A senior MP has revealed a major driver of one of the key problems behind Australia’s hospital capacity crisis.
Labor frontbencher Bill Shorten says federal social services agencies are caught up in red tape that is resulting in poorer outcomes for Australians.
Mr Shorten said he had realised “things are worse now in there than I thought looking on the outside” since taking on the NDIS portfolio as a government minister.
He said he had already known “things were administratively difficult”, with some “inexplicable decisions” happening within agencies such as the National Disability Insurance Scheme and the Department of Social Services.
“There’s a lot of good people working in these agencies,” he told 3AW Radio.
“But there’s some stuff happening which doesn’t pass the commonsense test.”
By way of example, Mr Shorten said too many NDIS participants were being “stuck” in hospitals as they waited for accommodation, care packages or home modifications.
“(They) are eligible to be moved out, but the system’s too slow in processing people getting into better accommodation. That’s causing bedlock in our hospitals,” Mr Shorten said.
“I think governments of all stripes and all levels sometimes need to just roll up their sleeves and try to fix up problems because sometimes it’s not about politics. It’s just about poor process.”
Mr Shorten said he thought some NDIS people in hospitals had been made to wait until their “forever home” was ready for them and that this was taking too long.
“We should look at medium-term accommodation for people so that we can move them from hospitals into a better environment,” he said.
Mr Shorten has vowed to overhaul other elements of the NDIS after taking over the portfolio from his Coalition predecessors.
He has said the Albanse government would consider additional resources for the scheme, including a dedicated multi-agency taskforce, to stamp out fraud.
“The fact of the matter is I want to stop the culture of overcharging once that someone hears that they have an NDIS package as opposed to not having one, right through to the serious organised criminals,” he told reporters in Melbourne earlier this month.
“The NDIS is funded by taxpayers for our most severely and profoundly impaired Australians. And right now, I’m hugely concerned that there is a fraud epidemic of people skimming money.”
Mr Shorten said exploitation of the scheme ranged from providers overcharging for services through to organised crime syndicates committing high-level fraud.
He made the comments after Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission head Michael Phelan told the Nine Network as much as 20 per cent of the $30bn a year scheme might be being misused.
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