Page 4378 - Week 14 - Thursday, 28 November 2013
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decision to no longer provide—no information is being provided about what will happen to the ACT government employees that currently operate these services.
People with a disability, their families and carers as well as the service providers are still no clearer on how they will transition from their current arrangements to the NDIS. All the minister can do at the moment is ask rhetorical questions. Instead, the minister must come up with the answers. It is her responsibility.
Much is still being done to build the expectations of people with a disability, their families and carers, about how the NDIS will allow them to live the life that they choose, utilising the services that they choose. What we do know is that the NDIS will only provide for about 20 per cent of the support and assistance that many individuals require, with the remaining 80 per cent of this assistance and support having to be met by family, friends and carers.
The NDIS was designed around this principle, and it is the only way that the system will remain affordable. I continue to caution the minister against continuing to unfairly build the expectations of the wider community and individuals who will rely on this funding. It is evident that Minister Burch is playing catch-up. She is behind the eight ball in this transition. She has said clearly today that the firm detail surrounding the transition will not be finalised until February—that is, less than five months prior to the actual transition date.
That gives the community organisations and service providers very little time to finalise any structural changes they may need to make to their businesses in anticipation of July 1. It seems that the NDIS launch in the ACT was delayed from 2013 to 2014 not to give the sector time to prepare but simply to give this government more time to get their affairs in order.
Another area of the transition that still has not been sorted out is the pricing schedule for the ACT specifically. The pricing of services is an essential key to working out if the NDIS trial in the ACT will be successful or not. If pricing is set the same as in other jurisdictions, many service providers here in the ACT may not be able to afford to continue to provide the services that they currently do, and certainly not to the standard that they currently are able to provide.
Issues such as the higher than average wage costs in the territory—a reality of doing business here in the ACT—will have huge impacts should the pricing not be calculated correctly. Regardless, however, of where the pricing schedule lands, it is not likely that the fee for service will cover the costs of inefficiencies that are incurred by government-run services.
I also wish to note many of the answers that the minister has provided during the annual report hearings recently. She has already started to shift much of the responsibility for the implementation to the national agency. Many of the issues that I have outlined here today have been issues for quite some time and a change in the federal government does not mean that Joy Burch now has an opportunity to shift the blame if things are not quite working out as they should in the ACT.
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