Joanne Ryan (Lalor, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today in response to a call made to me from local early intervention services for children with disabilities in my electorate. They are very concerned that there are currently 560 children who will be starting school in late January and who, at that point in their first year of school, won't be involved in the NDIS. This is alarming. Sitting behind them are another 1,400 children who will require support who need to be transferred quickly into the NDIS.

The NDIS only rolled out in my electorate in October this year, and I have to say, if I go back in time to the rollout plans for the NDIS, I took some comfort from the notion that most of the issues with the NDIS would be rolled out, because we all know that rolling out a large program like this for the first time across the nation is going to be difficult work. There are going to be problems that arise as the implementation progresses. So I took some comfort from the notion that being late in the rollout would mean that those people in my electorate who were in need of support in this program would have smooth sailing through the system. Lo and behold, that's not true. That is not true for the young people across the western region of Melbourne—2,000 of them, from zero to four years of age—who will be going into this system now without an advocate and without support. Some will be starting school with no support for, potentially, six months. This is just not good enough.

Of course, we're not surprised, because the NDIS has been through the merry-go-round of ministers, as we've seen. What this government has done with this incredibly important initiative is that they've taken a hands-off, arms-length approach. We have ministers on the other side and parliamentary secretaries on the other side who refuse to get their hands dirty in the nitty-gritty detail of what is a critically important program across this country. It is now going to impact on four-year-old children starting school. It's going to impact on their scores, it's going to impact on their teachers and it's going to impact on their families, as they are unsupported in this transition. I call on this government and I call on Minister Fletcher, the member for Bradfield, to get his hands dirty in the NDIS rollout, to make sure that we're ironing out the issues as we go and, please, to intervene to ensure that the funding gets put in place to ensure that these children get the support they need now. This can't wait until January; the action needs to be taken now.