Jenny Macklin (Jagajaga, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Families and Payments) Share this | Hansard source

Today I am speaking on the National Disability Insurance Scheme Savings Funds Special Account Bill. This bill proposes a new savings fund sitting within the Consolidated Revenue Fund, and I emphasise that this new account that is being debated in this bill will sit within consolidated revenue. The government claims that this new special account is needed to help the Commonwealth meet its funding obligations for the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

I must say I am a little surprised that the government has brought this bill on for debate today, given the disastrous week it has had by linking cuts to social security to the future of the National Disability Insurance Scheme. Even this morning, we see a report from Michelle Grattan that the Prime Minister's Office warned the Treasurer and the Minister for Social Services against the timing of making the outrageous link between the cuts in the omnibus bill and the National Disability Insurance Scheme. So there is already all this finger-pointing going on within the government about who is to blame for the reprehensible decision to link the omnibus bill and all the cuts to some of the most disadvantaged people in Australia to the future of the National Disability Insurance Scheme. In addition to the most reprehensible nature of that announcement, of course what this all demonstrates is the government's complete and utter incompetence.

The one thing this week did confirm is that this new savings fund is just a transparent attempt to pretend, yet again by this government, that the National Disability Insurance Scheme is not fully funded. It is clear that the government has not created this special account for the purpose of good policy. No, they have created this account for political purposes. The Turnbull government wants to use the NDIS as a bargaining chip in its negotiations with the Senate crossbench to pass unfair cuts through the parliament. How did that go?

We saw all of this on display this week in a press conference with the Treasurer and the Minister for Social Services. We saw the government emphasise the importance of giving big business a $50 billion handout. Then the Treasurer and the Minister for Social Services revealed their shameful plan. What they want to do is link the $5.6 billion in cuts to some of the most vulnerable Australians to the future funding of the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

This $5.6 billion of cuts include $2.7 billion in cuts to family tax benefits—money straight out of the pockets of some of the poorest families in Australia—and $1 billion of cuts to the energy supplement. That means cuts to pensioners, people with disability, carers and Newstart recipients. There are cuts to 70,000 new mothers and cuts to young people, including making young people wait five weeks to get access to Newstart, telling them that they will have absolutely nothing to live on for five weeks. The Turnbull government has decided to hold the National Disability Insurance Scheme hostage to its unfair cuts to family tax benefits, paid parental leave, the energy supplement and cuts to young people. That is what this government is doing. Linking the future of the National Disability Insurance Scheme to a range of 2014 and 2015 budget cuts is just an appalling political trick by this government—nothing but an attempt to try to blackmail the Senate crossbench into accepting harsh cuts including from the 2014 budget.

I want to say to this Prime Minister and to everybody opposite: this government has no right to pit one group of vulnerable Australians against another. As Laura Tingle, writing in The Australian Financial Review, said, 'The government's latest attempt to pass their savings playing off poor people against disabled people is just appalling,' and it is just appalling. The respected five-time Paralympian, Kurt Fearnley, said yesterday of the National Disability Insurance Scheme, 'I wish the Government would fight for it with as much vigour as fighting for its $50 billion business tax cut'. He went on to say that the government's attacks on the National Disability Insurance Scheme were 'just wrong'.

Labor will oppose this bill today. But we do more than that. Today, we call on the Turnbull government to take these unfair cuts to families, pensioners and young people out of the parliament and out of the budget for good. We also call on this government to stop playing politics with the National Disability Insurance Scheme. Be proud of it. Do not talk it down. Do not put fear into the hearts of people with disability. This legislation and the fund that it seeks to announce are a sham. The National Disability Insurance Scheme will be funded from consolidated revenue and the government knows that. The Minister for Social Services and the Treasurer have even said so. This legislation even makes that plain.

The Turnbull government repeatedly fabricates the story that Labor did not fund the National Disability Insurance Scheme, and now they are wasting the parliament's time by establishing an account with no other purpose than to try to support this untruth. They are seeking to present a false choice between cutting payments like the disability support pension and properly funding the NDIS. It is a false choice. The former government's 2013 budget set out a 10-year funding plan for the National Disability Insurance Scheme. This included but was not limited to an increase in the Medicare levy. A number of other budget measures were proposed and legislated, and these funds currently sit in consolidated revenue. Together, these measures provided sufficient funding for the National Disability Insurance Scheme well past the transition to the full scheme. The figures underpinning these budget measures were, of course, developed by the Treasury, led at that time by Martin Parkinson, now the secretary of the Prime Minister's department, and yet the Turnbull government continues to say that the scheme is underfunded. This is nothing more than a sham.

You do not have to go any further than the Treasurer himself. As The Australian newspaper reported last year, far from using its proposed National Disability Insurance Scheme savings fund for the NDIS, the Treasurer said that it could use the funds to spend money on anything it wants. It says, 'Scott Morrison told The Australian that the fund'—that is, the fund we are debating today—'while quarantined could be used by any future government for any of its spending whims.' That is what the Treasurer said. So what is this all about? Why are we debating this bill today? We have already seen the government use this special account as an excuse to play politics and engage in a disgraceful game of political brinkmanship.

In the last 48 hours, this government has tried to link the delivery of the NDIS to their attack on families, pensioners, people with disability, carers and Newstart recipients. Now it is crystal clear that the Turnbull government is using this fund as a smokescreen for their 2014 budget cuts. Both the Treasurer and the Social Services Minister have now confirmed that this fund will be financed through cuts to payments for the most vulnerable Australians. What the Treasurer and the Minister for Social Services are saying is that this government wants to abolish the energy supplement for those on Newstart, the disability support pension and the age pension. They want to cut paid parental leave. They want to force young people into poverty with a five-week wait for Newstart and cut family payments to 1½ million Australians, many of whom, of course, live in Liberal and Nationals Party electorates. So is the government seriously saying that, if these unfair cuts are not passed through the Senate, the NDIS will not go ahead? Is that what those opposite are saying? This week the government has shown its true colours.

What we cannot allow is for the government to use the NDIS as an excuse for more cuts to social security payments. That is not in the spirit of the NDIS and not in the spirit of the bipartisan and consultative approach committed to by both parties for the NDIS. The NDIS continues its full rollout across the country. It is a completely contradictory idea that we would use its implementation as a means to cut other sources of support for people with disability, but that is exactly what people opposite are trying to do.

My good friend the member for Bruce helped shine a light on a terrible story of young man with a severe and permanent disability. Andrew Johnson has profound autism, bipolar disorder, attention deficit disorder and epilepsy, cannot talk and needs a stomach tube to help him eat. Yet Andrew's mother has been asked by Centrelink to prove Andrew's eligibility for the disability support pension, despite his being eligible for support for many years. Andrew is one of the thousands of disability support pensioners that the government is trying to make subject to medical reviews to test their eligibility for the DSP. However, someone like Andrew, who has no capacity to work and was granted the DSP on manifest grounds, was supposed to be exempt from these DSP reviews. The government must explain what it is doing to ensure that people like Andrew are not harassed by Centrelink about their eligibility for the DSP again. This is just one example—I must say a very moving one.

Last year's budget papers make clear that the government wants to review the eligibility of 90,000 people who are currently on the disability support pension. The government expects that it will cut a number of people off the DSP through these reviews and then put whatever money it gets from this process into this National Disability Insurance Scheme savings fund. The government is doing the most horrible thing, robbing one group of people with disability to pay another group, robbing Peter to pay Paul, when it comes to the National Disability Insurance Scheme and this bill.

On top of this we see the appalling treatment of people with disability over the summer months by the government's Centrelink robo-debt debacle, a complete mess that has seen many vulnerable people with disability incorrectly issued with debt recovery notices. One example highlighted in The Guardian was of 21-year-old Jack Rogerson, who learned he had a $3,000 debt with Centrelink through a private debt collector. Jack is autistic. He was confused and unsure of how to explain himself. Fortunately for Jack, his mother, Nicole, intervened. Nicole is the head of Autism Awareness Australia, and she said, 'This hard line of the government is just heartless to the core.' Labor continues to be deeply worried by stories like this, and I again call on the government to suspend the Centrelink robo-debt program until the problems are fixed.

Since the NDIS's inception, I am pleased to say it has had bipartisan support across the parliament. I see the assistant minister at the table, and she has been a great advocate. This has been an important feature of the scheme's success. So why are the Liberals holding the NDIS hostage to harsh cuts to vulnerable Australians? Why, I say to the assistant minister, are you trying to rob Peter to pay Paul? Because this government has never given up on the 2014 budget cuts. It has never given up on the whole idea that there are lifters and leaners in this society. It has never given up on the idea of depriving young jobseekers of access to Newstart for five weeks. It seems to think that children growing up in very low-income families who receive family tax benefits do not deserve support, because fundamentally, it seems from the legislation that is before us, the Liberals think that Australians that need support from our social security system are somehow less worthy. So they thought: 'Let's use the NDIS as a way of forcing these unfair cuts through the parliament. Let's try to blackmail the Senate crossbench. Let's threaten the future of the National Disability Insurance Scheme by linking it to the fate of a series of unfair cuts.' That is what they thought, but of course it has backfired dramatically.

In Australia we do not set up a special fund to allocate for schools, hospitals or our Defence Force. Peter Martin in The Sydney Morning Herald was right this week when he said, 'There are no locked boxes.' That is not how governing works. Governments fund their priorities through the Commonwealth budget. So why should the funding of disability services be treated any differently? That is the question that this government has been unable to answer. Departmental officials confirmed that consolidated revenue is used to fund government priorities, which is hardly surprising.

What we also heard at the Senate hearing last October was a chorus of objections from stakeholders in the disability and community advocacy area who are very cynical and confused about the seeming lack of purpose in this bill, and I would like to quote some their observations. Peter Davidson from the Australian Council of Social Service stated:

… it is not obvious why this new fund is needed. Its purpose, apart from the generic one of funding the NDIS, is not clear, and we do not believe it should be supported in its present form.

The Young People in Nursing Homes National Alliance said:

… the alliance does not support the savings fund as constructed in the bill … the notion of a funding shortfall, portrayed in the bill and the minister's speech is, actually, concerning and perplexing.

Stephanie Gotlib from Children and Young People with Disability Australia said:

It is believed that the creation of this special account … places essential disability services and support as non-core business of the Australian government, with their full funding being dependent on other budget-saving measures identified by the government of the day.

Queensland Advocacy Incorporated, in their submission, crystallised this issue by saying:

This is a political strategy that will be at the expense of the most vulnerable Australians.

That really is what it is all about.

This is a government that is neither consulting with the disability sector nor providing stability during a time of change and transition for people with disability. These organisations truly understand the difficulties people with disability face, and the financial pressures that they are under. They also understand the NDIS and the purpose it serves. Their testimony speaks volumes about the actions and motivations of this government. The community can see through the petty politics that lie at the heart of this proposal.

It is time for the government to come clean with the Australian people and acknowledge that the NDIS is fully funded. Yes, it is true that Labor created a special account, the DisabilityCare Australia Fund, in 2013. But, unlike the government's special account, this was an investment account, credited with funding from the Medicare levy increase and used to assist the Commonwealth and the states in meeting their funding agreements under the NDIS. The increase to the Medicare levy was one of numerous funding arrangements and savings that the then Labor government introduced in order to pay for the NDIS over a 10-year period. I have to say I was very pleased at the time that we had bipartisan support. Everyone in the parliament voted for the NDIS, voted for the increase in the Medicare levy and, except for on one occasion, voted for all of these savings measures. So the then opposition, the Liberals, actually voted for these savings that of course went into consolidated revenue. They believed it was adequately funded then; why not now?

This government has signed agreements with the states and territories for the full rollout of the NDIS, and I do congratulate the government for securing these agreements. In the documentation that the Prime Minister has signed, it sets out how much the Commonwealth and the states and territories will contribute to the cost of the full rollout of the NDIS. Of course the money for this is in the federal budget. Don't tell me or anyone on this side of the parliament—or, I would hope, even on the other side—that the Prime Minister signs agreements to spend billions of dollars that he does not have or that he has not accounted for. Such an idea is just not believable.

Minister Porter needs to understand that people with disability actually need a minister who is committed to delivering the NDIS, not one who is asleep at the wheel, creating redundant, politically motivated accounts.

This legislation does not make the NDIS more secure. It does not give it certainty. What happens to the NDIS if these cruel cuts contained in the omnibus bill before the parliament do not pass either the House or the Senate? Is the funding of the NDIS not guaranteed? This is a false choice as well as a terribly cynical one.

This is a government with a very clear agenda to take money from the pockets of vulnerable Australians, and clearly they are prepared to use people with disability as blackmail to see these cuts passed. People with disability, and their families, deserve better. They need a government that puts them first and honours the spirit in which the NDIS was created: to create a fairer society where people with disability are valued participants, able to make their own choices about their care and future.

Let's be clear. The NDIS is fully funded. Labor secured that funding over 10 years. This last week has proved that this legislation, more than anything, is a political stunt from a government with no agenda other than a political one.

The National Disability Insurance Scheme is already transforming the lives of thousands of Australians right across the country. People's lives are being dramatically improved. Yes, there are problems—problems with the IT system, inadequate resourcing of the National Disability Insurance Scheme by the agency and so on. Today is not the day to go through the problems. Of course we are all aware of them, and we will continue to hold the government to account to make sure that we all get it right. But what we all want to do, I think, is make sure that people with disability get the best possible NDIS, the kind of NDIS that people with disability deserve. Accordingly, Labor moves the following amendment:

That all the words after "That" be omitted with a view to substituting the following words:

"the House declines to give the bill a second reading because:

(1) the National Disability Insurance Scheme was fully funded when Labor left office;

(2) this bill is nothing more than an attempt by the Government to use the National Disability Insurance Scheme to justify further cruel cuts to the most vulnerable in our community; and

(3) this Bill has unnecessarily caused significant concern in the disability community and threatened community confidence in the future of the National Disability Insurance Scheme—a scheme that Labor created and which will help hundreds of thousands of people with a disability when fully rolled out."

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