Kurt Fearnley: What do you remember most about the last 10 years in Australian politics?
Vox1: Umm there were a lot of prime ministers!
Vox2: I don't follow a lot of politics, to be honest.
Vox3: Probably like refugees. The economy during covid... Terrible leaders that we've had?
Kurt Fearnley: What do you remember about Julia Gillard?
Vox1: Not much!
Vox2: The most memorable bit would be the first female prime minister.
Vox3: Julia's speech in the parliament about misogyny is probably the thing that stands out for me most about Julia.
Kurt Fearnley: Do you know much about her role in getting the NDIS up and running?
Vox1: Uh, no.
Vox2: No, I don't.
Vox3: I remember she got a little teary, I think. And you could tell it was something she really cared about.
Vox4: I mean, I should know a bit more because my wife works in disability...
Voice-over [Kurt Fearnley]: The last 10 years in Australian politics have been a whirlwind, to say the least. We have rushed through FIVE Prime Ministers, debated same-sex marriage, struggled with immigration and wrestled our way through policy on climate change.
But one of the biggest social reforms in a generation, a quarter of a trillion dollars over a decade, the NDIS, it rarely even gets a mention. Even though it’s a HUGE part of the last decade in politics.
Voice-over [Kurt Fearnley]: I’m Kurt Fearnley, and this is A Nation Changed. We left the last episode at the launch of the NDIS. It’s June 2013, and Julia Gillard is the Prime Minister. Gillard was the person who introduced the NDIS bill to parliament and announced an increase to the Medicare levy to fund the scheme. To her, the scheme was a critical issue for each and every Australian.
Julia Gillard: Anybody in Australia could have a child with a profound disability born into their family. Anyone as an individual could have an accident, an illness, an injury that gave them a profound disability. Part of what enables us to go about our lives with confidence and fortitude is knowing that if something really difficult happened, then there would be a landing place that was, you know, welcoming and provided support.
Voice-over [Kurt Fearnley]: But just a few days before the NDIS was due to launch, Australia fell into a political frenzy. Julia Gillard was kicked out as Prime Minister and replaced by Kevin Rudd. Australia lost one of its fiercest advocates for the NDIS just days before the scheme was set to go live. Jenny Macklin was Minister for Disability Reform in the Gillard Government.
Jenny Macklin: One of the things that often happens as you change leader is that the whole cabinet gets thrown up in the air and people get moved around. And ah so ideas that might belong to a previous minister, you know, get dropped.
Jenny Macklin: I was nervous because it's that sort of instability that you can just lose a big idea that you were working on. You need stability.
Voice-over [Kurt Fearnley]: But while the Prime Minister changed, Jenny Macklin stayed in her role as Minister.
Jenny Macklin: The fact that I stayed there was positive, not to make too big a deal of it, but I think that stability was important. Those of us who cared so much about the NDIS. We were also fortunate that both Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard were very supportive. So we didn't have a problem at the leadership level.
Voice-over [Kurt Fearnley]: With an overhaul to the disability support system set for a few days time, Jenny Macklin was confident they were ready. But others in the disability sector weren’t so sure.
John Walsh: Look, it was, it was a time of incredible mixed feelings for me.
Bruce Bonyhady: There's always, in my view, with reforms of this size and complexity. Room for improvement.
David Bowen: There was an element to which the agency wasn't really ready to do it.
John Walsh: I guess I'm being critical of the fact that the ideology was maybe one step too far for the government at that time.
Voice-over [Kurt Fearnley]: In this episode, we look back on the events following the launch of the NDIS. How did this messy period in politics affect the scheme? Was Australia even ready for such great social reform? And what crucial pieces of the puzzle were missing before the NDIS even went live?
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Kurt Fearnley: So Julia Gillard’s just lost the job and we’re only a few days off launch. Where are you at this point?
John Walsh: I was probably still telling them that they hadn't done it properly.
Voice-over [Kurt Fearnley]: John Walsh was a commissioner on the Productivity Commission’s inquiry into the NDIS. He helped write the report that was critical in shaping the scheme. To roll out the NDIS, the Commission recommended starting with launch sites. Four places around the country were chosen. People with disability living in those areas had the opportunity to apply for the scheme. The government announced the launch sites would go live on the 1st of July 2013.
Kurt Fearnley: I remember when they announced Newcastle had a rollout area or a launch site. For me, it was exciting to feel like we were in ground zero. How did it feel for you when you entered into that?
Scott Taylor: It was certainly one of those moments that I look back on, obviously now, and realize just how wonderful, and how much of an impact it has had on not just myself but other people with disabilities.
Voice-over [Kurt Fearnley]: This is Scott Taylor. Scott grew up in Newcastle and was one of the first people in the country to apply for the NDIS.
Scott Taylor: That first day I look back on it and I'm like, okay like. This, this is a game changer. It’s really given me, personally, a sense that people with disabilities are now seen as equals within the community generally. And we're, we’re no longer ostracized.
Voice-over [Kurt Fearnley]: Being from Newcastle myself, I was stoked when the launch kicked off in my neck of the woods. It felt like all this talk of an NDIS - it was finally becoming a reality. But as the launch sites went live, John Walsh had some serious concerns. He was worried there were fundamental problems with the legislation.
John Walsh: I wrote a letter to the Prime Minister's department in early 2013 that said I thought that the legislation as drafted was very risky and would have a lot of problems. It hadn't done the work required to ensure that the system would be sustainable. For me, the building blocks were not in place from day one. They didn't consult with the right people in between 2011 and 2013.
Voice-over [Kurt Fearnley]: John says there were major recommendations from the Productivity Commission report that weren’t even in the legislation. One was an independent task force - where insurance and disability experts would oversee the scheme.
John Walsh: That didn't happen. After we delivered the report, the implementation was managed by an NDIS taskforce, which was a government taskforce within what's now the Department of Human, Department of Social Services. It was predominantly a taskforce of government officials from the Commonwealth government with senior officers, working groups from governments all around Australia.
Kurt Fearnley: Why did the government keep that task force in-house?
John Walsh: I don't know. I, I think it was a mistake. I think that to do justice to the spirit of the Productivity Commission, the independent nature of the NDIS should have been introduced from day one.
Kurt Fearnley: How do you think that impacted the scheme?
John Walsh: As I said, I had mixed feelings. I felt that the time between 2011 and 2013 when the trial started was not as well used as it could have been.
John Walsh: I'm, I’m deeply grateful that the scheme was implemented. But really frustrated on the other, that we had this great opportunity that we didn't seize properly.
Voice-over [Kurt Fearnley]: The report also recommended the scheme should launch in July 2014 - a year later than announced by the federal government.
David Bowen: The government had made the decision to bring forward the launch of the scheme twelve months from the date that was recommended by the Productivity Commission.
Voice-over [Kurt Fearnley]: David Bowen was the first CEO - the first boss - of the National Disability Insurance Agency. The NDIA is an independent body that implements and oversees the scheme. In 2012, government officials asked David to write a report on what needed to happen to make a July 2013 launch date a reality.
David Bowen: The subtext to that question really was, was it feasible to be able to do it by that date. My report said it will be difficult and the times will be tight and the amount that has to be done will be very significant. But it is feasible to be able to launch by that date.
Voice-over [Kurt Fearnley]: David spent the year leading up to the launch working hard to meet this target. But not only was the launch a year early… two initial launch sites turned into four. David remembers the lead up to the launch clearly… it was chaos in the agency offices.
David Bowen: I knew the first quarter would be difficult simply because all of the things that needed to be done had a compressed time. So we concentrated on getting doors open, offices set up. Getting operational guidelines was tight, getting the staff on board was tight and getting them trained. Some of my staff remind me they were there themselves personally vacuuming floors of offices (laughter in voice) on the Sunday before it opened on the Monday.
Kurt Fearnley: Why was it brought forward a year?
David Bowen: The government went a year early because they had an election in September 2013 and they were not confident that if it wasn't started before then, that it would be put on hold by an incoming government then I think that was a reasonable apprehension for them to have.
Kurt Fearnley: With the launch fast approaching, John Walsh was offered a spot on the NDIA board. But he didn’t know if he should take it.
John Walsh: And again, I was greatly honored to be asked, but I was worried that the thing wasn't set up properly.
John Walsh: I thought long and hard about going on the board and ultimately I felt, probably arrogantly, that I was better off being on the board trying to influence the way this scheme rolled out rather than being outside the board shooting unproductive arrows.
John Walsh: To be, to be perfectly honest, my whole time on the board was a time of thinking, should I resign from the board?
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Voice-over [Kurt Fearnley]: On July 1st 2013, the NDIS launch sites went live.
Jenny Macklin: This is a massive, massive cultural change and organisational change and a huge change for the people who worked in disability care and support.
Voice-over [Kurt Fearnley]: The main aim at launch was to collect as much information about people, as possible.
John Walsh: So things like disability type, age, severity, family circumstances. Where do you live? So we wanted to understand what people wanted to get out of the NDIS. What was their individual goal, if you like.
Voice-over [Kurt Fearnley]: Scott Taylor says it was the first time in his life that someone asked him about his goals.
Scott Taylor: Just sitting down with someone and having them ask me, okay, Scott, what are your goals for life? What do you want to achieve in the next 12 months? Like, for so long, people with disabilities have never been asked that. Honestly, I had to kind of sit there for a couple of minutes, in kind of in silence and just really absorb that mentally and just and just really go deep into my soul almost and just go, okay, what do I want out of life?
Voice-over [Kurt Fearnley]: Straight out the gate, David Bowen - the boss of the NDIA - felt like things were moving in the right direction.
David Bowen: Once we got rolling, we validated to some extent the rationale of an insurance scheme.
Voice-over [Kurt Fearnley]: But John Walsh was worried about one of the agency’s first decisions.
John Walsh: What the agency did was developed a support catalog. Which I was, never really in favour of. But nevertheless we have a support catalogue which is a seven or eight hundred item list, which tells people what they can choose to spend their money on. My reaction to that was that immediately defines the model as a service model rather than a person model. Because it's basically not allowing choice and control, it's governments defining what services people would use.
Voice-over [Kurt Fearnley]: As more and more people started applying for the scheme, the NDIA started facing its own challenges.
David Bowen: But I wasn't confident that we had it well enough in place to be able to push through the volume of people that were expected in that first quarter.
David Bowen: It was a resource limitation. People were going to be very much flying by the seats of their pants for that first quarter.
Voice-over [Kurt Fearnley]: David says it wasn’t just the NDIA who weren’t ready.
David Bowen: The problems which were always known came home to roost in the service provider sector. It was not set up to grow at the rate it needed to grow, particularly with the number of additional care workers that were needed to be able to provide the significant increase in services that people would, would want.
David Bowen: It was also obvious very, very early in the piece that the service providers were struggling to come to grips with a completely different way of service delivery. They were no longer being funded directly.
Voice-over [Kurt Fearnley]: While this wasn’t the agency’s responsibility, David felt like they were left to pick up the pieces.
David Bowen: This was not in the agency’s area of responsibility, the concept of doing a detailed workforce plan, the concept of doing a transitional strategy for the sector were matters, that were matters of policy. That first needed to be agreed at that ministerial level, which simply wasn't done, and wasn’t done for a number of years.
Voice-over [Kurt Fearnley]: As the NDIA looked to the government to fill in the blanks, Australia was heading towards a federal election. Jenny Macklin says things weren’t shaping up well for the Labor party.
Jenny Macklin: I mean, obviously I knew that we were in a very difficult political position, that we were unlikely to win the election.
Voice-over [Kurt Fearnley]: Jenny Macklin was right. The Coalition won the election and Tony Abbott became Prime Minister. While she was disappointed the NDIS wouldn’t roll out under a Labor government, she wasn’t too worried about handing it over to the Liberals.
Jenny Macklin: No, I wasn't worried at that point because Mr Abbott had voted for the legislation. The Liberals had supported it. And they weren't saying that they were going to do anything negative to undermine it or cut it in any way.
Voice-over [Kurt Fearnley]: But a change in government worried others. Bruce Bonyhady, the ‘architect of the NDIS’, was concerned about one announcement in particular. The Abbott government planned to change the name of the launch sites, to ‘trial’ sites.
Bruce Bonyhady: That certainly gave me cause for concern because the term launch sites doesn't connote any sense other than you’re launching the scheme and that you’re starting it. Whereas, ‘trial site’ indicates that you’ve got to perform and there may in fact be question marks.
Voice-over [Kurt Fearnley]: There were other red flags too. It was becoming clear to the NDIA that there were nowhere near enough workers to support the launch sites, let alone a full transition to the NDIS. And not just workers at the agency, but across the disability sector.
David Bowen: The Productivity Commission had looked at a number of different estimates as to what the workforce shortage might be like. The agency firmed that up in 2013 through 2014, which said it would need approximately 95,000 additional full time equivalent workers, and probably about 120,000 actual bodies given the high level of casual and part time work.
David Bowen: We told governments that would need a lot of attention to build that type of workforce, and that in doing so, given the NDIS was national, they should be looking at a national training program to ensure that all of these people coming into the care sector had the appropriate training, disability awareness training, any specialist training that might be necessary for working with different types of service provision, and that that should be all done before the full scheme roll out. And it simply wasn't done.
Voice-over [Kurt Fearnley]: In 2020, there is still no national framework to expand the disability workforce. The NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission - the scheme’s watchdog - is working on a Workforce Capability Framework... but it’s still being developed. At the same time, Bruce Bonyhady says the agency continues to face it’s own staffing challenges.
Bruce Bonyhady: The NDIA, like every government department, has staffing limits. When the work was done by the Productivity Commission on the expected number of staff for the agency, they estimated that it would have a staff of about 10 or 11,000. And we were told that the scheme would have a maximum staff number of under 3000. So this was a very significant staffing cap.
Voice-over [Kurt Fearnley]: The NDIA staffing caps were introduced by the Abbott government in the 2014 budget. Bruce says they have plagued the agency ever since.
Bruce Bonyhady: I mean this was part of a broader desire by the Abbott government to keep government small, make it smaller. The problem for us was we were an agency with no staff at all, or very few staff. And we needed to grow in order to deliver this landmark scheme.
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Voice-over [Kurt Fearnley]: While there were problems getting the scheme off the ground, John Walsh says they learnt a lot too.
John Walsh: The trial sites, as they were called, in the end they had been useful. They were not designed as recommended by the Productivity Commission, so they were probably not as useful as I would have hoped them to be, but they were useful in that we learned a lot of lessons.
Voice-over [Kurt Fearnley]: By the end of 2015, the federal government had signed full roll out agreements with most of the states.They then set a national launch date for the 1st July, 2016. But when the day came, John remembers they were still a long way off from being ready.
John Walsh: The rate of entry and transition was massive. So the work that was being asked of the staff of the NDIA and particularly the planners was gonna be very difficult.
Voice-over [Kurt Fearnley]: To move people from the old system and on to the NDIS, telephone triages were introduced. They were like a first planning meeting, just over the phone.
John Walsh: A decision was taken to roll out a telephone triage process, which just was a disaster.
John Walsh: The process of telephone triage basically wasn't personal enough. People weren't feeling that they were adequately listened to on entry to the scheme.
Voice-over [Kurt Fearnley]: The telephone triages weren’t the only problems at launch. Greg Bruce, an NDIS participant from the Hunter region in NSW, says when he was first approached about the scheme, no one knew what to do with him.
Greg Bruce: They held local meetings to inform the people in the local town about, you know, the NDIS, what was involved, the benefits and stuff. To myself, it was a negative experience. I'm visually impaired, I don't drive. I saw my needs as pretty simple. I just needed to get from A to B maybe to C and back to A again, but that seemed to be very hard. They couldn't answer our questions, which we thought were pretty simple questions. It felt like they were just brushing us aside.
Voice-over [Kurt Fearnley]: The NDIS was off to a rocky start. Not only did things need to improve, but there was a growing concern from the disability community that the launch was rushed. Jenny Macklin defends the decision to move fast.
Jenny Macklin: Maybe I would have liked to have started earlier, if anything. Ah because so many of the things that needed to change had to be done.
Voice-over [Kurt Fearnley]: While the NDIA was under the pump, Bruce Bonyhady agrees starting early was better than not starting at all.
Bruce Bonyhady: This was always a scheme where you needed data to improve and refine the scheme. I felt we had done as much as you could possibly do before launch. And so I don't feel the launch of the scheme was rushed. I feel the timing was right. And we were as prepared as we needed to be.
Voice-over [Kurt Fearnley]: David Bowen has a different take.
David Bowen: One of the problems with commencement on the 1st of July, the intent had always been under the Productivity Commission's model that you would also build a strong what was called ‘tier two’.
David Bowen: What was intended was to have someone who was not only providing assistance to the person, but had a knowledge of the different impacts that different types of disability may have and how that could be accommodated in the plan. Understanding what's quite critical and what outcomes they wanted to achieve.
Voice-over [Kurt Fearnley]: When David was CEO, over 15% of NDIA staff identified as having a disability. And more than half had a family member or were a carer for someone with a disability.
David Bowen: Now they are way, way, way beyond what's generally inside the Commonwealth or indeed any public service or indeed most corporate organisations. And, to be honest, they were well above most disability service providers had in terms of their own staffing.
Voice-over [Kurt Fearnley]: But David admits the agency fell short in meeting everyone’s needs.
David Bowen: We made some attempt, but perhaps didn't do it well enough to accommodate in our staff people who had expert knowledge on different disability types and to make sure that working in that area. We did do some of that and where it worked, it worked well. But we operated probably too much on a generalist approach to it.
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Voice-over [Kurt Fearnley]: John Walsh believes if the federal government had listened more closely from the start, a national roll out wouldn’t have been as strapped for time.
John Walsh: I feel like for the first three years of the scheme during trial, the scheme was very tightly controlled by the ideology of, of government. They didn't sufficiently appreciate the different ideology of an insurance model compared to a welfare care model.
Voice-over [Kurt Fearnley]: But John, he believes this is slowly changing.
John Walsh: From the end of 2016 through to now, we had a change of board and a change of ideology, I think. Not, not because of the board, the old board was a really strong board and we were working as hard as we could. But the new board seemed to have the support of the government that wasn't there for the old board. Anyway, the new board was able to introduce an ideology which was closer to the original intention of the scheme.
Voice-over [Kurt Fearnley]: With a fresh board and new sense of cooperation with the government, John says there have been positive changes.
John Walsh: A lot of work went onto a new pathway design from 2017 through to 2018 to make the planning process and entry to the scheme a better one for participants. Predominantly face to face and more focus to the participant rather than services, so more listening.
Voice-over [Kurt Fearnley]: This year on July 1st, the NDIS completed it’s full roll out. Over 400,000 people are now participants of the scheme - more than a third of those receiving disability support for the very first time. But as the scheme has gone national, not all of the issues have been ironed out. In the next episode, we’re taking a look at the scheme in 2020. We’ll learn about the nuts and bolts of getting onto the NDIS and hear first hand experiences of the scheme. From those who have felt the life-changing positives...
Scott Taylor: I have got those goals and more.
Voice-over [Kurt Fearnley]: ...to those who continue to fall through the cracks.
Debbie Chilton: I felt disempowered. I felt cheated. I felt disillusioned.
Trish Jackson: The stress it caused me was just unbelievable. I can honestly say that NDIS has broken my spirit.
A Nation Changed is hosted by me, Kurt Fearnley.
Our Lead Producer is Jake Morcom. Jasmine Mee Lee is our Assistant Producer, and Jess Bineth is Executive Producer of the series.
This podcast is a collaboration between Hireup Australia and Audiocraft.
Subscribe to A Nation Changed wherever you listen to podcasts.
Listen to episodes individually at Hireup-dot-com-dot-A-U forward slash A Nation Changed.
There are transcripts too at that same address – hireup-dot-com-dot-au forward slash A Nation Changed.
