Jeanine and Frazer
Content Warning: These stories are about violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation and may include references to suicide or self-harming behaviours. They may contain graphic descriptions and strong language and may be distressing. Some narratives may be about First Nations people who have passed away. If you need support, please see Contact & support.
‘Bad apples aren't being weeded out of the system. They're just disappearing into the system.’
Jeanine and Frazer run a service to match people with disability with support workers.
‘All of our work is inspired by [our brother] and his life and the challenges that he faced as a person with cerebral palsy,’ Jeanine told the Royal Commission.
Jeanine and Frazer’s company is registered with the NDIS.
‘We are very proud of the audit processes that we go through … to maintain our registration status,’ said Jeanine.
The problem, said Frazer, is that many service providers aren’t NDIS registered and never get audited.
‘People are saying, “Why do we have to register? Why would we bother with an audit and paying all this money and doing all of this costly complex work when we can just operate as unregistered?”’
Frazer said the NDIS was supposed to be a ‘consistent, connected, joined-up national system’, but it no longer is.
‘We've got a highly fragmented approach to quality and safeguarding within the disability sector.’
Jeanine said the number of unregistered service providers is going ‘through the roof’.
‘In 2015 … there were 2000–3000 providers. Now there's 120,000–130,000 providers and a lot of those are the independent, small business, sole traders … with only the oversight of a code of conduct that is unenforced.’
Jeanine said 90 per cent of those providers aren’t registered with the NDIS and the number of people being ‘extorted or abused or neglected or not knowing their rights was sort of inevitable’.
‘It's absolutely possible today for a person to go and get an [Australian business number] ABN and become a support worker the next day with no, you know, criminal checks … and to me that's deeply concerning.’
Frazer said, for example, he knew of an unregistered support worker who recently demanded an extra $10 an hour from an NDIS participant.
‘The participant said, “I can't pay you $10 extra every hour,” and the support worker said, “I'm gonna withhold care until you pay me more money.” So effectively individual workers who are not bound by much oversight or supervision are extorting participants for extra money per hour. There are literally hundreds, hundreds of these stories.’
He said it originally made sense that allied health professionals such as physiotherapists don’t need to register with the NDIS if they already have an industry qualification.
‘Again if I need to buy continence aids I don't want to have to wait for some slow specialist provider to provide those if I can go and buy them at Coles.’
The problem is that, in practice, many other types of service providers ‘have just opted out’ to avoid scrutiny and the cost of compliance.
‘What's been added by the NDIS into the mix is significant amount of money … If you're a, you know, a con artist and a fraudster and you're looking for vulnerable people with a lot of money … that's an absolute flashing beacon.’
The system is ‘so unregulated’, said Frazer, that abusive support workers ‘continue to move through the system with no oversight’.
Jeanine said while people are entitled to choose their service providers, there should be ‘some regulatory framework’, such as there is in the car and food industries, to keep people safe.
‘We need one system for everybody, small and large, and at the moment we have two systems,’ Jeanine told the Royal Commission. ‘We have those organisations who opt in to following the rules and those who then decide they're not going to.’
‘The underlying attitudes to people with disabilities is a massive systemic issue, but if we don't have a sensible, consistent framework to protect people we're going to have the very worst kind of people coming into our sector. And I think it's already begun.’
Disclaimer: This is the story of a person who shared their personal experience with the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability through a submission or private session. The names in this story are pseudonyms. The person who shared this experience was not a witness and their account is not evidence. They did not take an oath or affirmation before providing the story. Nothing in this story constitutes a finding of the Royal Commission. Any views expressed are those of the person who shared their experience, not of the Royal Commission.