Tony Zappia (Makin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

In my contribution to this debate on the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Strengthening Banning Orders) Bill 2020 I want to highlight some of the matters that were raised by the independent review of this matter by Alan Robertson SC. But, before I do, I preface my remarks by noting that the NDIS was a Labor government initiative. In fact, it was back in 2011 that the concept evolved in this parliament. By the time the legislation passed this parliament in 2013, it was the year of an election, and, ultimately, the actual implementation of the NDIS rested with the coalition government that was elected at the time and that continues in office to this day. I understand the NDIS today supports about 400,000 Australians, 35,000 of whom are in our state of South Australia, Deputy Speaker Georganas. It is a concept that, at the time, was reluctantly supported by the coalition opposition. That reluctance seems to have permeated the implementation of the scheme once they came to office. Therefore, I'm not entirely surprised that the scheme has been very poorly rolled out under this coalition government. Indeed, some have referred to it as being a sham in terms of the way it has been implemented.

Those are comments that I cannot disagree with, because in my own electorate I have seen time and time again—and I might come back to that—the problems experienced on a regular basis by the people out there in the community who want to be part of the scheme and get supported by it. We see long delays; confusion; inconsistencies in the services being provided; a very complicated process which people often simply do not have the ability to deal with; and rorting of the scheme, which I suspect is much more prevalent than we might understand right here and now. Also, there is questionable delivery of services, where quite often too much of the money that is allocated goes to the service deliverer rather than the recipient of the service. Indeed, many recipients appear to get very poor value for the dollars that the government is expending on their behalf. That is one of the concerns that I have detected time and time again when I speak to people who are beneficiaries of the NDIS here in Australia. We saw all of that manifest itself in the $4.6 billion underspend in the scheme by this government—$4.6 billion that I suspect was underspent in order to allow the Treasurer to claim that he had gotten the budget back into balance. But the reality is that the balancing of the budget came at the expense of a lot of vulnerable people in this country who needed the services they had applied for and either didn't get them or had to wait a long time for them.

My office frequently deals with issues on behalf of families, and on many occasions it has been my office that has had to sit down with all of the different parties and pull them together in order to work through all the difficulties that were being experienced and come to a plan that was agreed to by all the parties. That isn't a role that my office—or the offices of other MPs in this place—should be doing. Nevertheless, that's how difficult it had become. That in itself highlights the failings in the very implementation of the scheme by the coalition government.

Nothing more clearly highlights the failings of this government than the tragic death on 6 April this year of Ann-Marie Smith, a death that both shocked and angered the Australian people. As a South Australian, I can tell you that, from listening to talkback radio and reading the local daily newspaper, the anger in respect of the death of Ann-Marie Smith was incredibly widespread. People saw the circumstances surrounding her death as inexcusable. We've heard about the septic shock, the multiple organ failure, the severe pressure sores and the malnutrition of a person already afflicted by cerebral palsy, who, it appears from all the evidence I've been able to read, was left in a cane chair with no visitors for months on end, other than the carer who was entrusted with her care. I found nothing to suggest that any other person had visited her during the almost two years that she was under NDIS care. Where was the comprehensive care plan? Where was the oversight of her care? Where was the medical care that she needed? How could a society and a government funded program fail her so badly?

Those are the questions that the public and the community I represent continuously ask. Those questions resulted in three or maybe four inquiries—I believe the South Australian coroner might be conducting an inquiry into the matter as well. They resulted, through the federal government inquiry, in the Robertson report. The South Australian government had a task force review of the matter, and there's a South Australian police investigation underway. All of those investigations were in response to trying to answer those very questions that were raised when the death occurred.

The death of Ann-Marie Smith was avoidable. It was the result of no oversight of a poorly administered scheme, which this coalition government now, belatedly, attempts to rectify through this inadequate legislation. The neglect of Ann-Marie Smith is symptomatic of the neglect of older Australians in aged care, exposed time and again, most pointedly by the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety. We have seen neglect of vulnerable people in publicly funded care—people who are out of sight and out of mind—time and time again through numerous inquiries, both in the aged-care sector and in the disability sector, and there is a royal commission into disability right now as well. I expect the findings of that commission to be equally as abhorrent as those we have already seen with the interim reports and recommendations of the royal commission into aged care. I note that both Alan Robertson and the royal commission into aged care have used the word 'neglect' in their reports, a word that I believe is starting to sink in to the minds of people who have responsibility for looking after these very people.

Older people are not part of the NDIS, simply because of their age, but the reality is that many of them are just as vulnerable as Ann-Marie Smith was. In the aged-care sector, almost half of the people suffer from dementia or Alzheimer's disease, and that effectively means that they are incapable of caring for themselves. They, too, would be on the NDIS were it not for their age. So it is people like that that we should also be incredibly concerned about. Only last week I was contacted by a constituent in my electorate. In the midst of the royal commission into aged care, when there is sufficient publicity about the poor care being received by so many older Australians, I was still receiving concerns from residents about the care that their loved ones were getting in facilities in my part of Adelaide. It's almost unfathomable that, even with all the publicity, people are still being neglected.

Alan Robertson, in his report, made 10 recommendations. His report was non-statutory—that is, he had no power to compel anyone to produce documents or to answer questions—but nevertheless he came up with 10 recommendations. I won't read them in full, but I want to outline the 10 recommendations for the benefit of anyone who is following this debate, which are:

(1) The Commission should act to identify earlier those people with disability who are vulnerable to harm or neglect …

(2) No vulnerable NDIS participant should have a sole carer providing services in the participant's own home …

(3) For each vulnerable NDIS participant, there should be a specific person with overall responsibility for that participant's safety and wellbeing …

(4) Consideration should be given to the Commission establishing its own equivalent to State and Territory based Community Visitor Schemes to provide for individual face-to-face contact with vulnerable NDIS participants …

(5) … the Commission should conduct occasional visits to assess the safety and wellbeing of selected individual NDIS participants, whether or not a complaint has been made or a "reportable incident" notified …

(6) The statutory definition of "reportable incident" in s 73Z of the NDIS Act should be amended to make it clear that it includes a real or immediate threat of one of the listed types of harm …

(7) The Commission must at all times be able to know whether a person is or is not an NDIS participant …

(8) There should continue to be improvements to the exchange of information and more formal lines of communication between those running the State and Territory emergency services (including police) and schemes for people with disability and the Commonwealth agencies, being the Commission and the NDIA, and vice versa.

(9) To this end, s 67A(1)(e) of the Act should be amended so that the word "serious" is deleted. A threat to an individual's life, health or safety should be enough to authorise the use of the protected Commission information …

(10) The Commissioner should have statutory power to ban a person from working in the disability sector even where that person is no longer so employed or engaged …

In regard to recommendation 4, I note that the community visitor scheme was not in operation in South Australia at the time because the scheme applied only to government institutions or people in private institutions. It didn't apply to people living in their own homes, as Ann-Marie Smith did. That is a matter that I believe needs to be immediately rectified because, had that scheme been in place, there would have been someone other than the carer calling in and checking on Ann-Marie on a more regular basis, and I suspect the end result would have been very, very different.

However, my question to the government and to the minister is simple. There are 10 recommendations and there are many other comments in Mr Robertson's report. Why is the government not implementing all of those 10 recommendations? I note that, in the minister's response to that report, there was no commitment to do so. Those recommendations all need to be followed up and should all be part of this legislation or, at least, future legislation, and we should get a commitment from the government that that will be the case. You don't have an inquiry into a matter if you're not prepared to accept the recommendations. In my view, they are all quite reasonable and proper recommendations that would prevent a similar occurrence in the future.

I conclude with these comments. The NDIS was a new scheme and there was always an expectation that there would be some initial implementation problems. I don't believe anybody would ever have expected that it would sail through absolutely smoothly. But, after seven years in office, the coalition government have clearly mismanaged the scheme. They have had seven years to rectify the problems, to roll it out, to implement the changes that were needed and to listen to the feedback that I have been getting for years now about the problems that exist that still have not been rectified, which I'm sure you, Madam Deputy Speaker, have been getting, along with all the other members of this House. They've had plenty of time to do so. Sadly, what's happened is that we've seen the issue come to a head only because of the death of Ann-Marie Smith. As I said earlier on, there is no excuse for Ann-Marie's death or for the failures and problems that continue under this government's oversight of the NDIS.

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