Jenny Macklin (Jagajaga, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. As I was indicating, the Prime Minister this Friday is taking a recommendation to the Council of Australian Governments to establish a new select council on disability reform. I thank her very much for her leadership on this very, very important issue to millions of Australians who have been waiting decades for these changes.

The government has also committed an additional $10 million to get on with the very important technical work that is needed to make sure that we get, as we have termed it, the NDIS—the National Disability Insurance Scheme—ready, to make sure that we have the common assessment tools and the quality assurance work and to make sure we have the workforce ready so that we can start to build a national disability insurance scheme.

We understand how important this is. The Productivity Commission has recommended that by 2014 we be ready to launch the scheme. We want to make sure that, with the states and territories, we are ready by doing this technical work with the disability sector and the carers, who are doing an extraordinary job right now. I thank the Prime Minister for her— (Time expired)

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