Alison Byrnes (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That this House:

(1) acknowledges that the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) can be life-changing for Australians with disability;

(2) recognises the NDIS is not working as effectively as it should due to a decade of neglect and mismanagement by the previous Government, creating an urgent need to:

(a) improve outcomes for participants;

(b) restore trust in the scheme and certainty for participants and their families; and

(c) improve the effectiveness and sustainability of the NDIS and broader social and economic benefits, without imposing the types of blunt force cuts favoured by the previous Government;

(3) notes the measures the Government has already taken to get the NDIS back on track, including:

(a) installing new leadership at the National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA) and putting people with a disability at the centre of the scheme;

(b) reducing the inherited 4,500 case backlog of expensive, time-consuming appeals before the Administrative Appeals Tribunal by 2000 cases to date;

(c) reducing the number of people with disability trapped in hospitals despite being medically fit for discharge; and

(d) funding 380 new positions in the NDIA for better and faster planning decisions for people with disability and their families, carers, disability service providers and workers;

(4) calls on Members of the House to support the work ahead to make the NDIS the world-leading scheme it was designed to be, through:

(a) the root and branch review of the NDIS to improve its effectiveness, so that future generations receive the benefits of the scheme;

(b) planning for a workforce that can support the projected increase in NDIS participants;

(c) establishing a senior executive role within the NDIA to bolster its stewardship of the sector; and

(d) reducing waste and fraud so money intended for participants is not syphoned off or squandered; and

(5) further notes the benefits to the Australian community and our economy when we invest in people with disability and break down barriers to their participation in social and economic life.

Firstly I would like to congratulate Karen Burdett and the team at the Cram Foundation, who celebrated 90 years last Friday night. The deputy chair of Cram, William Dowson OAM, was a wonderful MC, and we were delighted to hear from Pam Milone, who spoke about her daughter Kate's wonderful home at Cram, and also from Wollongong local Michael Theo from Love on the Spectrum, who gave us some wonderful words of advice on the night. There were so many contributors across the Illawarra community who helped in making the Cram Foundation what it is today from very humble beginnings, in particular Ladies Auxiliary volunteer Martha Cram, who bequeathed her home to the organisation when she passed in 1965. I would also like to mention two other people very special to Cram: Cram's only life member and former chair, Patrick Roberts OAM, and also the current chair, Linda Wright, who gave us a snapshot of the times locally when Cram was established 90 years ago. Most of all, I would like to thank Cram's amazing team of staff, who carry the same passion and commitment to providing around-the-clock support to help participants live their very best lives.

I know the power of the NDIS to help people living with a disability. I also know from firsthand experience the damage caused by nine years of neglect and mismanagement by the previous government. A scheme that was designed to build trust and give choice to people with a disability in their care has gradually been eroded. Throughout my career, I have advocated on behalf of so many people dealing with heartbreaking challenges and unfairness within the NDIS. These are just the cases who have contacted me, and I can't help but wonder how many people missed out on the support that they need because there was no one to advocate on their behalf. It isn't right. People living with disabilities should not have to fight a crippled system that is supposed to help them. But, finally, Australians living with a disability and their loved ones have a government that is getting the NDIS back on track. It was a Labor government that developed and introduced the NDIS, and it will be a Labor government that fixes it.

There is a lot to fix. We are restoring the NDIS to put people with a disability at its centre. We have appointed Australian Paralympic champion and disability advocate Kurt Fearnley AO as the chairman of the board of the NDIA. There are now also five people on the NDIA board who have a disability—the highest number in its history. Our independent review into the NDIS will give a voice to people with a disability, their carers and families, disability care providers, and workers—voices that have been shut out for far too long, voices that we need to listen to.

We are helping people with a disability who are trapped in hospitals despite being well enough to be discharged. Investing in people with a disability and removing barriers to employment is good for our economy and good for participants. We are providing $20 million through the Building Employer Confidence and Inclusion in Disability grants, which will help employers to hire and train people with a disability. We have reduced the backlog of appeals to the AAT—which were up 400 per cent under the previous government—from 4,500 to approximately 2,500 so far. We are funding 380 new positions in the NDIA to improve the rate at which people with disability and their families and carers are provided planning decisions. We are planning to increase the workforce needed to fill these vital care sector jobs. This began with the NDIS Jobs and Skills Forum in August. The forum brought together NDIS participants, their families, employers and unions to discuss the needs and concerns in the sector.

It is no secret that the former government left the NDIA in a terrible state and that the NDIS was not delivering for Australians. My own office has been inundated with local cases of people waiting for months to get their programs fixed due to funding cuts that they've had over the past couple of years. We need to fix it, and we need to do it urgently. That is why, with this motion, I am calling on all members of the House to support the work that we have ahead of us. We can make the NDIS the world-leading scheme it was designed to be, and we can restore hope and dignity to people living with a disability in our communities and help them to live their best lives.

Rebekha Sharkie (Mayo, Centre Alliance) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is the motion seconded?

Susan Templeman (Macquarie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I second the motion and reserve my right to speak.

Monique Ryan (Kooyong, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The National Disability Insurance Scheme has now been active since 1 July 2016. The NDIS was established to provide people with a disability with the support that they need to live an ordinary life. It's the only national scheme of its kind in the world. At its introduction, the NDIS was touted as having the potential to effect the same sort of generational shift as Medicare had achieved in the 1970s. Unlike previous such systems, the NDIS was designed to provide people with a disability with choice and control over how, when and where their services and support are delivered to them. They should be in control of this process. They should be able to choose what works best for them.

In recent times this vision has been lost. In the last few years hundreds of consumers with autism, intellectual and psychosocial disabilities have lost their funding after the NDIA ruled that it wasn't value for money. Services have been stopped. Parents and carers have had to quit their jobs to look after their loved ones. As a member of the parliamentary Joint Standing Committee on the NDIS I've had the honour of hearing from providers and participants in recent weeks in a series of hearings in major cities in Australia. Some of those testimonials were really difficult to hear. They were raw, they were confronting and they were heartbreaking.

The NDIS system has the potential to be world leading but it has become adversarial. Participants are expected to justify why their static or progressive medical condition is not improving. They have been forced to undergo annual assessments which engender uncertainty and anxiety, when there's often no good reason for these serial assessments. They're having to take on review processes and the AAT without support or representation. We are forcing disabled Australians, their parents, their partners and their carers to battle a system in which transparency and generosity have been sacrificed to red tape and mean-spirited bureaucracy.

What we need from our NDIS is effective coordination and collaboration to make sure that people don't fall through the gaps between the NDIS and other services like health, justice, housing and transport. We need to focus on making the NDIS work for people with different needs, including culturally safe services, better regional access, expert planning, timely reviews and skilled support coordination. We need a service safety net which prevents serious harm when the NDIS market fails or when people need urgent access to NDIS supports. We need to put people first.

Next year I will be moving a private members bill to expedite placement of hospitalised NDIS participants into supported accommodation to get people who have been waiting months or years in hospital into housing which meets their needs and also frees up valuable hospital beds. It'll be a good thing, but it's just the start of what we need. We also need better services in rural, regional and remote areas. We need culturally accessible services for Aboriginal and Torres State Islander peoples and for people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. We need integration and coordination with mainstream support services. And we need more client engagement and transparency in the assessment and review processes.

In 2008 Australia became a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The first principle of this convention is to promote, protect and ensure the full and equal enjoyment of all human rights and fundamental freedoms for all people with disabilities and to promote respect for their inherent dignity. In recent years, this country has reverted to forcing people with handicaps to come cap in hand to our government for support. We owe them more than that. We owe them their dignity and our NDIS must deliver it.

Susan Templeman (Macquarie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Cunningham for moving this motion. It is something that so many of us deal with on a day-to-day basis in our offices, working hard to support people for whom the NDIS is still not the perfect system, although we all acknowledge what a difference it makes to people when it works well. It's been a priority for the Albanese government, in the last six months, to really try and get to the bottom of what the barriers have been in the NDIS that have made it one of the biggest challenges that my office has experienced in the six years I've been in parliament. There are many things we have done. One of them is install new leadership. Really, it is not just the leaders but what you task them to do—that is, to put people at the heart of the system. People with disability are reason that we are here, and the systems are designed to work around them.

Another key priority has been around reducing the number of people with disability who are essentially trapped in hospitals. They are medically fit but have been unable to get out of hospital. For example, there were 1,400 people with a disability stuck in hospitals in August instead of being discharged once they were fit. We all know that that time in hospital results in care being delivered in completely the wrong setting at a higher cost, and it blocks other people from being able to use those beds. It costs the health system hundreds of millions of dollars each year and that is just the Commonwealth cost, let alone what the states pay.

The NDIA has been implementing our initial plan with some early successes. In October the NDIS minister announced that 50 hospital liaison officers nationally are now working with states and territories to, as he describes it, wrangle support and accommodation teams so that things are moving. In addition, there are 54 dedicated specialist hospital discharge planners and they have greater powers to be able to get things done at a local level. The consequence of this is we have reduced the average wait time for an NDIS participant to leave hospital from 160 days to just 39. There are also more than 300 people not on that list that we had in August, that 1,400 kind of stuck-there list. So we are getting better outcomes for patients. That is one area we have focused on.

Another area is the backlog of cases before the AAT. It is horrific how people have had to go through massive legal hoops just to get a package they deserve. The AAT work has also made a difference to the backlog. Under the previous government there had been a 400 per cent increase in the number of cases being referred to the AAT, leaving a legacy of 4,500 cases in the backlog, people who were waiting for their day in court. We commenced an independent expert review process to address the poor experience of the NDIS participants who had a dispute and we are getting on top of that backlog. Over 2,000 inherited legacy cases have now been resolved. That will be 2,000 families whose lives will be a whole lot better. We have also funded 380 new positions in the NDIA to get better and faster planning decisions for people with a disability, which supports their families, their carers, their providers and all the workers. So there are a number of things we have done but there is clearly more to do.

Our root-and-branch review will make a difference. I commend groups like the group I work with very closely, Kindship, who did a survey of their members to tell me all the things that were still needing to be done. We know there is still a long list of issues that have not been resolved in our first six months, things that have been plaguing the system for nearly a decade. I look forward to working through those issues with my constituents.

I have a huge belief in the ability of the National Disability Insurance Scheme to transform people's lives, to allow older parents of people with a disability to sleep at night knowing that there is a plan in place for their child's future. There is so much we can do, and I know there is goodwill in this place to get it done and to support the workers who make this system a viable system.

Michael Sukkar (Deakin, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Social Services) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In rising to speak on this motion moved by the member for Cunningham, I think there are a few things worth highlighting. The first is that since the election we have seen a lot of rhetoric from the government and very little action. No doubt Australians will make judgements about the government in due course, and I think everyone will reasonably give the government time to implement some of the things that they have spoken about or, indeed, to address some of the issues that they have critiqued in opposition. The issue that many participants are having at the moment is the very significant change in rhetoric from the minister for the NDIS before the election to what the minister is saying now. Before the election, regrettably, in my view, the then shadow minister, now minister, sought to turn the NDIS into a partisan political issue in a way I hadn't seen any other parliamentarian do.

Back in 2013, the coalition and Labor government of the day, in a bipartisan fashion, established the NDIS. It was really quite a coarse and toxic political environment that the now minister brought to this debate by turning it into a hyperpartisan issue. In that time, he simultaneously accused the coalition of cutting the NDIS to spending too much on the NDIS. So consistency certainly wasn't his strong suit in these arguments. But probably most significant for the participants in the NDIS, before the election, Minister Shorten, when he was shadow minister, said, 'There are no sustainability issues with the NDIS; there are none.' In essence, he ran around the building saying that anyone who talks about sustainability of funding for the NDIS and its cost curve is somehow trying to undermine the scheme. Before the election, when he was asked whether he thought the scheme was sustainable, he said:

I don't buy that there's some catastrophic disaster happening to the NDIS.

Earlier in the year, he also said:

You can't move around the corridors of Parliament in Canberra without tripping over a Coalition Minister whispering the Scheme is unsustainable … I'm here to tell you today that is a lie.

Before the election, the minister, when he was trying to run a hyperpartisan and really regretful campaign that politicised the NDIS, he was saying that it's completely sustainable and anybody that says it is not trying to undermine it. Fast forward to the Labor government and their most recent budget, we now see the rhetoric drastically change. The minister is now saying that there are sustainability issues with the cost of the NDIS, and it's something that will need to form part of the government's thinking and, indeed, their review. Why is that such a significant breach of faith? In my view, the minister went to the election knowing he was sending a very strong message to those 500,000 NDIS participants and their families that he could, in some magical way, address all the problems and wave his magic wand to address all the problems in the NDIS. I suspect lots of people supported the government based on those promises. Now we see a completely different view.

The question for the government has to be: do they believe it's sustainable or not? If it's sustainable, as they said before the election, let's see how they plan to fund the expected growth in the scheme in a way that doesn't drastically change it. If they are now trying to use the review as some way to break that promise before the election, the minister should have the decency to fess up now because I can tell you that there are many NDIS participants and their families who are very nervous because the rhetoric has changed so drastically from before to after the election.

This is ironic coming from me as a shadow minister, but the minister still does sound like a shadow minister. He's running around critiquing all the problems with the NDIS, commissioning a review—a significant review in one case—without actually offering any solutions. Nothing's changed. The queues and the time that it takes to get into SDA accommodation have not changed. The minister's happy to talk about it to the enth degree, but he has been the minister for six months. Hurry up. Make sure the action meets the rhetoric.

Kate Thwaites (Jagajaga, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to thank the member for Cunningham for moving this motion. Like her and like so many of my colleagues, the NDIS is a critical issue for me and for members of my community. I know that, in terms of representations to my office in Jagajaga, this would be one of the top five issues that people bring to me—the challenges they are having with the NDIS, looking for my support for their interactions with the NDIA, and understanding interventions in outcomes that they just don't understand. This tells us something which I think we all know—that the NDIS, while a great scheme, is not working as it should for some participants.

Many people do have excellent experiences as part of the NDIS. I'm so pleased when I come across a parent who tells me that the NDIS has literally been life changing for their children. There are a lot of those parents, and that is something to absolutely be acknowledged and celebrated. The NDIS is a great Labor reform. It is a great Labor legacy, and now, it seems, it is up to a new Labor government to make sure that we fix the NDIS and that it is working as it should for all participants.

We do want to ensure that those people who had experiences that they just shouldn't have had, during the last nine years of the coalition government, don't have those experiences into the future. I don't want it to be a continuing situation that I have parents coming into my office, saying: 'I just don't understand how this decision was made. I can't get them to explain. What's behind this? Why are we at the AAT? Why are lawyers involved?' This isn't how the scheme was meant to operate. It is meant to give people with disability choice and control. At the moment, for some people, that is absolutely working, but it's not working for enough people. Our government wants to restore trust in the scheme. We want to see improved outcomes for participants and for the people who support them, and I absolutely know that my community wants to see this too.

At the beginning of this year, I wrote to households across my community about the NDIS because I had been hearing from so many people about problems they had encountered. I asked them to share their stories and their experiences so I could better advocate on their behalf. Across the feedback I received was a clear indication that our community wants the NDIS to be at its best. People saw the potential that's there for the NDIS to be as good as it can be, delivering supports and services to people in our community who need them. I continue to highlight that local desire, as well as the local experiences of NDIS participants and their families, with our minister. I am pleased to see that in the first six months of our government there are some very important steps that have been taken by our government to get the NDIS back on track.

It's not a small thing to say this includes the new leadership at the National Disability Insurance Agency, the NDIA. This is an important step. We know that those at the top of an organisation, any organisation, help set the standard. They're not the only people there, but they are important people there, and they do help to set the tone, set the standard and reinforce values. In the last couple of months, Kurt Fearnley has been appointed chairperson of the NDIA board, and he is joined by new board members Dr Graeme Innes and Maryanne Diamond. What these appointments bring is lived experience, which is so crucial to the scheme. They bring corporate and public sector experience and a great understanding and knowledge of the issues being experienced by so many people on the scheme. There is also a new CEO to help show to participants that this is a new chapter for the NDIA under our government.

The government has also sought to address some of the challenges that advocates have been highlighting with me and others as key issues. We are working to reduce the backlog of time-consuming, expensive AAT appeals that I know have caused so much stress and anxiety for too many people. In just five months, 2,000 inherited legacy cases have been resolved, slashing the backlog in half. This is really important. Again, I can't tell you how many families I've had come to me stressed about ending up at the tribunal. Our government is also reducing the number of people with disability unnecessarily stuck in hospitals despite being medically fit for discharge. We've reduced this to about 1,100 people and reduced the average wait time. We are funding 380 new positions in the NDIA to deliver better and faster planning decisions for participants, as well as their families, carers and providers, to give them that certainty so that they know what their pathway is, so that they understand what to expect and so that, in what can be a really stressful time, people feel supported—not like they are being told what they can't have, but like they are being supported with rules they can understand. These are all important changes.

Zoe Daniel (Goldstein, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Julia Gillard is rightly applauded for being the Prime Minister who established the NDIS. Indeed, she has declared it the achievement of which she is most proud—so too the government services minister, who deserves praise for his advocacy for the scheme as a member of that government and for standing up for the rights of people with disabilities when the previous government was doing its best to limit access to the scheme, tying up the disabled and their families in knots as they struggled to get the assistance to which they were entitled. These were issues which were raised with me repeatedly before the election, and that remains the case to this day. Constituents report the nightmares caused by care packages being changed, often without explanation, and then being caught up in lengthy battles in the AAT. The fact is that this retraumatises a highly vulnerable group of citizens, their families and their carers, and, if they're not traumatised, they're exasperated at the complexity and opacity of a system they were led to believe was there to help.

In December we're holding a forum on the NDIS in Goldstein, which is already almost sold out. Here are just a handful of examples from my community that have come to my attention. A constituent in her late 80s whose son has a disability has had changes made to his support package at short notice, with money running out in half the time it usually would. The constituent fears she will have to pay for his care now, at $10,000 a week.

Another constituent has had her disabled brother's hearing aid support stopped. Without the hearing aids, his hearing will be lost altogether. As her brother has an intellectual disability, he can only tolerate a fixed style hearing aid that he cannot feel or remove. Without hearing, her brother's already limited access to the world around him diminishes to almost nothing, seriously affecting his mood and how he relates to carers and others.

Another constituent has two girls, both born with severe disabilities. She and her husband are having difficulty coping, as they're trying to work as well as support their five- and three-year-old daughters. They aren't seeking anything more than the minimum day, and all of the experts they've spoken to think it's reasonable and necessary.

Unfortunately, the NDIA responses have been slow and complicated. Constituent experiences with local area support workers are highly variable and inconsistent, and having to revalidate cases every year or two is a full-time job for many families as they try to navigate the administrative tangle that is the NDIS.

I was disturbed to read in the Saturday Paper on the weekend that some of the departmental architects of robodebt are now in the bowels of the National Disability Insurance Agency. According to documents obtained by Rick Morton, they have or had been working out ways to outlaw the use of NDIS funds for what look on the face of it to be entirely reasonable purposes. For example, one note attached to a working document declares:

The drafting of the rules of what is an 'ordinary living expense' or 'goods and services specified in the rules' should provide us with a basis for making determinations of non-compliance and remove some of the questions of what is allowable / not allowable with the removal of the term 'reasonable and necessary'.

Sound familiar?

The minister told Radio National a fortnight ago that there'd been a lack of attention on the payment side, but he was clear that it was some service providers who were 'taking the scheme for a lend', as he put it. He added that there was 'rent-seeking behaviour by some providers' and 'there are rorts out there'. That is where the focus for the future must be—not on making it unnecessarily difficult and traumatising for people with disabilities and their families but on rooting out the rorts.

Rebekha Sharkie (Mayo, Centre Alliance) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

There being no further speakers, the debate is adjourned and the resumption of the debate will be made an order of the day for the next sitting.