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

I rise to speak on Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2009-2010 and Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2009-2010. These bills continue the Rudd government’s policy of spending sensibly to steer this nation through the global financial crisis. They continue our policy of keeping unemployment as low as possible through the tough conditions that the world experienced over the last year. Amongst other initiatives, they include funding for the Solar Homes and Communities Plan, funding to make us better prepared for a viral pandemic and funding for the Home Insulation Program. They include extra funding for the Regional Local Community Infrastructure Program to support investment in valuable infrastructure such as libraries, community centres and sportsgrounds. These are real projects that meet a real need in the community. They provide work for local builders and tradespeople in a tough time.

The bills continue this government’s support of the General Employee Entitlements and Redundancy Scheme to guarantee workers’ entitlements in the event of corporate insolvency. To lose a job is bad enough, but to lose the money that is rightfully yours and which you have been relying on to help feed and clothe your family and pay your mortgage is something that no family should ever experience. The global economic crisis has led to a higher possibility of companies failing, and that is why we have budgeted an extra $40 million for the GEER Scheme to which I have just referred. This money will help see many families through the loss of a job, and ease, at least somewhat, the stress and fear that spreads when companies collapse.

These bills will continue our economically responsible approach to the global financial crisis—an approach which has seen us avoid recession whilst maintaining lower debt levels than our OECD trading partners. We are not a government that is content to focus on the 24-hour media cycle. We are thinking about the big challenges of an ageing population—about how we want our country to look in 2050. The Intergenerational report released by the Treasurer last Monday laid out the stark challenge facing us: how do we increase our productivity as our population ages? I regard our ageing population as a triumph, not a problem; an opportunity, not a challenge. There will certainly be many opportunities arising from the fact that the number of people aged over 65 will double by 2050 and the number of people over 85 will quadruple—and that number will, hopefully, include me.

Many people will acquire a disability as they age. And one of the effects of an ageing population is an increase in the rate of disability. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare released figures last year that show that there are around 1.5 million people living with a severe or profound disability this year, and it will be almost 2.3 million people by 2030. Added to the moral challenge of how we empower people with a disability and their carers there is now an economic challenge. To keep Australia a wealthy and productive country, we will need to reshape the way we think about disability and how we include people with disability and their carers in our society. We must cease thinking of people with a disability in terms of charity or as a burden. These people cannot be an afterthought. We will need to recognise that people with a disability are people with skills and talents who can contribute to any organisation and help build our nation.

There are two million Australians either living with a severe or profound disability or, indeed, caring for a person with a severe or profound disability as their primary carer. We cannot prosper as a nation and do as well as we should do whilst this group remains minimally engaged in the workforce. We need to recognise that making our public buildings and our private buildings, our housing stock, suitable for people with a disability is not a cost—it is an investment in our future. I believe it is a sad fact that people with disabilities are still not equal citizens in our country.

Too many Australians live in a state of under-resourced poverty due not just to their impairment but to the attitudes of society towards their impairment. The truth of the matter is that, if you are a person living with a significant disability or if you are a primary carer for such a person, you are likely to be poor and powerless. These people are continually forced to make hard choices. They are forced to save every spare cent for aids and equipment and to have their lives limited both by their impairment but indeed, more significantly, by the community’s treatment of their impairment—something which something can be done. People with disability in Australia, by and large, are forced to bear the stigma of being different and to accept reluctantly a second-class status. Changing this will be a long-term process that will involve not just governments but the whole of society.

The Rudd government has made a start, and I am proud of the real improvements that we are making to the lives of people with disabilities and their carers. We doubled the funding to the states and territories under our national disability agreement last year, including the highest ever level of indexation. We have increased the disability support pension for around 740,000 Australians and given extra payments to carers. We have brought in the first support program for children under six with autism, which has provided early intervention to thousands of children. We are working to help people with disability into work, and away from the purgatory of long-term unemployment.

The ageing of our population gives new urgency, I suggest, to reforming how we fund disability in this country. Without fixing up the funding of disability in this nation, the rest of the valuable efforts we are currently making will be undermined. Despite the best efforts of thousands of professionals in the disability sector, the system we have remains a patchwork of services which remains crisis-driven and inactive. We have started working on benchmarking with the states, but there is still too little information about how much money is spent, where it is spent and what the unmet need is. People are not treated according to their need but according to how much money is left in rationed budgets. Recent trends indicate that the demand for specialist disability services will grow about seven per cent a year in real terms over the next decade, as ageing carers, sadly, can no longer support their children or their spouses.

It is clear that the current system cannot go on forever, and this is why the Rudd government has asked the Productivity Commission to investigate a national long-term care-and-support scheme. This kind of scheme, popularly known as a national disability insurance scheme, which has huge and growing support among people with disabilities and their carers, has the potential to change the way that disability is supported in this country. A child born with an illness can receive medical and hospital treatment under Medicare if necessary, for some conditions. A person injured in a car accident is paid compensation under third-party insurance schemes, in most jurisdictions. An employee hurt at work is appropriately eligible for workers compensation. But for people who are deaf or blind or autistic or who have cerebral palsy or Down syndrome or severe intellectual disabilities—or any other kind of disability—there is no coherent system and there is an inadequate safety net.

Why in this country is the manner in which you incur your impairment the determinant of the level of care you get, as opposed to the effect of the impairment itself? We know that a disability can be acquired in an instant, through an accident, through a genetic quirk or, indeed, through the consequences of age. But we should not have in our society these strokes of fortune defining and limiting a person’s life. Acquiring an impairment should not sentence someone to a life of boredom, unemployment or discrimination. Disability in Australia should not mean internal exile. We are a rich nation which is capable of doing better than to be unable to answer the question posed by thousands of ageing carers: what will happen to my adult child when I die? Until our nation can provide an adequate answer our job is not done. Parents with a child diagnosed with autism or another global developmental delay should not be left alone to struggle with the challenge and the trauma of having a child diagnosed with special needs. They should not be forced to turn to Google to find out where to go next. And their children should not miss out on early intervention services which can improve their ability to learn at school, to interact with their peers and to hold down a job in later life.

Starting this year, the Productivity Commission will look into the costs, benefits and feasibility of approaches which provide essential care and support, 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. Such a scheme will be a massive task to implement. It will have implications for our health system, our schools, medical negligence, and road accident and workers compensation schemes. The detail will be complex, but we have given the Productivity Commission the time and the tools to do the job properly. We have provided them with an advisory panel of eminent people to assist in all these matters. We have appointed an associate productivity commissioner, John Walsh, who has been researching these questions for a lifetime.

We are not a government that shies away from major reforms. Labor governments in the past have fought cynicism and opposition to introduce programs like Medicare and compulsory superannuation. The governments that introduced these schemes were told that they were too hard or impossible or too expensive, and I predict that we will hear, yet again, these arguments of ‘too expensive’, ‘too hard’ and ‘impossible’ and, for people with disability: ‘What can they expect? You can’t cure their disability, so there’s little that can be done.’ Yet we have schemes like Medicare and superannuation, which make us proud to be Australian, as bedrocks of our political system.

I suggest today, in discussing the appropriations bills, that a national disability insurance scheme would provide a better deal for people with disability. I believe that this is something we owe our fellow Australians with a disability, their families and carers, who struggle every day to pay bills, to get adequate care and to find work. I believe we owe it to the ever-ageing parents of needy children, who chew up the best years of their lives in ever-lengthening sacrifice. People do this not because they are saints but because they love their children, but we have too many people with disability living in what amounts, as I have said, to second-class exile in our country, which is still sometimes in denial of the existence of people with disability, their uniqueness, their numbers or, indeed, the cries of their hearts. There are things that many take for granted here in our nation: a job we like, a house we may own outright, retirement years in comfort as the respected elders of our community. Unfortunately, too many people with disability dare not hope for or even dream of those things—not in this lifetime.

The New South Wales government has introduced a scheme in recent years called the Lifetime Care and Support Scheme for people with serious motor vehicle injuries such as spinal cord damage, multiple amputations and burns. The New South Wales scheme pays for medical treatment, rehabilitation and care, including domestic help, child care and educational and vocational support. The scheme currently only benefits people injured in car accidents, but I believe it is an indication, a sign of hope, of what can be achieved if the political will is there.

The Rudd government is committed to social inclusion. We are committed to moving people with a disability from the margins to the centre of our society. We do this, I suggest, because we believe that it is not right for a wealthy nation in the 21st century to have people who are shut out and denied opportunities available to the rest of the population. But the argument for a national disability insurance scheme is not just moral; it is about responsible economic management, of productivity and of planning for the future of our ageing population. Australian governments spend approximately $20 billion a year on our disability welfare system. There is perhaps $8 billion to $9 billion spent on the disability support pension and another $4 billion spent on payments to family and carers. Another $8 billion is paid for community care and support providers across the federal and state governments and local government. When I look at some of the indirect costs of disability—the fact that nearly 20 per cent of the population of our jails are people who have an intellectual disability and the cost to the health system of disabilities diagnosed and treated too late—and when I look at the opportunity cost of two million Australians not having the opportunity to be productively engaged, I recognise that it is an economic issue.

It will be up to the Productivity Commission to crunch the numbers of an insurance scheme and look at competing models, but I believe it is common sense that a better system is one that intervenes early, that offers support before a problem becomes a crisis and that gets people into work where they can and want to. This system will actually save us a lot of money. We are still some years away from a final scheme. I know that the disability community is patient—they have had to be, sadly. The progress of disability rights in this country has been too stop-start, and my words take nothing away from the many accomplishments of many people who have accomplished much. There have been the efforts of hundreds and thousands of committed activists, people with disability and their families, winning one small victory at a time to get us to where we are today. But these people are tired and they need our assistance. They need the assistance of the mighty Australian society.

The Rudd government is committed to policies that will rethink the way we support people with disability, not just putting money into a system that is not coping but big game-changing ideas like a national disability insurance scheme. I believe the Productivity Commission study will be the most important breakthrough, potentially, in disability in a generation. It starts to tackle the fundamental problems of disability, which are poverty and powerlessness. We recognise that it is inevitable that profound and serious disabilities could afflict any of us at any time, through birth, accident, disease or old age. I think it is one of the tasks of our civilised society, which we claim and aspire to be, that we determine how best to ensure that those who are struck by a disability are given that measure of security, of freedom from fear and of hope for the future that should be their birthright as Australians; that our society can move from looking at the person’s impairment to looking at the person’s ability and including them with all of us.

Debate (on motion by Ms George) adjourned.

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