matching the federal governments
or they could risk losing their hospital fundings. So talk to me a little bit about that approach and what's at risk here if the federal government can't get agreement from the states.
I think there's a broader point here, but they have deliberately held up hospital funding in a really broken hospital system. The commoal said we're not getting your hospital cash unless you do a deal on disability, and that hasn't happened. So it got to the point where just before the election, the government the Comalth had to institute a rollover of the original funding agreement for hospitals of just an extra year.
They sold it as a big win, saying more cash for hospitals, but the reform work is tied to the actual new agreement, which has not been done because it has been held a negotiating tactic. And I think more broadly, this speaks to a concern in the community. So right after the election, Mark Butler was made Minister for Health and Aging and Disability and the National Disaility Insurance scheme.
He's Cabinet Minister for the NDAs. The NDAs was moved from social services social policy to health, which in the disability community is a big red flag because they see that as going back to a medicalized model of looking at disability. It's not about social support, it's about intervention.
The NDAs is not a medical scheme, it is a support scheme, and so a lot of people saw this as foreshadowing what we seem to be having now where we've got you know, Medicare line items been introduced to some kind of potential problem solver for children with autism as part of thriving kids and hospital negotiations tied to disability negotiations. It's a bit of a mess at the moment, to be quite honest.
And can we talk a little more concretely about what this means for a kid with mild or moderate autism. You know, the difference it means if it's picked up earlier, and the quality of care that they get.
If it is. Yeah, I mean it's basically with any developmental condition development to delay autism, the earlier you pick these things up, the better. You can't go all the way back to point zero. We don't have a test for autism. You've got to have a family that is engaged with GPS, with midwives for follow up care, with the community through universal access childcare, which Mark Butler says will help a lot with thriving kids, and I suspect
that's true. The more referral points you've got, the better right and the individual here might be as gentle as understanding the child's communication needs and you know, as they grow up and develop over time, figuring out what it is that child needs to make the world around them more accessible to them, and that at its best is exactly what the NDIS does. As long as there is something that gets to the children of all kinds before you know problems kick in, then you can they can
live a pretty good quality of life. But it's important to note that Mark Butler appeared to stumble over this where he said that.
Remember, the NDIS was established to support people with significant and permanent disability.
And so there was some angst that people were thinking that maybe he was trying to suggest that autism is not an ongoing permanent disability, which it absolutely is. He was asked to clarify this in subsequent radiohen it views, which he did. He said, no, no, it's a permanent disability. We're not trying to find a cure. But he reiterated that the NIS is for people with significant disabilities.
Rick, I think a lot of Australians are very proud of the NDAs. They think it's a good thing that was put in place by Julia Gillard and we're one of the few countries in the world to have something like this. But the commentary from the federal government for many years now has been that it is too big,
it's too expensive, changes will have to be made. So do you think that as a result of that there has been erosion in the public support for the scheme and the public's appetite for spending on looking after people with disabilities.
I think there has been, and I think it's almost entirely at the feet of federal politicians starting with the Coalition.
But turbocharged, I might say, by Bill Shorten when he was Minister, who very deliberately set out on a kind of machiavellian, I guess way of trying to implement his own NBAS reforms after having stood very publicly in the way of the coalition's ones which did much the same thing and are almost exactly the same when you read the draft legislation changes that were put up in two in twenty one and that were put up by him, and then he commissions red Bridge Group to do this
social research that looks at how they can sell reform to people. And the key takeaway from four different tranches of research there is that they can induce, as they call it, qualified tolerance, qualified tolerance for unpopular changes to eligibility and more difficult reform in the NDAs if people think that there's a problem with fraud and routing, and you know, I keep seeing it because of Robodet here.
But you know, the way they sold Robodett is the where they sold the NDAs reforms, which is to talk about all of the fraud, all of the routing, all of the time. And when you're playing with that kind of fire retric loose language using the tabloid media to get your message across, you're going to lose trust in this scheme. And that's exactly what we're seeing and I think it is an appalling use of power.
Well, Rick, thank you for speaking with me today.
Thanks rebby always pleasure.
Also in the news today, the Prime Minister Anthony Albernezi says he takes the threat of the sovereign citizen movement seriously. The man accused of shooting dead two police officers in Victoria's northeast, Deisi Freeman, is a self identified sovereign citizen. The Prime Minister says the government is aware of the dangers of the spread of extremism and ASIO has been warning about it. And Britney Higgins has been ordered to pay almost three hundred and fifty thousand dollars in defamation
damages to the former Defense Minister Linda Reynolds. A judge ruled yesterday that reynolds reputation was damaged by social media posts made by Britney Higgins in July twenty twenty three. I'm Ruby Jones. This is seven am. Thanks for listening. You m