THE PSYCHOLOGIST : Diagnosis list for NDIS to be scrapped under five-year reboot plan

Diagnosis list for NDIS to be scrapped under five-year reboot plan

This sounds reasonable. "Autism" covers a wide spectum of disorders, with many manageable by the person afflicted. Taxpayer support should only be offered if the person's health is endangered

The list of medical diagnoses that guarantees access to the National Disability Insurance Scheme would be scrapped within five years under a set of reforms that seeks to ease pressure on the $42 billion scheme so that it does not buckle under its own weight.

It means a diagnosis of autism alone would no longer be enough for children to access individual support packages through the NDIS, which has become one of the scheme’s greatest pressure points.

More than 2.5 million Australians with a disability – including children with mild autism and developmental concerns – would instead receive services under a new system called “foundational supports” that will be established under a fresh agreement between state and federal governments so that the NDIS is no longer Australians’ only source of disability support.

That new layer of services will include home and community care supports, aids and equipment, early childhood support, psychosocial services, and help for adolescents and young adults – services that the reviewers do not think need to be delivered through individual NDIS packages.

The independent recommendations from scheme architect Bruce Bonyhady and former education department head Lisa Paul, published on Thursday, aim to improve people’s experiences of the NDIS while dampening its growth trajectory so that it does not blow out to $100 billion within a decade.

A new electronic payment system would help the government track who was getting paid for what – and more easily pick up fraud or overcharging – while providers would have to register under a new regulatory system.

A new role of “navigator” would be created to help connect people to the right services in an attempt to improve accessibility. The NDIS would also cover the cost of people’s application assessments, so they would not have to pay out-of-pocket.

But a significant piece of reform will be supporting children, who currently make up half of NDIS participants, outside the scheme by delivering stronger support in schools and childcare centres – places the reviewers say are more appropriate than clinical settings.

Access criteria will also be tightened to make sure the scheme is used most by Australians with significant and permanent disabilities.

Thousands of NDIS participants – in particular, children with autism level two or above – currently receive automatic access to the scheme through its diagnosis list, and remain on it for years.

“These lists were introduced during transition to the full scheme to accelerate access for some people... However, they have led to a focus on medical diagnosis rather than function and disability-related support needs,” the reviewers said.

“These lists can provide simple and transparent access to the scheme for some children. However, they also exacerbate inequity and delay support for children with similar levels of need who may not have a diagnosis on an access list, or lack the means to obtain a diagnosis if they don’t meet the age criteria for developmental delay.

“We recommend removing automatic access under the access lists.”

The reviewers said access to the NDIS should be based on the impact disability had on a person’s day-to-day life.

“It should not be based on a medical diagnosis alone or just your primary diagnosis... A focus on functional impairment will enable multiple disabilities to be considered - which when taken together, result in significant functional impairment.”

They said definitions in the NDIS legislation should be reset to link eligibility to the outcomes of a functional assessment process that can measure the impact of impairment and compare it to others.

“Reasonable and necessary” supports – another vague term that has created confusion in the NDIS legislation – would also be redefined, with people’s budgets instead based on a structured needs assessment.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Wednesday said enabling legislation would be introduced in the first half of next year, with phased in implementation.

Bonyhady and Paul said they wanted all Australians with disability to have better access to mainstream services as well as the new foundational supports within five years.

Participants would have two years before they were asked to meet any new access requirements, while children under seven should be able to stay on the scheme until they turn nine.

“Our recommendations will support more children in existing services, such as maternal and child health, integrated child and family centres, early childhood education and schools – reducing the need for families to access the NDIS and leading to better long-term outcomes for children,” the review said.

“Children with higher support needs would get additional, individualised support through the NDIS via an early intervention pathway.”

NDIS Minister Bill Shorten will address the recommendations at the National Press Club on Thursday.

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/diagnosis-list-for-ndis-to-be-scrapped-under-five-year-reboot-plan-20231207-p5epq6.html

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

Diagnosis list for NDIS to be scrapped under five-year reboot plan

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