Matt Keogh (Burt, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak on the National Disability Insurance Scheme Savings Fund Special Account Bill 2016. What the government is perpetrating by this proposed legislation is an out-and-out lie. Do you know why that is? It stems from this: the Prime Minister walks into this chamber and he holds his head up high with a legacy to Australia of having lost a republic referendum and having delivered a failure of an NBN. Bill Shorten, the leader of the Labor Party, the Leader of the Opposition, walks into this chamber and he can hold his head up high because even before he has made it to being the Prime Minister, which he will, he has the legacy of having delivered for disabled people in Australia.

People with disability can thank the Labor Party because we delivered on a fully funded NDIS, and the lie of this proposed legislation is writ large in its own wording because what it is doing is setting up a special fund which—wait for it—is part of the Consolidated Revenue Fund. It is a fund within a fund. It sounds like a fund we do not need. And do you know why that is? It is because Labor had always fully funded and fully costed the NDIS, which is being delivered now for people of disability in this country. We recognised that the people who are the worst off, the people who need the most care, deserve to have the most assistance from this government and from the nation, because not only is the NDIS about helping those who need our assistance, it is about making our entire country more productive. That is why it was recommended by the Productivity Commission.

This entire legislation is effectively a fabrication. It is a political tool from the government to try to wedge Labor, to try to make Labor look bad. Well, have I got news for you, government. You have been in power for four years. All we hear in this chamber day after day, question time after question time, is the government getting up and complaining about its view on a Labor policy. Well, get on and government. I mean, do you even govern, bro?

I come back to the NDIS itself. One of the things that the government has done now to make this travesty of a lie even worse is that it has tried to pit people with disability in this country against those with children who need child care and against those who have a need for the family tax benefit. It has said, 'We need to make these cuts to Australian families in order to pay for the NDIS.' Not only is that a lie, because Labor fully funded the NDIS, but it completely fails to take into account that this government has done a grubby deal with the Western Australian government that sees a substantial part of the cost—$140 million at least—transferred across to the Western Australia government. It has already made a huge saving on the administration of the NDIS by offshoring it to Western Australia, which is a complete dud of a national disability insurance scheme. This is one of the real travesties of the way in which the government has been operating the NDIS and trying to bring it to fruition.

In Western Australia we have seen two trial areas established: one for the National Disability Insurance Scheme, another for what is called WA NDIS. I am a reasonably parochial Western Australian, so it makes sense to make sure that WA gets the best deal, and I could not really fault the idea of saying, 'Okay, WA has a pretty good disability service scheme with the Disability Services Commission. Let's make sure that we get the best deal in Western Australia.' However, after setting up these trials and, in fact, even expanding the area being covered by these trial sites, including expanding WA NDIS into the Armadale area in my seat of Burt, the government then almost immediately signed up a deal between the federal government and the Western Australia government to introduce it across the entire state before the trials of WA NDIS had been completed.

What really troubles me about that—and what I think should trouble not only all Western Australians but all Australians, because this is a deal with the federal government—is that they set up these trials to do an evaluation and they have not shown us the result. Apparently, buried somewhere in the bowels of the Commonwealth and state governments is an evaluation report that nobody has seen. How are we in Western Australia—let alone across the nation—to know that this deal that is being done, which is going to cost Western Australians $140 million at least, is actually to the benefit of Western Australians. This is some secret, grubby deal.

What makes it even worse and what just underlies the political nature of that agreement is that the agreement was signed the day before the Barnett government went into caretaker mode. They did not want any scrutiny of this. They did not want the opportunity for a Mark McGowan WA Labor government to come in and actually understand what has been going on. No, they were going to sign the deal up straightaway to cover their own tracks.

I have had disability advocates, people with disability and parents of children with disability coming to me in my office and meeting with me at community meetings, saying, 'Matt, we are very concerned about the differences between the WA NDIS and the national scheme.' I will accept that there could be some deficiencies in the national scheme. Under this government, I do not think that will come as any surprise to anybody. But what concerns me is that these people, whose children are some of the most vulnerable people in our community, want to know that their children will be cared for as they grow older and that they will have access to support, especially after the time has come when they, as parents, are no longer able to look after them. They are concerned about some of the differences that they are seeing in the schemes. In fact, that differences between the schemes is a critical point, because what we saw under the trials was that the Commonwealth government would not comment on the WA NDIS and the WA government would not comment on the national scheme. So we had this situation where no-one could ever really get to the bottom of the differences.

Fortunately, the wonders of Facebook—you might have heard of the internet over there on the government side—have meant that there has been collaboration and discussion between service providers and those that receive these benefits under the NDIS, and they are very concerned about some of the differences they see. I will not run through them all now because part of the problem has been that, in trying to clarify what the differences are, how they operate and why they are there, we cannot get any information out of the WA government or the Commonwealth government. In fact, we even tried to use freedom of information to get access to the evaluation report to understand the differences and why one scheme is better or not better than the other, but we were told, 'No, that's subject to intergovernmental agreement now, so you can't have access to that report.' What are this government and the Barnett government trying to hide?

Under the NDIS, there is supposed to be this concept that the user, the person with disability, is able to choose how their benefit is spent, what services they access and how they access them. The control is placed with the individual. Instead, under the WA NDIS they will go and meet with their local coordinator, who will say, 'This organisation can provide you with that service,' and sign them up for at least six months prepaid—done. If there is a problem with that service provider, it would appear there is no capacity for the individual to change service provider, find a better service provider or use someone who better meets their needs. It may be no fault of the service provider that, for whatever reason, they cannot meet the individual needs of that person—but, no. They are signed up for six months prepaid and cannot change it.

With all of these issues, we do not know what sits behind it, but one of the interesting things under this agreement between the Commonwealth and the state government of Mr Colin Barnett is that Western Australia, unlike any other state in the Commonwealth, will now bear the administration costs of the NDIS in WA. It is supposed to be a national scheme, but instead Western Australians are now going to have to pay for the administration of the NDIS. If you accept a proposition that says, 'The WA government's going to provide more administration or better service or better access to local coordinators,' you might think, 'Okay, it makes sense that the WA government bears the additional cost,' but, no. It will not be just the additional cost; it is going to wear the whole cost. This is an absolute travesty. This is supposed to be a national scheme—and, again, we do not know what is better.

The other part of this, of course, is that we are supposed to have national transferability—portability around the country. If you are a person with disability in Western Australia and the opportunity arises for you to take up a job in the ACT or New South Wales, or your family needs to move and you are a child who is receiving benefits through the NDIS, you do not know what you are going to get now because they have changed the schemes and we do not know how. How will we have full portability if we have different schemes operating in different states?

The other thing here is that, in addition to Western Australia wearing the administration costs, while the Commonwealth will pick up the cost of the actual scheme and the services provided—that seems fair—now 75 per cent of the cost overruns in Western Australia will be borne by the state of Western Australia. This is supposed to be a national, federally funded scheme. Those opposite say, 'Labor didn't fully fund the scheme,' but they do not even want to fully fund the scheme; they want to palm the costs off onto the state, which is exactly the opposite of what we are supposed to be doing.

I raise these concerns because I am seriously concerned about what is going on for our national disability scheme. The key thing I want to emphasise in speaking on this is this: when it comes to those individuals—when it comes to people with disability and to the parents of children with disability—they need to know that as Western Australians they will be no worse off than anyone else in the Commonwealth under this scheme. They should know that; that should be a guarantee. That was part of the design of the NDIS as it was put in place by Labor. But now they do not know. They have uncertainty. They have fear. They are coming to people like me and saying, 'We just don't know, but all we want is to know that we'll be no worse off.' I think that is a very reasonable request—for people with disability and their parents to know that, by being in Western Australia, they will be no worse off. But, with the way in which this government is hiding and the way in which the Colin Barnett Liberal government is hiding, the results of that evaluation tell me that there is something rotten in the state of Western Australia and something rotten in the deal that the Barnett government has cut with Christian Porter and the Liberal government here in Canberra.

When it comes to this piece of legislation, the government says, 'Oh, Labor didn't fund the NDIS.' We know from the wording of the legislation that that is a bunch of rot. Once again, the Turnbull government is all fluff and cluck on the NDIS and helping people with disability. That is why I have serious difficulty with this legislation.

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