Jordon Steele-John (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I want to thank the minister for her responses to my subsequent lines of questioning. I must say, as an aside, I've dealt with a couple of social services ministers in my last two years here and have always found your office to be receptive and for you, personally, to be willing to engage in the substance of the discussions at hand. If you ever want to have a chat about AFOs, I'm your man, because I used to wear them. I can tell you all about them, backwards, sideways and what kind of cartoon prints you can have put on them if you want to.

I want to return firmly to the substance of the bill, and I will inform the chamber as to why. We have, ourselves, had a number of conversations about this issue, Minister. There's a high level of distrust in many ways between disabled people and various levels of government regardless of who's in office, because we've all at one time or another experienced a bit of systemic failure, discrimination, et cetera. So, in relation to the NDIS, and it was the same issue under Labor, there's always a need to clearly communicate one's thinking around a change—a change in policy, a change in direction. Communication is key. Communication has, at times, been not as good as it could have been between the agency and the public, between the government and the public in relation to the agency. That has subsequently led to, again, at times, unnecessary, undue concern in the community, unnecessary and unneeded concern in relation to the public and its aspirations for the NDIS. I'm sure it's resulted in a lot of letters and paperwork and various damage control for all sides of politics.

What I want to seek now to try to do is to clarify some elements around the bill in such a way that will give the Australian public a really solid line of sight, if you like, to the thinking of the government behind the proposition of the bill and, indeed, the various, shall we say, ways in which the central intent that the government is pursuing here is realised in the relevant pieces of legislation and, in so doing, either get to the nub of certain issues or, in fact, to allay certain community concerns.

So I'll start with what I hope is a simple question in relation to the legislation itself, and I note that the Commonwealth has covered this in a little bit of detail in relation to the inquiry into the bill. But for want of a better word, Minister, whose legislative 'baby', if you like, is this bill within the department? Who originally recommended it to Minister Robert, with the government subsequently adopting it as something it wanted to pursue?