Last week, the federal government announced it will be spending $2 billion to divert children with mild to moderate developmental delays or autism from the NDIS into a program called “Thriving Kids”.
In a speech to the National Press Council, Health Minister Mark Butler said the NDIS was “the only port in the storm” for parents with children with autism and developmental delays, and that some children being placed on it were being “over-serviced” by a scheme that is always, seemingly, at a breaking point.
This speech came on the heels of the Nine newspapers saying that seven out of 10 new participants of the NDIS have autism as their primary diagnosis. This analysis, and this policy shift, set off a predictable round of discourse regarding nefarious NDIS rorters who, if you went by some comment sections, were operating autism-based grifts in the realm of Tom Cruise in Rain Man.
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Since the NDIS’ conception, a peculiar narrative has grown that it is a dole-lite for disabled loafers, none of whom are actually disabled, all of whom exist somewhere on the spectrum between Fagin and Forest Gump. Few of these hypothetical con artists are more cunning than the Inauthentic Autist: a scamp-like figure who has wrangled a diagnosis for themselves or a loved one so they can receive cheap movie tickets and free rounds at the local putt-putt at the innocent taxpayer’s expense.
To the NDIS and autism sceptic turned paranoiac (see: our national commentariat), few things are as dastardly as this combo of stimming and The Sting. But what gets lost in the autistic-hustler narrative is the reality of an autistic diagnosis, and life, in Australia. Getting diagnosed at any age is a lengthy and expensive slog, and autism itself is both a mercurial and somewhat merciless experience. And to the great detriment of its public perception, it manifests itself in many different ways.
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What that manifestation is within the confines of the NDIS is not so much a matter of cons as it is cogs. To be autistic in the great NDIS machine is about as fun as it is to be autistic in a Chemist Warehouse — a somewhat hellish experience with an undercurrent of knowing that, despite all the signs saying “AWESOME DEAL”, you are somehow being taken advantage of.
People are using autism to rort the NDIS, but it’s not the people with autism. Two-plus years as a support worker (an autistic one to boot) has given me a grim ground’s-eye view of an industry with little to no oversight — one where government policy has had the marrow sucked out of it by a vicious circle of shoddy private companies that had positioned themselves between their “clients” and those clients’ funding.
Like almost every major Australian government policy of the past 30 years, the NDIS is a tragic farce of state responsibility being outsourced to rapacious contractors. It’s an industry designed to get between those in need and the financial help intended for them. The sole purpose of most disability support organisations was seemingly to create the illusion of work (much like our private job providers) to meet government quotas, while charging clients for what is best described as the illusion of care. The efficacy of said illusion usually lived or died in the hands of the individual workers themselves.
These workers — most of us paid minimum wage to be therapist, nurse, chauffeur, cleaner, personal assistant and companion — allow the real grift to work via their disposability. Underpaid, undertrained and overworked, your average support worker exists as a sort of transient freelancer within an organisation whose money, you realise, must surely be going somewhere. In a job that wears you down both physically and psychically, you eventually hit an unsettling epiphany: you are the frontline of the NDIS — and that you/this/it is not, can not, be enough.
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When we talk about rorting the NDIS, we need to shift our attention. It is a cottage industry of shifty, unreliable and often negligently overlooked privateers weedling their way into the lives of the most disadvantaged and/or those desperate to help them. These people find you at your most exhausted and wanting, and will shunt you off into whatever direction is most expedient and profitable, so long as you tick the box that tells the government it’s doing a great job.
To quote Tom Sizemore in Heat: the action is the juice. The NDIS allows these companies to pull off an amazing heist via a mirage of care. The media and the government are chasing illusory autistic Music Men, when they’ve built an industry of mercenary henchmen, 90% of whom are Waingro.
Until the NDIS comes up against a 12-year-old autist whose special interest is Catch Me If You Can, I think we are worried about the wrong thieves.
What’s been your experience navigating the NDIS?
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