Mr. Peter Broadhead:

Deputy Wynne will have to remind me of a couple of her questions because I did not take notes quickly enough.

The Deputy asked first about how the change happened at the level of Government. That is difficult to describe but it was driven by the UN convention. In 2007, we had a Government that signed up to the UN convention and it was ratified in 2008. The carry-through of that into the scheme involves a definite relationship. As a federation, previously the disability services people mostly think of, including the kind of support for people Dr. and Ms Walsh mentioned, was provided by our state governments and some additional funding was provided by our federal Government to those state governments to do that. It was done by funding providers on a block-funding basis, giving them a grant and so on to meet their costs. That was the principal approach.

Somebody said there was a deal of organisation by people with disabilities and that is true. It was our civil society and non-governmental organisations who mounted a campaign but it is also true that at the time there was a wish to do something more than had been done in the past. The Act creating the scheme was passed in 2013, following the 2008 ratification. The scheme was set up as a series of trials. There were seven trials around the country to see how this different approach would work. That was it for the first three years. From 2013 to 2016, it operated as a series of islands of doing things differently in different parts of the country. In 2016, it rolled into a period of transition. By this time, there had been a change in federal Government. I have not kept track of all the state territory governments coming and going. The Act was passed with multiparty support so when the new Government came in, there was a commitment to carry on with the scheme. We went through this period of transition from a series of trials to progressively rolling it out across the country, which meant transferring people out of the old arrangements into the new.

I do not have the time and neither does the committee to go through the whole process but it was not straightforward and in some ways it is not over yet, despite the fact we are in 2021, eight years later. The ambition was to do it in such a way that the thing was stood up in full by 2019 or 2020 but it turned out to take a bit longer.

The federal Government had commissioned our Productivity Commission, which is a sort of independent government entity that provides advice on economic and social issues when asked to do so by the Government. That commission did a report which led to the creation of the scheme. It was invited to do so. It gets its terms of reference from our treasurer. It was asked to do an investigation into disability care in Australia and that report set out the shape of arrangements that were then introduced by the Act. That report came out in 2011 and can be found on the Productivity Commission's website. There was an organised push and an acceptance by the Government of the day of the need to do something. There was a commissioning of a report. That was handed down in 2011 and led to the Act in 2013 and on to the scheme.

One of the questions concerned inequality by disability type, as I would characterise it. There is unevenness in the way the scheme is rolled out because everybody is different. As we moved from the previous system, our eight states and territories did not do things exactly the same and did not take the same approach to bringing people in and the level of change required. There was concern in the early years of the scheme that people with psychosocial disabilities were struggling to get in. There was an anticipated level of participation that was not met. It began at 8% and is now at 11%. Perhaps the position in our country is different from this country. Groups we particularly struggle to reach, engage and include our First Nations people such as people from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island backgrounds. Most of them live in our cities but a disproportionate number live in remote areas. Simon and Fiona, who lived in Alice Springs, will be aware of this. Reaching those people has been a challenge for us. It is a challenge for us in a range of ways outside disability but also for members of that community who have disabilities - not by disability type but for other reasons.

We have had much larger involvement of people with autism than we expected. That was not anticipated, in particular, the numbers of children with autism who are now participating in the scheme. The others might take a different view and, of course, different groups advocating for people with different types of disabilities may have a view but, overall, I would say the scheme is fairly inclusive across the board because it only focuses on functional impairment. It does not distinguish by diagnosis.

The one area that is contentious is the fact that due to the way the scheme was developed, the assumption was made that people aged 65 and over would go towards our age care system rather than the disability system. For this reason, people must be under 65 to apply for the scheme. A person who ages in the scheme can remain in it or choose to go to our age care system at some point but a person over 65 cannot get into the scheme. There has been a fair bit of pressure on that.