NDIS Green Paper 1: Data Assets, Efficiency and the NDIS

The Australian Disability Services System requires complex, bespoke services and supports to be individualised and delivered reliably for often vulnerable people. To be effective, people with disability and care workers need to be at the very centre of the decision-making system, which means they also need to be at the centre of the data system. Through personal experiences, these people collect “Little Data” every day and use it to make daily decisions that impact their clients’ lives massively. At the same time, government agencies at the Commonwealth, state/territory and local government levels need aggregated data and analytics—that is, “Big Data”—at the appropriate levels of aggregation to support the decision-making needs of their policy makers and administrators.
Developing a national data asset will substantively support the system and is overdue. However, it will not be enough to enable the provision of sound, bespoke services at the individual level. For the Australian Disability Services System to function efficiently and be integrative with mainstream government and other services, the structure of authority and control must align with those who have the best knowledge and skills regarding service users, and that can effectively utilise these skillsets. These people are not within state/territory or Commonwealth offices. Rather, they are distributed and embedded within our communities.