Daniel Mulino (Fraser, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

This bill is a major reform of a landmark piece of social justice. I'm very pleased to be able to speak to it today because this is one of the most important schemes in Australia that any government has brought into being over the last half century. Because it's such a major piece of reform, I think context is important and I want to put on the record, before I get to a couple of the specific aspects of this bill, two important pieces of context.

The first relates to what existed before the NDIS. To clarify that, I go back to the Productivity Commission report in 2011 that was so instrumental in providing momentum behind the reform push that led to the NDIS being legislated and funded, but was also instrumental to its design. If we go back to that very, very important report, it said, 'The current disability support system'—that is the one that was in place before the NDIS:

… is underfunded, unfair, fragmented, and inefficient and gives people with disability little choice and no certainty.

That was what was in existence before the NDIS, which I think is critical because we do need to make sure that the NDIS improves from where it is. We need to make sure the NDIS is more fit for purpose for people with disability, we need to make that it is more sustainable and we need to make sure that there is less fraud. Let's be very clear, and this is what I hear from people in my electorate all the time, that what we have now is far better than what existed before the NDIS and that it is absolutely critical that we strengthen the NDIS and make sure that it is permanently in place. That's because we cannot go back to where we were. We cannot go back to a system that was underfunded, unfair, fragmented and inefficient.

The second piece of context I want to talk about is that the NDIS is now a critical part of our broader welfare state. I just want to frame that in terms of a question: what is it that the modern welfare state comprises? I would argue that social insurance and lifetime risk management underpin the modern welfare state. Risk management has been with us just about since human beings started living together. If we go back to the most ancient of societies, subsistence societies, people developed very sophisticated methods of food-sharing so that they could avoid starvation. But of course there have been many, many other forms of very sophisticated risk management and social insurance that people developed all through human civilisation. We know the guilds from the Middle Ages but, way before that, in ancient Chinese society, Greek society, Roman society and Sumerian society, there were all sorts of occupational arrangements where people provided each other with income support and funerial support. Survivors of a wage earner who might have died would have been provided with supports from people in those arrangements. There have been sophisticated risk management safety nets for millennia.

But what changed in the late 19th century, in the 1890s, is that the state stepped in. The most famous example of that was Bismark's Germany in the 1890s, where the state stepped in to provide support—workers' compensation for employment, for disability and for many kinds of risks. All of the key social support legislation in the 1890s that Bismark championed had 'insurance' in the title. Insurance has been absolutely pivotal, I would argue, to so many state interventions over the last century and a half. Bismark's Germany is a powerful example. FDR, after the Great Depression, brought in many critical social supports, including an occupational and disability insurance scheme from the 1930s. That still exists today as the best single protection for people as a major safety net. Again, insurance was at the heart of it. In the UK in the post-World War II period, following the Beveridge report, social insurance was at the heart of the post-World War II welfare state. In Australia, again, we have a storied history with Labor governments in particular, but not just Labor governments. We have the age pension, unemployment insurance and universal health care. All of these mechanisms, I would argue, have insurance either as a key element or as the defining element of them.

I would argue that the NDIS is the next step in this great journey of social protection, and I think it's important to put it in that context. The NDIS, at its heart, is a social insurance scheme and it fills a major gap. Before the NDIS we had a number of major social insurance schemes: we had an age pension scheme that was world-leading, we had universal health care and we had other social insurance mechanisms in Australia. But the NDIS was sorely needed and it filled a major gap, as the PC report highlighted.

I just want to ask: what is it that makes a scheme 'insurance'? In the public realm, we have a number of different kinds of social interventions. We have some schemes that are redistributive by nature and we have some schemes that are universal by nature. I would argue that there are some characteristics of a social intervention safety net that make it insurance. One is that support is provided contingent on some event or some state of affairs. That makes it different to a universal scheme. In some circumstances, a universal approach is appropriate—for example, everybody having access to a vaccination when there's a pandemic. A universal approach is the best one there. In other circumstances, where more targeted assistance is needed, a contingent provision of support is more appropriate. So the first aspect of an insurance arrangement is that it is contingent on somebody having a certain state of affairs or having suffered a certain harm. The second is that in an insurance arrangement there is a promise or a commitment for something to flow from that contingent occurrence. I'll talk about that in a moment. Thirdly, an insurance arrangement is reliant upon one of a certain range of funding arrangements. Those are three core characteristics of a social insurance arrangement that I think are critical, because this bill strengthens the NDIS on all three of those fronts.

First, assistance is contingent upon something happening. Now, this goes to the heart of eligibility, and this bill helps in two ways. Firstly, it clarifies who is eligible to be in the NDIS. To be clear: that is absolutely critical for any insurance scheme. It is critical that it is clear who is in the scheme and who is out of the scheme. This bill helps because it clarifies eligibility for the NDIS. Secondly, this scheme makes sure that those who are not in the scheme don't go without any supports. The additional definition and the additional funding for foundational supports and the additional ways in which this bill and further work being done beyond this bill provides for state, local and federal governments to all work together to make sure that there are additional foundational supports outside the NDIS mean that those people who aren't necessarily in the scheme don't go without, because many people who aren't in the scheme are in need of substantial support. So there's that first question, which is critical to any insurance scheme: Who is in and who is out? What is the contingent state of affairs that leads to support being given? This bill provides significant assistance on that front.

The second question in any insurance scheme is: What is the promise? What is the commitment that is being made to the people who are in the scheme? Now, in the NDIS, I would argue that the core elements of the promise were, first, that there be a package of benefits tailored to the circumstances and the needs of the person. That was one of the key and revolutionary aspects of this scheme. Second and, I think, perhaps even more revolutionary was that there be agency, that the person be in control of what those resources be devoted to. This was absolutely critical and this was something that people with a disability themselves advocated for so passionately. Third was that there be holistic care of the individual. Fourth was that there be uniformity of benefits across jurisdictions to remove some of that inconsistency that the PC had criticised. Finally, there would be assistance to provide people with participation in all of society, including employment. All of those aspects of the promise that was made to people who are in the scheme are absolutely critical.

This bill, again, goes towards providing that promise in a more fulsome way. It retains the packages' integrity, and that's something the minister made absolutely central to his second reading speech. It also ensures that people's autonomy and agency remain central to the scheme. If we're looking at that central core element of this being an insurance scheme, once somebody is identified as being in the scheme, what is the promise? What is the commitment that is being made to them? If somebody takes out an insurance policy on their home, the promise is that the home will be rebuilt if there's a fire or if there's a flood. In the case of the NDIS, the promise is that there be a tailored package that reasonably meets that person's needs and that they be given agency in how those resources are spent.

Finally, there's the third question, which lies at the heart of insurance: the scheme must be sustainable. Now, in some insurance schemes—and we're used to this with private insurance—there's a pooling of resources that comes from premiums. We know that, with home insurance, we all pay a premium, they're pooled and then, if people suffer accidents, whether they be minor or major, as in a natural disaster, the pool is used to provide people with assistance. In some publicly-regulated insurance schemes, the same occurs. Workers compensation, compulsory transport accident—again there's a premium, and that goes into a pool. In other contexts, it's taxpayers' funds that are used instead. So think of universal health care and a range of other social insurance schemes in the public realm where it's not a premium that is linked to the funds but rather consolidated revenue. The NDIS falls into that category. It's consolidated funds rather than premiums paid by the individual. This means that sustainability of the fund in terms of the government's ongoing fiscal parameters is absolutely critical.

Again, this bill goes to this challenge, because this bill materially reduces fraud, which we know has been evolving as a problem over the last decade in the scheme. This bill also puts downward pressure on scheme costs but at the same time is maintaining outcomes through early intervention. We see that, for example, with young children with certain mental health conditions. These are critical for scheme sustainability, which is critical for any scheme where there's not a direct link between premiums and the fund.

Finally, the work that I referred to earlier in relation to foundational supports is also critical because it is absolutely important that people who may fall just outside the scheme also receive the help that they need. What I would argue is that the NDIS is now an absolutely integral part of our broader welfare system but that it is a public social insurance component of our broader safety net and of our broader welfare state and that as a public social insurance scheme those three key elements that I referred to are absolute important to bed down if we're going to ensure that the NDIS is working as best as it can and also that it can be sustainable.

That issue of the contingent eligibility needs to be clarified as much as possible. That is the heart of any insurance scheme. This bill goes a long way towards clarifying that and ensuring that that is sustainable going forward. It's also critical that the commitment, once one is found eligible, is fulfilled. This bill goes to the heart of that also. This bill goes to the heart of the fiscal sustainability of the scheme, which is critical given that it is being funded out of consolidated revenue.

The NDIS, I would argue, is one of the great social reforms of the last half century. Given what occurred before it, given the state of affairs that the PC described in that seminal 2011 report, we can't go back. But what we have to ensure is that the NDIS is fit for purpose, that it is sustainable, that it gives people the right outcomes and that it continues to give them those outcomes with agency, dignity and respect. This bill is a big step forward on that broader goal.

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