David Feeney (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Defence) Share this | Hansard source

We have Senator Fifield's 100-year plan for action on disability insurance, spanning many parliaments and many changes of government, covering the years and the aeons. His is a program which leaves Fabian gradualism looking like a revolutionary movement. No doubt the Liberal Party has sent Senator Fifield into this place to defend his fig leaf, because in the Liberal Party's ERC there are challenges which are beyond human imagination. They have not only to meet the very real contest of a Labor budget in surplus but also they are increasingly under pressure to explain how their $70 billion black hole might be brought under some kind of rein. When they contemplate the challenge of their $70 billion black hole, I can just imagine the sympathy Senator Fifield will receive from his colleagues when he suggests that the coalition needs to match the Labor government's action through the National Disability Insurance Scheme. My heart goes out to him—his task is nigh on impossible. Not only is their ERC populated by economically illiterate members of this place and elsewhere; there is poor old Senator Sinodinos trying to bring order to this madness, and Senator Fifield himself must now front up to the parliament with his own inspirational multiparty committee and generational change over the span of centuries.

This government is very proud of the fact that it has come up with a plan that is real, a plan that is embraced by the sector and a plan that means real reform—and it is a plan that is funded. It is a plan that does not involve a committee; it involves changing people's lives. It is not a plan that involves bipartisan co-convenors; it is a plan that actually means people have real transformation in their challenges, their carers, their lives—