The bill proposes enabling the National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA), which runs the NDIS, to use computer programs to carry out various hard-to-understand, barely defined “administrative actions”.
To give you an idea of what we’re talking about, one definition of administrative action includes “making, or refusing or failing to make, a decision, or a part of a decision, under a designated provision”.
The draft legislation specifically authorises the use of computers to make “objective” decisions about the payment of a claim, such as rejecting it if it exceeds a participant’s funding limit.
The minister would have the power to expand the use of automated decision-making in the future.
The bill requires the development of a standard operating procedure for automated decision-making, and states automation will not “displace the important role of a human delegate”, who will be able to override incorrect automated decisions.
It also requires the NDIA to tell people if certain decisions affecting them were made by a computer.
What the explanatory notes say: “The agency supports hundreds of thousands of people with disability, including NDIS participants, their families and carers, and thousands of NDIS providers on a daily basis … automating certain administrative actions in a safe, transparent and accountable way can support more timely and efficient decision making.”
What the concerns are: With the Robodebt scandal still fresh in the memory, the prospect of introducing automation with little specificity into another government program servicing vulnerable people has alarm bells ringing.
Ms Anderson says society’s ubiquitous use of computers means “we have to assume automated decision-making is occurring in some form already”.
“But what this bill does is opens the door to a range of automated decision-making powers that are not actually articulated in the bill,” she says.