John McVeigh (Groom, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. Will the Prime Minister update the House on how the government is ensuring that people with a significant disability can access the care that they need to live with dignity? Is the Prime Minister aware of any alternative approach?

Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for his question. The National Disability Insurance Scheme is a critical social and economic reform. It is a great national enterprise. It was established under the Labor government, with the full support of the coalition. It was a bipartisan enterprise. But unless it is fully funded it fails to deliver to the very people who need it most: Australians living with severe and permanent disability.

The opposition have consistently claimed that they fully funded the NDIS. We expect this from the opposition leader, because he prefers to play politics with this issue rather than deal with the substance. He says one thing on this and, as on so many other issues, he does another. He said on 11 May that the Disability Insurance Scheme was fully funded when Labor was in office. In his budget reply speech he said:

Labor did not just create the NDIS; we fully funded it, we budgeted it …

But then, only yesterday, as he endeavoured to justify defying the wishes of the majority of his own shadow cabinet, defying the advice of his own colleagues to support the government's decision to increase the Medicare levy by 50 basis points—instead of supporting that, he has wanted to differentiate himself and play the old politics of envy to which he is so accustomed nowadays. And when he sought to justify that, he said he had a fairer and better way to fund the scheme.

Well, was it funded or not? Yesterday he admitted he had not funded it at all. He admitted it needed more money. He claimed to have an alternative method. Everything he said in government, everything he said in opposition, until yesterday, affirmed that great untruth which we all saw through but which he adhered to: that it had been funded. But of course now he admits what we know to be true: that there is a funding gap.

We have presented a fair way of dealing with this: to increase the Medicare levy by half a per cent. It is exactly the approach he took when he was in government and which he called on us to support—and we did—and which he said we would be 'stupid' or 'dumb' if we did not support. We supported it, we backed it in, because we knew it was fair. He can do the same today as Craig Emerson has urged him to do, and as more and more members of the Labor Party know in their hearts is right: support the NDIS, back it in and pay for it. (Time expired)