Establishing a strong foundation of accessible and inclusive supports for people with disability is imperative for the sustainability of the NDIS – and can be done without significant new funding.
Individualised NDIS funding was never supposed to be the only game in town – the Productivity Commission’s vision for a more holistic NDIS has not been fully implemented.
There is currently very little support outside of individualised funding for the majority of disabled Australians who don’t qualify for it, creating huge incentives for people to get ‘into’ the NDIS regardless of whether this type of support is genuinely best for their needs.
The situation is particularly stark for children with developmental delay or disability, for whom individualised funding is the only option despite proving ill-equipped to deliver high-quality results from early intervention.
Establishing foundational supports is an opportunity to re-balance the system, ensuring that disabled people get the appropriate supports when and where they need them, and reducing pressure on the NDIS to deliver everything for everyone.
General foundational supports should make information and capacity- building supports available to all disabled people, to help prevent, reduce, or delay their requirement for more specialised support. The current Partners in the Community program should be improved to better connect disabled people to services, and feed back to the NDIA about local service gaps.
Targeted foundational supports should provide more specialised supports to some groups of disabled people who don’t receive individualised funding, including children with developmental delay or disability and people with psychosocial disabilities.
Governments should jointly commission targeted supports for children with developmental delay or disability. These supports should have a clear evidence base, and children should be able to use them in the places they live, learn, and play. These supports must be sufficiently funded so as to provide an appealing substitute to individualised funding for many children currently in the NDIS.
Our analysis shows that the problem is not the amount of money in the disability support system, but how it is spent. By managing individualised funding and foundational supports as one system, governments could more effectively and efficiently target services.
We outline how governments can establish and fund general foundational supports with no new investment, by better allocating existing funding for Information, Linkages, and Capacity Building, Partners in the Community, and some individualised NDIS funding. Once decisions are made about the scope of targeted foundational supports, a similar mechanism could be used to fund them.
Given the budgetary pressures on state and territory governments, establishing foundational supports without relying solely on new money is the only viable way to ensure that effective supports are available to disabled people in their communities, and ensure the sustainability of the NDIS into the future.