Annette Ellis (Canberra, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I congratulate and thank the member for Gilmore for bringing this motion to the House. As she and other members know, this has been an area of enormous interest to me ever since I have been here, which is 11½ or 12 years. I have had many an opportunity to stand up in this place and speak about the needs of people with disability. In 2003—there may be more recent figures, but these are the most recent ones I have—the ABS estimated there were approximately 700,000 Australians under the age of 65 across Australia who were living with severe and profound disabilities. That included almost 250,000 children. During the Senate inquiry into the funding and operation of the CSTDA, which was completed last year, people with disabilities and their families and carers made a compelling case for disability reform. Amongst other things, they spoke—as did the member for Gilmore—of the blame game between governments. One of the witnesses to that inquiry could not have put it better when they said:

The States say they are doing their bit, but the Commonwealth is falling short. The Commonwealth says just the opposite. Frankly, I don’t care about playing the ‘blame game’, I just want the system to work.

Nearly all witnesses told the inquiry that disability must be the responsibility of all levels of government working together. The job cannot be done by one government alone, nor by each government working in isolation. I am really pleased that we have a motion talking about a bipartisan approach and bipartisan support. I join with all of my colleagues on both sides of the House in supporting, together with the state and territory governments, the idea that we work to reform and improve the disability system in this country.

On 1 February Jenny Macklin, the Minister for Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, and Bill Shorten, the Parliamentary Secretary for Disabilities and Children’s Services, met with state and territory disability ministers to progress negotiations on the fourth Commonwealth state/territory disability agreement. The meeting proved successful, with all representatives from each level of government agreeing to implement eight priorities and to the development of an overarching national disability strategy. It is an acknowledgement of the valuable work taking place across the jurisdictions that that sort of approach is there. But, as you have asked, Member for Gilmore, it is now about ending the blame game and working cooperatively together.

I believe that we are on the right track to improving the lives of the over 3.9 million Australians—that is one in five of the population—with a disability, if we take the measure as a whole. The eight priorities that were listed through that meeting include disability reform relating to: better measurement of current and future needs for disability services; moving towards national population benchmarks for key disability service types; making older carers a priority for all disabilities services under the CSTDA; quality improvement systems based on the National Disability Services Standards for all CSTDA services; focusing—and I am so pleased about this—on early intervention, lifelong planning and increasing the independence and social participation of people with disabilities; workforce planning; and access to disability services by Indigenous Australians.

I know that most of us in this House who have been here for a while have had the opportunity to work, through committees and in other ways, where disability is concerned and have had wonderful opportunities to see what we do really badly and to understand what needs to be done to improve the services across the board. We could all stand and cite example after example of individuals and communities—all sorts of people and all sorts of places around our society—where we see such a terrible distinction between how people with a disability or chronic illness are treated and how people without those circumstances are treated.

I am just so pleased that we are now on a path, hopefully, that will take us right through to the fruition of lifelong planning. If a child with a disability comes along, why do they continue to fall off that pathway as they go through their lives? There needs to be seamless planning. There needs to be underpinning of resources. There needs to be a commitment—and we already have it, it seems to me—that across jurisdictions and across all different socioeconomic and other areas of the community we will see definite forward planning and services to improve the lives of people with disability, their families and their carers and allow them to participate in our communities and our society in a very full, wholesome and proper way. I do not think any of us could wish for anything better than that.

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