Linda Reynolds (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I too rise to speak on this NDIS report. The areas I want to focus on are the coalition comments, particularly in relation to the financial sustainability and transparency of the scheme. Financial sustainability and transparency light the heart of the future success of this world-first and incredibly life-transforming scheme. When in government, as the minister, I significantly increased the amount and regularity of NDIS data that was released publicly. Sadly, this transparency has been progressively eroded by the Albanese government, to the point where current actuarial data is no longer available on the future projections of the scheme beyond the next three years. There is a very clear reason for that, which I'll come to shortly. The government have made $74 billion worth of cuts to the NDIS program over the next 10 years, and they have now hidden any of the data publicly were participants, senators and the Australian public could have found out exactly where those cuts are coming from.

To put it in context, the scheme in 2019 was just under $10½ billion. What the last quarterly report—which was thankfully released, albeit very late by the government—has now demonstrated is that the scheme is almost that in the first quarter of this year alone. Those $74 billion cuts apparently are going to come from a framework of initiatives that have yet to be implemented and a framework that does not yet exist. It is no wonder they are not revealing the data.

Again to put the scheme in context, the last publicly available NDIA actuarial forecasts predicted the scheme will have more than one million participants by 2032 and cost Australian taxpayers close to $100 billion annually. This quantum of growth is not reflected in the latest federal Labor government's budget, hence why they haven't released this year's actuarial forecasts. The government continues to refuse to provide the detail on where these cuts are coming from. Instead, they're claiming—as I said—a yet-to-be-developed financial framework that will magically make $74 billion in savings without cutting either of the two drivers of the insurance costs to the scheme, the number of participants and the average cost per participant. Why is this important in relation to this report? Coalition members absolutely understand that, no matter how good the recommendations in this report might be, if you cannot fund them and you cannot even fund the scheme then, no matter what recommendations this place makes, they are pointless because they cannot be funded.

Let's have a look at what we have gleaned from the reports they have made available. The quarterly report, which has just been released, has five key figures which combined demonstrates that this government cannot deliver those $74 billion worth of savings over the next 10 years without slashing participant numbers and slashing participant packages. They very cunningly hid that data until after the next election, but I can guarantee you they will not get away with a $74 billion fraud on Australians with serious and permanent disabilities. The quarterly reports says:

Total Scheme expenses for the 3 months to 30 September 2023 were $10.1 billion …

That is one per cent higher than the estimates in June this year. The second point is that in September, so this last quarter, total planned inflation for that single quarter was 5.5 per cent, which annualised is well over 15 per cent. Remember that 15 per cent because the government are trying to tell us that they are trying to cut the annual increase down to eight per cent when inflation went up in one quarter from 12 per cent to over 15 per cent. Somehow without cutting participant plans and cutting participant numbers they are magically going to reverse that trend.

The third piece of interesting data is that participant numbers themselves are still increasing significantly and by three per cent in the last quarter alone when over 21,000 new participants joined the scheme. This quarterly increase is the equivalent to an annual increase to the scheme of 15 per cent. These numbers are still trending upwards when the government is telling us these mythical yet-to-be-identified measures are magically going to drop the scheme's growth. The fourth bit of interesting data they have tried to hide but cannot is that the average payment per participant during the last quarter was $63,600 per annum, or 1.3 per cent higher than the projections from the last budget alone. Participant numbers, average plan costs and the total budget amounts are all still trending upwards, and, significantly, there was no reduction in the average plan budgets of participants who were continuing in the scheme. In fact, that number was still trending upwards.

You have a scheme that is still exploding in numbers and an insurance scheme where the two drivers of costs, participant numbers and the average cost per participant, are not and cannot be controlled by the federal government on behalf of the taxpayers. That is why in every quarter of every budget since 2019 those costs and numbers have been going up. No matter what committees in this place report, no matter what review Bill Shorten is hiding from this place and people with disabilities—the independent review that has taken of time a long time, which he has, the states have, but is not going to be released to us—and unless structural changes are made that mean the government of the day or board can control both drivers of cost, the scheme is not sustainable. This government is not actually offering a hand of bipartisanship, as we did to the current government and I did as minister over two years ago when I said, 'Let's work together to fix this to put it on a sustainable trajectory,' and that means it can't live within the budget the taxpayers give them. They are hiding actuarial data and putting to people with serious and permanent disability the completely false and cruel narrative that, while the scheme costs are going up, they can somehow cut $74 billion from the scheme over the next 10 years without cutting plans and participant numbers. It is probably the cruellest financial hoax of any government in living memory, and certainly we on this side will not let them get away with it.

In finishing, I want to highlight that, while they suppressed the annual financial sustainability report, which is the actuarial data—it has been 239 previously, with probably well over a hundred tables—in their four-page actuarial report they had the Government Actuary's report for the annual report. The Government Actuary could not have been any more damning. They didn't even give the Government Actuary the full actuarial data, the projections over 10 years. He got the executive summary of the report and some draft Excel spreadsheets from the minister and the agency. He has clearly said he does not believe the numbers from the NDIS. He said he considers this risk to be greater in the middle term, which is exactly the data the government is now hiding from us. Remember, they have gone from giving us 10 years of actuarial forward data to giving us three. Guess what? That gets them through the next budget so they can maintain the fiction that they are not cutting the scheme by $74 billion. In fact, with the cost of the scheme still rising greater than was forecast—they were trying to get it down to eight per cent, and in the last quarter it has gone from 12 to 15 per cent—not only will it have to be $74 billion; they're going to have to rip out even more than that to bring it down to the eight per cent. (Time expired)