Health Department acting deputy secretary Luke Mansfield told the hearing that the NDIS model of individual packages had distorted the distribution of allied health workers around the country.
“Where the workforce is available, it’s distorted pricing,” he said. “I think the notion of government-commissioned, funded or delivered services will help to overcome that. It helps government plan where the services are available, as opposed to where the provider wishes to provide the service.”
However, the parents surveyed by CYDA were concerned the new block-funded services would no longer be individualised to their children’s needs and they feared schools would not be able to step up.
About half said they enlisted services such as occupational therapy, speech therapy, psychology and support workers each week. A further one in five used them fortnightly.
Liz Develin, a department deputy secretary, said the reforms had come from the realisation there was a high proportion of young children on the NDIS – about 50 per cent of new participants – “and a sense that families are actually looking for mainstream supports and they can’t find them”.
“One of the key rationales for Thriving Kids is to think about how we can provide more mainstream services outside of the NDIS for these children, so that you don’t have those extensive delays, because a child of two or three cannot wait six months or a year for a service,” she said.
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She said the government still hoped to land a funding deal by the end of the year – which is being held up in a dispute over hospital funding with states – and that the advisory group would do “very rapid work over the next few months” so that services started from mid-2026.
But in a separate submission, Aruma, one of the country’s biggest NDIS providers, said private providers in the non-profit sector were already delivering lower-intensity early intervention supports for children, which should be scaled up as part of Thriving Kids.
“Aruma delivered early intervention services to children and families before the NDIS, and over the last 20 years has developed its evidence-based programs that build capacities for children and families across both metropolitan and rural regions,” chief executive Martin Laverty, a former board member on the National Disability Insurance Agency, told the inquiry.
“The not-for-profit sector has current and future capacity to deliver evidence-based early intervention programs to children with mild to moderate developmental delay or disability.
“The inquiry is encouraged to collate information on capacity of the not-for-profit sector to commence Thriving Kids program delivery from July 2026.”
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