#ndis — Public Fediverse posts

If more proof was needed that #LittleTimmy is a gas bag with little practical understanding of … well, anything, his budget reply speech about #NDIS, #DiscretionaryTrusts and Down Syndrome tells you all you need to know about the #ShadowTreasurer and the #LNP:

‘Rather than ask about how, as we reported last week, those with Down syndrome will be among the most affected by cuts to NDIS services, the opposition has instead tried to suggest the biggest issue for people with Down syndrome is testamentary discretionary trusts. According to #Tim “Families of disabled children [will be] forced to overhaul finances under new Labor tax reforms”. In reality, special disability trusts were specifically exempted from the changes to trusts. Nothing has changed for them.’ (Source: Greg Jericho in The Guardian - 28May26)

#AusPol #TaxReforms

How long will the LNP continue to serve as the #Opposition is up for grabs. The odds aren’t good btw.

RE: https://rssfeed.media/@abcfeeds/116645717881673137

Distressing neglect of disabled NDIS participant but again shows that providers being registered solves nothing! & does not prevent abuse or neglect #NDIS #Disability #AusPol

RE: https://rssfeed.media/@abcfeeds/116645717881673137

Distressing neglect of disabled NDIS participant but again shows that providers being registered solves nothing! & does not prevent abuse or neglect #NDIS #Disability #AusPol

RE: https://rssfeed.media/@abcfeeds/116645717881673137

Distressing neglect of disabled NDIS participant but again shows that providers being registered solves nothing! & does not prevent abuse or neglect #NDIS #Disability #AusPol

RE: https://rssfeed.media/@abcfeeds/116645717881673137

Distressing neglect of disabled NDIS participant but again shows that providers being registered solves nothing! & does not prevent abuse or neglect #NDIS #Disability #AusPol

RE: https://rssfeed.media/@abcfeeds/116645717881673137

Distressing neglect of disabled NDIS participant but again shows that providers being registered solves nothing! & does not prevent abuse or neglect #NDIS #Disability #AusPol

On my to do list this weekend: make a succinct submission to the Parliamentary inquiry into the NDIS Bill. It’s pretty clear that the Labor political party are going to gut support for people who are neurodivergent or have psychosocial disability no matter what I say or do. But they should at least be made to feel uncomfortable about their disrespect for human rights and dignity, and I’ll not just sit quietly by when people are going to suffer as a consequence of this.
#NDIS #disability #auspol #Budget2026
https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Community_Affairs/NDISFutureGenBill

@sortius About the only thing I want from the US at the moment is there election recall system where if you get sufficient people you can force a fresh election as Labor is now so far to the right & forgotten true Labor values #AusPol #NDIS

RE: https://rssfeed.media/@guardianfeeds/116603250808345796

Labor #NDIS cuts to severely impact participants with Down Syndrome - Labor doesn't seem to care #AusPol #Disability #DownSyndrome #Discrimination

RE: https://rssfeed.media/@guardianfeeds/116603250808345796

Labor #NDIS cuts to severely impact participants with Down Syndrome - Labor doesn't seem to care #AusPol #Disability #DownSyndrome #Discrimination

RE: https://rssfeed.media/@guardianfeeds/116603250808345796

Labor #NDIS cuts to severely impact participants with Down Syndrome - Labor doesn't seem to care #AusPol #Disability #DownSyndrome #Discrimination

RE: https://rssfeed.media/@guardianfeeds/116603250808345796

Labor #NDIS cuts to severely impact participants with Down Syndrome - Labor doesn't seem to care #AusPol #Disability #DownSyndrome #Discrimination

RE: https://rssfeed.media/@guardianfeeds/116603250808345796

Labor #NDIS cuts to severely impact participants with Down Syndrome - Labor doesn't seem to care #AusPol #Disability #DownSyndrome #Discrimination

Comedian Dave Hughes: Emotional Vulnerability Meets Political Friction

Why is Dave Hughes talking about his late mother and the NDIS? Learn how the comedian is balancing personal loss with his public fight against government policy.

#davehughes, #ndis, #australiannews, #theassembly, #mentalhealth

https://newsletter.tf/dave-hughes-grief-and-ndis-policy-critique/

Comedian Dave Hughes: Emotional Vulnerability Meets Political Friction

Why is Dave Hughes talking about his late mother and the NDIS? Learn how the comedian is balancing personal loss with his public fight against government policy.

#davehughes, #ndis, #australiannews, #theassembly, #mentalhealth

https://newsletter.tf/dave-hughes-grief-and-ndis-policy-critique/

Comedian Dave Hughes: Emotional Vulnerability Meets Political Friction

Why is Dave Hughes talking about his late mother and the NDIS? Learn how the comedian is balancing personal loss with his public fight against government policy.

#davehughes, #ndis, #australiannews, #theassembly, #mentalhealth

https://newsletter.tf/dave-hughes-grief-and-ndis-policy-critique/

Comedian Dave Hughes: Emotional Vulnerability Meets Political Friction

Why is Dave Hughes talking about his late mother and the NDIS? Learn how the comedian is balancing personal loss with his public fight against government policy.

#davehughes, #ndis, #australiannews, #theassembly, #mentalhealth

https://newsletter.tf/dave-hughes-grief-and-ndis-policy-critique/

Comedian Dave Hughes: Emotional Vulnerability Meets Political Friction

Why is Dave Hughes talking about his late mother and the NDIS? Learn how the comedian is balancing personal loss with his public fight against government policy.

#davehughes, #ndis, #australiannews, #theassembly, #mentalhealth

https://newsletter.tf/dave-hughes-grief-and-ndis-policy-critique/

Comedian Dave Hughes showed raw emotion on ABC's The Assembly this week. This is a big change from his usual comedy style as he discusses his mother's death.

#davehughes, #ndis, #australiannews, #theassembly, #mentalhealth
https://newsletter.tf/dave-hughes-grief-and-ndis-policy-critique/

Comedian Dave Hughes showed raw emotion on ABC's The Assembly this week. This is a big change from his usual comedy style as he discusses his mother's death.

#davehughes, #ndis, #australiannews, #theassembly, #mentalhealth
https://newsletter.tf/dave-hughes-grief-and-ndis-policy-critique/

Comedian Dave Hughes showed raw emotion on ABC's The Assembly this week. This is a big change from his usual comedy style as he discusses his mother's death.

#davehughes, #ndis, #australiannews, #theassembly, #mentalhealth
https://newsletter.tf/dave-hughes-grief-and-ndis-policy-critique/

Comedian Dave Hughes showed raw emotion on ABC's The Assembly this week. This is a big change from his usual comedy style as he discusses his mother's death.

#davehughes, #ndis, #australiannews, #theassembly, #mentalhealth
https://newsletter.tf/dave-hughes-grief-and-ndis-policy-critique/

Comedian Dave Hughes showed raw emotion on ABC's The Assembly this week. This is a big change from his usual comedy style as he discusses his mother's death.

#davehughes, #ndis, #australiannews, #theassembly, #mentalhealth
https://newsletter.tf/dave-hughes-grief-and-ndis-policy-critique/

#NDIS
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05-18/john-della-bosca-warns-albanese-government-over-ndis/106678358?utm_source=abc_news_app&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_campaign=abc_news_app&utm_content=other

@sbwrightpoet.bsky.social Even grandfathering provisions to protect all current people so only new people affected eg with negative gearing people doiing it currently are exempt from changes. Never seen that with disability supports! #NDIS #AusPol

When policy changes threaten wealth, governments talk about fairness and transition periods. When policy changes threaten disabled people, they call it “necessary savings.” #NDIS #disability

RE: https://rssfeed.media/@abcfeeds/116586264130499001

Read about the proposed #NDIS #Disability cuts #AusPol

H/T to @[email protected] “Social murder” was the term Engels used when a society knowingly creates conditions that shorten the lives of the poor and vulnerable while pretending the deaths are unfortunate inevitabilities instead of policy outcomes. #Disability #NDIS

#ndis #auspol #publichealth
Thriving kids is not the answer either. The people leading that want to throw autistic children under the bus. Deeming it too many children to be able to assist.
If they were serious about saving cost, they would bring the support services under the public umbrella and not just pay third party services
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05-17/will-ndis-cuts-lead-to-the-mistakes-of-the-past/106665656

Recommended viewing. Apparently #trusts account for a quarter of Australia's GDP. Changes to taxation of trusts will probably be a major impact of this #budget on revenue.

Insightful interview on #NDIS with El Gibbs, but the cat steals the show.

Gas tax and support for #Zionism get mentioned toward the end.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1iGu5kr30U
#AusPol

Recommended viewing. Apparently #trusts account for a quarter of Australia's GDP. Changes to taxation of trusts will probably be a major impact of this #budget on revenue.

Insightful interview on #NDIS with El Gibbs, but the cat steals the show.

Gas tax and support for #Zionism get mentioned toward the end.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1iGu5kr30U
#AusPol

Recommended viewing. Apparently #trusts account for a quarter of Australia's GDP. Changes to taxation of trusts will probably be a major impact of this #budget on revenue.

Insightful interview on #NDIS with El Gibbs, but the cat steals the show.

Gas tax and support for #Zionism get mentioned toward the end.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1iGu5kr30U
#AusPol

Recommended viewing. Apparently #trusts account for a quarter of Australia's GDP. Changes to taxation of trusts will probably be a major impact of this #budget on revenue.

Insightful interview on #NDIS with El Gibbs, but the cat steals the show.

Gas tax and support for #Zionism get mentioned toward the end.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1iGu5kr30U
#AusPol

BUDGET 2026: TREASURER ADDRESSES CRITICISM AMID GLOBAL SHIFTS

Australia's Treasurer Jim Chalmers announces NDIS reforms and tax system changes, impacting participants and homeowners. Find out what's new.

#NDIS #TaxReform #Budget2026 #Australia #JimChalmers

https://newsletter.tf/australia-ndis-tax-changes-budget-2026/

The government plans to save money by changing the NDIS. This is the biggest saving in the new budget.

#NDIS #TaxReform #Budget2026 #Australia #JimChalmers
https://newsletter.tf/australia-ndis-tax-changes-budget-2026/

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

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

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

@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

@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