The recognition of the dire need for a tier of high-quality disability supports to address the significant unmet needs of Australians with disability who are not eligible for individual National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) plans is very welcome. Well-designed and appropriately funded Foundational Supports will deliver many benefits for people with disability, as well as their families, informal supports, allies, the disability sector, governments, the economy, and society.
We believe the design of Foundational Supports presents a significant opportunity to adopt a fresh contemporary approach to supports for Australians with disability that reflects the Social Model of Disability. The Model of Citizenhood Support would provide a strong basis for building a comprehensive and cohesive national strategy that all tiers of government could use to coordinate their investments in a system of Foundational Supports that work well together. We strongly recommend genuine co-design processes are adopted to develop Foundational Supports with people with diverse disabilities involved in decision making and the leadership and evaluation of the implementation.
Successful Foundational Supports will depend on consistent and adequate long term-funding underpinned by a strategically coherent and public-facing strategy. As the Productivity Commission cautioned in 2017, underfunding these types of supports is a ‘false economy’. Short-term, time-limited grants also overlook the fact that making this type of impact is often a slow-burn – people do not just show up on the first day. Steps must also be taken to ensure that small local agencies with good capacity and potential to deliver benefits are not excluded by a lack of skills to write winning grant applications. Accountability for outcomes should be built into the framework in a way that focuses on delivering benefits without preventing projects and programs to evolve based on early learnings.
We strongly support a focus on peer support networks that offer a very cost-effective way to connect people to information, supports, and each other. Self-advocacy should be included in General Foundational Supports as part of a comprehensive and integrated approach to all types of advocacy supports. Likewise, advancing Supported Decision-Making approaches should be a core goal of Foundational Supports. Capacity building supports need to be considered more broadly than only targeting people with disability and, instead, focus on societal change in line with the Social Model of Disability. Information and advice should be provided in a range of accessible formats to meet diverse needs with a focus on ensuring people can easily access in-person services. Although navigation has been explicitly excluded from this consultation, we believe it needs to be at the core of Foundational Supports and should be prioritised. It will be hard to measure the adequacy of other Foundational Supports without improved navigation support in place.
More work is required to fully deliver on the commitments in Australia’s Disability Strategy 2021-2031 because this will maximise access to inclusive mainstream supports and opportunities, thereby making both Foundational Supports and the National Disability Support Scheme (NDIS) more sustainable. Attention should also be given to the urgent need to provide clarity on arrangements for the transition period to ensure that successful existing programs and projects can be transferred to the new framework without losing momentum, funding, staff, and participants.