Labor’s plan to cut NDIS participants’ social and community supports in half are more about protecting the government’s budget bottom line than helping people with disability, a disability solicitor has told a Senate inquiry.
Speaking to a Melbourne inquiry, Villamanta Disability Rights Legal Service’s principal solicitor Naomi Anderson said people misunderstood the value of social and community participation payments. Anderson said the payments allow NDIS participants to conduct daily tasks and make them “visible” members of the community.
“The necessary tasks of life, shopping for food, clothes, getting your haircut, going to the dentist, appointments with doctors, specialists, scans, pathology, go to the gym, access therapies, whether NDIS funded or not, all the things everybody else does when they leave the house,” Anderson said.
“Cutting this support in half is short-sighted and does not in any way improve the NDIS, reduce frauds and rorting or achieved anything but helping the federal budget,” she said.
“The NDIS was supposed to give people with disability and those who support them confidence that they can build a life with the security that the supports they need will be there. This bill does the absolute opposite of that in so many ways.”