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Kirsten Deane, Deputy Director of the Melbourne Disability Institute, was scathing.
“OK,” she told the DSC Conference yesterday. “So just where are these foundational supports? In fact, what are they? I saw the Premiers were very happy to get up and pose with smiles for the cameras after their meeting with the PM, but they had no idea how completely f—— they are.”
“The problem is, there’s nothing behind it.”
The session was addressing what’s rapidly becoming a critical issue for the NDIS - the existence (or rather the lack of) foundational supports that can help People with Disability who don’t qualify for the NDIS.
Pannelists Deane, Sophie Cusworth (CEO of Women with Disability Australia) and Hannah Orban (from the Grattan Institute) all agreed that while the NDIS had achieved its objective of providing support to individuals who met its eligibility requirements, these barriers were leaving others uncovered.
And because the NDIS was swallowing all the funding, people who failed to qualify for one reason or another were left stranded and unsupported.
Cusworth pointed out that this was a particular issue for people at the intersections. She offered an example of a woman, from a migrant background, who possessed specific disabilities that might not meet the stringent definitions required for a NDIS package but was left floundering as state governments had withdrawn from funding.
Orban offered a glimpse into the number of individuals who were in this situation by identifying the number of Australians who identified as disabled and comparing this huge figure with the number of NDIS recipients.
By unpacking the specific cohorts missing out on individualised packages, she indicated it was possible to identify these unaddressed areas of critical need.
Nobody mentioned Bill Shorten’s name, however the panelists did intimate that the way the NDIS had been originally envisaged had become a problem. Funding for the individual participants had grown so substantially that it had swallowed all the other needed supports.
The DSC Conference heard that these provide genuinely vital support for marginalised individuals. The problem was that the financial agreements signed between the Commonwealth and the States had left the smaller jurisdictions responsible for funding. Because they’re always short of money, they had used this opportunity to largely vacate the field in the hope that the Commonwealth would pick up the slack.
This dearth of support has left a huge group of people without any fall-back they can rely on when they’re at their most vulnerable.
The irony is that the very characteristics of these people means they don’t require either the depth, or length, of assistance over a longer period. The issue is, however, that they have nothing to assist them when they are at their most vulnerable.
This article was first published by Ability News on May 22nd 2025. Republished with permission. Read the original article here.
Further reading:
- ‘Who looks after me?’ More than 40% of disability carers have disability themselves – and they need more support
- Original Design to Delayed Reality of Foundational Supports
- Results of the media request on foundational supports
- In search of clarity on the new supports outside the NDIS
- Explainer: What are Foundational Supports?
- Disability Supports Beyond the NDIS