Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party, Shadow Minister for International Development and the Pacific) Share this | Hansard source

Yes, shame! I could take that interjection, but we move on. I know he was being facetious. It was a shame, because we heard that we were going to see more transparency and more probity, but quite the opposite is the case. Labor should have consulted more widely and broadly for this particular legislation. They will claim they have. I doubt that.

The text from Mr Pietsch continues that the most problematic is section 10, which is likely to be shot down by the human rights committee as it cherrypicks only some of the sections of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with a Disability.

Mr Pietsch is right. He's got skin in the game. He knows that the NDIS as it stands is riddled with problems. It is draining people who would otherwise be engaged in other activities from those activities into this. It is a whirlpool of money that really needs to be addressed. I can remember the then New South Wales Premier, Morris Iemma, a Labor Premier, talking in the nineties about the fact that the health budget, if it were left to run as it was, was going to take up almost all of the state budget. He, as a former minister and then a premier, strove to do something about it. I pay tribute to him for doing just that. He was, in essence, a good premier.

This is the same. We face a grave dilemma here with the NDIS: that it will, as a money whirlpool, suck so much out of the budget—and I appreciate that much of it is uncapped. We need to do a thorough investigation about where the money is being spent, why people who have lifelong conditions have to consistently and continually prove that they have those conditions and why there are such delays, I appreciate that in the budget we're getting 36,000 more public servants. No doubt most of them will be occupied on shiny seats here in Canberra. If we're going to have that many thousands more public servants, they need to be doing gainful activities, and that is perhaps on the NDIS switchboard and making sure we address some of these cases, making sure we go through them so that people such as those in the case examples that I read from my electorate office aren't happening more and more.

We have to listen to people like Mark Pietsch, who knows what he's talking about. It's one of the main reasons he had to move from Forbes to Wollongong. It's forcing people with disabilities out of local communities into the cities to access services. This is not fair. This is not equity. This is not right in the Australia that we live in in 2024. The government has to, must and should do better.

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