Politics

Despite the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) recently celebrating it’s tenth anniversary of being rolled out across all Australian states and territories, it hasn’t been without it’s overarching problems of financial exploitation, theft and malfeasance. Many participants have had to battle repeatedly with the National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA) to avoid having allocated funding in their plans severely slashed, thus lowering the demand for expenditure on services and products.

Craig Wallace, who is the Head of Policy at the ACT based non-profit independent advocacy organisation, Advocacy for Inclusion, believes that the stewardship of the disability service marketplace had naively underestimated the amount of care and attention that was required to ensure participants were given more knowledge and power as consumers to choose which service providers had high quality competitive packages.

Wallace also discusses with De-Stigmatised‘s Jarad McLoughlin some of the unfortunate misgivings that have befallen the NDIA throughout the past decade, including its operational and managerial culture becoming more guarded due to the incurred risk of funding getting peeled back by the former federal Liberal National Coalition government.

Produced by Jarad McLoughlin

Photo supplied by Craig Wallace