The long-awaited NDIS review has looked far beyond the National Disability Insurance Scheme, taking a bird’s eye view of disability services in Australia. Critical to the future of the NDIS are services for people with disability outside of the scheme.
More than 85% of the 4.4 million Australians with disability are not in the NDIS. As services to support them have shrunk in the ten years since the NDIS was introduced, they’ve been scrambling to join the scheme.
The very first of the NDIS review’s 26 recommendations is a separate tier of disability services, called “foundational supports”, outside the scheme and accessible to many more people with disability. This will sound familiar to those familiar with the scheme’s original design when it was proposed by the Productivity Commission.
