Hollie Hughes (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Climate Change and Energy) Share this | Hansard source

A couple of weeks ago in estimates we had an opening statement delivered by Minister Farrell which, I have to say, was probably the most disgusting opening statement I've ever heard in any inquiry, let alone at Senate estimates. The blatant politicisation of the National Disability Insurance Scheme that's being conducted by those opposite is nothing short of appalling. I acknowledged to Senator Farrell that clearly he had not written that statement—that it had been written for him by Minister Shorten.

The NDIS has been a scheme that has had bipartisan support. We, in government, always reached out across the aisle and said: 'Help us help participants and their families on the NDIS. Let's work together to make sure this scheme is the best it can be.' Yet those opposite are now using those most vulnerable in our society to manipulate union membership and absolutely destroy the 'choice and control' principles of the NDIS. How do we know this? We know because they're now trying to push through inquiries into registered and unregistered providers. For those that don't understand and don't access the NDIS, 'unregistered providers' doesn't mean that they're not qualified. It doesn't mean that they don't have skills, experiences and qualifications. For a lot of them, it means that they're sole operators. They work for themselves. They work running their own small business, and they are not part of the old block funded routine that we know served disabled people so poorly. But what are we seeing here? We're seeing a push back to people having to use the big old block funded providers. I can assure you, as someone who uses both registered and unregistered providers, I will lead the rallies in every state, in every marginal seat and everywhere I can go, because I use an unregistered provider who charges me about a third of the rate of a big block funded provider. The unregistered provider has been with my family for well over a decade and knows my son and our family better than anyone. This is my story, but this is the story of so many people who have children with a disability.

What was also interesting is so much of this is couched in, 'We want to cut down on fraud.' We didn't get much out of the CEO of the National Disability Insurance Agency at estimates, but one of the things that we did get was that self-managed participants of the NDIS have the lowest level of fraud. That's because it is a direct relationship between the participant and their family and that provider. They know when that provider was with their family, because they manage the plan themselves. We know that once it goes into the bureaucracy of these big providers it's a case of, 'Oops, we accidentally billed you for a day that you didn't provide a service.' We know that the fraud is occurring within the big-scale operators, the ones who are managing plans on behalf of participants, not where participants are managing it for themselves.

We know this is just about a push for the Health Services Union and pushing all NDIS service providers in what we already know is a super-thin market. One of the biggest things that we know about the NDIS is that participants struggle to find enough service providers because the market is already thin. What are those opposite doing? They want to make it even thinner. They want to spread it out so that, if you're not a part of the HSU, you can no longer work with people with a disability. Shame on you! It is absolutely appalling.

To Senator Scarr's point about the claim that it's going to damage the relationships with the states, I'll give you a little bit of a tip, because some of us do talk to people across the country at all sorts of levels of government. Disability, education and health state ministers don't know what they've been signed up to. They've got their own budgets to manage, but they don't know what additional supports they're going to have to put into classrooms or into community health—into all of these areas—because it is done under secrecy and a cloak of darkness. We know that these kids and families, particularly in the early childhood strain, are going to be left even more vulnerable than from the challenges they currently face under the scheme as it is.

It is absolutely disgraceful that we are here again. Senator Steele-John, NDIS Monday will be back, and we'll be back and back, because this is not going to be allowed to stand. This is a government that promised transparency. We know that it's a slogan only as good as the $275 off your power bill. We're never going to see transparency. We're never going to see any honesty or integrity from those opposite, just as we're never going to see $275 off our power bills.

Question agreed to.