NDIS overhaul will ‘harm’ Australians with disabilities, government’s own committee warns

In a submission to a parliamentary inquiry, the NDIS reform advisory committee said the government should redraft the bill in ‘genuine partnership with the disability community’. Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP View image in fullscreen In a submission to a parliamentary inquiry, the NDIS reform advisory committee said the government should redraft the bill in ‘genuine partnership with the disability community’. Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP NDIS overhaul will ‘harm’ Australians with disabilities, government’s own committee warns Reform advisory committee says changes will undermine scheme’s original intentions and give unprecedented power to the health minister Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates Get our breaking news email , free app or daily news podcast The national disability insurance scheme’s proposed overhaul will cause “material harm” to Australians with disabilities, undermine its original intentions and hand unprecedented power to the health minister, the federal government’s own reform advisory committee warns. The Australian Human Rights Commission has also urged the government to slam the brakes on the potentially “regressive” changes to the NDIS, saying more consultation time was needed to avoid the “clear risk of adverse and unintended human rights impacts”. Labor’s NDIS overhaul will leave participants more ‘isolated’ and ‘segregated’, former royal commissioner warns Read more The Albanese government is eager to move ahead with changes that are estimated to remove more than 200,000 people from the $50bn-a-year scheme by 2030 in a bid to secure its financial sustainability. A Labor-led Senate inquiry is due to deliver its recommendations mid-June after three public hearings. But alarm bells are ringing for a number of disability advocacy bodies, human rights groups and government watchdogs as the scale of the changes required to achieve that goal are realised. In a submission to a parliamentary inquiry, the NDIS reform advisory committee, made up of disability representatives, admonished the changes and encouraged the government to redraft the bill in “genuine partnership with the disability community”. The submission, authored by its co-chairs, El Gibbs and Dougie Herd, added that the savings could be achieved through focusing on provider integrity, fraud enforcement and pricing reform – rather than cutting support services for Australians with disabilities. “The community has, repeatedly, asked for that change to be done with us, not to us,” it said. “The community has not been listened to in the design of this bill. Sign up for the Breaking News Australia email “The bill in its current form does material harm to current and future participants. It misrepresents the founding intentions of the NDIS. It inverts the [2023 NDIS] review on which the government relies. It demolishes the federated joint venture and concentrates unprecedented power in the Commonwealth minister. “It is, on the government’s own admission, retrog