There is a question I have been sitting with since I returned from the Northern Territory.
Not a complicated question.
Actually, a very simple one.
How much power should one person in a regional office have over whether a provider can operate in that area?
I am not asking theoretically.
I am asking because I experienced it.
When I expanded into the NT, I did what any provider trying to do things properly would do.
I made contact. I introduced myself. I tried to build relationships with the right people.
At one point, I received a formal invitation to meet with the NT Region Manager.
A scheduled meeting. A named contact. An address.
The kind of invitation that tells you — you are being taken seriously.
Then, the following day, I was told not to come.
No formal explanation. No reschedule. Just — don’t come.
And over time it became clear that the source of that friction was not coming from the top.
It was coming from one person.
One person in one office who had accumulated enough informal influence to shape how our business was received in that region.
I want to be precise about what I am describing here.
I am not describing someone with formal authority to block a provider.
I am describing something more subtle than that — and in many ways more difficult to address.
Informal power.
The kind that operates through relationships, through gatekeeping, through the slow accumulation of influence in a small office in a remote region where accountability structures are stretched thin.
The kind that doesn’t show up in any policy document.
But that every provider who has worked in remote areas will recognise immediately.
I raised this question directly with the NDIA.
I asked — simply and clearly — whether one person in a regional office could hold that kind of influence over a provider’s ability to operate.
I did not get a satisfying answer.
What I got was a redirection.
And that redirection told me something important.
Not that the question was wrong.
But that the system does not yet have a clear way to answer it.
This matters beyond my experience.
Because remote regions are not like metropolitan areas where a provider can absorb friction from one office and route around it.
In remote NT, the networks are small. The offices are few. The decision-making is concentrated.
And when that concentration sits with individuals rather than structures — when one person’s disposition toward a provider can effectively determine that provider’s viability in a region — the system has a problem.
Not just for the provider.
For every participant in that region who might have benefited from that provider’s services.
I am still operating. I am still in this space. I am not sharing this from a place of defeat.
I am sharing it because I believe that the NDIS, at its best, is designed to create choice and access for participants.
And choice and access cannot exist if the pipeline of providers into remote regions is being narrowed — not by policy, not by compliance, but by the informal power of individuals who face very little accountability for how they use it.
That is not an accusation.
It is an observation.
And it is one I think the sector needs to hear.
— Joice Motref