Australian of the Year Dylan Alcott has urged policymakers and the public to listen to people with lived experience when it comes to the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). The champion wheelchair tennis player handed his Get Skilled Access report into the scheme to NDIS Minister Bill Shorten on Tuesday, making 10 recommendations on how it could be improved. Mr Alcott said listening to people with disability was at the forefront of what he wanted to see with the NDIS. “I just want the lived experience of people with disability to be heard and listened to first and foremost,” he said. “For hundreds of years, people with disability were spoken on behalf of. Yet if you need to learn something about disability, listening to lived experience is the best way to do it. “Really listen to the participants’ voices because they're the ones in the scheme. They know, their carers know, their families know.” It was what made Mr Alcott so excited when Paralympian Kurt Fearnley was named as National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA) chair last week. “Last week I almost got up and walked I was that excited when Kurt Fearnley got announced as the chair of the NDIA,” he joked. “That’s putting lived with experience back at the heart.” Another recommendation from the report was to promote the positive change the NDIS has made to shift public perception. “Change that rhetoric around ‘it’s costly’, ‘it’s a pain for people’, and talk about the awesome work that’s already been done,” Mr Alcott said. “Every dollar spent on the NDIS, $2.35 goes back into our economy … that’s awesome.” These sentiments were shared by Mr Shorten, who said the government wanted to “fundamentally change” the conversation surrounding the NDIS. “What we have to do is understand that when you have a disability, look at the whole person not just their impairment,” he said. “When you invest in the NDIS, it’s an investment in people. We’ve got to look at the investment in the quality of life of people with disability, not the price of a particular item. “We want to change the way that disability is perceived in this country.” Mr Shorten said more work needed to be done for those who suffered from mental health issues but did not qualify for the NDIS. He pointed to new innovations introduced by the government through Medicare and Telehealth but said “we‘re kidding ourselves to say we’re doing enough”. “The NDIS wasn’t created for every Australian with a disability of every age, but that doesn’t merely say because you don’t qualify for the National Disability Insurance Scheme that therefore you can be forgotten,” Mr Shorten said. “In the last nine years, if you qualify for the NDIS and you have a psychosocial condition, that‘s good, you’re on it, you get help. “But I do think that the NDIS is in danger of becoming the only lifeboat in the ocean, the whole lot of Australians who might have impairment of disability. “So I think for people with mental illness who are struggling and don’t qualify for the NDIS, we’ve got to have a system which is better than just the emergency ward of a hospital for nothing.” Originally published as ’Almost walked’: What made Australian of the Year Dylan Alcott so excited Sign up for our emails