Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I might leave the issue around legal privilege till then as well. Can I move on to advocacy. This is an issue that came up extensively, and the Greens also have an amendment on advocacy. Many submitters drew a clear distinction between the systemic advocacy to improve access for all people with a disability in specific areas of need, and they also looked at individual advocacy, particularly advocacy for individuals who are in dispute with the NDIA. On the weight of evidence, the Australian Greens, as I articulated in my second reading contribution, felt that it was better to leave the funding of advocacy outside the scheme, but we still felt it was very important, and we very strongly support the committee's recommendations that the concept of advocacy be included in the NDIS, which the government is doing through these amendments.

The role of advocacy is brought into sharp focus by the mechanisms by which each participant and others can seek to challenge and address decisions of the agency. We have supported the recommendation that launch sites should monitor this aspect. So the issue that came up was the immediate review and then going to what people felt was the more extreme AAT approach. They were looking for something in between. I understand the government's concern about setting a whole new process up through the launch sites, because they want to get this up and running, which is why the committee recommended that there be this process of monitoring this particular aspect to see if there are a lot of concerns coming up during the launch site process and to see whether there is a need for an intermediate step between those two levels of what is essentially appeal. There was, of course, that call for funding of advocacy.

So the problem here is that, yes, we totally get the weight of evidence that suggests that we should not be funding advocacy under the agency, but that then leaves out there the issue of advocacy and how we are going to fund it. The problem is that in the past—I am not pointing the figure at any particular governments here—we have seen funding for advocacy go up and down. We have had previous attempts to muzzle advocacy, and under this government there was the failure to index some of the grants to advocacy agencies—which was, I have to say, reversed, but it can be something that comes and goes, and that is not good for advocacy. So my question to government is: one of the recommendations in the report was funding of advocacy, so what is the government doing about funding for advocacy services, given that they will not be provided for through the scheme itself?