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

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”. 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”. …