Bill Shorten (Maribyrnong, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the National Disability Insurance Scheme) Share this | Hansard source

I don't share the member's concerns and I don't think it's a fair characterisation of the process. The member says it's been rushed. We've had a four-year disability royal commission and a 12-month review into the whole scheme. I worry that the argument that there's too much rush is actually selling people with disability short, because there are problems which need to be dealt with now.

I don't know if the member heard my second reading contribution. It's forgivable if you didn't, but I'll just repeat a couple of the key points in it. There are issues which need to be resolved now. Every month we wait sees people with disability, the NDIS and taxpayers face costs of an extra $160 million. This is a real issue. We've moved amendments, and I'll go through them. There was a concern that somehow NDIS support needs were going to be narrowed. We've clarified that to make sure that, as we move from line to line, budgeting on a more flexible basis, we have a constitutional basis and some reasonable constraints. We've heard concerns about the use of the APTOS—the Applied Principles and Tables of Support, first agreed by first ministers in 2015 as an interim approach to defining NDIS supports—that it was out of date and not sufficiently clear. We've updated that, reflecting the concerns of the Public Interest Advocacy Centre.

Other amendments include technical amendments to clarify the operation of new provisions and to improve the operation of planning provisions in section 23. We want to provide certainty about the amount of funding that participants have available during a specified time and assist participants in managing their funding. Our amendments clarify exceptional circumstances when payments can be made above a relevant funding amount. Our amendments make clear the legislative instruments setting out the needs assessment process and the method for calculating reasonable and necessary budgets, and that the minister needs to have regard to section 4(9A), which states that 'people with disability are central to the NDIS'. So we're putting in a specific endorsement of the principle of co-design. We're placing limitations on the proposed new powers of the CEO to request a participant to attend an assessment or examination. But we do need some powers because, at the moment, there are 13,000 participants whom we are unable to contact. That's not a realistic proposition going forward.

We are expressly going to require the CEO to provide a needs assessment report to the participant. There's been talk in the scheme that, somehow, participants won't get to be consulted about their needs assessment. That's not true. There's also a myth, which has been circulated, that review rights around the needs assessment are being abolished—they're specifically not. In fact, I thank Dr Ryan and PIAC, the Public Interest Advocacy Centre, and others for making sure that we are doubled down on the basis of the existence of internal/external review processes.

See this speech in context