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

The parliamentary scrutiny of the NDIS provided by the Senate is vital. Asking questions in this place of the government in relation to how they run the NDIS is so important because disabled people do not trust the major parties not to stab them in the back as the Liberal Party did over the decade that they were in power. As the NDIS was rolled out, they systematically and continually excluded disabled people from critical decision-making and attempted, again and again, to cut our plans and supports to make it harder for us to get on the scheme, and as a result so many people went for so long, and still go, without the support that they need. Quite frankly, it was hoped among the disability community that, having wrenched the Liberal Party out by the neck and, God willing, condemned them to the dustbin of history, that period of time in our lives, when we woke up week after week, month after month to headlines about the government of the day making changes to the NDIS in such a way that impacted our lives without consulting disabled people, was over.

Indeed, before the election the Labor Party made the promise that they would make no change to the NDIS without consultation and co-design, yet in the budget they broke that promise. A week before the budget, the Prime Minister led every mainland Premier—all of whom are Labor—and the Tasmanian Liberal Premier out into the public to announce a cap on the NDIS. And that cap was followed through with in the budget delivered by this government. The impact of that cap, or that cut, is that $74 billion—colleagues, $74 billion—will be removed from the NDIS funding pot over this decade. That $74 billion is being reported today—and I believe that this is accurate—as the single largest so-called saving in the budget. This is at a time when this government has committed to $368 billion—

more than $368 billion, I'm reminded by Senator Shoebridge now—nearly upwards of half a trillion dollars—on the AUKUS nuclear submarine project. This is at a time when they are continuing to commit in their budget to $54 billion in stage 3 tax cuts over the decade. These are tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit wealthy men—wealthy white men, I should make the bloody point.

In that budget, the single biggest 'saving' they could find was not scrapping the stage 3 tax cuts. It was not opposing the AUKUS proposal. It was cutting the NDIS. And, just in case disabled people hadn't got the message, just in case we hadn't really understood where the priorities of this government were, they really drove it home by failing to commit a single dollar to the implementation of the recommendations that will come from the historic royal commission into disability abuse, which will be handed down in December. This means that when those recommendations are handed down disabled people will have to continue to wait until the next budget cycle, when—I assume—some form of funding for the recommendations will be provided.

In case that wasn't enough, they also failed to listen to the disability community and raise the rate of the disability support pension across the board, which we have been pleading with the government to do, for so long, because of the expense of being disabled in Australia. Disabled people in this community will not cop this cut. We will not be gaslit by any government or any minister that tries to tell us that a so-called target isn't a cut, particularly not by a mob that, when they were in opposition, made much hay out of the exact same language from the Abbott government in relation to health and education.