Monique Ryan (Kooyong, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

The National Disability Insurance Scheme has now been active since 1 July 2016. The NDIS was established to provide people with a disability with the support that they need to live an ordinary life. It's the only national scheme of its kind in the world. At its introduction, the NDIS was touted as having the potential to effect the same sort of generational shift as Medicare had achieved in the 1970s. Unlike previous such systems, the NDIS was designed to provide people with a disability with choice and control over how, when and where their services and support are delivered to them. They should be in control of this process. They should be able to choose what works best for them.

In recent times this vision has been lost. In the last few years hundreds of consumers with autism, intellectual and psychosocial disabilities have lost their funding after the NDIA ruled that it wasn't value for money. Services have been stopped. Parents and carers have had to quit their jobs to look after their loved ones. As a member of the parliamentary Joint Standing Committee on the NDIS I've had the honour of hearing from providers and participants in recent weeks in a series of hearings in major cities in Australia. Some of those testimonials were really difficult to hear. They were raw, they were confronting and they were heartbreaking.

The NDIS system has the potential to be world leading but it has become adversarial. Participants are expected to justify why their static or progressive medical condition is not improving. They have been forced to undergo annual assessments which engender uncertainty and anxiety, when there's often no good reason for these serial assessments. They're having to take on review processes and the AAT without support or representation. We are forcing disabled Australians, their parents, their partners and their carers to battle a system in which transparency and generosity have been sacrificed to red tape and mean-spirited bureaucracy.

What we need from our NDIS is effective coordination and collaboration to make sure that people don't fall through the gaps between the NDIS and other services like health, justice, housing and transport. We need to focus on making the NDIS work for people with different needs, including culturally safe services, better regional access, expert planning, timely reviews and skilled support coordination. We need a service safety net which prevents serious harm when the NDIS market fails or when people need urgent access to NDIS supports. We need to put people first.

Next year I will be moving a private members bill to expedite placement of hospitalised NDIS participants into supported accommodation to get people who have been waiting months or years in hospital into housing which meets their needs and also frees up valuable hospital beds. It'll be a good thing, but it's just the start of what we need. We also need better services in rural, regional and remote areas. We need culturally accessible services for Aboriginal and Torres State Islander peoples and for people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. We need integration and coordination with mainstream support services. And we need more client engagement and transparency in the assessment and review processes.

In 2008 Australia became a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The first principle of this convention is to promote, protect and ensure the full and equal enjoyment of all human rights and fundamental freedoms for all people with disabilities and to promote respect for their inherent dignity. In recent years, this country has reverted to forcing people with handicaps to come cap in hand to our government for support. We owe them more than that. We owe them their dignity and our NDIS must deliver it.

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