In Western Australia there are 3 pieces of important Mental Health News to do with how the government views and supports mental health. We need to first recognise that “the government” has two different parts. We will talk about the state government changes first – which are the good news, then the federal government second – the bad news.

WA Gov – GPs can Re-script Existing ADHD Medication

To see all of the details, check out our page ADHD, GPs and Repeat Psychiatric Prescriptions.

In summary, from October 2024, GPs can look up your script in ScriptCheckWA and if you are 18+ and your last psychiatric script is less than 3 years old, they can choose to write you a new one rather than you having to visit your existing psychiatrist or you having to find a new one if you no longer see that psychiatrist. If you are under 18, your last paediatrician or psychiatrist script of less than 12 months old, same logic.

There are pros and cons to this that we cover in the linked detailed page. Here is a quick summary of when you don’t want to do this:

• The last medications from your Psychiatrist / Paediatrician are not working well for you
• If it has been more than a year since your saw your paediatrician or 3 years for your psychiatrist
• If your relationship with your GP is not good
  • If this is a new GP for you, they may not feel confident to do this
  • If your GP is not supportive of your mental health and ADHD diagnosis

Additionally, the government allows for scripts from psychiatrists from other Australian States to be honoured. If you can’t find a local psychiatrist to assess you, diagnoses you or write scripts for you, try online telehealth psychiatry, such as Hello Doc (no affiliation). Their wait lists are dramatically shorter than local WA psychiatrists, but they do cost more.

WA Gov – Soon GPs can Diagnose and Treat ADHD

The WA Labor Party are fulfilling their election promise to allow GPs to diagnosed and prescribe medications for ADHD. To do this, GPs need to enroll in to relevant training and get approval to diagnosed and prescribe medications for ADHD. The first batch of doctors are expect to be able to begin doing this around March 2026 (RACGP says “early 2026”, a friend of mine who enrolled in the program expects it to be March).

Is this a good thing?

Mostly yes, because more people can get diagnosed for their medication condition and receive treatment without having to be independently wealthy. It is important that GPs recognise when a person’s condition is complex and requires a specialist and makes the relevant referral, just like in any other medical condition.

We explore all of the issues in our page ADHD, GPs and Repeat Psychiatric Prescriptions.

Federal and Stage Gov – NDIS will be moving child Autistic folk to Thriving Kids Program

According to 7 News, NDIS (National Disability Insurance Scheme, run by the NDIA – National Disability Insurance Agency) is going to be moving Children with autism off the NDIS and transferring them to a new program called Thriving Kids Program. This is to relieve the stress on the NDIS program after far more youth are being diagnosed with Autism than was expected. The NDIS has been struggling with costs, $42 billion this year, and is expecting those costs to rise to $58 billion by 2028.

Minister Butler states that nearly half of new NDIS participants are under the age of nine. Most of these entering through the early intervention stream, which was a recent required expansion of NDIS, despite the scheme’s original focus on significant and permanent disabilities. This effectively bypasses the legal requirement to recognise that early intervention is better and cheaper than later management. Butler argued that these children are often placed on a pathway intended for lifelong support, which strains the NDIS’s sustainability. Butler ignores the fact that Autism is a lifelong congenital neurological condition – you are born with Autism, your Autism doesn’t get better, you don’t spontaneously heal or get cured from Autism. But you can get better at being Autistic and learn better ways to live in a world that isn’t created for Autistic people. Butler effectively ignores the reality of the condition and the fact that better management includes helping society be more inviting and supportive of Autistic people. Instead, Butler views this as a broader issue affecting around one in five young children [fact check: 1 in 20-33], best addressed through mainstream systems like schools, childcare, and health services – which is a false dichotomy. You don’t have to pick one – you can improve schools, childcare and health services, while also helping manage any disabling components of Autism through the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

Disability Representative Organisations have been close to unanimous in their denunciation of the Thriving Kids scheme. They cite that they weren’t included in consultation or planning. The motto “nothing about us without us” was completely bypassed, and the Thriving Kids program was delivered as a fete accompli. That does not engender trust of the program. If the government was planning a good thing, they should have welcomed the inclusion of DROs and been far more open about what was going on.

A Brief History of NDIS – for background

NDIS was initially a scheme created by the federal Labor government in response to the “Make it Real” community campaign run by several disability advocacy groups. Its goal was to support the state governments and standardise disability care. This resulted in the state governments dropping disability care since the federal government was doing it. Autism wasn’t originally in the scope for NDIS, but rapidly it became apparent it needed to be. Later, psychosocial was added to the scope for NDIS, and weirdly Autism was migrated to psychosocial disability, it stayed in more the physical disability false dichotomy side of how NDIS interprets disability. That means you can get a wheelchair quite easily for participants diagnosed with Autism, but it’s hard to get a mental health therapist.

NDIS got quite a few things right.

For a start, they paid health professionals a real wage. When a private employed person comes to me for therapy, I charge $250 per hour – a reasonable rate at the lower end of therapists. NDIS allows for me to be paid $193, which is close to what I charge. When I see a concession card holder and bulk bill them, Medicare (also part of the federal government) thinks that I’m worth $87 per hour.

Another aspect NDIS got right is to recognise that a person who has disabilities needs various types of support and that the specific person may need support in unique ways for their condition. That is, just because your diagnoses is X doesn’t mean that the only support you can get is Y. The NDIS participant can argue for the support they need, get professionals to confirm this is needed, and NDIS is likely to pay for that individual care plan.

NDIS got many things wrong too. Shortly after its inception and creation by Bill Shorten, the government changed to Liberal. In my opinion, this is when corporates gained control. This led to lots of money being paid to select large organisations and little of the funds making its way to necessary staff and support for end users. What this means is, if I worked for one of those corporations, they would charge the government $193 per hour and I would likely get $87 per hour. The rest would be taken up by the administration and profit – aka overheads. The logic put forward for this was “quality control”, but based on my experience with many large organisations providing care to NDIS participants, there isn’t much quality control and not much that NDIS can do to enforce it (I speak from person experience – I’ve helped a few investigations, and despite excellent evidence, nothing happened). This has led to rampant fraud by corporations, a very expensive NDIS and poor outcomes for disabled people.

Another huge thing that NDIS got wrong is the clarity around their rules. While the legislation that NDIS runs by is easily downloadable and legible, its language is vague and highly interpretable. To bolster this, NDIS have internal documents that are not available that define how they will interpret the legislation. Many NDIS workers don’t know how to find these documents, so they evolve their own individual interpretation. This is why you ring up NDIS 4 times to understand what is meant by a term and you get 5 answers.

Another huge problem with NDIS is that you need an expert to navigate their system. It is not posisble for the majority of people with disabilities to apply for NDIS. The application system is so onerous, inconsistent and nonsensical that most disabled people cannot comprehend what is being asked, cannot track down the evidence required by NDIS, or afford the fees to get the necessary diagnoses, afford the experts to apply for NDIS on your behalf or afford the experts to fight for your application on your behalf. Two things to keep in mind – when you are disabled, you likely are both poor and struggling to survive. The sheer cost of getting on to NDIS is often beyond the people who need it most.

It is common that NDIS Participants end up fighting the very program that is supposed to help them, to get the help that their very inclusion in the NDIS Scheme defines that they need. As ABC News put it, “Families in ‘anguish’ as NDIS agency accused of ‘fighting’ participants, not helping“. The fix isn’t to reduce funding to participants, it is to streamline the program so that Federal Funds translate more directly into participant funds, without the huge overhead.

The last major problem with NDIS I am going to mention here is the disabling nature of it. While the whole point of NDIS is disability, most people with a disability are not intellectually disabled. Most people with a disability want to lead a productive, high quality life. While this is often listed as a goal for people on NDIS, you aren’t actually allowed to achieve it, otherwise you don’t meet the pre-defined expectations of “disabled”. For example, as a therapist, I can help a participant to manage their moods and behaviours, I can help them learn skills, so long as this is aimed at only maintaining their current level of disability. I can’t help a participant improve, because “a disability is permanent and untreatable”. NDIS only insures disabilities that can’t be helped, only managed. Treating illness, disease and disability falls under the budget of Medicare. That’s a good point, but Medicare pays me $87 to see this disabled person living of a disability pension (so can’t afford any more) to help them improve their lives, while NDIS pays me $193 to only maintain them. This is more about how messed up the rest of the health system is than the fault specifically of NDIS, but without a systemic review of all the relevant departments (Medicare, NDIS, Centrelink and government housing), the real money is in maintaining disability, not helping to improve it.

Wow, that’s a lot of background.

Concerns about the Thriving Kids Scheme

So, what does this news mean? Rather than fixing the problems within NDIS, NDIS are going to push people who are current participants, or would become participants, off to another scheme run in distributed organisations by both state and federal funding. This is a disaster already in the process.

On the one hand, if this new program is run well to start with, this bypasses a whole lot of inherited problems that are now pretty much baked into the NDIS program, and that will be good. I don’t trust that though. How many new systems have the government made that didn’t have the same inherent problems that NDIS ended up with? The odds are, Thriving Kids will become another financial mess that fails to meet its targets.

Another aspect is, a new name is corporate speak for “we’ll pay them less”. Any time a thing is renamed but effectiverly is supposed to provide the same thing, it is done so that you do the same thing for less money. That means the participant gets less funding to get what they need and the burden to maintain healthy minimums falls on to the caregivers – family, and health professionals that have a heart. Not every disabled person has access to this. That results in either disabled people bearing the cost, or the people who help that disabled person bearing the cost. The cost doesn’t just go away.

Another aspect is, it is much easier to hide Autistic people from public view if they are enrolled in a program that isn’t NDIS. Out of sight, out of mind, and easy to skip maintaining. Thriving Kids is a joint program from the Federal and State governments. Each one can start to skimp on quality and funding and blame the other one for what is going wrong. At least with NDIS, we know who is responsible.

The Thriving Kids scheme is a joint program set up by both the state governments and federal government, funding and oversight, in non-government organisations. This means that each can point to the other and blame them for why it isn’t working, or isn’t being funded properly, or for who is responsible to fix the problem that affects a participant – not that children can effectively complain. This looks to be a disaster.

If you want a scheme that is similar to look at, consider the way that Centrelink outsourced helping people find work to Job Network Providers. JNPs are non-government organisations that are paid to help people get work. The JNPs have insufficient funding to help train people in any meaningful way to get better jobs, insufficient funding to spend any quality time with a staff member to find a job or orient the JNP worker to what is suitable. The JNP has no power to feed back to Centrelink anything that helps a job seeker, only reasons why the person should have their income decreased or halted. This means that JNPs can only punish the people they are helping, and you have to go to Centrelink to undo the JNPs frequent errors. At least this is at the feet of Centrelink only, although Centrelink blames the JNPs for failing, while the JNPs point out that the dollar and resources per person is insufficient. A company I worked for around 15 years ago was interested in becoming a JNP when the scheme was first announced – I was on the panel that looked into “is this a good idea?” and my recommendation was approximately “Don’t touch it with a barge pole. The only way you can make a profit is to screw over the people we are supposed to help, and if we don’t do that, we go into debt. That is, its already set up to fail someone and we would have to pick – fail the job seeker or us”.

What can we do about it? Write a letter to your local federal minister to complain about it. If every federal minister receives 20 letters from local constituents that state approximately “this looks bad, it is better to fix NDIS AND provide support to schools, childcare and health services, please assure me you are taking this seriously by [date]” – expand this to put it in your own words – then the minister’s will get worried and not support it going through legislation.