Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Indeed. I was simply informing the member that the minister will be here in due course, because this is a big portfolio, and there are multiple ministers. So you went off a bit early. It is disappointing, though, listening to that. I want to talk about disability employment services, but I'll just make this point: the member well knows, given he was the Assistant Treasurer for that brief glorious time, that the NDIS is not sustainable without reform. That's a publicly stated fact. The trajectory which we were on as a country—and this should be a bipartisan issue—was to see over a million Australians on the NDIS by 2032 spending more than $100 billion. That's what we inherited. In the House, your leader, your shadow minister and you say that you want to work with the government on a bipartisan basis to fix up the problems and that you'll vote for the legislation. Then you come in here, the place where good speeches go to die in your case, and want to have a sledge and make snide digs. I think you need to go and have a good hard conversation with yourself and decide whether you actually mean what you say in the House—that you want to work with the government to fix the scheme and get it refocused on people with a permanent and significant disability—or whether you want to mean what you say in here. You can't have it both ways.

One in six Australians have a disability, and they should be reflected in our workforce and workplaces, but they're not. People with a disability want to and have a right to dignified work, and we pledged in the election to tackle job insecurity, wages and skills. We pledged in the employment white paper Working future to reform employment services. I'm delighted to see those commitments to reform the disability employment services reflected in this budget. There's an extra $227 million for DES, which will help people prepare for and find suitable employment. There's $23 million allocated for the Disability Employment Centre of Excellence.

I want to commend the minister, though, on a couple of aspects—in particular, on the minister's personal commitment, which flows through in this budget, to service quality. It is astounding that when the minister came into the portfolio—many of us are interested in this—the previous government had no quality framework. I chaired the Workforce Australia Employment Services Select Committee, and we saw this. When you want to marketise services, as has happened for a range of reasons—some of them good, some of them not so good—in social services, in human services, you have to have a view, as the public sector, as a government, as to what a quality service is. Otherwise, it's just like The Hunger Games: you've got a whole lot of providers, and they're just relatively good or relatively bad. You can't sustain the ideology of the former government, where you just privatise stuff and sit and watch and see what happens. So, the minister's commitment to a quality framework, to listening to service users so that we actually have some idea as a country as to whether an individual service is meeting the benchmark—not just kind of relative degrees of performance—is critical.

I also commend the minister on the commitment to restore the role of specialist service providers, to exercise greater market stewardship. Providers will be engaged through a procurement process rather than a grants agreement. And it's just profoundly weird that you'd engage people for hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in critical services through a series of grants, because the public sector doesn't have the flexibility to deal with problems when they emerge. So, that's a boring, arcane but critically important shift to improve service quality.

And, frankly, specialist providers are not that specialist. The previous government's ideology of privatisation was to let people profiteer, let the market rip. Let's be really clear: governments create this market, and they have to exercise active market stewardship. We've seen in too many regions a couple of big providers with deep pockets effectively buy market share with loss leaders, setting up offices everywhere, and close down the small providers. That's not a good deal for people with a disability who need a specialist provider who might specialise in their particular disability. So, I commend the minister on the budget initiatives around that, and on introducing more controls over market entry. The changes towards a focus on meaningful engagement of participants with their provider to cut back the number of pointless payment suspensions—which corrupt and demoralise participants, actually make people less employable, and hurt the relationship between a skilled worker and consultant and the participant—are absolutely welcome. The higher-value wage subsidies, as well as showing leadership in disability employment through the centre of excellence, are terrific initiatives.

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