Michael Sukkar (Deakin, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Social Services) Share this | Hansard source

Maybe the member thinks it's a very wise use of money. On this side of the House we don't. I suspect that, unlike the member interjecting, many of his colleagues would be sitting there right now going: 'Mate, that's not the fight to pick.' But if that member wants to do so, I'm very happy for him to.

We see a scheme that's now out of control. We've seen wait times double since this government came to power. The minister hand-picked the CEO of the NDIS. We remember the minister absolutely running down the former CEO of the NDIS—really unprincipled attacks on a good man. He's pulled in his own, hand-picked bureaucrat from the Andrews government bureaucracy—that glorious shining light on the hill the Andrews Labor government bureaucracy—who is now running the NDIS. Surprise, Surprise! Guess what's happened? Wait times have doubled. We now see the payment system overnight—I receive messages overnight from many individuals—under the scheme has dropped out again, so people won't be paid for 24 or 48 hours.

The scheme and the agency is being run into the ground by this government, and they've been there for only two years. Boy, what could we have done in the last two years? It has taken them two years to get this bill before the House today, and may I say there's a long way for this bill to go. While we won't stand in the way of this bill in the House today, we will ultimately reserve judgement on this following the Senate committee inquiry, which is being conducted with the requirement that the Senate committee have an opportunity to examine all of the different issues with the bill, and that they have sufficient time to have each of the relevant stakeholders and agencies provide evidence—because the litany of concerns with this bill are very long. In some respects it looks like a rushed bill, but how on earth could a bill be rushed when you've had two years to do something? This was supposed to be a high priority of this government. We're two years in.

Here are some of the concerns raised by stakeholders—not to mention them all, because I would take up my entire time if I did that. It's not clear from the bill what a participant can do if they don't agree with an outcome of a needs assessment. This particular stakeholder said: 'The NDIA decisions are notorious for being inconsistent and variable. There doesn't appear to be an avenue for review.' Wow! The second concern raised by stakeholders is: 'The new definition says the NDIS will only fund eight categories of supports. These are based on selected elements out of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. However, by leaving out other elements of that convention, the bill excludes some supports from NDIS funding. For example, the convention recognises the right to live where a person chooses and with who they choose, as well as rights to work in employment. However, this bill does not appear to include supports that would specifically facilitate a participant's economic participation.'

The review recommendations contain a range of numerous contentious recommendations. The drafting of the bill lacked opportunity for consultation. This is what one stakeholder said: 'Our position and those we represent is that without examination and scrutiny of the full and complete proposed changes the bill would deliver a result in the future that looks akin to Frankenstein's monster. Participants, their families and providers would be scrambling to have fair and equitable access to the scheme and supports they need.' Another stakeholder said: 'What is and is not an NDIS support must not be so strict as to allow a participant to explain why it is reasonable and necessary for requested support to be funded.' The APTOS will be incorporated as an interim measure to determine what is and is not an NDIS support, yet it has been widely recognised that APTOS has failed. There are also no provisions around providers of last resort.

Another stakeholder said: 'There's still a lot of work to do to develop a method for more consistently assessing and determining funding levels for housing and living supports. The approach to providing participants with funding incrementally must not be rigid. Participants should still get what they need when they need it, and not be punished for having exhausted their funding, particularly for very valid and reasonable reasons.' Another damning statement from stakeholders was: 'There has been a lack of a co-design approach to developing the bill. It's unclear who has been consulted in its development. Some disability representative organisations were apparently consulted. However, non-disclosure agreements were in place. The bill makes multiple references to co-design, yet the bill was not open for public consultation, which comes back to a lack of transparency, fairness, compassion and accountability.'

Just to stay on that point for a moment, this Prime Minister came to office, saying: 'We are going to be an open, transparent and accountable government. We are going to let the light shine in.' There has been a worrying trend with this government—and it seems almost uniform—in their consultations, and that's the use of non-disclosure agreements. If they're genuinely consulting with the sector, but the sector can only find out or be consulted on the basis that it agrees—presumably by fear of prosecution by the government not to tell anybody about it—how on earth will that be genuine consultation? NDAs, non-disclosure agreements, have not been a feature of genuine consultation with the federal government, but they're an Albanese government feature. It will be written that NDAs became a feature of government consultation under a Labor government: 'You can consult with us. We'll tell you a little bit about it, provided you don't talk to anybody else, you don't consult your members, if you're a representative organisation, and you don't air or ventilate some of the questions.' That's not genuine co-design. They can call it co-design, but if they're hand-picking and selecting who they supposedly consult with, and those people are unable to share that information with counterparts, peers or even their own members—if they're a representative organisation—then that's not co-design and that's not consultation. That's a very worrying feature of this government. Let's be frank: you only get people to sign NDAs when you're trying to hide something. NDAs are not there if you're proud of the product that you're consulting on. NDAs are there if you're concerned, or if you want to hide something from the Australian public.

There's a litany of issues with this bill. We've now had the minister concede that he was wrong before the election. Before the election—again, when he said that the NDIS, 'was tracking just as predicted,' and that the coalition was hyping up fictional cost blowouts—he was either genuinely ignorant of the truth, which is possible, or he deliberately deceived the entire disability sector, community and NDIS participants when he made those statements, knowing they were incorrect. In the end, I'll leave that for Australians to judge: was the minister ignorant of the issues with the scheme or was he deliberately deceiving the people he is now purportedly representing as minister? I like the minister, so I'm not going to answer that question. But I think it's fairly obvious, given his form, what the answer to that question is. I think, unlike him, that this coalition opposition is not going to use the more than 600,000 Australians with a disability and their families as some kind of political football or some kind of opportunity to embarrass the government. They are Australians who deserve honesty; they're Australians who are realistic and who understand the strengths and weaknesses of the scheme. They're the best people to turn to when you need answers as to what to do next, which is why it's so disappointing that this minister has ignored those people—that he has not consulted with them and has not engaged with them. It's as if this government and the minister have gone into the bunker and decided: 'We're going to reverse our position from before the election. We're going to do the opposite of what we said before the election, so let's put the flak jackets on, get into the bunker and just do this—not consult intelligently, fairly, openly and transparently with the people on whom these changes will most significantly impact.' In doing so, there's huge anxiety now, and I think that's a fundamental error that this minister has made. The suspicion and concern that are now faced by many participants and their families, I think, are a direct response not just to the mixed messages from saying one thing before an election and another thing afterward but also to the minister and the government's thought processes. One obvious example that is raised with me all the time is parents with children with ASD or developmental delay.

Let's be frank. If someone is diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder in this country—often, if you're fortunate, it's been diagnosed early for a young child—their parents have nowhere to go other than the scheme. They've got nowhere to go other than the NDIS because this minister, when he signed the deals with the states or when he agreed the scheme with the states in its first iteration when he was a minister in the Rudd and Gillard governments, had no forethought as to what the consequences would be. And guess what the consequences were. State governments completely withdrew all of their services. The framework of supports that was there for children with developmental delay or ASD was completely gone. He's got to wear that. The minister has to wear that. He can't say, 'I'm the architect of the scheme, but I was only the architect of the good bits, not the bad bits.' He wears that.

Those parents of a child with ASD, developmental delay or a range of other disabilities have nowhere else to go than the NDIS, so, when the minister says, 'We're going to transition those children out of the NDIS and co-fund with the states supports for those participants under the scheme,' quite rightly the families and particularly the parents of those children say, 'Well, we want to know what you're promising us before you transition us out of the scheme, thank you very much, because we've seen what the promises from this minister mean before an election compared to after an election.' Before an election, there are no issues with the NDIS. It is tracking just as predicted. There are no cost blowouts. Post the election, that's all he talks about. The scheme's unsustainable and has to be reined in. So those families are understandably nervous and have anxiety. Again, I think that's exacerbated by the fact that so much of what's contained in this bill and the government's response to the Bonyhady review has been cloaked in secrecy and shrouded by non-disclosure agreements—a shameful feature of consultation by this government.

To quickly touch on the bill: in the end, we're not opposing this bill in the House. There are some things in here we think are sensible changes—subject to the range and litany of concerns that we've raised that are yet to be appropriately addressed by the government, and they will have an opportunity between now and the Senate committee inquiry report and, ultimately, the Senate looking at this to try to address and alleviate a number of these concerns. We will happily engage with the government on those. But the bill before us today, which has taken two years to get its way here to this dispatch box, amends the NDIS Act in substance in the following ways.

Firstly, it will require the NDIA to provide participants with a clear statement of the basis on which they enter the NDIS. The bill will also clarify and expand the NDIS rules relating to access provision, including the methods or criteria to be applied when making decisions about the disability and early intervention criteria and the matters which must or must not be taken into account. It will create a new 'reasonable and necessary' budget framework for the preparation of NDIS participants' plans, and participants will receive funding based on whether they access the scheme on the basis of impairments that meet the disability requirements, the early intervention requirements or both. It will also provide for the needs assessment process and the method for calculating the total amount of the participant's flexible funding and funding for stated supports for new framework plans to be specified in legislative instruments and NDIS rules. It will insert a new definition of 'NDIS supports', which will provide a clear definition for all participants' authorised supports that will be funded by the NDIS and those that won't. It inserts measures focused on protecting participants, including allowing the CEO to specify the total funding amount for reasonable and necessary supports together with the funding component amount under the plan for each support or class of support up to a specified amount. It clarifies the requirement that a NDIS participant who receives an amount or amounts for NDIS supports may only spend that money in accordance with the participant's plan, and enables the agency to change the plan management type as well as imposes shorter funding periods to safeguard the participants. It also inserts quality and safeguard amendments, enabling the imposition of conditions on approved quality auditors to not employ or engage a person against whom a banning order has been made.

There's much in this bill that's, to some extent, I think, uncontroversial. There are sensible changes. But, again, the acceptance of those is not aided by the shambolic process undertaken by this government—the shambolic way in which the minister and the government have been engaging with their own predominantly state Labor counterparts, quite frankly. That has been a very messy and public display of disagreement that again heightens anxiety, and I think the headline-chasing grabs from the minister have not helped either. When he refers to plan managers, when he refers to many good and decent Australians as 'parasitic pen-pushers'—decent Australians, in most cases, trying to do their best for the people they serve—that sort of coarse language, talking down to your fellow Australians and denigrating them, is not a way to engender support for serious reform. We'll give the government an opportunity between now and the Senate committee inquiry report to demonstrate that they have heard some of these concerns, and we will make our final judgement at that time on whether we support the bill. For the purposes of the House, we will have many speakers on this bill.

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