Mike Freelander (Macarthur, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am delighted to speak today. I know much has been said about the National Disability Insurance Scheme Savings Fund Special Account Bill 2016, but for me this is personal. In my working life there have been very few major dramatic social advances. Medibank, now Medicare, was one. Most change, however, has been incremental, usually barely noticeable but sometimes bitterly fought. The most dramatic change in social policy since Medicare has had bipartisan support—I thought. It was fully funded by the Labor Party and has dramatically changed the lives of many of the families I have cared for over my many years working as a paediatrician. For many children with disabilities that I have seen, the NDIS has been truly dramatic.

Almost universally, parents of children with disabilities worry about what will happen to their children as they themselves age and also how they can afford the ongoing costs in caring for someone who cannot ever support themselves or will need help to support themselves. Some felt forever chained to the role of supporting parent, never able to let go, even in very old age. I have seen parents in their 80s still wondering what will happen to their child with a severe disability. Many of the children I have seen can never feed or toilet themselves. Many had intractable seizures, severe cerebral palsy, visual impairment, hearing loss and multiple congenital abnormalities. They are human beings nevertheless and deserve to be treated with dignity, care and compassion. They have as much right to share in the wealth of this country as I do. The Labor Party and the Liberal-National Party gave bipartisan support to the NDIS. The NDIS gives these people support, where in the past they got none or very little. It gives them and their families certainty to plan their futures in the knowledge that we will all share in supporting their burden, that we will act as an inclusive society and, using the government's own language, we will all lift together.

Of itself, this bill represents a very small cog within the grand design that is the National Disability Insurance Scheme. NDIS trials were completed in 2016, and there are now over 30,000 people participating. That number will ramp up very rapidly over the next three financial years, and the current estimates are that the annual cost of the scheme will hit $22 billion by the financial year 2019-20. The costs were factored in with the NDIS, and there was unanimous parliamentary agreement. Labor has consistently argued for full NDIS funding, and we will continue to work with the government to ensure this comes to fruition.

The bill is planned to create a special account within the Commonwealth Consolidated Revenue Fund, required under the Constitution as the repository of all federal government moneys. The Treasurer, never one to undersell even the most unremarkable of this government's limited achievements, has lauded this proposal as a 'locked box', trying to safeguard the NDIS from the depredations of future governments. This has caused unending distress amongst people who are eligible for the NDIS and their families. Notwithstanding the Treasurer's and various ministers' confected anger about the NDIS funding arrangements, they are all aware that there are no 'locked boxes' in the Consolidated Revenue Fund.

As the journalist and ex-Treasury officer Peter Martin wrote only a few days ago, the locked-box analogy is not well made. The Constitution makes the Consolidated Revenue Fund a single fund which may include special accounts, but neither the Consolidated Revenue Fund nor the accounts within it can ever be seen as a locked box. That is the case whether the special account is created by legislation or administratively, as many special accounts are. This one could have been created administratively too, if that was what the government really wanted—and you wonder why it was not. It seems that the government cannot explain this properly either. Neither the minister's second reading speech nor the explanatory memorandum have assisted debate today on why the legislative path was selected.

It is at this point that the government needs to be called out. What the government is doing is using the NDIS and people with disabilities as a pawn in its political game-playing. I remain totally mystified, as do others, by the minister's claim that money moved from any proposed special account to the CRF is somehow lost to the NDIS. That is like saying that money in a bank is lost to its customers if it is moved from one vault to another—totally mystifying.

None of these arcane accounting niceties would amount to much if it were not for the fact that the Turnbull government seems to have allied this partitioning-off approach to sourcing money to fund the NDIS. The government's line—it is a bit ambitious, I think, to call it its thinking—seems to be that, apart from the funds raised from Labor's increase to the Medicare levy and the contributions from the states and territories, the only way you can add to the fund is by drawing off moneys earmarked for other forms of social and welfare spending. It is also ramping up its rhetoric by somehow trying to link the NDIS funding to its so-called omnibus bill.

Overall, I strongly believe this is a shameful attempt to link cuts to supports for some other very vulnerable people to the NDIS funding. This, I reiterate, is causing unbelievable distress to people and families with disabilities. This is an attempt to politicise something that has previously had bipartisan support. I think this reflects that, for the Liberal Party, anyone who requires support or deals with Centrelink or the NDIS is seen as a liability and has to be compartmentalised, isolated and not seen to be as worthy as other people.

This bill, as does the omnibus bill, sends a very bad message. The NDIS had bipartisan support. For example, the member for Warringah, in particular, was a strong advocate for the NDIS. Funding was agreed upon. It comes as something of a shock to see this government, for no particularly good reason, trying to segregate it. People with disabilities need to know that they are valuable members of our country, they are supported and they have as much right to the resources of this country as any other Australian.

I want the Treasurer to stop his insincere rantings full of renal output and flatulence—that is piss and wind, to the uninitiated. It is just not right. It is insulting and it sends a very poor message. It is all the more pity then that the government has again sought to use this arguably unnecessary bill as a device to revive its spurious and unsubstantiated claim that the Labor Party failed to fund the scheme that we first legislated for what is heading up to four years ago. The government has been making this claim since it entered full election mode in late 2015 but without trying to substantiate it. When given the opportunity to do so by way of a Senate inquiry when this bill was last before the parliament, in May, it singularly failed to take up Labor's challenge.

The government has made varying claims about the alleged size of the shortfall but never explains what it is down to, never explains what it is talking about and what the differences are. It will not even say if it arises from reasons such as previously unidentified demand for the NDIS now revealed through the trial and pilot programs the intergovernmental agreement established for that very purpose—of getting a better handle on costs. Nor does the government say if the alleged shortfall arises from a revenue gap related to the fact that the increased Medicare levy has not been as high as expected, because of fairly static incomes. If it is the latter, the government must take responsibility, as lower-than-budgeted tax receipts are due to the uninspiring levels of economic activity under this government, and it must take responsibility. That is something both Treasury and the RBA have pointed out, but the government's eloquent silence on this leaves us all guessing. As the member for Jagajaga, the Hon. Jenny Macklin, has made clear, the 2013-14 budget provided full funding for the NDIS for the first 10 years—that is seven years on top of the normal forward estimates horizon. The sources of that funding are well-known. They were not somehow spirited away like Shakespeare's princes in the tower during the last days of the Rudd government—

See this speech in context