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

When it comes to the NDIS, disabled people have watched a bit of a political blame game play out for a long, long time now, and while that debate's been going on we have been falling through the cracks and suffering. And I've got to say, listening to the contributions that have been made so far, that I find myself deeply frustrated by the continuation of that blame game. The reality is, if you look at the history of the NDIS, mistakes have been made on both sides. And there is an attempt now to cast the contribution made on one side or the other as perfectly pure, when in reality nothing could be further from the truth.

Senator Hughes, in her contribution, talked about the rushed nature of the scheme—that it was rushed into being. There is some merit in that argument. It was rushed. I remember it. I remember campaigning for it. I remember looking at the time lines and thinking they were very ambitious. But you've got to remember why it was rushed. It was rushed into being because the Labor Party, the Greens and the disability movement knew that the Liberal Party wanted to kill it. We knew that you wanted to kill it, because your advisers were out there saying, 'Oh, it's a nice idea, but we can't quite afford it.' Maurice Newman, head of Tony Abbott's business advisory council: 'It's a nice idea but not something we can afford.' So, we knew it had to be brought into being.

Senator Hughes talks about demand, and this is something we hear from the government a lot: if there's more demand there'll be more funding. Well, I tell you now, there is more demand, and that demand is not being met. The agency is being suffocated by the staffing cap that has existed upon it, without reason, for the best part of 10 years now. The institutional knowledge that has been lost in that time is profound. The waste and inefficiency caused by outsourcing to the private sector has been horrendous, and the outcomes for disabled people have suffered as a result. Disabled people know exactly what has happened to their scheme in the past six years, and that is that it has been under the management of a party that never really believed in it in the first place but regarded it as a political third rail that they dared not touch. So, it was passed from one incompetent minister to the next, until it washed up with Mr Robert.

The reality of the NDIS today is that it is letting far too many disabled people down. How do I know that? Because we keep dying. How do I know that? Because in the time that the NDIS has existed the rates of abuse, neglect and isolation have not moved a jot. How do I know that? I spend so much time talking with my friends, advocates who work in the space, going through horrendous stories of people having to waste their lives fighting agency decisions through administrative tribunal processes, just trying to get what they need, just trying to get what they are entitled to, just trying to get what they should be able to expect.

The real kicker in all of this is the structural underspend in this scheme that the government is now using to prop up its budget. I'll say it again really clearly: this government is balancing the books on the backs of disabled people. When you look at the driving causes of that underspend, it's not that people don't want services and supports; it's that they can't access them. If a deaf person in WA has had for a year 10 hours of interpreter support a day in their plan, when they sit back down with their NDIA planner in a year's time they won't have used half of it—not because they decided that they wanted to stay indoors but because currently they can't access that much interpreter support in WA because there is an absence of interpreters on the ground.

Those kinds of problems have been created by a fundamental lack of engagement in the disability space by both sides of politics. The real essence of why this scheme is still so much less than what people need is that neither side of politics in Australia actually truly understands what disability is in 2020. There is still so much belief in a medical model of disability that puts the impairment with the person rather than in a social model of disability that correctly identifies disability as the result of barriers in society created and sustained by ableism. That lack of acknowledgement has led to an approach to this scheme that has fallen back into the old pattern of turning to somebody who asks for support and saying: 'It's a bit too pricey. We just can't go that far.' That attitude needs to change, but it can't change until the NDIS has the resources that it needs and it ultimately can't change until everybody in this place takes their lead on the NDIS and every other piece of disability policy from disabled people. I thank the chamber for its time.