Zoe Daniel (Goldstein, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

Julia Gillard is rightly applauded for being the Prime Minister who established the NDIS. Indeed, she has declared it the achievement of which she is most proud—so too the government services minister, who deserves praise for his advocacy for the scheme as a member of that government and for standing up for the rights of people with disabilities when the previous government was doing its best to limit access to the scheme, tying up the disabled and their families in knots as they struggled to get the assistance to which they were entitled. These were issues which were raised with me repeatedly before the election, and that remains the case to this day. Constituents report the nightmares caused by care packages being changed, often without explanation, and then being caught up in lengthy battles in the AAT. The fact is that this retraumatises a highly vulnerable group of citizens, their families and their carers, and, if they're not traumatised, they're exasperated at the complexity and opacity of a system they were led to believe was there to help.

In December we're holding a forum on the NDIS in Goldstein, which is already almost sold out. Here are just a handful of examples from my community that have come to my attention. A constituent in her late 80s whose son has a disability has had changes made to his support package at short notice, with money running out in half the time it usually would. The constituent fears she will have to pay for his care now, at $10,000 a week.

Another constituent has had her disabled brother's hearing aid support stopped. Without the hearing aids, his hearing will be lost altogether. As her brother has an intellectual disability, he can only tolerate a fixed style hearing aid that he cannot feel or remove. Without hearing, her brother's already limited access to the world around him diminishes to almost nothing, seriously affecting his mood and how he relates to carers and others.

Another constituent has two girls, both born with severe disabilities. She and her husband are having difficulty coping, as they're trying to work as well as support their five- and three-year-old daughters. They aren't seeking anything more than the minimum day, and all of the experts they've spoken to think it's reasonable and necessary.

Unfortunately, the NDIA responses have been slow and complicated. Constituent experiences with local area support workers are highly variable and inconsistent, and having to revalidate cases every year or two is a full-time job for many families as they try to navigate the administrative tangle that is the NDIS.

I was disturbed to read in the Saturday Paper on the weekend that some of the departmental architects of robodebt are now in the bowels of the National Disability Insurance Agency. According to documents obtained by Rick Morton, they have or had been working out ways to outlaw the use of NDIS funds for what look on the face of it to be entirely reasonable purposes. For example, one note attached to a working document declares:

The drafting of the rules of what is an 'ordinary living expense' or 'goods and services specified in the rules' should provide us with a basis for making determinations of non-compliance and remove some of the questions of what is allowable / not allowable with the removal of the term 'reasonable and necessary'.

Sound familiar?

The minister told Radio National a fortnight ago that there'd been a lack of attention on the payment side, but he was clear that it was some service providers who were 'taking the scheme for a lend', as he put it. He added that there was 'rent-seeking behaviour by some providers' and 'there are rorts out there'. That is where the focus for the future must be—not on making it unnecessarily difficult and traumatising for people with disabilities and their families but on rooting out the rorts.

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