David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Minister Shorten—a $600,000 salary for a PR spinner in Minister Shorten's office and a $14.4 billion cut to people with disability. And $400,000 was spent on RedBridge commissioned focus groups by Minister Shorten's office—and a $14.4 billion cut to the budget for people with a disability. And what did RedBridge come out with? They came out with this ugly smear campaign. They actually put it in writing. This is what they said to the government. They said there was a bit of a problem trying to sell a $14.4 billion cut to support for people with disability; that might not pass the pub test. So they decided they'd spin it, and they said:

When we presented rorts, fraud, and unreasonable pricing as posing an existential threat to the NDIS, we were able to create an environment in which respondents were amenable to reforms designed to counter these things—

and make a $14.4 billion cut. So, when you highlighted a tiny, tiny minority of spending being potentially misapplied—some of it clearly misapplied—and when you made it about that and not about the essential needs of people with disability, the spinners in the minister's office thought they could sell this cut.

Well, the disability community aren't fooled, because they know what it means to them, their friends and their families. They know what a $14.4 billion cut looks like. It looks like some pretty tough, brutal years of not having the support you need, of your carers being utterly exhausted, of people not getting a break, of people not getting essential medical and other support needs. They know that's what it means, that it's not just a media release.

Then, when you look into the detail of the bill, this government wants to set up some sort of framework for pushing people off the NDIS into some supports that it thinks that, at some point, the states and territories might provide. There's no pathway identified for the government to have these state and territory supports in place in any reasonable time and no identifiable funding arrangement, so what will Labor do? It'll kick people off the scheme and push them towards services that don't even exist, leaving them with nothing.

The bill will also make it easier for bureaucrats to put up walls and barriers to prevent people—people who desperately need help—from getting onto the scheme in the first place. The bill is also going to allow bureaucrats to force disabled people to undergo mandatory psychiatric or physical examinations in order to make a decision about whether or not they will take them off the scheme. That is unquestionably going to traumatise and retraumatise many participants, and many won't be willing to do that. Many who won't be willing to go through that further traumatising review by some hatchet doctor chosen by the scheme are then going to find themselves kicked off the scheme.

What about the practical reality of somebody who can't get a psychiatrist's assessment or the specialist's assessment within 90 days? The practical reality is that thousands and thousands of people with disability won't be able to, and the government's quite comfortable with them just being kicked off the scheme by a bureaucrat who has chosen to given them that requirement. There are so many things in this bill that were not properly explored. They were not properly explored in the inquiry because the government wanted to shut it down when it got too hot.

But it wasn't just in the inquiry where we saw this government trying to gag the community and silence advocates and silence people with disability. Did I mention that this is a bill that's proposing to make some of the most significant changes to the scheme in the 10 years that it's been up and running? I want to say this about the scheme: yes, we have the coalition talking about criminals and we have Labor talking about junkets to Brazil that don't exist and attacking the scheme. This scheme has fundamentally changed people's lives for the better. It has lifted people out of poverty, giving them the support that they've desperately needed, and made this country a fairer place. It's incredibly important. If you care about a society that treats people with genuine equality, then the NDIS is critical to that.

This government sought to ram these changes through without any kind of transparent consultation with the disability community. There was no attempt to build consensus or to understand whether there was a way of working together or of travelling together to find ways to hold down cost pressures but keep the core support and the core decency of giving people agency and power over the packages of support that they need. There was no effort at all to do that. Instead—this evidence was presented to the committee—groups and individuals were picked out one by one and invited to participate in consultations, but they were required to sign legally binding gag agreements, or non-disclosure agreements. There wasn't a single public consultation process for this bill before it was introduced. How bad must a change be for you to sign up the community to non-disclosure agreements before being willing to talk to them? It's this bad. It turns out that it's '$14.4 billion cut to people with disability' bad. That's the kind of bad it is.

Having consulted in secrecy and gagged the sector, they then didn't even put out a draft bill. There was no exposure draft. There was no opportunity for the community and disability groups to consult on an exposure draft. They just rammed in a bad piece of legislation downstairs. They rammed it in and tried to ram it through, and the bill as introduced does some pretty noxious things. It introduces so-called 'NDIS supports' to replace the core concept of the existing scheme, which is 'reasonable and necessary supports'.

Do you know one thing that gives people with some comfort about the NDIS? At the core of the NDIS is a promise that if you have a disability and you need help you will get reasonable and necessary support. That is such a fundamental promise that should be made—and kept—to people with disability, but this bill rips it away. It removes that fundamental pillar from the NDIS. Instead of that, it talks about 'NDIS supports', which will be defined by the government, put in neat categories, listed on a table and have no connection to a person's actual life and to what they need to live their life to the fullest. It totally removes that reference to somebody as a whole person with a complex set of needs and, instead, it chops and dices and slices people on the basis of that little disability there, this issue here and that issue there, and refuses to treat people as people. That's really what's at the core of this: this refusal to treat people with as whole people with real needs. They're going to be begging for individual NDIS supports instead of getting the reasonable and necessary support they need.

What does the sector say about it? The Disability Advocacy Network of Australia—and I want to commend them for the work that they do of bringing together so many groups and showing so much clarity about this bill—said:

Our organisations are deeply disappointed that the Senate Committee did not listen to the evidence and expertise of people with disability, our families, supporters and organisations, who made extensive, and detailed submissions about the flaws in the proposed legislation.

We have engaged with the Committee over three hearings and provided substantial evidence and lived experience. People with disability feel a loss of trust in the Parliamentary process that promises to listen to us, as we contemplate significant reform to the services and supports provided through the scheme.

And they said this, which I think is a telling summary:

The legislation as it stands will restrict support to some parts of a person's disability, instead of their whole person. People with disability told the Senate Committee about how we do not fit into neat little boxes that can be assessed separately. This is unfair, difficult to implement and will result in significant hardship and harm for people with disability.

That's the evidence. Don't do this. Don't rush this legislation through. Don't strip away these core supports. Act with some decency. Press pause, put it aside and work together with people with disability and their supports across this country.

I want to commend my colleague Senator Steele-John for the work he's done. We're up here in the bleachers of this chamber, and I'm proud to sit next to Senator Jordon Steele-John, but, after six years, surely my colleague should be able to sit anywhere in this chamber—surely he should. It's that mindset that keeps Senator Jordon Steele-John here and it's that mindset that's going to drive this bill through. Look to people as whole people.