NDIA: the national disability agency in need of 'more heart' at the top

Years before the creation of the National Disability Insurance Agency in 2013, one of the nation's main economic advisory bodies said it would need 10,000 staff for the job.

The reality fell thousands of roles short of that figure.

A cap on staffing imposed by the Coalition government restricted the NDIA from hiring public servants into its ranks. Instead, the agency turned to the private sector for labour.

As part of The Canberra Times' new series We need to talk about the NDIS, former staff, and the public sector union, pointed to the trend they said was behind negative workplace culture and high turnover inside the agency.

A former manager - who was hired through a labour hire firm and spoke to The Canberra Times under the condition of anonymity - said their nearly two years working within the agency was "constant peril".

They had witnessed a number of occasions where contractors, who have fewer protections from dismissal than internal staff, were treated like second-class workers or were fired without warning or reason.

"There were direct and indirect threats almost daily: 'You're a contractor, we'll just terminate you'," the former manager said.

Other signs indicated something was amiss within the NDIA's workplace culture.

A survey of employee attitudes last year found only 57 per cent of public servants recommended the agency as a good place to work - far below average for the Australian Public Service.

One of the main complaints was about the amount of work they faced. Nearly 40 per cent of the NDIA's employees said workloads were far above their capacity.

However, the agency said in its recent annual report that its 2022 staff census showed staff health and wellbeing was improving.

A spokesperson said it was "committed to instilling a positive, participant-centred culture" and was looking to increase its permanent workforce subject to its budget.

The spokesperson said "there is always the opportunity to continually improve the experience and wellbeing of our staff".

But the agency has poured vast amounts of cash into its labour hire workforce as it attempts to keep up with expanding workloads despite restrictions on its internal staff numbers.

It spent nearly half a billion dollars in the three years to June 2021 on labour hire contracts, including nearly $200 million in the 2020-21 fiscal year.

Hays ($153.6 million), DFP ($81.2 million) and Randstad ($52.5 million), among the largest suppliers of private labour for NDIA, reaped a major cut of the contractor splurge.

But no matter the amount spent on contractors, the workload just kept growing.

Despite the outlay, little is known about the remuneration of the labour hire staff working alongside NDIA public servants. The agency told senators investigating the capability of the public service it did not know what labour hire workers were being paid.

Community and Public Sector Union deputy secretary Beth Vincent-Pietsch believes the NDIA's reliance on labour hire is where things started to go wrong for the agency.

Once the agency reached its staffing cap, which hovered around 3000 public servants in the mid-2010s, it turned to nearly 50 different labour hire firms in order to bring in extra hands.

Those staff, however, were employed under precarious conditions and were often not given adequate training or pay arrangements, the union said.

"They were on short-term contracts that frequently didn't get renewed ... or they would find out at the very last minute that they were going to get renewed," Ms Vincent-Pietsch said.

"They were constantly in insecure employment and it just led to this really high turnover."

As demand for the scheme grew last decade, the then-government's focus turned to providing disability support plans for participants as quickly as possible, she said.

The Productivity Commission's 2011 recommendations only ever estimated 410,000 Australians would use the scheme but by the 2020-21 financial year, the figure was surpassed.

And new forecasts show no sign of it slowing down.

The total cost is expected to rise from $29 billion to $41 billion over the next three years, and a projected surge will mean participant numbers could rise from 530,000 to 670,400.

Read more from the ACM series examining the future of the scheme:

Back within the agency, the task was efficiency as more participants rolled in.

This raised concerns by planners within the agency, who Ms Vincent-Pietsch claimed were worried it was becoming a "tick and flick" service.

She added staff weren't able to raise the issues without facing hardline responses from the executive management team.

"Our members were very concerned that they were not providing plans as good as they should be to participants," Ms Vincent-Pietsch said.

"It worried them a lot because of the pressure to do it quickly and to just get it done and to do it with a minimal amount of expense."

The former manager recalled experiencing the agency's "culture of concealment" where raising issues meant exposing yourself as a target to senior bureaucrats.

Well-informed policy responses, rigorous research papers and detailed risk assessments were scrapped in favour of whatever could be pulled together the quickest, they said.

"If there was a project or there was an initiative, nothing was ever systematically planned or completed, or shared across multiple departments, it was all very siloed," the former manager said.

"The primary and only objective was to get it done, appease whoever the head was at the time and make it look like everything's in accordance with either what the politicians are saying, or in the instance, during my tenure, [what] the CEO was saying."

The agency's staffing cap was eventually lifted beyond 4000 in 2019 - still well short of the Productivity Commission's expected 10,000-strong workforce - but has been steadily rising since.

Since Labor's election win, staffing levels have surpassed 5000 but labour hire figures remain around a third of the workforce and are still rising.

One of NDIS Minister Bill Shorten's first moves in government was to boost the number of permanent staff in the agency by an additional 380 roles.

An earlier review handed to the former government revealed the NDIA's funding, and in turn, staffing, was not keeping pace with the skyrocketing size of the scheme.

But Ms Vincent-Pietsch said it was the people who made up the workforce that mattered too.

According to the union, the massive workloads and unreasonable key performance indicators meant it had failed to become a model employer for people with lived experiences.

Unable to keep up with unrealistic expectations, staff with disabilities often burned out quickly or were put on performance management plans, she said.

"Fortunately, the people that are drawn to work in this scheme - they do have deep commitment to the scheme's success and they are prepared to put in above and beyond," she said.

"But they need ... senior management to value their experience."

The former manager, who also has a disability, said little-to-no consideration was given to how his condition affected his work and output.

Former minister Linda Reynolds last year said the scheme was too reliant on the "natural empathy" of public servants.

While adequate resourcing is one part of the puzzle, the union thinks empathy is the other missing piece for the troubled agency.

"You need lived experience of disability and empathy at the core of this because we are dealing with some of Australia's most vulnerable and most in need," Ms Vincent-Pietsch said.

"For this scheme to succeed, it does need more heart put back in it."