Exclusive: Letters obtained by SBS News show the government initially approved a six month extension, despite concerns the inquiry would not be able to finish its work.
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There is fierce opposition to NDIS independent assessments coming not only from the disability community, but also legal groups, medical bodies, state governments and others, according to SBS News analysis of hundreds of submissions to a parliamentary inquiry.
The submissions reveal there is also considerable concern from outside the disability sector, which has been essentially united in opposition to the reforms since they were announced in August last year.
Submissions from outside the disability community voicing concern and opposition have come from the likes of the Australian Medical Association, Maurice Blackburn Lawyers, and the Queensland and Northern Territory governments.
But the departmentâs daily data releases do not give specific figures on the vaccination of either the aged care workforce or those in disability care, two areas where the rollout is lagging badly.
Both cohorts were included in the highest-priority group â phase 1a â but the rollout plan has since shifted repeatedly.
Initially, aged care workers were to receive their jab from an in-reach team, which visited their facility separately to aged care residents. The in-reach teams, in many cases, did not show up, and staff were left in limbo.
As recently as last month, the federal government still did not have a clear plan for vaccinating aged care workers under the age of 50.
It is understood states and territory disability ministers, who meet regularly with their federal counterpart, have also been denied access to the agency’s actuarial data on projections of NDIS costs.
Prof Bruce Bonyhady, the inaugural chair of the NDIA, told a parliamentary inquiry last month the “cost estimates for the full scheme were based on a very small sample of people, around which there was a reasonably wide margin of error”.
There were “literally hundreds, if not thousands, of assumptions that go into the estimate of a scheme’s sustainability,” he said.
“But we have never seen the financial sustainability report from the scheme actuary which would detail those assumptions and enable them to be properly scrutinised.