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

First of all, I'd like to thank the Joint Standing Committee on the NDIS for their hard work and their very detailed findings, which I thoroughly support. I'd also like to thank all those who made submissions to the Joint Standing Committee on the National Disability Insurance Scheme, and in particular the families that made submissions and spent a great deal of time considering the information they should relate about the NDIS. As I have said, I welcome the findings. In some ways they perhaps don't go far enough, and I think there are some issues with the NDIS that we still need to address.

I have spent all my working life dealing with children with disabilities, and I thoroughly support the NDIS. I think it's a fantastic social intervention that has always had bipartisan support, and I welcome that and I thank people on both sides of the parliament for the development of the NDIS—in particular, Julia Gillard, the Labor Prime Minister whose reputation grows and grows the longer it has been since her prime ministership. I also thank some on the other side, such as the member for Warringah, Mr Abbott, who was also a strong supporter of the NDIS.

As I have said, I think the NDIS is a fantastic social intervention, and I've seen the relief on the faces of parents who have a child with a severe disability, knowing that their child or children will receive lifelong care and support. I would stress that that is not just because of the financial supports involved and the supports in providing housing and intervention services. This is something that's really important to me. What the NDIS says to those who have a child or a person in the family with a disability is: 'You are part of us; you are part of our society. We will bring you with us. You are as deserving of the fruits of our social networks as anyone else.' I think that's a really important inclusive message, and a very important message that the people of Australia are giving to those who are less fortunate. So it is really important from that philosophical point of view as well as from the other points of view. It's a sign that we as a community recognise that we're all in this together and that we will lift you up and you will come with us on our journey. As I have said, I welcome the findings of standing committee and I welcome its recommendations.

I acknowledge that the NDIS rollout has not been perfect. I didn't expect it would be. I think there are few of us in the paediatric community that found it all smooth going. There are lots of wrinkles that need to be ironed out. The rollout in many places has been very rapid and there have been problems with poor training of the planners and assessors. There have been some haphazard plans and long waiting times before review. I tell all my patients and their parents not to accept plans over the phone, that the planners need to see the child in person, preferably in their own home. As has already been mentioned, there have been some difficulties even in accessing NDIS offices, and I think that's been part of the poor planning process. I know that originally in many areas there was a plan to have standalone NDIS offices. But, because of moves by this government to try and compress the budget, NDIS offices have now often been forced to move into Centrelink offices, often in cramped conditions, with poor wheelchair or even poor stroller accessibility. That's not been a good thing and I hope that that will change.

I think that some of the planning basics that should have been considered by the NDIA have been underbudgeted and not thought through—things like personal care costs, transport costs, transition-to-work programs for people with disabilities and, in particular, and it's been brought to my attention by a number of my constituents, funding for mental health disorders and rehabilitation for people with severe mental illness. These issues are brought up time and time again, not only by the constituents and their families but also by some of the providers in my electorate of Macarthur, and I'm trying to work through these issues on a daily basis with many of them.

We know that many parents who have disabilities have a lot of trouble interacting with the NDIS, and they can have similar problems, in this day and age, dealing with Centrelink. I think that's an issue that needs to be thoroughly canvassed. It seems that the people who get the best NDIS plans are often those who are the most articulate and the best advocates for themselves and for their children and family members. So I think we could do more in that space.

However, to me the most glaring deficiency has been the lack of planning for those very young children requiring early intervention programs. These are children who often present with problems from birth, and we have previously had very good services for them. We are now in danger of actually making things worse, not better. A prime example is those children who are born with severe to profound hearing loss. In Australia, we have one of the best programs in the world. Every newborn child in Australia has a hearing test in the first few days of life, and if they're diagnosed with a severe or profound hearing loss they're immediately referred to the National Acoustic Laboratories—a free service provided by government—and then on to an early intervention program. In my home state of New South Wales, the biggest provider of these services is the world-famous Shepherd Centre, which provides fantastic early intervention programs for children with severe to profound hearing loss—often those children requiring cochlear implants.

We know that world's best practice is to intervene very early for those children—with hearing aids and speech therapy and other interventions on a frequent basis. The problem is that with the NDIS there is a long lag time between diagnosis, the package being produced and the financial remuneration. This means that places like the Shepherd Centre have to carry the not inconsiderable cost of the early intervention programs, often for many months, before the remuneration package comes through. That means that they may not be able to provide the services that they have been providing throughout New South Wales. That's something that certainly needs to be looked at and reviewed. We don't want to lose our world's-best-practice management of infants with severe to profound hearing loss.

We also know that in cases of very young children with disabilities it's often hard to form a final diagnosis, and it's often hard to get in for assessments because of long waiting times. In my electorate of Macarthur our child development unit currently runs on a waiting time of almost 12 months. This means that even though the children would benefit from early intervention, because of financial constraints, very often they may not get their therapies until their NDIS package is approved after the initial assessment for which they have already waited a year. They may then wait many months after that to get the financial package. So I think we need to do more about the early provision of NDIS packages for children with severe disability who are very young and who require early intervention.

Our long waiting times often relate to funding issues at our local hospitals. That's certainly true in my electorate. I think we could do more to commence early intervention programs in very young children. In Macarthur there's a very good program, the KU Starting Points, run by the former Kindergarten Union. It provides early intervention programs, but it does miss out on funding from the NDIS because of the long delays.

I think the NDIS is a wonderful program. I thank both sides of parliament for it and I thank the standing committee for their findings. But there is more to be done.

Debate adjourned.

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