A new independent body will review thousands of outstanding national disability insurance scheme legal appeals in an attempt to “cut the bullshit” for participants and applicants, the NDIS minister, Bill Shorten, has said.
Speaking to a disability advocacy group seminar on Tuesday, Shorten said the situation was “repellent and repugnant” for people with disability, who had been forced into an “opaque” appeals process.
He said former disability discrimination commissioner Graeme Innes would lead an oversight committee for a new alternative dispute resolution process, which Labor proposed during the election campaign.
Innes will appoint experts who will review the outstanding cases so people are not waiting months for their plans to be resolved.
Shorten said the process would be more conciliatory than the administrative appeals tribunal (AAT), though it was voluntary and people retained their right have the AAT decide their case.
It was hoped more than 2,000 cases could be reviewed by Christmas after an initial trial of 15 to 20 cases.
The latest figures showed there were 3,991 outstanding NDIS administrative appeals tribunal cases last week, an 11% reduction from the peak of 4,501 at 27 May 2022.
That compared with a 400% increase last year, with widespread anecdotal complaints about big cuts to some NDIS funding packages and tens of millions of dollars paid to external law firms.
The large backlog at the AAT has meant some people with disability have been left without support for months or even years, while some believed the agency’s lawyers have sought to prolong the process so appellants simply give up.
Advocacy groups have described this as a David and Goliath situation where ordinary people were pitted against lawyers from external law firms.
The NDIA’s new chief counsel, Matt Swainson, said there was broad acknowledgment that the agency needed to “look at what we’re doing and how we’re running things”.
He said many of the people in the seminar would have had a “very terrible experience”.
Shorten said the “alternative dispute resolution” would be used to inform a new planning and appeals process, which he said was vital to fixing the overall system.
He said he understood there was a lot of “trauma and pain” but that he couldn’t change everything overnight.
“This blitz to deal with the legacy [appeals] cases is just dealing with one part of the system, but it’s by dealing with this that I want to help build trust in everything else,” he said.
Jean Cotchin of Every Australian Counts, which hosted the seminar, said people who participated in the seminar were hopeful about the new process but “really cautious”, because “we’ve all been burnt”.
