A quadriplegic doctor, lawyer and researcher has told a senate inquiry about his experience with the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), while expressing support for the program.
Dinesh Palipana is a founding member of Doctors with Disabilities Australia, trained as a lawyer, has served as a government adviser and lectures at university.
He suffered a spinal cord injury in a traffic crash on Brisbane’s Gateway Motorway in 2010, when he was a medical student, three years before the NDIS was introduced.
Palipana spoke in favour of the NDIS and the support he said it had offered him.
“I wake up, and I think of the things that I’m grateful for, and one of the things is to live in Australia, and this is because I was born in Sri Lanka, and if I were to have an injury like I do in my country of birth, my life expectancy would be a fraction of what it is here,” he told the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee.
“We’re very lucky to have the medical care that we do. We’re very lucky to have a scheme like the NDIS.”
Palipana described the state-based services he received prior to the implementation of the NDIS as “challenging.”
“I remember when I first started receiving care, the funding was given to an organisation that is now controversially shut down, but I was a medical student,” he said.
“Then I fought very hard to come back to medical school, and the schedules were crazy ... but for the organisation that was providing care for me at the time, it was a very prescriptive set-up.
“They wanted to maximise their profits, so they had me seeing people on the weekends, when I perhaps didn’t need them to help me, and when we really needed help, it was just my mum around, so she had to work extra hard to get me through medical school.”
Palipana said the contribution of unpaid carers, including his mother, who still helps him with many daily tasks, should also be recognised.
“I work as a doctor today in the emergency department,” he said.
“I worked in the emergency department on the weekend, and my schedule is variable as a doctor’s might be, so for me having a registered or unregistered support worker has not made a difference.
Government’s Plan to Reduce NDIS Growth
Palipana’s comments came as NDIS costs have risen sharply since the scheme’s inception, growing from about $1.1 billion (US$770 million) in 2015–16 to around $50 billion a year by 2025.Proposed measures include tighter rules around plan reassessments and reviews, alongside changes to participant planning and budgeting, including a transition to a new planning framework from 2027.
“Unless we fix the system, that when we came into government was growing at 22 percent annually, then simply the system would not be sustainable,” he said.
“What we’re seeking to do is not reduce the cost of the NDIS, but to reduce the growth in the cost of the NDIS.
Clarity on Reforms Needed: Economist
Independent economist Saul Eslake said many things still needed to be “spelled out” when it came to the government’s proposed NDIS reforms, given it is the third biggest spending program in the federal budget.“It’s not entirely clear to me exactly how the government proposes to slow the rate of growth in spending to that foreshadowed in the budget papers (3 percent per annum over the five years to 2029-30),” he told The Epoch Times.
“That is, what services will be reduced, to whom will services be reduced, what sort of disabilities will no longer attract the same level of support under the NDIS, what programs will be transferred to the states and will the states accept that?”
