Over to you Bill and Tony!

HONESTLY, if you wanted to try and hide the 12-volume final report from Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability, which has taken three and a half years to compile, you’d release it on the public holiday before the AFL Grand Final.

And especially where the football-mad Victorian public is concerned, that’s exactly what happened last Friday, September 29.

Certainly, it got some of the coverage it deserved but nowhere near enough for such an important issue.

It was always going to be tough to encapsulate the findings of such a complex subject in a couple minutes on TV, but it’s an issue that everyone in the community needs to take an interest in, at least at some level.

On just one of the issues, and it’s a central one, the report makes thousands of references to the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), which incidentally just passed its 10th anniversary.

In the past year, the NDIS cost the Australian Government an estimated $36.7 billion, expected to rise 14.4 per cent in the coming year.

We spend $52.5 billion on defence by comparison, so it’s right up there.

But it’s not just about the money, in fact if it was only about the money, you’d also need to factor in how the investment in better outcomes for people with a disability also has a hugely beneficial economic multiplier effect for the economy as well.

It’s all about the people. By September 30, 2022 the NDIS had 554,917 eligible participants, rising in excess of 20,000 per quarter. So, it’s huge and getting bigger.

What the report identifies, however, is that this is no time for squeamishness on the part of Minister For The National Disability Insurance Scheme Bill Shorten and his boss, Anthony Albanese. Some hard decisions need to be made and they need to be made now or the vast majority of people getting much better outcomes, as a result of the NDIS, will come under threat from a wildly unsustainable program.

Two things they need to address, and they need to go hard after are unskilled, unqualified and unregistered people charging full tariff for services, including $62 an hour to take clients shopping and the people without a disability who shouldn’t be on the scheme in the first place.

The government will cop some flack for cutting off the people who shouldn’t be on the system but that goes with the territory when you win government.