Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

That is right—through the back door. It is no surprise that the savings measures proposed thus far for possible credit to the special account include $1.5 billion of cuts to welfare recipients. This includes $62 million the government believes that it will get from the conduct of up to 90,000 eligibility reviews of disability support pension recipients as well as 30,000 medical reviews—something that I have raised once or twice before and that we will keep on about.

The 2016-17 budget papers note:

These measures demonstrate the Government’s ongoing commitment to ensure that those who need assistance receive that assistance, with savings from increased integrity contributing to the sustainability of important welfare programmes such as the National Disability Insurance Scheme …

It sounds very reassuring, except that these measures relate to people with Down syndrome, the severely intellectually disabled, those with paraplegia and those with multiple diagnoses so impaired by their disability that it was accepted decades ago by the very agencies now conducting the reviews under government duress that they would never work again. This is an extraordinary and avoidable burden on the carers forced to adhere to ridiculous demands for specialists reports, IQ tests and documentation spanning diagnoses that will never change. I wonder whether that $62 million of supposed savings actually takes into account the cost to the budget in Medicare of running around and collecting multiple specialists reports—I would almost bet that they do not, but that is another matter which we are pursuing—or the cost of the staff required to implement this flawed policy. Really, you have to wonder what those opposite actually hope to achieve by linking the conduct of eligibility reviews for the most severely disabled in our society with their capacity to access the NDIS. If the government is serious about reducing welfare fraud it needs to take a much more sophisticated approach to undertaking these reviews and to the selection of targets for budget savings.

We have all been talking about and will continue to highlight the matters of the robo-debt scandal. These kinds of measures demonstrate not only the government's commitment to disabled Australians—or lack thereof—but its commitment to the wholesale pillaging of their critical income support. I will quote from another submission to the Senate inquiry, that from Disabled People's Organisations Australia:

Creating trade-offs between income support and disability support is counter-productive, short-sighted and does not promote the human rights objectives of the NDIS. It is unconscionable to shift people on low incomes, including people with disability, further into poverty in order to create savings for the NDIS.

That is what this government is doing.

I will turn to the issues of ministerial responsibility and the governance arrangements. One of the few things that this three- to four-page bill actually does is hand responsibility for determining what is credited to the account to the Minister for Social Services. The explanatory memorandum mentions that the minister:

will be solely responsible for the day-to-day policy and management of the special account—

and that credits might come from various areas, such as:

or—

This is badly conceived. Young People in Nursing Homes National Alliance said in its submission to the Senate inquiry:

The fact that the Bill enables the Minister alone to decide ‘deposits’ to the fund; and the PM and Cabinet to make discretionary payments to the fund, make this a poorly designed long term funding mechanism for the scheme.

A related problem … is that it casts the NDIS as a program of the Minster rather than a truly independent scheme … This is one of the key reasons the Productivity Commission recommended an insurance model that would be free of the budget related political tussles that plagued the old disability system:

…   …   …

… the NDIS needs a funding formula that is transparent, predictable, viable and sufficient.

In the Productivity Commission's wide-ranging inquiry into disability care and support, it was noted:

… the Insurance Council of Australia … identified four significant sources of managerial risk for a scheme — ignorance, self-interest, ideology and political interference.

Every single reason comes to pass with this construct and with the passage of this legislation. It is sadly prescient. Yet here is the government, so early into the implementation of the NDIS, proposing to build these very risks directly into the NDIA's external rules, the legislation and the governance model that frame the scheme's operation. This is exactly what the Productivity Commission and those inquiries which informed the scheme said they had to avoid.

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