Professor Patrick Keyzer, Law School La Trobe University presented two public lectures: ‘The Implementation of the National Disability Insurance Scheme: Hopes, Dreams, Challenges and Prospects’ at the Faculty of Law – University of Indonesia, Jakarta 24 October 2018 and ‘How is capacity measured in Australian disability law?’ at Jentera Law School, Jakarta 25 October 2018.
Summary of ‘The Implementation of the National Disability Insurance Scheme: Hopes, Dreams, Challenges and Prospects’ lecture: The Australian Federal Government introduced the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) in 2013. The NDIS is a new and exciting social policy direction for Australia that implements the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (the Convention) and enshrines its principles into law. For many years, people with disability in Australia were lived in institutions where they received inadequate support and they could not realise their personal goals. At its core, the NDIS and the Convention state that people with disability should be able to plan and develop their own lives as best they see fit and design their own packages of care and support. Of critical importance is the economic modelling that preceded this reform: the Australian Productivity Commission demonstrated that a surge in funding that would create a market for disability services would yield significant economic benefits because of the income-generation and taxpaying of people with disability and their carers who would be able to participate in the workforce. Rather than treating people with disabilities as welfare dependents, a care economy would liberate their economic participation. Prof Keyser examined the genesis of the NDIS and outlined the challenges that it currently faces.