About us

A string of dysfunctional policies from NDIA, have demonstrated that NDIA bureaucrats don't interact with the disability sector, use the scheme and are too far removed from the day-to-day realities of disability supoort to understand the issues affecting participants. In combination, this makes them unable to design either safe or targeted disability policies far removed in Canberra.

Co-design with the disability community is necessary to ensure that NDIA's policies accommodate the needs of its severely disabled participants and do not harm them. Disability policy is high risk and NDIS participants are among the most vulnerable people in Australia.

To this end, members from the disability community– with professional backgrounds in law, government, engineering and psychology– have come together to form Disabilitywatch, in order to:

- advocate for, and assist in developing, safe user-led disability policy alternatives, with a view to informing co-design;

- while mindful of the need to improve NDIS' financial sustainability. Effective disability policy is not simply a question of more funding, but designing smart policies which target the needs of participants.

What we do

Specifically, Disabilitywatch seeks to:

■ Monitor harm coming to disabled participants resulting from any maladministration or poorly designed NDIS policies;

■ Bring the attention of the Australian public to any NDIS policies which are harming vulnerable participants through the publication of online policy articles;

■ Thereby, help inform mainstream media of the issues affecting vulnerable scheme users;

■ Analyse NDIS policy from a community-led perspective;

■ Alert politicians of both major parties of any maladministration or policy problems on NDIS;

■ Support law-firms pursuing class-actions by referring NDIS participants who have suffered loss or harm to them in order to encourage policy change on NDIS;

■ Encourage co-design by liaising with the disability community on-line to design safe user-led policy alternatives, drawing on their extensive working knowledge of:

  • what the needs of the disability community are;
  • the disability industry;
  • how fraud happens; and
  • where current policy dysfunctions on the scheme are.

In order to design safe, targeted and cost effective disability policies.