NDIS commissioner resigns days before report due into scandal
NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commissioner Tracey Mackey will step down from her position just days before an independent report is due into a scandal exposed by Four Corners in which children with autism were unlawfully restrained at an NDIS funded program.
In a Four Corners investigation which went to air last September, the program broadcast CCTV footage showing a non-verbal teenager with an intellectual disability being held face down by six workers as part of the “Severe Behaviour Program”, run by Melbourne’s Irabina Autism Services.
An internal consultant report obtained by Four Corners said the boy was subject to the treatment 10 or more times over a 17-month period.
Families and workers said other children, aged between 10 and 14, were also subject to unlawful and unauthorised restraints when they had an “uncontrolled behaviour”.
The pin-down method used by staff at Irabina is unlawful throughout Australia and is in breach of Victoria’s human rights legislation. Former Victorian senior practitioner Frank Lambrick said the methods used were “abuse”.
Ms Mackey told Four Corners she found the footage “deeply concerning and that’s why staff took action immediately to make sure that participants were safe and the practice ceased” in 2021.
Asked in the interview why the regulator hadn’t fined Irabina or banned its executives, Ms Mackey said the commission had acted by “shutting down that particular service and ensuring that that program was not operating anymore”.
Ms Mackey also deflected questions about whether other aspects of the program – such as secluding children in small windowless rooms for hours on end – had also ceased.
The day after the program aired, a speech therapist told the ABC that the program was still operating the following year in 2022, and that children continued to be secluded in small rooms and observed through one-way mirrors.
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