Bill Shorten (Maribyrnong, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Disabilities and Children's Services) Share this | Hansard source

The Intergenerational Report, released by the Treasurer on Monday, laid out a stark challenge: how do we increase our productivity as our population ages? A big part of this challenge is how we empower the growing number of Australians living with a disability. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare released numbers last year which show that this year there are around 1.5 million people living with a severe or profound disability and that there will be almost 2.3 million by 2030. We in this country need to stop thinking of people with a disability as charity cases or as a burden. They cannot be an afterthought. We need to recognise that people with a disability are people with skills and talents who are valuable contributors to any family, community, organisation or business. They are part of the building of this nation. Too many Australians with a disability are both poor and powerless. This is not due to their disability but due to the entrenched discrimination they experience in their daily lives. They and their carers are continually forced to make hard choices, to save every spare cent for aids and equipment, to have their lives limited both by the impairment and the community’s treatment of it.

The Rudd government has made a start and I am proud of the real improvements we are making to the lives of people with disabilities. But despite this and the best efforts of thousands of carers, both paid and unpaid, the system we have throughout this nation remains a patchwork of services which is crisis driven and reactive. Australian governments at all levels spend approximately $20 billion a year in the disability welfare system. But the question is: is it enough and are we spending what we spend efficiently? It is clear to me that the current system cannot go on forever and that is why the Rudd government asked the Productivity Commission late last year to investigate a national long-term care and support scheme. This kind of scheme, which has growing support amongst people with a disability and their carers, has the potential to change the way that disability is supported in this country. It will be up to the Productivity Commission to crunch the numbers on the scheme, but I believe that it is common sense that a better system is one that intervenes early, offers support before a problem becomes a crisis and that gets people into work. This will save us a lot of money, as well as providing greater equity.

We know that disability can be acquired in an instant through a genetic twist of fate, through an accident or indeed as a consequence of ageing. What we should not have is Australian society allowing these shafts of fate to define and limit a person’s life. The Productivity Commission this year will start looking at the cost benefits and the feasibility of approaches to provide a national disability insurance system on an entitlement basis for eligible people with a severe or profound disability. It will look at a no-fault social insurance model, reflecting the shared risk of disability across the population. The detail will be complex and the system, if it were to be created, would certainly require a lot of analysis. We are not a government that will shy away from major reform, and a national disability insurance scheme would provide, once and for all, a better deal for people with a disability and their carers.

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