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”.<\/p>\n
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”.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The minister would have the power to expand the use of automated decision-making in the future.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
It also requires the NDIA to tell people if certain decisions affecting them were made by a computer.<\/p>\n
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 \u2026 automating certain administrative actions in a safe, transparent and accountable way can support more timely and efficient decision making.”<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Ms Anderson says society’s ubiquitous use of computers means “we have to assume automated decision-making is occurring in some form already”.<\/p>\n
“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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The bill proposes enabling the National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA), which runs the NDIS, to use computer programs…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":27173,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[22,21,12033,3893,25148,6020,23227,23228,13520],"class_list":["post-27172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-au","tag-austrlia","tag-automation","tag-disability","tag-henry-viii","tag-ndis","tag-ndis-bill","tag-ndis-cuts","tag-thriving-kids"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27172"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27172\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}