Bruce Bonyhady Amchairman, Disabilitycare Australia

DisabilityCare My Choice My Control My Future Conference, 23 June 2013

Bruce Bonyhady AMChairman, DisabilityCare Australia

I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we are meeting, the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation, and pay my respects to their elders past and present.

May I also acknowledge the Minister for Disability Reform, the Honourable Jenny Macklin, the Shadow Minister for Disability, Senator Mitch Fifield, the Queensland Minister for Disability, the Honourable Tracy Davis, Professor Ron McCallum, Mr Graeme Innes, other distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen.

It is a great honour and privilege to be here and to have the opportunity to address you all this morning.

Standing before you and seeing so many people gathered together for one purpose is not just an extraordinary sight, it is truly inspiring.

Never before has such a large and diverse audience from all parts of the disability sector, government and the broader community gathered together to consider the future of disability policy in this country.

It is therefore symbolic of a transformation that has gathered pace over the past five years and this large room is a microcosm of the national disability insurance scheme itself:

• People with disability, who have advocated for decades for an end to Australia’s deeply unfair, inefficient and fragmented disability system;
• Family members and carers for whom peace of mind, and hence this moment, cannot come too soon;
• Leaders of advocacy, information, peer support and advice organisations who will support others to make informed choices and take greater control under an NDIS;
• Representatives of disability service providers, many of whom funded the Every Australian Counts campaign, because they knew that their purposewas to promote the rights of people with disability, their families and carers and even though they also knew a national disability insurance scheme would imply great changesto their organisations;
• Representatives of mainstream and community support sectors who believe in and wish to deepen their practices of inclusion;
• Representatives of the media who, through their coverage, have ensured that every Australian understands the importance of the NDIS;
• Representatives of Australian governments and political parties at every level – Commonwealth, State, Territory and Local Government and so are emblematic of the extraordinary support the NDIS has managed to gather across all parties and all governments notwithstanding could deeply divided political environment of the past three years; and,
• Public servants in Government Departments in every jurisdiction that are part of the Inter-Governmental Agreement signed by COAG last December and who have worked tirelessly under very tight timetables in order to convert the Productivity Commission’s recommendations into legislation and rules so as to ensure the launch of DisabilityCare Australia in eight days time.

All of us are here, today, share a common purpose: to celebrate that DisabilityCare Australia has become a fact – not just a good idea – and through presentations and discussions to refine andimprove the national disability insurance scheme, as part of its continuing co-design.

The opportunity could not be greater because, if we are successful, Australia will be able to proudly declare that it has one of the best disability systems in the world, rather than the one which today leaves more people with disabilities living at or below the poverty line than any other OECD country.

Today also continues to grow the partnership which has seen people with disability, families, carers, service providers and the broader community working together to ensure that Every Australian Counts.

The journey to this moment – the moment just before DisabilityCare Australia opens the doors of its first seven offices for the very first time – in some ways seems to have been a long one. However, for those who have studied public policy reform, it is clear that the path that has led to the establishment of the National Disability Insurance Scheme has been extraordinarily, indeed breathtakingly, quick.

Just over five years ago, in early 2008, 1,000 people gathered in Parliament House in Canberra at the 2020 Summit, to discuss, debate and agree on the ideas which would shape Australia’s future. Literally thousands of ideas were listed on butchers’ paper and at the end of two days, one of the big ideas that was endorsed was that Australia’s disability system based on welfare, should be replaced by a system based on insurance, investment and individualised funding.

We now know that the NDIS was not just one of the big ideas to emerge from the Summit; it was the big idea.

Then, two years ago, just half a kilometre from here nearly 1,000 people attended the National Disability and Carer Congress to make the NDIS real, and to discuss and debatesome of the details of the NDIS following the release of the Productivity Commission’s draft report into disability care and support.

Prophetically, that meeting was held in the Victory Room.

Bill Shorten told that conference that the door was ajar and from that meeting support for the NDIS both within the disability sector and in the broader community has grown unstoppably. Concerns and doubts were replaced with endorsement, culminating, seven weeks ago, in the community’s overwhelming support for an increase in the Medicare levy to help fund the NDIS.

Personally, I have always believed in the generosity and decency of Australians; that a fair go lies at the heart of the Australian community.

I have also always believed that the NDIS is a great unifying idea; unifying because it will provide disability support based on need, rather than where, when or how a disability was acquired and so will end the random postcode lottery with which people with disability have had to live for too long.

The NDIS is also for all Australians because none of us know when we may acquire a disability ourselves, or have a family member with disability.

Nevertheless, knowing all of this I still found those few action packed days at the beginning of last month, when Australians from all walks of life stood up and said they wanted all Australians to count and that they were prepared to accept an increase in taxes to fund an NDIS,deeply reaffirming and humbling.

As the suggestion that Australia should have a National Disability Insurance Scheme has grown and evolved, moving from the margins of social, economic and political debate to the mainstream and culminating in its central position in this year’s Budget, many people have contributed enormously to this revolutionary change. They all deserve our enduring gratitude.

Success, they say, has many fathers, while failure is an orphan. But in this case, there is only one mother.

I am referring, of course, to the Minister for Disability Reform, the Honourable Jenny Macklin.Without her careful and considered nurturing of the NDIS over the past five years, her extraordinary attention to detail and her evidence-based approach which convinced her Cabinet colleagues of the need to fully fund the NDIS, we would not be here today and for this we all thank you.

Personally, I would also like to thank you for having the confidence and trust to appoint me as the inaugural Chair of DisabilityCare Australia. It is an appointment for which I am deeply grateful and to which I will bring my total commitment and determination.

On Friday, the Minister and I had our first formal meeting five years after Brian Howe introduced me to her so I could talk to her about the need for an NDIS.

She asked me,on Friday,how I was feeling – a very Jenny Macklin question – and I replied that I was both excited and filled with fear. Excited at the opportunity; the chance to play a central role in ending Australia’s deeply inequitable disability system. But fearful, too; that despite my total commitment and the commitment and dedication of so many others to implementing the NDIS successfully, it could still fail.

In many ways, these feelings of excitement and fear are what have driven me throughout the last few years, as I have played my part in both the design of the NDIS and the Every Australian Counts campaign.

For me, excitement and fear are deep motivators. Without excitement, there is no hope and optimism and so no potential for change, reform and, ultimately, transformation. But without fear, there is the danger of complacency, when enduring and transformational change requires continued alertness to avoid mistakes and great care to recognise and mitigate risks.

My professional background has been in funds management and business and I have and will continue to draw on these experiences.

In funds management, there is a saying that one’s performance, which is usually reported and measured monthlyby clients is only as good as last month’s numbers! The need for short term as well as long term performance also applies to reforms, especially sweeping reforms like the NDIS. Therefore while there will be setbacks and dips in performance as the NDIS is rolled out, success must build on success. A track record of performance must be built.

In my last executive role in business, which was as Managing Director of a funds management and insurance business, the objective was to Perform, Grow and Breakout.

If the business performed, and by that I mean achieved its business targets, it earned the right to grow and if it grew it got the chance to break out.

The same is true of the NDIS. We must ensure that it performs through the launch phase so that it earns the right to grow. Then, by 2019 it will reach all Australians, ultimately transforming their lives as well as the lives of future generations.

Responsibility for ensuring that DisabilityCare performs will rest with David Bowen and his Management team. That is their jobs as executives.

I have known David a long time. He was a Member of the Independent Panel advising the Productivity Commission, which I convened, and I had met him earlier when he was the Chief Executive of the Lifetime Care Scheme in NSW.

Since becoming the Chief Executive of, first, the NDIS Launch Transition Agency and now DisabilityCare, David has done an outstanding job in preparing for next month’s launch. Through David, I have also got to know many of his key staff.

I can therefore give you my personal assurance that the staff of DisabilityCare is deeply committed to making next week’s launch a success. They are committed to building a sustainable, flexible and responsive NDIS within a spirit of continuous improvement and development.

Next week the scheme will take its first steps in the launch sites in Barwon, the Hunter, South Australia and Tasmania and then grow to the full scheme across the whole of the country making an irreversible difference not just to the lives of the 460,000 people who are expected to receive an individualised support package but having a positive effect upon every Australian .

But it is vital to remember that the world is not going to change for people overnight next week. It will not be a broken system on Friday afternoon and a perfect world next Monday morning.

It is also possible that not everything will operate completely smoothly from the moment the doors open on 1 July, although I am confident the staff of DisabilityCare Australia have prepared for that moment as well as any group of deeply committed professionals could do.

So I give you this assurance:

Everyone responsible for DisabilityCare Australia,

• From all the governments of Australia and their public servants;
• the Board I Chair;
• every member of staff now working for DisabilityCare Australia – receptionists, planners, local area co-ordinators, finance, administration, ICT and the policy, operations, engagement and communications teams;
• to the senior managers and the chief executive officer;

we will all play our parts – do our professional best to get this right.

And by starting on a small scale, by building up our knowledge and expertise over time, by listening to participants and by sustaining and improving the scheme’s foundations, we will contribute to a fairer, more inclusive community, where people with disability are empowered and enabled to have the lives they yearn for.

Critical to achieving all of this will be the good governance of DisabilityCare Australia and so this is the area I would now like to address, by giving my personal perspective. These are necessarily personal commentsbecause the Board of Disability Care has not yet met for the first time and our appointments will not take effect until 1 July.

I believe that there are four key areas where the Board of Disability Care Australia will need to focus its attention. These are both separate and linked together, adding to a comprehensive risk management framework.They are:

• scheme sustainability;
• ensuring that the commitments to achieving the full social and economic participation of people with disability, the UN Convention on the rights of Persons with Disabilities and control and choice for people with disability, their families and carers, as set out in the Objects of the National Disability Insurance Scheme Act, are achieved;
• that the insurance model that lies at the heart of the design of the NDIS is properly implemented and then maintained; and,
• that support for the NDIS across all governments, political parties, the disability sector and the wider community is maintained through the full implementation of the Scheme.

Disability Care is a company established under the Commonwealth Authorities and Companies Act. This is often termed a CAC Act company for short and this is the term I will use.

The Directors of a CAC Act company have very clear and overriding fiduciary responsibilities. These responsibilities are in many ways more onerous than for a normal company and under the CAC Act, as Directors, we must ensure the financial sustainability of Disability Care.

However, the importance of financial sustainability goes well beyond the legal requirements of the CAC Act, becausein the absence of financial sustainability and ensuring that the NDIS is fiscally affordable and operates efficiently, the overwhelming support that the Scheme enjoys today throughout Australia will evaporate. And without community support for the full funding of the NDIS, people with disabilities will again be pushed to the margins of Australian society.

In the absence of financial sustainability, disability support will again be rationed. People with disability will be forced to resume proving how disabled they are, instead of seeking to maximise lifetime opportunities, and the hopes of recent years will be dashed, causing uncertainty and fear to return.

As a result, the Board will need to monitor and ensure that the legislation and rules which are contained in the National Disability Insurance Scheme Act and the associated Regulations are fully implemented at all times.

This is almost certain to require the Board to take a firm and fair stand in order to ensure that the boundaries of eligibility and reasonable and necessary benefits which are contained in the regulations are maintained and not widened in ways which would undermine the Scheme’ s sustainability.

The Board is also going to need to be firm so that other complementary systems which people with disability need to access such as health, education, aged care, employment and transport, do not shift costs which should be part of mainstream services onto the NDIS.

Further, while initially DisabilityCare has set the prices of services, in the medium term prices will be set by the market and so DisabilityCare will need to take an active interest in ensuring that markets are competitive, so that the viability of the scheme is not undermined by price inflation

However, responsibility for the financial sustainability of the NDIS does not just rest solely with the Board and Management of DisabilityCare.

DisabilityCare fits within a much broader community agenda of participation, productivity and inclusion and with rights come responsibilities. DisabilityCare is neither designed nor funded to improve the health, education or other systems that people with disability must access to have quality lives and to achieve full economic and social participation.

It is therefore the responsibility of every participant, their families, their carers, disability service providers, advocates and government officials to view claims on the DisabilityCare through the lens of fairness and sustainability.

As Chair of DisabilityCare you have my commitment to ensuring that Disability Care will hold true to its Mission to give people with disability control and choice and to put people with disability, their families and carers at the centre of the system.