Mr. Peter Broadhead:

I understand the question and it is not really my role to tell in another country what it should do. The most radical part of introducing the NDIS in Australia was moving away from funding providers to funding people with disability. That was the transformation in a nutshell. That was not easily done. You can imagine how it was received by the organisations that had been funded to provide services. It was very painful for organisations, all full of good intentions and good people. They had to change from an organisation that had certainty of funding to provide a level of services to as many people as they could with that funding to actually having to compete to get payment from the people with disability for the services they provided. Many made the transformation successfully; some did not. That is still something that is working out in the way we have created a market for provision of services rather than a block-funded set of arrangements.

The phrase I hear most often repeated by the government for which I work is "fully funded and demand driven". It is a repeated statement because people doubt that this thing will be fully funded and demand driven and yet that is the commitment that has been made. The cost has now reached a higher level than was expected, but the government of the day has said it is committed to fully funding it and it is demand driven.

The Act sets the criteria for assessment and then for the funding people receive. It is not formulaic; it is individualised. Simon and Fiona Walsh probably know more about it through direct experience. A plan is prepared taking account of the reports and information a person or his or her family brings to a planning meeting and that is what determines the level of funding provided to a person. The application is based on significant and permanent disability. Any person with significant and permanent disability is eligible for the scheme assuming they meet the permanent residence, citizenship and age requirements. The plan is then done, the person receives a sum of money and purchases services in a market with various providers.

There are difficulties in Australia, as Simon and Fiona Walsh will know. It is a very big country with a small population for the area of land. Therefore, we have difficulties getting out to remote areas. We do not have hot and cold running therapists in the remote parts of the country. We have had our problems and challenges in doing this. A market model is quite difficult to make work in those circumstances. However, considerable work has being put into expanding the workforce. We still need another 83,000 people to join the workforce in the coming years and that is after already increasing it by a significant number. Much of that is not high-level therapy, but personal care and those sorts of workers. However, throughout there has been a political commitment by governments to it and the journey goes on.

Somebody asked if there is another one like it in the world. I am not aware that there is, but that is not to say there are not some that are similar. In the early days of what people call client-directed care in the UK, we looked at that years ago as interesting experiments again where people were given sums of money to use how they thought suited them best. This was not completely new in the world, but I do not know of another scheme that has rolled it out on this scale, in this way and in this timeframe. I would not claim to know what each of the 190 countries around the globe does.