NDIS Rip-offs

Not sustainable’: sex work, steam rooms, crypto to be banned on NDIS
Tom McIlroyPolitical correspondent
Jul 7, 2024 – 3.03pm

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NDIS Minister Bill Shorten said payments for sex work will be banned under changes to the scheme, conceding a wide range of services being billed to taxpayers are unsustainable.
Mr Shorten slammed the opposition and the Greens for dragging out passage of legislation to overhaul exploding costs, saying another round of parliamentary hearings will slug the budget by $1.1 billion – the equivalent of paid packages for as many as 60,000 children.
Disability Minister Bill Shorten says reports of NDIS funding being used for sex work are minimal. Alex Ellinghausen
“We want to issue regulations which can’t get rolled … which say you don’t get to spend your money, and I kid you not, on cryptocurrency or steam rooms, or in one case people trying to organise 20 people to go to Japan. It’s not on.”
But the Coalition on Sunday said it would not be bullied into supporting changes proposed by the federal government, insisting a further Senate inquiry was necessary to stop the scheme’s cost outstripping Medicare, aged care and the pension.
Mr Shorten admitted courts and the Administrative Appeals Tribunal had frustrated government efforts to stop unreasonable or inappropriate spending.

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“The problem is we’ve been issuing operational guidelines, the Liberals and now under Labor, and we get rolled in the courts. So we want to be able to belt and brace what you can spend money on,” he told Sky on Sunday.
Asked if payments for sex work would be banned, Mr Shorten said such a move was necessary, even if cases were isolated.
“We will rule it out. That’s just not a sustainable proposition,” he said. “The rules have been a bit loose at the margins, let’s just tell the truth.”
The $42 billion program is already on track to overtake the age pension within three years as the most expensive area of government spending. Labor’s attempts to cut the annual growth rate to 8 per cent are being held up by Coalition and Greens plans for another inquiry.
Just a decade old, the NDIS already costs more to run per year than the aged care system ($36 billion), Medicare ($32 billion), federal government funding for hospitals ($30 billion) and the pharmaceutical benefits scheme ($20 billion).
Labor’s changes would enact key recommendations from last year’s NDIS review. About $14.4 billion would be saved, including an end to automatic top-ups, when a participant uses all their allocated funds.

The budget estimates that state and federal government NDIS spending will reach $60.8 billion by 2027-28. The Parliamentary Budget Office’s online budget tool shows the watchdog’s baseline expectation is the NDIS to overtake the age pension in 2034-35, when both programs are expected to cost about $100 billion a year to operate.
The legislation was referred to a Senate committee in March, with a final report released in June. But the Coalition and the Greens sent the legislation back to a Senate committee for another round of scrutiny, due to continue until August.
Mr Shorten said the delay was unnecessary.
“We’ve got no means or recourse to set up risk, or control, or interval payments. The Liberals know this needs to be changed … the Greens are just off with the fairies when it comes to any sort of fiscal common sense on this.”
But Coalition frontbencher Bridget McKenzie raised doubts about the changes on Sunday, calling them “so-called reforms”.
“We’ve sensibly sent this to a Senate inquiry, to flesh out the issues,” she said, flagging possible additional amendments.

“We all want the NDIS to be a success. We want it to support our most vulnerable, but we do not want to see it overtaking Medicare in terms of how much of the federal budget it requires.
“We’re not going to be bullied by Bill [Shorten] in rushing the decisions that need to be heard, or rushing the evidence that this Senate inquiry needs to hear.”
The Australian Financial Review reported last week that there had been a 50 per cent increase in participants seeking unscheduled top-ups, with more than 2500 participants a week asking for increases before proposed new rules take effect.
The rush for reassessments on overspent plans is estimated to be costing an extra $5.5 million per day in forgone savings.
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