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

You know, these people were the NDIS rorters' best friends, and they just never knew it. I'll give them that credit. I don't say it was deliberate. I say it was just genuinely incompetent. If it's between a conspiracy and a stuff-up, these people are the stuff-up, not the conspiracy, on the fraud.

What we did was to set up our Fraud Fusion Taskforce—$126 million. That's a good idea. Why didn't you have it? We got all the agencies talking to each other. That's a good idea. Why didn't you have it? We put extra people in the investigation teams. That's a good idea. I don't know why you didn't do that.

We had the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission—the poor old NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission. For those of you who aren't students of history, we called for a disability royal commission in 2017. The former Prime Minister Mr Turnbull panicked and said, 'Oh, we can't have a royal commission.' That didn't work so well for him. He said, 'Instead we'll set up a quality and safeguards commission.' It opened its doors on 1 January 2018. The problem was that they put only 350 people into it. Then what happened was that those people weren't able to do their job properly. What we've seen since we came in, on top of our Fraud Fusion Task Force, our extra investigators and the range of other measures I've already outlined, such as changing payment system so we scrutinise them—that's a revolutionary idea!—is that we've now doubled the staff in the safeguards commission.

Here are another couple of fun facts which the amnesiacs opposite me seem to forget. When I became the minister, there was $231 million of NDIS payments under scrutiny. There's now several billion. When I came in, they had 41 investigations underway. There are now 220. There are now 510 compliance actions underway. We have 20 matters in court and another 12 matters with the DPP waiting to be progressed to court.

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