#ndis — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #ndis, aggregated by home.social.
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The AFR also deserve a massive dressing down for their disability BS too. Shame on you. #NDIS #disability #AusPol
RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:nxs2zn6z3nxudtdqgiilpbww/post/3mls3aa3gi22r -
The AFR also deserve a massive dressing down for their disability BS too. Shame on you. #NDIS #disability #AusPol
RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:nxs2zn6z3nxudtdqgiilpbww/post/3mls3aa3gi22r -
The AFR also deserve a massive dressing down for their disability BS too. Shame on you. #NDIS #disability #AusPol
RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:nxs2zn6z3nxudtdqgiilpbww/post/3mls3aa3gi22r -
The AFR also deserve a massive dressing down for their disability BS too. Shame on you. #NDIS #disability #AusPol
RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:nxs2zn6z3nxudtdqgiilpbww/post/3mls3aa3gi22r -
Anyone Can Be Your NDIS Support Worker. Who Is Keeping You Safe?
Reflections from several years on the scheme.
I have been on the NDIS for several years. A recent re-hiring process clarified something I had long suspected. The scheme has a workforce problem, and participants are the ones bearing the brunt.
There Is No Mandatory Registration Requirement
Under current Australian law, participants who self-manage or plan-manage their NDIS funding can hire any person as a support worker. Independent support Workers require no registration or minimum training standards.
The worker who enters your home, learns your medical history, handles your medications, and has significant authority over your daily life may have no formal preparation for any of it.
The NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission exists and handles serious complaints, including abuse, neglect, and criminal conduct. Boundary violations, confidentiality breaches, and chronic unpreparedness that fall below that threshold leave participants largely without recourse. Skilled and ethical workers bring those qualities from their own formation and prior training. When those qualities are absent, the participant discovers this after the fact, and any remedy is slow, uncertain, and theirs alone to pursue.
That is the baseline. Everything that follows is built on it.
The Dog
My service dog performs specific medical functions. His effectiveness depends on remaining focused and oriented to me.
Some workers reach for him the moment they walk through the door. They do not ask.
Touching a service animal without permission is a safety violation and, in some contexts, carries legal weight under Australian disability discrimination law. A worker entering the home of a participant with a service animal has a professional obligation to understand what that animal does and what it requires. That preparation belongs to the provider. Its absence transfers the risk to the participant.
This is a professional standard.
What the Certificate III Does Not Cover
The Certificate III in Individual Support is the standard qualification in this sector and takes between six and twelve months. For many workers, it is completed online with minimal supervised practice hours, and it does not prepare them for the clinical and ethical complexity of supporting people with invisible or fluctuating conditions.
A worker with their cert may have no framework for how fatigue functions in ME/CFS or autistic burnout. Why pushing through is sometimes dangerous, why capacity varies day to day in ways that cannot be read from a plan approved six months ago, and why the participant’s account of their own condition is the primary source of accurate information.
Workers who arrive without that preparation fill the gap with assumptions. Correcting those assumptions, educating the person sent to support them, translating their own experience into terms the worker finds legible — this falls to the participant. That work is skilled and exhausting, and no NDIS plan funds it.
A Plan Is Not a Person
An NDIS plan records approved supports, written at a point in time by a planner who may have spent an hour with the participant. What it cannot capture is what a Tuesday looks like after a bad night, or how that changes what Wednesday can hold.
Workers who treat the plan as a complete picture end up supporting the document. When the participant’s actual day diverges from what the plan implies, some workers become confused, inflexible, or subtly sceptical. The participant then carries that response throughout the day.
Confidentiality Is Not Discretionary
Support workers enter your home and learn about your health, medications, finances, and relationships. The ethical obligations around that information are clear. Workers routinely underestimate them.
Information moves in cars and waiting rooms, in casual exchanges during handover. Shared without consent in contexts the participant did not choose, each instance is a breach — and the pattern across a working relationship represents a significant, under-reported ethical problem in the sector.
Providers who do not train explicitly for this are not taking their duty of care seriously. The Commission’s framework addresses the most serious breaches. Below that threshold, the everyday end goes largely unmonitored.
A Diagnosis Is a Starting Point
Workers who arrive having already decided how a participant communicates — based on a diagnostic label rather than a conversation — are making a category error with professional consequences.
Autism produces significant variation across individuals, as do acquired brain injury, cerebral palsy, and many mental health conditions. Experience with one person transfers little to the next. The participant is the authority on their own communication and needs. Workers who approach that through the filter of what they already think they know require the participant to work harder to be accurately seen.
Being Present Is the Job
A worker on their phone during support hours has decided where their attention belongs. That decision reflects on the worker and the provider, and on a regulatory environment that permits it without consequence.
Participant time is funded. Divided attention during that time is a failure of basic professional conduct.
Punctuality Has Clinical Stakes
For participants with fatigue conditions, medication schedules, or appointment windows that cannot flex, a late worker is sometimes no worker at all. The window closes, an appointment is missed, and the energy available at nine o’clock is gone by ten.
Workers who treat punctuality as a matter of general courtesy have not been told what the costs of late arrival are in this context. Providers should tell them, in writing, before they begin.
Handover Exists for a Reason
When workers do not read handover notes, participants repeat themselves. Questions get asked that the notes had already answered. Avoidable errors get made. The first portion of support time becomes unpaid orientation, delivered by the person the support was supposed to serve.
Reading the handover is the floor — it signals that a worker understands preparation begins before they arrive.
The Re-Hiring Process
When a support worker leaves, the participant does not simply wait for a replacement. A position description must be written, applications reviewed, interviews conducted, and a hiring decision made with incomplete information about a person who will have access to their home, their medical records, and significant portions of their daily life.
After that comes orientation, and the contextual knowledge that made the previous support functional has to be rebuilt from the beginning.
None of this is funded. The NDIS has no category for the labour of maintaining access to support, and for participants with high support needs or complex conditions, that labour is substantial.
What Competent Support Looks Like
Workers who are good at this job arrive having read the available documentation, ask before they act, and give more weight to what the participant tells them about their own needs than to any plan or file. When something changes during a shift, the response is immediate and adaptive.
Their presence does not generate additional work for the participant — that is the measure. Support that requires the participant to manage, educate, or compensate for a worker’s preparation gaps has redistributed the load rather than reduced it.
What Needs to Change
Mandatory registration for all NDIS workers, regardless of how a participant’s plan is managed, would create a baseline of accountability. Genuine consequences for ethical breaches — including low-level, chronic ones — would change the conditions under which workers operate.
Revised training requirements are long overdue: supervised hours in complex support settings, explicit coverage of invisible conditions, service animal protocols, confidentiality obligations, and fluctuating capacity. These are the preparations the role demands.
Wages need to rise. Turnover in this sector is directly linked to pay, and the continuity of support is a safety condition for many participants — the relationship carries clinical knowledge that cannot be quickly or cheaply reconstructed.
Participants also need a complaints mechanism they can use without fear of losing their support. Accountability cannot depend on participants absorbing the risk of speaking up.
The Principle and the Practice
Participant choice and control sit at the centre of the NDIS. On paper, participants are experts in their own lives and directors of their own support.
That principle requires a workforce framework capable of supporting it. At present, workers enter participants’ lives with significant authority over their access, safety, and daily functioning, operating under training requirements and accountability mechanisms that do not match the weight of what they are being asked to do.
Positioned at the centre of a scheme designed around their needs, the participant often ends up holding the system together when it fails to hold itself together.
That is worth saying clearly, and worth changing.
Share this with someone who trains support workers, manages a disability provider, or influences workforce policy. The problem is documented. The changes required are known. What is missing is the will to treat this workforce and the people it serves with the seriousness they both deserve. #NDIS #DisabilityRights #DisabilitySupport #SupportWorkers #DisabledPeople #DisabilityAdvocacy #Accessibility #AusPol #Australia
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Anyone Can Be Your NDIS Support Worker. Who Is Keeping You Safe?
Reflections from several years on the scheme.
I have been on the NDIS for several years. A recent re-hiring process clarified something I had long suspected. The scheme has a workforce problem, and participants are the ones bearing the brunt.
There Is No Mandatory Registration Requirement
Under current Australian law, participants who self-manage or plan-manage their NDIS funding can hire any person as a support worker. Independent support Workers require no registration or minimum training standards.
The worker who enters your home, learns your medical history, handles your medications, and has significant authority over your daily life may have no formal preparation for any of it.
The NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission exists and handles serious complaints, including abuse, neglect, and criminal conduct. Boundary violations, confidentiality breaches, and chronic unpreparedness that fall below that threshold leave participants largely without recourse. Skilled and ethical workers bring those qualities from their own formation and prior training. When those qualities are absent, the participant discovers this after the fact, and any remedy is slow, uncertain, and theirs alone to pursue.
That is the baseline. Everything that follows is built on it.
The Dog
My service dog performs specific medical functions. His effectiveness depends on remaining focused and oriented to me.
Some workers reach for him the moment they walk through the door. They do not ask.
Touching a service animal without permission is a safety violation and, in some contexts, carries legal weight under Australian disability discrimination law. A worker entering the home of a participant with a service animal has a professional obligation to understand what that animal does and what it requires. That preparation belongs to the provider. Its absence transfers the risk to the participant.
This is a professional standard.
What the Certificate III Does Not Cover
The Certificate III in Individual Support is the standard qualification in this sector and takes between six and twelve months. For many workers, it is completed online with minimal supervised practice hours, and it does not prepare them for the clinical and ethical complexity of supporting people with invisible or fluctuating conditions.
A worker with their cert may have no framework for how fatigue functions in ME/CFS or autistic burnout. Why pushing through is sometimes dangerous, why capacity varies day to day in ways that cannot be read from a plan approved six months ago, and why the participant’s account of their own condition is the primary source of accurate information.
Workers who arrive without that preparation fill the gap with assumptions. Correcting those assumptions, educating the person sent to support them, translating their own experience into terms the worker finds legible — this falls to the participant. That work is skilled and exhausting, and no NDIS plan funds it.
A Plan Is Not a Person
An NDIS plan records approved supports, written at a point in time by a planner who may have spent an hour with the participant. What it cannot capture is what a Tuesday looks like after a bad night, or how that changes what Wednesday can hold.
Workers who treat the plan as a complete picture end up supporting the document. When the participant’s actual day diverges from what the plan implies, some workers become confused, inflexible, or subtly sceptical. The participant then carries that response throughout the day.
Confidentiality Is Not Discretionary
Support workers enter your home and learn about your health, medications, finances, and relationships. The ethical obligations around that information are clear. Workers routinely underestimate them.
Information moves in cars and waiting rooms, in casual exchanges during handover. Shared without consent in contexts the participant did not choose, each instance is a breach — and the pattern across a working relationship represents a significant, under-reported ethical problem in the sector.
Providers who do not train explicitly for this are not taking their duty of care seriously. The Commission’s framework addresses the most serious breaches. Below that threshold, the everyday end goes largely unmonitored.
A Diagnosis Is a Starting Point
Workers who arrive having already decided how a participant communicates — based on a diagnostic label rather than a conversation — are making a category error with professional consequences.
Autism produces significant variation across individuals, as do acquired brain injury, cerebral palsy, and many mental health conditions. Experience with one person transfers little to the next. The participant is the authority on their own communication and needs. Workers who approach that through the filter of what they already think they know require the participant to work harder to be accurately seen.
Being Present Is the Job
A worker on their phone during support hours has decided where their attention belongs. That decision reflects on the worker and the provider, and on a regulatory environment that permits it without consequence.
Participant time is funded. Divided attention during that time is a failure of basic professional conduct.
Punctuality Has Clinical Stakes
For participants with fatigue conditions, medication schedules, or appointment windows that cannot flex, a late worker is sometimes no worker at all. The window closes, an appointment is missed, and the energy available at nine o’clock is gone by ten.
Workers who treat punctuality as a matter of general courtesy have not been told what the costs of late arrival are in this context. Providers should tell them, in writing, before they begin.
Handover Exists for a Reason
When workers do not read handover notes, participants repeat themselves. Questions get asked that the notes had already answered. Avoidable errors get made. The first portion of support time becomes unpaid orientation, delivered by the person the support was supposed to serve.
Reading the handover is the floor — it signals that a worker understands preparation begins before they arrive.
The Re-Hiring Process
When a support worker leaves, the participant does not simply wait for a replacement. A position description must be written, applications reviewed, interviews conducted, and a hiring decision made with incomplete information about a person who will have access to their home, their medical records, and significant portions of their daily life.
After that comes orientation, and the contextual knowledge that made the previous support functional has to be rebuilt from the beginning.
None of this is funded. The NDIS has no category for the labour of maintaining access to support, and for participants with high support needs or complex conditions, that labour is substantial.
What Competent Support Looks Like
Workers who are good at this job arrive having read the available documentation, ask before they act, and give more weight to what the participant tells them about their own needs than to any plan or file. When something changes during a shift, the response is immediate and adaptive.
Their presence does not generate additional work for the participant — that is the measure. Support that requires the participant to manage, educate, or compensate for a worker’s preparation gaps has redistributed the load rather than reduced it.
What Needs to Change
Mandatory registration for all NDIS workers, regardless of how a participant’s plan is managed, would create a baseline of accountability. Genuine consequences for ethical breaches — including low-level, chronic ones — would change the conditions under which workers operate.
Revised training requirements are long overdue: supervised hours in complex support settings, explicit coverage of invisible conditions, service animal protocols, confidentiality obligations, and fluctuating capacity. These are the preparations the role demands.
Wages need to rise. Turnover in this sector is directly linked to pay, and the continuity of support is a safety condition for many participants — the relationship carries clinical knowledge that cannot be quickly or cheaply reconstructed.
Participants also need a complaints mechanism they can use without fear of losing their support. Accountability cannot depend on participants absorbing the risk of speaking up.
The Principle and the Practice
Participant choice and control sit at the centre of the NDIS. On paper, participants are experts in their own lives and directors of their own support.
That principle requires a workforce framework capable of supporting it. At present, workers enter participants’ lives with significant authority over their access, safety, and daily functioning, operating under training requirements and accountability mechanisms that do not match the weight of what they are being asked to do.
Positioned at the centre of a scheme designed around their needs, the participant often ends up holding the system together when it fails to hold itself together.
That is worth saying clearly, and worth changing.
Share this with someone who trains support workers, manages a disability provider, or influences workforce policy. The problem is documented. The changes required are known. What is missing is the will to treat this workforce and the people it serves with the seriousness they both deserve. #NDIS #DisabilityRights #DisabilitySupport #SupportWorkers #DisabledPeople #DisabilityAdvocacy #Accessibility #AusPol #Australia
-
Anyone Can Be Your NDIS Support Worker. Who Is Keeping You Safe?
Reflections from several years on the scheme.
I have been on the NDIS for several years. A recent re-hiring process clarified something I had long suspected. The scheme has a workforce problem, and participants are the ones bearing the brunt.
There Is No Mandatory Registration Requirement
Under current Australian law, participants who self-manage or plan-manage their NDIS funding can hire any person as a support worker. Independent support Workers require no registration or minimum training standards.
The worker who enters your home, learns your medical history, handles your medications, and has significant authority over your daily life may have no formal preparation for any of it.
The NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission exists and handles serious complaints, including abuse, neglect, and criminal conduct. Boundary violations, confidentiality breaches, and chronic unpreparedness that fall below that threshold leave participants largely without recourse. Skilled and ethical workers bring those qualities from their own formation and prior training. When those qualities are absent, the participant discovers this after the fact, and any remedy is slow, uncertain, and theirs alone to pursue.
That is the baseline. Everything that follows is built on it.
The Dog
My service dog performs specific medical functions. His effectiveness depends on remaining focused and oriented to me.
Some workers reach for him the moment they walk through the door. They do not ask.
Touching a service animal without permission is a safety violation and, in some contexts, carries legal weight under Australian disability discrimination law. A worker entering the home of a participant with a service animal has a professional obligation to understand what that animal does and what it requires. That preparation belongs to the provider. Its absence transfers the risk to the participant.
This is a professional standard.
What the Certificate III Does Not Cover
The Certificate III in Individual Support is the standard qualification in this sector and takes between six and twelve months. For many workers, it is completed online with minimal supervised practice hours, and it does not prepare them for the clinical and ethical complexity of supporting people with invisible or fluctuating conditions.
A worker with their cert may have no framework for how fatigue functions in ME/CFS or autistic burnout. Why pushing through is sometimes dangerous, why capacity varies day to day in ways that cannot be read from a plan approved six months ago, and why the participant’s account of their own condition is the primary source of accurate information.
Workers who arrive without that preparation fill the gap with assumptions. Correcting those assumptions, educating the person sent to support them, translating their own experience into terms the worker finds legible — this falls to the participant. That work is skilled and exhausting, and no NDIS plan funds it.
A Plan Is Not a Person
An NDIS plan records approved supports, written at a point in time by a planner who may have spent an hour with the participant. What it cannot capture is what a Tuesday looks like after a bad night, or how that changes what Wednesday can hold.
Workers who treat the plan as a complete picture end up supporting the document. When the participant’s actual day diverges from what the plan implies, some workers become confused, inflexible, or subtly sceptical. The participant then carries that response throughout the day.
Confidentiality Is Not Discretionary
Support workers enter your home and learn about your health, medications, finances, and relationships. The ethical obligations around that information are clear. Workers routinely underestimate them.
Information moves in cars and waiting rooms, in casual exchanges during handover. Shared without consent in contexts the participant did not choose, each instance is a breach — and the pattern across a working relationship represents a significant, under-reported ethical problem in the sector.
Providers who do not train explicitly for this are not taking their duty of care seriously. The Commission’s framework addresses the most serious breaches. Below that threshold, the everyday end goes largely unmonitored.
A Diagnosis Is a Starting Point
Workers who arrive having already decided how a participant communicates — based on a diagnostic label rather than a conversation — are making a category error with professional consequences.
Autism produces significant variation across individuals, as do acquired brain injury, cerebral palsy, and many mental health conditions. Experience with one person transfers little to the next. The participant is the authority on their own communication and needs. Workers who approach that through the filter of what they already think they know require the participant to work harder to be accurately seen.
Being Present Is the Job
A worker on their phone during support hours has decided where their attention belongs. That decision reflects on the worker and the provider, and on a regulatory environment that permits it without consequence.
Participant time is funded. Divided attention during that time is a failure of basic professional conduct.
Punctuality Has Clinical Stakes
For participants with fatigue conditions, medication schedules, or appointment windows that cannot flex, a late worker is sometimes no worker at all. The window closes, an appointment is missed, and the energy available at nine o’clock is gone by ten.
Workers who treat punctuality as a matter of general courtesy have not been told what the costs of late arrival are in this context. Providers should tell them, in writing, before they begin.
Handover Exists for a Reason
When workers do not read handover notes, participants repeat themselves. Questions get asked that the notes had already answered. Avoidable errors get made. The first portion of support time becomes unpaid orientation, delivered by the person the support was supposed to serve.
Reading the handover is the floor — it signals that a worker understands preparation begins before they arrive.
The Re-Hiring Process
When a support worker leaves, the participant does not simply wait for a replacement. A position description must be written, applications reviewed, interviews conducted, and a hiring decision made with incomplete information about a person who will have access to their home, their medical records, and significant portions of their daily life.
After that comes orientation, and the contextual knowledge that made the previous support functional has to be rebuilt from the beginning.
None of this is funded. The NDIS has no category for the labour of maintaining access to support, and for participants with high support needs or complex conditions, that labour is substantial.
What Competent Support Looks Like
Workers who are good at this job arrive having read the available documentation, ask before they act, and give more weight to what the participant tells them about their own needs than to any plan or file. When something changes during a shift, the response is immediate and adaptive.
Their presence does not generate additional work for the participant — that is the measure. Support that requires the participant to manage, educate, or compensate for a worker’s preparation gaps has redistributed the load rather than reduced it.
What Needs to Change
Mandatory registration for all NDIS workers, regardless of how a participant’s plan is managed, would create a baseline of accountability. Genuine consequences for ethical breaches — including low-level, chronic ones — would change the conditions under which workers operate.
Revised training requirements are long overdue: supervised hours in complex support settings, explicit coverage of invisible conditions, service animal protocols, confidentiality obligations, and fluctuating capacity. These are the preparations the role demands.
Wages need to rise. Turnover in this sector is directly linked to pay, and the continuity of support is a safety condition for many participants — the relationship carries clinical knowledge that cannot be quickly or cheaply reconstructed.
Participants also need a complaints mechanism they can use without fear of losing their support. Accountability cannot depend on participants absorbing the risk of speaking up.
The Principle and the Practice
Participant choice and control sit at the centre of the NDIS. On paper, participants are experts in their own lives and directors of their own support.
That principle requires a workforce framework capable of supporting it. At present, workers enter participants’ lives with significant authority over their access, safety, and daily functioning, operating under training requirements and accountability mechanisms that do not match the weight of what they are being asked to do.
Positioned at the centre of a scheme designed around their needs, the participant often ends up holding the system together when it fails to hold itself together.
That is worth saying clearly, and worth changing.
Share this with someone who trains support workers, manages a disability provider, or influences workforce policy. The problem is documented. The changes required are known. What is missing is the will to treat this workforce and the people it serves with the seriousness they both deserve. #NDIS #DisabilityRights #DisabilitySupport #SupportWorkers #DisabledPeople #DisabilityAdvocacy #Accessibility #AusPol #Australia
-
Anyone Can Be Your NDIS Support Worker. Who Is Keeping You Safe?
Reflections from several years on the scheme.
I have been on the NDIS for several years. A recent re-hiring process clarified something I had long suspected. The scheme has a workforce problem, and participants are the ones bearing the brunt.
There Is No Mandatory Registration Requirement
Under current Australian law, participants who self-manage or plan-manage their NDIS funding can hire any person as a support worker. Independent support Workers require no registration or minimum training standards.
The worker who enters your home, learns your medical history, handles your medications, and has significant authority over your daily life may have no formal preparation for any of it.
The NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission exists and handles serious complaints, including abuse, neglect, and criminal conduct. Boundary violations, confidentiality breaches, and chronic unpreparedness that fall below that threshold leave participants largely without recourse. Skilled and ethical workers bring those qualities from their own formation and prior training. When those qualities are absent, the participant discovers this after the fact, and any remedy is slow, uncertain, and theirs alone to pursue.
That is the baseline. Everything that follows is built on it.
The Dog
My service dog performs specific medical functions. His effectiveness depends on remaining focused and oriented to me.
Some workers reach for him the moment they walk through the door. They do not ask.
Touching a service animal without permission is a safety violation and, in some contexts, carries legal weight under Australian disability discrimination law. A worker entering the home of a participant with a service animal has a professional obligation to understand what that animal does and what it requires. That preparation belongs to the provider. Its absence transfers the risk to the participant.
This is a professional standard.
What the Certificate III Does Not Cover
The Certificate III in Individual Support is the standard qualification in this sector and takes between six and twelve months. For many workers, it is completed online with minimal supervised practice hours, and it does not prepare them for the clinical and ethical complexity of supporting people with invisible or fluctuating conditions.
A worker with their cert may have no framework for how fatigue functions in ME/CFS or autistic burnout. Why pushing through is sometimes dangerous, why capacity varies day to day in ways that cannot be read from a plan approved six months ago, and why the participant’s account of their own condition is the primary source of accurate information.
Workers who arrive without that preparation fill the gap with assumptions. Correcting those assumptions, educating the person sent to support them, translating their own experience into terms the worker finds legible — this falls to the participant. That work is skilled and exhausting, and no NDIS plan funds it.
A Plan Is Not a Person
An NDIS plan records approved supports, written at a point in time by a planner who may have spent an hour with the participant. What it cannot capture is what a Tuesday looks like after a bad night, or how that changes what Wednesday can hold.
Workers who treat the plan as a complete picture end up supporting the document. When the participant’s actual day diverges from what the plan implies, some workers become confused, inflexible, or subtly sceptical. The participant then carries that response throughout the day.
Confidentiality Is Not Discretionary
Support workers enter your home and learn about your health, medications, finances, and relationships. The ethical obligations around that information are clear. Workers routinely underestimate them.
Information moves in cars and waiting rooms, in casual exchanges during handover. Shared without consent in contexts the participant did not choose, each instance is a breach — and the pattern across a working relationship represents a significant, under-reported ethical problem in the sector.
Providers who do not train explicitly for this are not taking their duty of care seriously. The Commission’s framework addresses the most serious breaches. Below that threshold, the everyday end goes largely unmonitored.
A Diagnosis Is a Starting Point
Workers who arrive having already decided how a participant communicates — based on a diagnostic label rather than a conversation — are making a category error with professional consequences.
Autism produces significant variation across individuals, as do acquired brain injury, cerebral palsy, and many mental health conditions. Experience with one person transfers little to the next. The participant is the authority on their own communication and needs. Workers who approach that through the filter of what they already think they know require the participant to work harder to be accurately seen.
Being Present Is the Job
A worker on their phone during support hours has decided where their attention belongs. That decision reflects on the worker and the provider, and on a regulatory environment that permits it without consequence.
Participant time is funded. Divided attention during that time is a failure of basic professional conduct.
Punctuality Has Clinical Stakes
For participants with fatigue conditions, medication schedules, or appointment windows that cannot flex, a late worker is sometimes no worker at all. The window closes, an appointment is missed, and the energy available at nine o’clock is gone by ten.
Workers who treat punctuality as a matter of general courtesy have not been told what the costs of late arrival are in this context. Providers should tell them, in writing, before they begin.
Handover Exists for a Reason
When workers do not read handover notes, participants repeat themselves. Questions get asked that the notes had already answered. Avoidable errors get made. The first portion of support time becomes unpaid orientation, delivered by the person the support was supposed to serve.
Reading the handover is the floor — it signals that a worker understands preparation begins before they arrive.
The Re-Hiring Process
When a support worker leaves, the participant does not simply wait for a replacement. A position description must be written, applications reviewed, interviews conducted, and a hiring decision made with incomplete information about a person who will have access to their home, their medical records, and significant portions of their daily life.
After that comes orientation, and the contextual knowledge that made the previous support functional has to be rebuilt from the beginning.
None of this is funded. The NDIS has no category for the labour of maintaining access to support, and for participants with high support needs or complex conditions, that labour is substantial.
What Competent Support Looks Like
Workers who are good at this job arrive having read the available documentation, ask before they act, and give more weight to what the participant tells them about their own needs than to any plan or file. When something changes during a shift, the response is immediate and adaptive.
Their presence does not generate additional work for the participant — that is the measure. Support that requires the participant to manage, educate, or compensate for a worker’s preparation gaps has redistributed the load rather than reduced it.
What Needs to Change
Mandatory registration for all NDIS workers, regardless of how a participant’s plan is managed, would create a baseline of accountability. Genuine consequences for ethical breaches — including low-level, chronic ones — would change the conditions under which workers operate.
Revised training requirements are long overdue: supervised hours in complex support settings, explicit coverage of invisible conditions, service animal protocols, confidentiality obligations, and fluctuating capacity. These are the preparations the role demands.
Wages need to rise. Turnover in this sector is directly linked to pay, and the continuity of support is a safety condition for many participants — the relationship carries clinical knowledge that cannot be quickly or cheaply reconstructed.
Participants also need a complaints mechanism they can use without fear of losing their support. Accountability cannot depend on participants absorbing the risk of speaking up.
The Principle and the Practice
Participant choice and control sit at the centre of the NDIS. On paper, participants are experts in their own lives and directors of their own support.
That principle requires a workforce framework capable of supporting it. At present, workers enter participants’ lives with significant authority over their access, safety, and daily functioning, operating under training requirements and accountability mechanisms that do not match the weight of what they are being asked to do.
Positioned at the centre of a scheme designed around their needs, the participant often ends up holding the system together when it fails to hold itself together.
That is worth saying clearly, and worth changing.
Share this with someone who trains support workers, manages a disability provider, or influences workforce policy. The problem is documented. The changes required are known. What is missing is the will to treat this workforce and the people it serves with the seriousness they both deserve. #NDIS #DisabilityRights #DisabilitySupport #SupportWorkers #DisabledPeople #DisabilityAdvocacy #Accessibility #AusPol #Australia
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@HardBeingGreen The whole Act is giving all the fine details to Minister rule/regulation making power. We need the Senate to force the Minister to table the exposure draft of the rules before being willing to vote on the primary skeleton Act. But it seems at the moment there are no appeal rights in terms of arguing over amount of supports #NDIS #AusPol
-
@HardBeingGreen The whole Act is giving all the fine details to Minister rule/regulation making power. We need the Senate to force the Minister to table the exposure draft of the rules before being willing to vote on the primary skeleton Act. But it seems at the moment there are no appeal rights in terms of arguing over amount of supports #NDIS #AusPol
-
@HardBeingGreen The whole Act is giving all the fine details to Minister rule/regulation making power. We need the Senate to force the Minister to table the exposure draft of the rules before being willing to vote on the primary skeleton Act. But it seems at the moment there are no appeal rights in terms of arguing over amount of supports #NDIS #AusPol
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@HardBeingGreen The whole Act is giving all the fine details to Minister rule/regulation making power. We need the Senate to force the Minister to table the exposure draft of the rules before being willing to vote on the primary skeleton Act. But it seems at the moment there are no appeal rights in terms of arguing over amount of supports #NDIS #AusPol
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Can everyone reporting on the #NDIS just amend when they say the new legislation gives "the minister" power to arbitrarily cut funding for supports, to say that the new legislation also gives "an LNP or One Nation minister" the power to cut supports.
Whatever discretionary powers the #ALP give themselves, the only certainty is they are going to be out of power eventually, and someone worse than them is going to have said powers. #AusPol
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Can everyone reporting on the #NDIS just amend when they say the new legislation gives "the minister" power to arbitrarily cut funding for supports, to say that the new legislation also gives "an LNP or One Nation minister" the power to cut supports.
Whatever discretionary powers the #ALP give themselves, the only certainty is they are going to be out of power eventually, and someone worse than them is going to have said powers. #AusPol
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Can everyone reporting on the #NDIS just amend when they say the new legislation gives "the minister" power to arbitrarily cut funding for supports, to say that the new legislation also gives "an LNP or One Nation minister" the power to cut supports.
Whatever discretionary powers the #ALP give themselves, the only certainty is they are going to be out of power eventually, and someone worse than them is going to have said powers. #AusPol
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Can everyone reporting on the #NDIS just amend when they say the new legislation gives "the minister" power to arbitrarily cut funding for supports, to say that the new legislation also gives "an LNP or One Nation minister" the power to cut supports.
Whatever discretionary powers the #ALP give themselves, the only certainty is they are going to be out of power eventually, and someone worse than them is going to have said powers. #AusPol
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RE: https://rssfeed.media/@abcfeeds/116571164247215465
#NDIS news - working on legislation analysis at the moment and it is terrible with nearly all crucial detail hidden & still to come in rules/regulations but plenty of warnings on power grabs #Disability #AusPol
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RE: https://rssfeed.media/@abcfeeds/116571164247215465
#NDIS news - working on legislation analysis at the moment and it is terrible with nearly all crucial detail hidden & still to come in rules/regulations but plenty of warnings on power grabs #Disability #AusPol
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RE: https://rssfeed.media/@abcfeeds/116571164247215465
#NDIS news - working on legislation analysis at the moment and it is terrible with nearly all crucial detail hidden & still to come in rules/regulations but plenty of warnings on power grabs #Disability #AusPol
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RE: https://rssfeed.media/@abcfeeds/116571164247215465
#NDIS news - working on legislation analysis at the moment and it is terrible with nearly all crucial detail hidden & still to come in rules/regulations but plenty of warnings on power grabs #Disability #AusPol
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Hughes Unleashes Expletive-Laden Tirade Over NDIS Reductions
Australia's NDIS faces major changes. Up to 160,000 people could lose support by 2028. Find out how these budget cuts affect participants.
#NDIS #DisabilitySupport #Australia #BudgetCuts #NDISChanges
https://newsletter.tf/australian-ndis-cuts-160000-lose-support/
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Up to 160,000 Australians might lose NDIS support by 2028. This is a large number of people who rely on the scheme for daily living.
#NDIS #DisabilitySupport #Australia #BudgetCuts #NDISChanges
https://newsletter.tf/australian-ndis-cuts-160000-lose-support/ -
Labor finds new and ingenious ways to kick the vulnerable when they’re down. #auspol #Budget2026 #NDIS www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...
Australians will need to exhau... -
RE: https://rssfeed.media/@abcfeeds/116570456581139050
This story & the Liberal policy show the whole problem with how the Politicians & some public view the #NDIS It is not welfare, it is purely helping us people with a #Disability to live ordinary lives, nothing special - Liberals are lumping NDIS in with all welfare payments #AusPol
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RE: https://rssfeed.media/@abcfeeds/116570456581139050
This story & the Liberal policy show the whole problem with how the Politicians & some public view the #NDIS It is not welfare, it is purely helping us people with a #Disability to live ordinary lives, nothing special - Liberals are lumping NDIS in with all welfare payments #AusPol
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RE: https://rssfeed.media/@abcfeeds/116570456581139050
This story & the Liberal policy show the whole problem with how the Politicians & some public view the #NDIS It is not welfare, it is purely helping us people with a #Disability to live ordinary lives, nothing special - Liberals are lumping NDIS in with all welfare payments #AusPol
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RE: https://rssfeed.media/@abcfeeds/116570456581139050
This story & the Liberal policy show the whole problem with how the Politicians & some public view the #NDIS It is not welfare, it is purely helping us people with a #Disability to live ordinary lives, nothing special - Liberals are lumping NDIS in with all welfare payments #AusPol
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I really fucking hate this government. Prime Fuckmuppet Albanese and his entire party can die in a fucking fire.
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I really fucking hate this government. Prime Fuckmuppet Albanese and his entire party can die in a fucking fire.
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There’s not much cheering about the #budget. Some grudging remarks on finally tackling the ‘big end of town’ but also much about #NDIS cuts and #AUKUS spends. But the truth iwe shouldn’t get too excited and think about this budget as foretelling what’s to come next (election time next that is). A New Politics article reminds us it is still a budget steeped in neoliberalism:
“..it’s a mixed but ideologically revealing budget: it contains some redistributive reforms, especially on housing tax concessions, but it also preserves the deeper neoliberal framework that has afflicted most economies in the Western world for far too long – there’s the typical material about budget repair, productivity, business incentives, expanding the defence, means-testing and restraint on social spending, especially within the National Disability Insurance Scheme.” (Source: https://www.newpolitics.com.au/p/the-new-politics-verdict-a-slightly )
#AlboPM is not about to change in any radical way anytime soon. Vote #GreensFirst #LaborSecond (Or a good progressive independent small ‘L’. liberal if Labor offends too much) next time around. That’s the lesson I learned these past two years.
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There’s not much cheering about the #budget. Some grudging remarks on finally tackling the ‘big end of town’ but also much about #NDIS cuts and #AUKUS spends. But the truth iwe shouldn’t get too excited and think about this budget as foretelling what’s to come next (election time next that is). A New Politics article reminds us it is still a budget steeped in neoliberalism:
“..it’s a mixed but ideologically revealing budget: it contains some redistributive reforms, especially on housing tax concessions, but it also preserves the deeper neoliberal framework that has afflicted most economies in the Western world for far too long – there’s the typical material about budget repair, productivity, business incentives, expanding the defence, means-testing and restraint on social spending, especially within the National Disability Insurance Scheme.” (Source: https://www.newpolitics.com.au/p/the-new-politics-verdict-a-slightly )
#AlboPM is not about to change in any radical way anytime soon. Vote #GreensFirst #LaborSecond (Or a good progressive independent small ‘L’. liberal if Labor offends too much) next time around. That’s the lesson I learned these past two years.
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There’s not much cheering about the #budget. Some grudging remarks on finally tackling the ‘big end of town’ but also much about #NDIS cuts and #AUKUS spends. But the truth iwe shouldn’t get too excited and think about this budget as foretelling what’s to come next (election time next that is). A New Politics article reminds us it is still a budget steeped in neoliberalism:
“..it’s a mixed but ideologically revealing budget: it contains some redistributive reforms, especially on housing tax concessions, but it also preserves the deeper neoliberal framework that has afflicted most economies in the Western world for far too long – there’s the typical material about budget repair, productivity, business incentives, expanding the defence, means-testing and restraint on social spending, especially within the National Disability Insurance Scheme.” (Source: https://www.newpolitics.com.au/p/the-new-politics-verdict-a-slightly )
#AlboPM is not about to change in any radical way anytime soon. Vote #GreensFirst #LaborSecond (Or a good progressive independent small ‘L’. liberal if Labor offends too much) next time around. That’s the lesson I learned these past two years.
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There’s not much cheering about the #budget. Some grudging remarks on finally tackling the ‘big end of town’ but also much about #NDIS cuts and #AUKUS spends. But the truth iwe shouldn’t get too excited and think about this budget as foretelling what’s to come next (election time next that is). A New Politics article reminds us it is still a budget steeped in neoliberalism:
“..it’s a mixed but ideologically revealing budget: it contains some redistributive reforms, especially on housing tax concessions, but it also preserves the deeper neoliberal framework that has afflicted most economies in the Western world for far too long – there’s the typical material about budget repair, productivity, business incentives, expanding the defence, means-testing and restraint on social spending, especially within the National Disability Insurance Scheme.” (Source: https://www.newpolitics.com.au/p/the-new-politics-verdict-a-slightly )
#AlboPM is not about to change in any radical way anytime soon. Vote #GreensFirst #LaborSecond (Or a good progressive independent small ‘L’. liberal if Labor offends too much) next time around. That’s the lesson I learned these past two years.
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@andyjennings Im not going to forgive nor forget what they did to the #ndis . I love that the only way is to get change is to threaten them.
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@andyjennings Im not going to forgive nor forget what they did to the #ndis . I love that the only way is to get change is to threaten them.
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@andyjennings Im not going to forgive nor forget what they did to the #ndis . I love that the only way is to get change is to threaten them.
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@andyjennings Im not going to forgive nor forget what they did to the #ndis . I love that the only way is to get change is to threaten them.
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NDIS provider: we can offer face to face meetings or telephone. Here’s a list of telephone appointment times. Me: I’d prefer face to face meeting due to complex nature of my condition. Provider: We can offer you these telephone appointment times. Me: … sigh #NDIS
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NDIS provider: we can offer face to face meetings or telephone. Here’s a list of telephone appointment times. Me: I’d prefer face to face meeting due to complex nature of my condition. Provider: We can offer you these telephone appointment times. Me: … sigh #NDIS
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Non disabled Australians we’d appreciate your signature c.org/SQRNy96fKL #Auspol #NDIS
Sign the Petition -
Non disabled Australians we’d appreciate your signature c.org/SQRNy96fKL #Auspol #NDIS
Sign the Petition -
Federal Budget: A Landscape of Half-Measures and Shifting Priorities
Australia's 2026 budget has new tax rules for trusts and negative gearing. Find out how it impacts workers, renters, and NDIS users.
#AustraliaBudget, #TaxChanges, #CostOfLiving, #NDIS, #Renters
https://newsletter.tf/australia-budget-2026-tax-changes-affect-workers/
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Australia's new budget has tax changes for trusts and negative gearing. This budget is seen by some as not doing enough for cost of living.
#AustraliaBudget, #TaxChanges, #CostOfLiving, #NDIS, #Renters
https://newsletter.tf/australia-budget-2026-tax-changes-affect-workers/
