Episode 6 – NDIS Is Making Psychology Support Harder To Access And The New Budget Rules

Jane McFadden:

Hello and welcome to ADHD Mums. Today we have an episode on NDIS and psychology — what has changed and what it means for ADHD families.

So just a quick recap if you didn’t listen to episode one for the season opener. Each episode for the solos I’m going to do a really quick mum hack. If you love the mum hacks, jump into the Facebook group, into the community, and share all the mum hacks that go around. There’s so many of them.

First up, I’m going to do a mum hack. And that is one of my personal favourites, which is the floor basket rule.

What I find is having lots of things around — stuff all over the floor — means I walk around and pick up stuff all the time, and then I put it all away in each room. Well, I laugh about that. I don’t actually do that every time. But what I’ve been doing lately is put a couple of big baskets out. Sometimes I put colour codes on them and the kids know what colour is theirs, and they have to go find everything in the living room or the rumpus room that’s theirs and put it in their basket.

That is a pretty quick way for me to feel a little bit more in control or a little bit more relaxed that there’s stuff not just everywhere. So you can change this up in any way that suits you. You could put a basket on the floor in each of the main rooms of your house that get really dirty or cluttered.

You don’t have to clean, you don’t have to organise it, but just put it there or put it away in the back laundry like you do and get to it later. You’re not solving the clutter necessarily, but you’re buying yourself time in that ‘I don’t feel like doing that yet, but I don’t want to walk around it for the next week.’

I find that this system really helps me because I feel like I’m in a tidier home, but I haven’t actually done all of the work. It depends on your brain, but I find living in clutter and untidiness — I find it stresses me out. And I absolutely do not want to be tidying things every single day. So that is my mum hack for this week.

So today we have an episode on NDIS and psychology. And you wouldn’t believe it — just after I finished recording this episode, there of course was a twist. And it was released so quietly, you almost wouldn’t know it had happened.

Of course they don’t update everybody properly with all of the changes that negatively affect people. But we know from the 19th of May, all new and renewed plans are going to be 12 months only. They will no longer have the annual funding bucket, where you can use that at your discretion.

So for example, the Christmas holidays — if your child is not able to attend vacation care programs, you may use that support worker funding right then, but you cannot do that any longer. Now the money will drip in monthly or quarterly, and it will be divided up in such a way that you will not be able to use it if your child has fluctuating capacity — which means that some weeks they’re going really well, and you may be able to reduce down therapies. Other weeks it’s very difficult and you need to increase it.

That has always been okay, as long as you don’t go over the funding for the year — except now you actually have to use it evenly the entire year.

So why does this matter? This matters because neurodivergent families do not live on fixed schedules. We have fluctuating capacity — one week, one month, we’re all in therapy, we’re all in a breakdown. The next, our child is in a shutdown and we’re managing a full crisis, but then we can’t access anything because the month before we’ve used it.

This new system assumes that people work in a linear step-by-step process and have just very static, rigid needs that are always the same. But that just shows a complete lack of understanding for the autistic community or for the disability community as a whole.

The change makes it almost impossible to actually plan intensive — so for example, like an intensive equine therapy program over the school holidays. I’ve done that with my children many times. It doesn’t look like we’re going to be able to do that anymore, but it’s very difficult for me to get my kids to another after-school activity during the week, so I use the school holidays for this.

It really does limit our choice and control, which is one of the fundamental pillars of the NDIS, apparently. It also tells us that you can only need help in polite, manageable chunks that seem very neurotypical.

I cannot understand how this works in a neurodiverse family. It’s kind of like saying you can have groceries, but only for two weeks at a time — but you can’t stock up if something is on special.

If your child changes preferences, they don’t eat that anymore, you can’t change that either. You just have to get the same thing all the time, no matter what. Even if your child is going to hit a rough patch and you know that you don’t need this any longer or you need more of that, you cannot make any changes.

It’s like rationing out supports. I just don’t understand it. And don’t even get me started on the impact in early intervention in families in crisis. It just does not work.

The most infuriating part is we are being told by the NDIS that this is actually going to improve management. This is actually helping us and we need to trust them. But what that means is there’s more admin, less trust and a complete disconnect on how actual disabilities function in everyday life.

That is the update on section 33, which is coming out on May the 19th. If you feel like things are changing within the NDIS, that’s because they still are. It does seem like whenever there’s a plan review, there seems to be funding cut rather than more funding given, no matter what your functional capacity assessment says.

This episode breaks down how the recent cuts are quietly reshaping what’s considered reasonable and necessary — especially for psychology and mental health. So if you have a child on the NDIS that’s currently accessing psychology, this will impact you when you have your next plan review, which is where you need to prepare your evidence and go back through the planning process.

Or if you have already been reviewed — you’ve just got onto the NDIS — you may need to listen to this episode because your psychologist may contact you about upcoming changes on how services are approved and reimbursed.

Jane McFadden:

Now, the psychologists are all full under governing bodies and they’re going to have their own take on how they work. Sorry if you’re autistic and you like to have a concrete answer — this is going to be a little bit grey as to how your psychologist will handle the changes.

So for example, a psychologist could notify a family and say, ‘Hey, I’ve been treating your child for anxiety, trauma, depression. This is actually no longer covered under NDIS and I’m being directed to refer you back to the Medicare system.’

You might already have been asked to shift the focus of the sessions towards more emotional regulation, executive functioning, social skills — because your psychologist is going to want to work on reports that clearly link your child’s needs to functional outcomes. That is not your psychologist doing that for their own choice necessarily. They are following policy from the NDIS.

So we do need to stay proactive. If you have an email or a call like this from your psychologist, you don’t need to panic. Reach out to your NDIS planner if you have one, check your goals. If you don’t know who your NDIS planner is or about checking your goals or any of those basics around NDIS requirements, I really recommend that you jump onto my website.

I have all of these guides about the NDIS that I used to sell. The reason I don’t sell them anymore is because I feel like it’s not right when the NDIS have made all their changes to charge people when they are less likely to get onto the NDIS than before.

In the show notes, I’m going to link all of my NDIS guides that are all free, and it spells out exactly how the NDIS works. This episode is going to go beyond the basics. If you’re still on the basics, please go and download my guides or look back on some of my other episodes about the NDIS that I can also put in the show notes.

Because I wanted to do a current update because we know that the rules around psychology and mental health under the NDIS have got a whole lot messier. Now, I’ve run a large psychology business myself. I’ve worked in that space for a long time — over 20 years. I’ve got kids on the NDIS, so I’m absolutely across these issues.

Let’s start with the headline: the NDIS is no longer funding clinical mental health therapy under psychology. Is that true? Yes, but there’s a lot of grey underneath that. It is true — that does include generalised anxiety treatment, trauma, depression, emotional dysregulation that’s not tied to a clear functional impairment.

Now, I’m going to break down what this actually means for you in everyday people terms. So just hang on. Those treatments that psychologists used to look after and bill the NDIS for are now being pushed back into the mainstream health system.

Now, what that means is your GP and the Medicare system and private psychologists that you need to book in with. And what that means is waitlists, massive gap fees, and fewer qualified providers that are willing to take those mental health care plans — because we’ve got to remember that rebates haven’t come up with inflation. So the Medicare health rebates are not going to cover the private billing that your psychologist will bill.

And that means that we do have this gap payment and often a huge waitlist. And even more so, we can’t even really cherry pick who we use because there’s not that much available. So when did this happen and why did it happen? The NDIS changes were implemented on the 3rd of October 2024.

But industry knowledge — I had found out that was where it was going a long time before that. If you are waiting to read on the website, ‘NDIS is no longer funding psychology,’ you won’t see that. They’re not going to come out so openly with that. But what they are going to do is make it harder to use your funds with psychologists.

So if you are currently on the NDIS, it will shift the way that you can use your NDIS funds and your experience in the NDIS. And the NDIS will still fund psychology — but the treatment has to be non-clinical in nature. It has to focus on functional or capacity building, which we will go into and I’ll break down what that means.

So if you are in the NDIS at the moment and you’re using a psychologist — great. Continue and wait to be told differently. There are two different types of psychologists that have Medicare billing attached to them.

One is a registered, and one is a clinical. A lot of people on the NDIS and ADHD mums are more familiar with the clinical psychologist because they have done the assessment. A lot of the time they’ve submitted that to the NDIS.

A registered psychologist usually doesn’t submit assessments to the NDIS. Clinical psychologists have got additional training and they often have a higher rate per session than a registered psychologist. Most people are familiar with the mental health care plan, which is a part of the Medicare billing system.

If you’ve been told that your psychologist sessions now aren’t clinical in nature — they’re around depression, anxiety — and you need to go through Medicare, you need to go see your GP and ask for a mental health care plan. You have to have goals that are agreed upon and treatment options with your GP.

Now, who is eligible for a mental health care plan? You actually do need to be eligible — and a lot of people don’t realise this. When you book the appointment, you need to make a long appointment with your GP to take the assessment.

The GP will usually ask you about mental health concerns. They might ask you to complete a K10, which is an anxiety and depression test. The mental health care plan treats a lot of different conditions — addiction, drug use, eating disorders — pretty much all of the mental health conditions that exist.

However, you really do need to score significantly on the K10 or have a real goal or something that you need to work on. I’ve known plenty of women who have sent their partner along to a GP to get a mental health care plan. Their partner has not really presented much of an issue — ‘I don’t know why I’m here. My partner told me to come.’

They’ve not really said enough, and then the GP has gone, ‘I’m sorry, but you don’t meet requirements.’ From Medicare’s point of view, they want to be treating something. They don’t want to be just funding sessions, partially even, for people who are going there that don’t have anything specific to work on.

You actually need to meet criteria to receive that mental health care plan. There are a lot of benefits to getting a mental health care plan. Better Access is a program that aims to encourage more people to seek mental health and treatment.

A Medicare rebate for a session with a clinical psychologist is much higher than that of a registered psychologist. Have a look at who you’re picking, who you want to go to, where the availability is, and also what the rebate is.

In terms of how many sessions — generally, you can claim up to 10 sessions for a psychologist per calendar year. Your GP will do the referral. They will do up to six sessions. After the six sessions, the psychologist will produce a treatment report card and send it back to your GP.

And then your psychologist can ask for another four sessions after that. And then your GP will give you another referral to claim the last four sessions. If you go over the 10 sessions, your Medicare rebate is no longer available, and then you have to pay out of pocket or privately the whole amount.

One thing that grates me so hard is the price gap. I cannot understand how the NDIS can refer people back now to Medicare. It really, really upsets me. The reason is because when the NDIS rolled out, it had its pricing guide, and Allied Health was not actually charging back then what it charges now.

For example, I worked as a psychologist in a mental health clinic in 2014. The mental health clinic was charging me out at $150 per session. Now, I thought that was a lot of money back then. There were other people that I knew that were charging $100, $120, $130 — or people that were more experienced clinical psychologists that were charging more.

But when the NDIS came out, straight away they went out to $193 for a psychology session — fully paid for an NDIS participant. Then there was report writing on top, travel, all kinds of things. And what it meant was that psychologists such as myself — we were taking those NDIS referrals.

Because we were taking those NDIS referrals — and then inadvertently, people being people, it’s no one’s fault — we were prioritising those NDIS referrals because when you’re getting a mental health care plan, so let’s say your Medicare rebate is $60 or $80 a session…

Jane McFadden:

…so back in 2015, the Medicare rebate was a lot less. If you had a chronic disease management plan, which sometimes people do — especially for ADHD mums with chronic illness — you can have a chronic disease management plan. The rebate for that was only about $63, and that’s approximate back in 2014. And a Medicare rebate for a psychologist was, I think, somewhere between $60 and $80 at that time. It does go up with inflation every year.

But back then, when I worked in the health retreat in 2014, if we got clients that were coming in on a $60 or $80 Medicare rebate, for example, we wouldn’t be wanting to take them as much as what we would with an NDIS client who was paying us $193 straight up without any admin.

So you’ve got a Medicare processing fee, you’ve got to take credit card payment with people — a lot of psychologists as well, it’s always that icky part of the appointment where you have to pay. And so it did seem like a lot of people were taking those NDIS clients, and a lot of psychologists did a great job, and allied health professionals were still taking the other clients.

But it just ended up being that if you wanted to get in with a psychologist, well, it just ended up with allied health that a lot of them started raising up their fees, because you’re basically losing money if you’re taking a client that’s not in the NDIS, because the rate of that was so much higher.

And of course, there’s a lot of really great allied health providers out there who still keep their rates low and they do prioritise those other referrals. So I’m not saying this is a blanket rule, but what I am saying is that the NDIS has created that price gap.

They are the ones that have created the gap payment that is so much larger than what it’s ever been. And the waitlist is so much longer than it’s ever been. That’s what I see. And the reason the gap is higher than it’s ever been was because the NDIS, when it rolled out its price guide, lifted up the amount of money for providers — where those gap payments have never been as large as what they have been before.

Now, where am I talking from? I am talking from somebody who’s worked within the psychology industry for over 20 years. I’ve also run allied health clinics with exercise physiology, dietitians, and physiotherapists, and I ran that for over 10 years. So I can tell you that the change when the NDIS came out was huge.

And as allied health providers, I watched everybody lift up their rates and the waitlist get longer and longer. Now, for families with multiple kids, weekly therapy is basically financially unmanageable at this point. And psychologists and allied health professionals are really not bulk billing.

It is so difficult to find a bulk billing allied health provider. And I understand why, because I’m absolutely backing the allied health professionals. I have been one and I get it. The cost of living has increased for everybody.

So families are looking for bulk billing because they don’t have the funds to pay those huge gaps. However, from the allied health professional’s point of view, we also have the same issues. We’re paying rent. We are paying for systems, platforms, memberships to different bodies, professional development.

But they don’t actually — a lot of them — work that all day. They’ve got to do report writing. They’ve got to do admin. They have to pay admin staff.

So I want to be really clear that allied health professionals are not the issue here. But the price gap that the NDIS created is the issue, because now we have a really big mismatch where the NDIS are going out to current participants who are already on the NDIS and saying, ‘Hey, you’ve got to go back to Medicare with your clinical issues that you’ve always had treated.’

The psychologists are under pressure because they don’t want to be billing for something that’s not allowed. They don’t want to put their registration at risk, which is their livelihood. But then that psychologist has to then bill that family for the same service under Medicare and charge them like $100, $150 per session.

It is a really, really bad situation for everybody. I’ve spoken to parents who say that they’re paying $600 per month just to keep therapy going for their children. Some of them are having to choose between psychologists, speech, OTs, or they’re just having to cut things entirely and just try and wing it themselves.

So how about we talk about something slightly different? And I’m going to give you some really good insight into how I plan to continue into the grey area that the NDIS don’t want you to know — about how you can get this funded.

Because it’s just a way of looking at the service. And I wouldn’t expect your psychologist to be able to figure this out. But if we strip this back for a moment, we know that NDIS isn’t meant to fund clinical services now. It’s not about depression, anxiety, or therapy ongoing. But they will fund what’s called functional.

So what does this mean? And who decides what is what? If you have an NDIS planner — that’s somebody that manages your funds — you can talk to them about that. I would recommend going verbal, not on email, because you’ll get a more flexible response via verbal. But they’re always hesitant to put things in writing, which I understand.

Or if you self-manage your funds, and if you want to know more about how that works, just check out my NDIS free packs.

So, for example, let’s talk a really standard thing — anxiety. You have a child that’s being treated by a psychologist for anxiety. Now, I would look straight away as to how that anxiety impacts school attendance, sleep, social impacts, community-based — they’re too anxious to go to sport.

What is it that the anxiety is impacting that is then functional?

My child, Samantha, has been treated for anxiety. But that anxiety is impacting her function. Her daily routines are now becoming unpredictable. She’s refusing to go to school. She’s resisting going different places. It’s taking her hours to get dressed in the morning. It’s her nervous system going into survival mode.

This affects her ability to actually participate in daily life and her independence. Or you could say her executive function is absolutely impacted by anxiety. Her anxiety is increasing her clinical load to such a point that doing homework, packing a bag, following steps — she is now rendered unable to do this.

Not because she can’t, but because she’s so stressed out, her mental capacity is consumed by worry. Or you can say their social participation is shrinking. The anxiety is now affecting playground, excursions, sporting, their confidence, connection — or they’re having a sleep decline, stomach aches, headaches, panic attacks.

It’s really reducing my child’s capacity to engage in therapy and family life. That is a way to link anxiety, trauma, depression to actually the functional impact.

Now, this is completely legal. That is what the NDIS is there for. It’s talking about functional impact. But see how they’re just trying to make it harder.

It depends on how your psychologist reads the legislation from the NDIS as to what they deem is a Medicare-funded session and what is an NDIS-funded session. So yes, this is going to make it trickier because you are going to be relying on the psychologist.

However, you can always use my provider form on my website. Those are the most neuroaffirming, ADHD-mum-friendly psychologists. I will put the link into the show notes. Go in there and have a look.

They would be a really great list to have a look at — or ask your psychologist. Always better to ask verbally than to put things in writing. So sometimes having a conversation about how the anxiety is impacting can really change whether you end up paying a hundred dollar gap every time or whether you’re on the NDIS and how many sessions you can actually have, which helps your child.

Because the consequences that no one is talking about — which absolutely grinds me to the bone — is that when a psychologist says to a family, ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t treat this anymore because it’s clinical,’ they’re doing their best. That’s what they think.

And they’re trying to meet legislation, which absolutely I respect. Or an NDIS planner contacts or an NDIS review happens and psychology is no longer involved in the child’s support plan — then you may find regression in skills that they’ve worked really hard to build, behaviour escalation at home, school, everywhere, which then impacts their self-esteem because they can then start to get all of that negative feedback.

School avoidance. Parent mental health can really plummet too because you’re like, ‘Wow, we’ve just taken a big step back. Took me so long to get there.’

See, I don’t believe that this is about fraud or anything. It’s about neglect of the NDIS and avoidance. And again, if there is an issue with the NDIS — if they cannot afford what they’ve created, whatever it is — they should have planned it better. You shouldn’t give things to people and take it.

So what can we do? When we’re planning for a plan review, you need to frame every report around function. Can my child attend school five days? Can they manage transitions? And when I say transitions, I mean into the car, out of the car, after school.

Can they manage leaving the house? Can they communicate their needs without getting distressed? Can they participate in daily routines? How’s their daily care? Make sure your psychologist outlines how the therapy is building their participation in the community, not just reducing anxiety.

How is that then helping your child function?

Now, let’s say you were rejected. What can you do? Request an internal review immediately. Escalate to an external review if necessary. Collect data — attendance records, teachers’ letters, GP notes.

Join advocacy groups like my Facebook group. Join my Facebook group, share there. I’ll put the link to how to join it in my show notes. Also, fill out my NDIS complaint form, which is a Jotform in the show notes.

Because we need to have a clear pathway — if psychology was still removed, how can you request a review? Because if you were to get an NDIS letter that says, ‘We are acknowledging your child benefits from psychology support. However, we’ve determined that this is Medicare,’ you need to say something.

Jane McFadden:

I do have to talk about the system. Now, this is a contradiction because the National Autism Strategy — and I have a whole episode on what I think of that, which is in the show notes too — it has words like inclusion, support, community. Sounds great. But at the same time, thousands of families are quietly receiving letters saying their kids are removed from the scheme.

In fact, one third of the government’s projected NDIS savings are coming from removing children. This isn’t about fraud. It’s not about efficiency. It’s about actual kids losing access to their supports.

Their projected savings at NDIS fraud is projected at $200 million over four years. But removing kids from the scheme is $500 million saved per year. This is just a cost-cutting campaign. And psychology is the first on the chopping block, which is why I want to make sure that we are complaining from the beginning.

Now, I have a real problem with children being affected, particularly in early intervention when they’re developing their speech and language skills. And I have an issue with the National Autism Strategy’s idea to create different job pathways for the autistic community.

That’s great, but that’s for kids when they get to 18, when they start working. And that’s great — but I don’t know, do they need different pathways? What about if we did some early intervention and gave these kids the best start that they can possibly have?

And I’m talking about neuroaffirming. I’m not talking about turning them into neurotypicals. But what I’m talking about is if they have a speech and language delay, if they have emotional regulation skills — if they have emotional regulation issues, let’s say like anxiety, huge levels of rejection sensitivity — let’s say they struggle really just building a friendship.

It’s not about making them neurotypical. I absolutely do not believe that. But it is about giving them the best start for them to choose their pathway. And we know that speech and language and having a child be able to speak for themselves is going to reduce their frustration.

I have a problem with the NDIS removing kids from early intervention particularly. That there I just think is wrong. Why would we create different employment paths for the autistic community as if they can’t take the other employment paths? What if they can?

What if a lot of these kids just need a really great start? What if, when their brain is developing, we pour in those resources? And then maybe if they can’t afford it, we could start to move them out as they hit teenage years. But how about we put in the money when their brain is developing?

I just don’t understand how that can be the right thing to do. I believe that if we gave everybody the best start possible, we could then see where they’re at employment-wise. And I do believe that we would absolutely — if we looked after these kids properly and gave them help in the beginning — I 100% believe that we would have less money spent in jail time, youth detention, drug and alcohol addiction, Centrelink — all of that.

I believe the money spent there would reduce if we had proper and better early intervention. The NDIS taking that away completely does my head in.

We have so much research that shows us that neurodivergent children are more likely to make impulsive, reckless decisions, right? Through childhood, teenage years, until their prefrontal cortex is completely developed. So why don’t we look after them then? Because that to me screams kids that make mistakes.

And there are different types of mistakes. I think there are mistakes that you make when you’re a kid that affect you for the rest of your life. And there are mistakes that you made that you look back and you shudder and you think, ‘I’m so grateful to be alive. I’m so grateful that nothing happened there.’

Now, if you have neurodivergent children making more mistakes, requiring more support, why would we not support them through that period? Let’s not punish them after they make a mistake. Let’s support them.

Now, you can hear I get very passionate about the NDIS. I get very passionate about early intervention. But I think we need to also address something that again, no one talks about, which is the impact on the mum. Because geez, we take some hits.

And at Parliament House, they’re not talking about us. Because every time the NDIS changes, it doesn’t just impact our kids — it hits us directly and deeply. We already have decision fatigue. We already have mental load.

Now we’ve got to become legal experts in reasonable and necessary supports. We need to be a behavioural analyst, an advocate, a systems navigator — just to stop a support disappearing from our child’s life that they desperately need.

It’s not enough that we have to pay for it, drive them around, support them, get the referrals, all of the things that we need. Now we have to try and prove that we need it as well. So we’re left scanning the plans for keywords, emailing therapists, crying in your car after another letter.

And then we get told psychology supports aren’t going to be funded necessarily. It’s like, do we have to then look at our children’s faces and say, ‘Hey, you can’t go see that person anymore that you’re really relying on’?

Or the panic when we can’t find another provider, the anxiety because a psychologist hasn’t said anything to us yet, or the guilt about not being able to cover the amount per week, per kid, because it’s just so expensive. And then we feel like it’s our fault because our kids aren’t getting what they need — but it’s not up to us.

And of course, we don’t have time for a breakdown because we are stretched thinner than ever. And the impact on the mums is what I get so upset about, because the system doesn’t even keep just not supporting us — it’s actually getting worse, making small changes under the table, and then having an impact without really coming out and saying what they’re doing.

Let’s also name the truth — and that is that ADHD mums are already more prone to anxiety, emotional dysregulation. A lot of us have got a lot of trauma, and stripping psychology supports from our kids doesn’t just harm them. It floods our nervous system.

We talk about youth mental health in this country. We talk about autistic and ADHD kids being more susceptible to that. But yet we then take away their supports. Because I cannot understand how ADHD families are supposed to then support our kids financially in this.

Because we also know from the research that families with neurodivergent kids are more likely to have one parent that has to work part-time, or they have to not work at all. I interviewed Tanya Waring in the school series, and she talks about how as a medical negligence lawyer, she had to quit her job as a lawyer to actually advocate for her son because there was not enough available for him. And she’s just coming back into work now.

So we have families that are on one income possibly. So what happens when ADHD mums can’t access the mental health supports for the kids themselves? We stop functioning. We drop balls. We withdraw. We work less. We pay less tax.

Maybe we rely on Centrelink more. Maybe our kids who are now unsupported make those decisions that everybody wishes they could take back — and they end up in the system, because that all costs money. But yet why is the Australian government okay with spending money on jail time, youth detention, and things to punish kids — but they are not willing to spend the money proactively?

How, when all the research is available, are they not getting that? Now, I don’t expect a politician to be an expert in the NDIS or neurodivergent kids or any of this research that I talk about. But what I do expect — and I do demand — is somebody, and it doesn’t have to be me, have a seat at the table when they make those decisions.

Because why are we here today? The reason we are in this position is because when the NDIS was created — and again, I was an allied health professional at this time — and all of the allied health professional people were talking, and what were we saying? The NDIS is an absolute mess.

People were talking about it like they were fixing a plane that was in the air. That was the NDIS — ‘We’re going to launch it. We don’t really know how it’s going to go, so we’re just going to sort it out as we start.’ But those are people’s lives.

It’s been very well accepted that the NDIS was poorly planned and that people did not realise what autism was when it came out. So the NDIS was created by Julia Gillard, who was then the Prime Minister and then the Labor government.

Bill Shorten is probably the politician that’s most known within the NDIS, and he took over in June 2022. So whilst he took over as a minister in 2022, he was actually really pivotal in the creation of the NDIS when he started, because he was actually the Parliamentary Secretary for Disabilities and Children’s Services — which was throughout earlier 2007 and 2010 — and he often is credited as one of the key people that started the scheme.

Now, it’s very well known because they talk about making it sustainable, as if they can’t afford it. But whoever created the NDIS — and I think it was a group within Labor — I don’t understand who they spoke to within the autism community, because I feel like they created the NDIS thinking that only people who are autistic were level three, which is more associated with that more visible presentation.

You get people who struggle with communication, they struggle with daily living, and they require a lot of support. And it’s been this kind of like pulling back of the rest of the autistic community off the scheme since then. But if that’s the case, that is a result of your poor planning. That’s not anybody else’s fault.

And it’s up to the government to create those community-based supports that they keep talking about. So when they talk about it, they talk about access to Medicare and community-based supports. However — again, my other NDIS episode talks about this, and I’ll put that in the show notes — where are those supports?

Make them first. Don’t take everybody off the NDIS or try and start to move people off the NDIS back to Medicare without the community-based supports actually existing that you’re talking about. That’s where we need to start. That’s what I believe needs to happen.

I don’t want to just talk about the problem and the injustice of it. I want to see the community-based supports that the National Autism Strategy talks about, that the NDIS talks about, actually be put into place. Because I cannot see for the life of me where to access those community access supports.

If you don’t have the funds for the private billing, where are they? Get them up and running first. Show me how they work, and then make those changes to the NDIS. Don’t leave everybody out in the wilderness and don’t leave all of the children with this massive gap whilst you figure it out.

If you felt the impact of this episode, please share it. We need to push back. If you could share this episode, I’d be so grateful.

I’d love you to submit your story on the NDIS Jotform in the show notes. I’d love you to sign the petition in the show notes as well or write to your MP. Join the Facebook group. Join the mailing list on the ADHD Mums website, because that’s where I keep a lot of the updates.

And please know that your voice is powerful. They are relying on us being vulnerable and downtrodden and not saying anything, and I won’t let that happen. We are not giving up. Let’s keep the pressure on together.

Thank you so much for listening. I really appreciate it. Let’s be loud and be heard together — because as I said, this season, season three, is not about talking about awareness of being neurodivergent or talking about how the system’s not made for us. I want change. Let’s make change together.

Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed this episode.