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

When I was about 10 years old, I started using a manual wheelchair for the first time. The state run disability service system in Western Australia at that time gave you the option to choose between three wheelchairs. I tried them out and trialled them. None of them fit properly. All of them hurt. None of them had the right type of cushion, and none of them had side guards, simple bits of plastic, so that the dog poo, mud or rainwater that you might run through wouldn't get on your clothes or your skin. Because none of those chairs worked, because they lacked a cushion and those basic pieces of plastic, I and my family had to fight and fight and fight to get a wheelchair that actually worked, because the wheelchair that worked and the cushion and guards I needed weren't on the government approved list for wheelchairs in WA.

Eventually we got them. We got them because of a great team of allied health professionals and because of a mum who had spent 20 years as a social worker in the United Kingdom and had the skill to push back on the system. But God it was hard, and it was so stressful and so degrading to sit in the office of the person who could approve these changes and have to justify why I needed the wheelchair that worked for me. It made me feel terrible. At one point during the conversation, that government employee said to me, 'Well, Jordon, if we give you a wheelchair that costs that much money, we won't have enough money to put safety belts on buses for kids who go to special schools.' When I asked, 'Please can I have the pieces of plastic so that the dog poo doesn't get on my clothes and go into my skin and give me a pressure sore,' the response was, 'Well, the rules here say all we're meant to do is fund you for a wheelchair in your home.

This was the reality of the state based systems before the NDIS. You had to fight against a government approved list, a list of yes or no. You had to burn yourself into the ground to get anything, and there were only a couple of government approved providers that you could choose from. It was a terrible, disconnected system that led people to be abused and that constrained us, harmed us and made life more difficult for us and for our families. So we campaigned together—disabled people, our families, our allies, our organisations and the people that work with us—for a better way, for a nationally consistent system of supports that would enable you to get funding for the services that you need, for the equipment that you need, for the therapies that you need and for the support workers that you need to live a life with dignity, independence, purpose and aspiration. We campaigned for a system that would provide you with individual supports based on your specific needs and empower you to have agency over how they were used, empower you to be able to decide who came into your home and who gave you a wash, enable you to live independently on your own if that's what you chose to do and enable you to build a network of professionals around you that were paid properly for their time so that they could provide you with their expertise. We wanted a scheme that would enable disabled people to live, our families to live and the barriers in our society and community to be brought down.

We campaigned for our NDIS, and a decade ago we won it. Together, we spent that next decade fighting to protect it. We knew all too well that the establishment of the NDIS did not mean that the barriers would vanish. It meant that we had established a foundation stone upon which to build a life for ourselves and hope for our communities and our families and that we were now charged, as disabled people, with its dogged and determined defence. As disabled people, we know that government, if left to its own devices, makes choices about us without us. In every space, from whether there is an accessible entrance way to a public building to whether we are forced to live together in institutions or whether we get to live or exist at all, government, if left alone, makes the choice about us without us, with catastrophic consequences. So we defended it again and again and again. During all of those years of Liberal government, we defended it. The Labor government, at the last election, pledged itself to that cause, to the defence of our NDIS. They promised that, if they were elected, they would stop the cuts and they would end the awful culture that had taken root within the agency, which treated disabled people and their family members as though we were trying to get something we weren't really entitled to, as though we were criminals trying to get access to things we knew we shouldn't have.

They promised, more than anything else, to make any change about our scheme in deep co-design with disabled people, acknowledging that co-design requires consent of the parties to the process of co-design. Can you imagine the reaction of the Australian disability community and our families, allies and organisations when, after two years of giving our time and our emotional labour and extending our trust to review after review, to the disability royal commission and to endless numbers of taskforces, we were landed in March of this year with a bill that goes so far beyond anything that we had asked for and so far beyond anything the evidence supported as to almost make a dark joke out of the commitment to co-design and out of every sentence that had, to that moment, dropped from the mouth of the minister?

Let me make very clear: this bill removes choice and control from the NDIS. This bill removes the ability to have individual-specific supports funded in our plan and replaces that ability, replaces those principles, with a government mandated list of 'yes' and 'no', a government mandated list of supports created by—wait for it—ministers of the Crown, of the state and federal governments. There is not a disabled person in sight among any of them. Under this bill they get to choose, behind closed doors, what they believe we as disabled people should be able to receive, when none of them understand what it means to be a disabled person, when none of them have demonstrated in their careers an actual understanding of what is needed from government to make the community more accessible and inclusive.

Yet they will decide. The federal government, under this bill, is granted the ability to divide disabled people into classes, into groups. How can we, in 2024, be asked to consider a bill that gives a government the power to divide 20 per cent of the population into a class? This bill gives the government the ability to force upon us mandatory government assessments, regardless of how many we have already endured, regardless of how much trauma we may be subjected to and regardless of whether, as a First Nations person, you know damn well that those tools—designed by white people, designed by academics in some far-off place—will not represent your needs, your support, your life or your culture.

These processes become mandatory. Under this bill, this assessment is exempt from review, and the result of that assessment is then translated into a capped budget. You might ask, how is it translated? Well, by a method—that's all the bill says. What will be in that method? How will it translate a number of complex needs assessments and personal contexts into a budget? We have no idea. But the federal government says: 'Trust us that we'll get it right. Trust us that we'll give you what you need. Give us all the power now to decide what you may be funded for, how you may be funded for it, who provides it and when it is provided, and we will do the rest. And we promise we'll do it with you, even though the way in which we made this bill was the literal definition of designing a piece of legislation behind closed doors. Trust us that we will consult. Trust us that we will make the right decisions for you.'

Well, no. The disability community do not trust this government. The disability community have been profoundly betrayed by this government. The disability community do not accept this bill. The disability community reject this bill. And we do not accept that it is appropriate to ram a piece of legislation that affects the lives of 660,000 Australian citizens and their families, their friends and their organisations through this parliament with 2½ days of hearing, when the amendments offered by the government to this point are little more than lipstick on a pig—an insult to the intelligence of any disabled person, any lawyer, any advocate who reads them. We do not accept this.

I asked you earlier to imagine what it was like to live as we lived before the NDIS. I asked you to imagine how hard you would fight for something better. I now ask you to imagine how hard you would fight to defend the scheme—the supports and the services—that you need to live a good life or that your child needs to live a good life. I ask you to imagine it. If you fail, don't worry, because we are about to show you just how hard we fight, just how much we are willing to give and just how many of us vote.