From Schwartz Media. I'm Ruby Jones. This is seven AM. Outgoing Labor Minister Bill Shorten says he's leaving politics at the end of the month, confident with the state of the National Disability Insurance Scheme. As Minister for the NDIS, Bill Shorton has been focused on making massive reforms to the scheme in an effort to rain in its growing
costs and insure its sustainability. And while the government says the changes are largely about cracking down on fraud, it turns out a third of the savings will come from pushing children off the NDIS. Today Senior reporter for the Saturday paper, Rick Morton on the children targeted in the NDAs crackdown and the real intent behind the cuts. It's Thursday, January sixteenth, So Rick, I thought we could begin by
talking about the letters. So the NDIS, the National Disability Insurance Scheme, has been sending out letters to some of its participants telling them that they are no longer eligible for support. You've seen one of these letters, Can you tell me about what it says?
Yeah, So they've been sending out about twelve hundred eligibility reassessment letters a week and they're asking for more information, more evidence about a person's disability because they believe they may no longer qualify. And if after twenty eight days these people are unable to furnish that evidence or what they give the NDIS agency in charge doesn't meet whatever mysterious requirements they have, they tell them they're no longer eligible and they literally just kick them off the National
Disability Insurance Scheme. So I've seen one in particular, where there's this young girl. She's got childhood apraxia of speech, which is quite a severe communication disability, it's a neuro impairment, and the NDA has said, look, there's no doubt that your daughter, to the parent we've chosen not to name, requires intensive support and will continue to require intensive speech therapy,
but we're not going to fund it. That is the job of the health system, the National Disciplined Insurance Agency says, and the health systems are run by the state governments, and you need to go and get your support from them. So these letters are very blunt, and there's thousands of them every week in what is essentially a scattergun approach,
often without prior communication or explanation. They just spat out of a system process where you know, according to people I've spoken to, there are KPIs where staff are feeling forced to meet a certain number of targets.
Right, okay, And so twelve hundred letters like this going out a week, do we know, Rick, how many children are being told this that they're no longer going to be supported in this way?
Yeah, they've actually got targets. So the target for this financial year just gone was six percent of all children on the scheme they wanted to remove. They ended up removing about three and a half percent of the one hundred and eighty thousand children under the age of nine on the NDS. Children are the biggest and have always been the biggest part of the NDAs they've been the fastest growing, and a lot of that comes down to the fact that the modeling that was done when the
NDS began just wasn't accurate. They didn't know how many kids with autism or how many kids who had developmental delay or needed therapy, particularly early intervention therapy, and so they've never coped with the numbers, which is one side of the equation. But of course the other side is that having written the legislation as it is that allows kids to get access and their families to get much
needed support, much needed therapy. The NDAs has decided they don't want them anymore, and to the fullest extent possible, they are targeting them. They are quite open about this. They write about it in their annual report, they track
it in their quarterly reports. They have grasped the numbers of how many kids have ultimately left the scheme, and in the last financial year alone, there were six thousand and eighty seven children under the age of nine who were revoked and another four hundred and fifty who ended up qualifying for full disability under the NDAs and going on, So three point three five percent of all of the kids.
Right, So this isn't something that the NDAs is trying to hide. But why are they doing it? Rick, What are they saying about why they think that these children no longer need their support?
Now the NBAA is selling all of this as a massive success story. They actually claim in their annual report that there are more children leaving the NDAs because they have quote unquote achieved their goals. Now, when I put that to an advocate, they're like, that is an outright line. They don't even measure it. They can't measure the data is missing, and they're actually, as we've spoken about in the letters, they're sending to family saying, oh, yeah, so
and so your daughter needs intensive support. She hadn't met her goals at all, she's got childhood a praxia of speech, and they're claiming this as a win. It's misleading in the extreme. But also we've seen many decisions where people have had their access revoked, who should not have and who because they fought it, had it overturned. So there was a mistake in the agency decision making. They got
it wrong, they had to overturn it. But not everybody is able to fight, and so the process by which this is happening, I think it is a blunt instrument, and I think it is catching a lot of people off guard. And it's also hurting families who actually don't have anywhere else to go and whose kids need support now lest their decilities become worse over time.
And so for these children and their families who are being kicked off, sometimes completely unfairly, and that's I suppose shown in some of the reversals. They're being told that they should be cared for by the health system, but does that work? Is there any room for them in the health system.
No, you know, you might be able to get some chronic health funded items under Medicare, for example, with childhood a practicia of speech, you might get access to maybe six weeks of speech therapy and then it cuts off. And according to the NDA's own admissions on the letter sent to the family, this child in particular will need
intensitive support ongoing. And what happens when you don't quite qualify for the NDS is that there should be service systems, mainstream supports in schools, in childca settings outside of the NDAs, funded by the state governments but also the Commonwealth that will support your child. Now, the moment the NDAA started, state governments got out of service provision and it was a complete disaster and should never be allowed to happen,
but it did. And what we have now is where family's the only place they can get the support they need is the NDAs. What the government did was say, well, actually we're going to fix that, and we're going to start kicking everyone off now before we fixed it, and so there isn't this promised foundational level of support which isn't due to begin until July this year, and it is probably not going to be ready. It doesn't seem
to be ready in New South Wales. I query whether it will even be what was promised anywhere, but it either way, it doesn't exist yet. The bald fact of the matter is that they're exiting people to nothing from the NDIAS and all of the talk we're getting and hearing now about NDOS reform is about fraud and wrought in. That's a crackdown on fraud, and people are like, yes, yes, get the bad people, but that's not actually what we're seeing in terms of the savings being realized under the NDIAS.
Reform after the break to the figures around fraud ad up. So Rick, you've been reporting on the savings that the government is finding by kicking children off the ndaes. But what we've heard again and again is that there is so much fraud happening within the unds and does need
to be cleaned up. So if we look at the bigger picture, how much of the savings that the government is making come from actually cleaning up fraud versus changing who it is who actually receives funding for their disability.
Well, this is a fascinating question because almost none of it and yet to listen to the retric it is all fraud, it's all roarting all the time.
The National Disability Insurance Scheme, set up to help our most vulnerable is being roughted by around four billion dollars every year.
Examples just in the last week, a twenty thousand dollars holiday border car brand new, seventy three thousand dollars rent subsidies alcohol.
The revelations made by the Schemes integrity chief who told Parliament you name it, it's on the list, including illicit drugs like heroine, cocaine and ice.
And in fact they were told that if you want to sell difficult reform that cuts the cost of the ndias, the way to do that is to focus on talking
about fraud and routing. And they got the labor aligned Pollyon Research GRIP Redbridge in to do three or four rounds of market research where they tested messaging with people and what they came up with, literally they said, you can induce qualified tolerance for difficult NDOS reforms if you talk about fraud and morting, and to a t that is what the NDAs Minister Bill Shortan has done ever since.
The roots have been right. For years, the NDIA did not have a system to see det or detect. We are making up for years of bad systems.
And the thing is it works because it's true in that there is fraud and routing. No one disagrees with that.
That everyone in this house wants to stamp out the roots. But I have to say it takes a labor government to fix the NDIS.
But using Bill Shorten's own figures of crackdowns on payment integrity, so not even fraud, but suspicious payments or payments that they say we don't fund, which is different to a fraud case. They reckon they'll save two hundred million dollars over the next four years. Now, the value of kicking kids off the scheme is one hundred and twenty five
million dollars in three months. Their own figures five hundred million dollars a year of revoking access to kids, and yet the fraud and routing saving is two hundred million dollars over the next four years now in the annual accounts. After the NDS legislation reform package passed and with future proposed reforms, the difference between what the ndias would have cost and what it is going to cost now is
nineteen million dollar less. So they're making nineteen million dollars worth of savings to the four cars, only two hundred million dollars of which is coming from fraud and warting.
Right, that's not much at all, Rick, That's only one percent of cost savings actually coming from fraud.
That's correct, and that's just from actually, I mean not to overcomplicated, but that is actually just from payment integrity, the fraud savings. There's a funny little footnote in the annual report for the NDOS which says, oh, actually, so the fraud saving for last financial year twenty three twenty four was meant to be thirty million dollars or thereabouts.
Right. So would you say then that the rhetoric around fraud is disguising the government's true intent here when it comes to cuts to the NDAs.
I think it disguises the reality, which is that they are making really difficult decisions, and I think some of them are difficult decisions that were always going to have to be made, but they don't want to be honest about what they're doing. I've covered the NDA since it began right in twenty thirteen. For the longest time, until Bill Shorten came to power, the NDAs agency would tell me in official statements the NDAs is on track and
on budget and there is nothing to see here. And of course now it's a crisis.
Yeah, it is a crisis for the thousands of children who are losing this support. And Rick, it seems obvious that if this assistance is pulled and there is not a viable safety net in place, then this will mean likely worse outcomes for them in the immediate term, but also potentially a real knock on effect for their lives.
Yeah, what we're seeing is evidence that the agency is failing on a large scale with everyone. I think their own metrics have fallen through the floor. They've collapsed. And so this is not a story about how the NDS does not need to be reformed. It is a story about how the NDAs reform is happening in a topsy turvy way that is actually hurting people who should not be hurt. And they know about enough of this now
to know better, and they're doing it anyway. If you save money in the NDIAS budget, but the budget of medicare goes up and the budget of state services goes up, are you actually saving money? The shortsightedness of some of these decisions is quite mind boggling because it's become again, as all things in austrain politics tend to do, how much is the budget for this one siloed thing, and
if that money goes somewhere else, who cares? Because the person who came up with these NDAs reformed Push Orden, who's retiring and will no longer be a minister as of a few weeks gets to say, I fix the NDAs, and I'm just I think the story is much more complicated.
Rick. Thank you so much for your time.
Thanks for we appreciate it. Also in the.
News today, a forty nine year old man has been charged with murder after the body of an Indigenous woman was found near the Todd River in Alice Springs. Please say the fifty one year old woman was the partner of the man, noting she's the Northern Territory's first alleged victim of domestic violence homicide of twenty twenty five. Advocates say the case is the first domestic violence homicide of the year in the country. Last year, seventy eight women
were killed in acts of gender based violence. According to the Counting Dead Women Project, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women are eight times more likely to be victims of homicide than non Aboriginal women and her Mass has accepted a draft agreement for a ceasefire in Gaza. The proposed ceasefire involves a release of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners, a greater aid access to Gaza, and eventually a full
withdrawal of Israeli troops from the Gaza Strip. The plan still needs approval from the Prime Minister Benjamin Ettina, who's security cabinet, with one minister threatening to resign if the government agrees to the Dear, I'm Ruby Jones. This is seven a m.
See you tomorrow.