Dave Sharma (NSW, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this piece of legislation, the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Getting the NDIS Back on Track No. 1) Bill 2024, but it's worth noting that this government has now been in office for two years and, prior to the election, the minister responsible, Bill Shorten, said there were no problems with the NDIS and there was no need to get the NDIS back on track. The coalition, when in government, warned repeatedly and sought to have a mature conversation with state and territory governments, but also with the opposition, about putting the NDIS on a fiscally sustainable pathway. But Bill Shorten, the minister responsible—the member for Maribyrnong—was not open to those sorts of mature conversations. He variously accused us of running a scare campaign, said the NDIS was tracking just as predicted, said the coalition talk of cost blowouts was misinformation and ran a highly irresponsible scare campaign. Two years later, two years into office, he's finally accepted the disingenuousness of the claims he was making before the election, and now he's telling us the NDIS needs to get back on track. Well, it does need to get back on track. The NDIS last year cost us $32 billion. That's more than the cost of Medicare. The NDIS growth in costs is running at about 20 per cent per year. If that continues for the next three to four years unchecked, we will soon see spending on the NDIS eclipse the entire defence budget of Australia.

The NDIS is a worthwhile scheme. It's supporting some one in 50 Australians and their families, some 666,000 people. But it cannot be an unlimited, uncapped, untested and fiscally unsustainable scheme. If the public is to retain faith in the integrity and the worthwhile purpose of the scheme, but more importantly, if taxation is going to be able to continue to support the scheme, then it must be put on a fiscally sustainable pathway.

Two weeks ago, at Senate estimates, we heard from officials representing the scheme about the high incidence of fraud and the high incidence of claims for items that no taxpayer in their right mind would expect would be funded under the NDIS. The scheme is at a point of crisis, not only a fiscal crisis because of the growth in cost but a continued erosion in public trust and faith in the scheme because of the rampant fraud, because of things being funded which no right-thinking Australian would think should be funded under the scheme and because of the minister's unwillingness to date to grapple with the reality and prepare the public for the hard decisions and difficult compromises that will need to be taken.

This legislation supposedly puts the scheme onto a more fiscally sustainable pathway of eight per cent real growth in expenditure per year but provides no detail about how that is going to be met: Are the number of participants in the scheme going to be capped? Is the growth and the number of participants going to be capped? Are payments going to be capped or reduced? Are certain conditions currently supported by the NDIS going to be no longer supported? These are all things that the community that benefits from the NDIS and the broader Australian community deserve an answer to. This legislation and this minister have not provided that.

Soon after we heard concerns raised by experts who run the NDIS in Senate estimates, you would have thought that the minister responsible would have bunkered down, got to grips with this issue, reassured the public that there were steps in place to address it, reassured the public of his resolve to combat fraud and other abusive entitlements within the NDIS scheme, and reassured the public that there was indeed a pathway to put the NDIS on a sustainable footing. Instead, the minister found himself on a plane flying to Switzerland, to a five-star resort, Lake Burgenstock, from memory, to attend a Ukraine peace summit. I'm a supporter of peace in Ukraine, peace on the right terms, and I'm a supporter of Australia attending the Ukraine peace summit, but why the minister responsible for the National Disability Insurance Scheme is attending a Ukraine peace conference in Switzerland when the National Disability Insurance Scheme is in disarray is beyond me. You would think we would send the Prime Minister, perhaps. You would think we might send the foreign minister, or perhaps the defence minister, or perhaps any minister who sits on the National Security Committee of cabinet. While I know this government has an unconventional approach to who sits on the National Security Committee of cabinet, I'm almost certain that the minister with responsibility for the NDIS does not.

When the issues facing this scheme are so pressing here in Australia,  when—remember—the minister responsible was one of the original architects of this scheme in the Gillard-Rudd governments, when these issues are confronting the nation, when public faith in the NDIS scheme is being eroded and when the fiscal pathway for the scheme looks increasingly unsustainable, his job should be here in Australia dealing with these issues rather than moonlighting or auditioning for some future diplomatic role. I don't know what he has in mind. I don't know what the Prime Minister has in mind for him. Maybe he'll be our next ambassador to Ukraine. I don't know. If he is, he could return the embassy to Kyiv rather than keep it in Warsaw. For now, his job is Minister for the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

We heard from this minister before the last election that the NDIS's costs were tracking as expected. That was not the case. That was not the case when we were in government, and we warned as much. We heard from this minister before the last election that nothing needed to change, that the NDIS was proceeding as you would hope it would proceed and that nothing needed changing or addressing. We also know that was not the case. What we finally had, after two years in office, was a recognition that the points the coalition was making were right. This isn't, or needn't be, a politically partisan or contentious dispute. Both sides of politics support the existence of a scheme which looks after the most needy in our community and allows them to live more full and meaningful lives.

When the coalition was in office, we took the scheme from one which supported about 50,000 people to one that now supports over half a million people. We were the ones who fully funded the National Disability Insurance Scheme, presided over a significant growth in its budget and presided over the scaling up and ramping up of the scheme. We support this scheme, but it needs to be fiscally sustainable. We have offered our support. We did 2½ or three years ago, and we continue to offer support to the government to take the decisions that are necessary to restore public faith in this scheme.

Now, what this bill does is introduce a number of changes, which the coalition does not oppose, and which I support, to put in place the process to put the scheme on a sustainable footing. But it's really just the first step in what needs to be a much more detailed and exhaustive process—a process that has to involve more consultation with the community affected by this scheme, a process that has to be conducted with greater transparency and accountability than has happened to date, and a process that must involve an honest levelling with the Australian public and with the disability recipients about what will be covered in the scheme and what cannot be covered.

We have had too many instances revealed in past weeks, at Senate estimates and elsewhere, of items being funded by the National Disability Insurance Scheme which, frankly, do not pass the pub test—items which taxpayers do not think they should be supporting and which, if released publicly, would further erode confidence in this scheme. There are two parts to making sure that this scheme is sustainable. There's the fiscally sustainable part—that is, ensuring that the NDIS does not consume an ever greater share of our budget. Remember, it now costs us more than Medicare. Medicare is something every Australian accesses. The NDIS is something that 660,000 Australians—about two per cent of Australians—access, and the NDIS is growing at a cost of 20 per cent per year. If it continues to grow at that rate, it will simply consume more and more of the government budget, which will mean that other items of social welfare spending must be cut or that taxes will have to be raised considerably. No-one is making that case yet, but unless we rein in cost we will need to start having that conversation. That's the first part: fiscal sustainability.

But the other part is a more broader social licence, if you like. Fair, generous, decent Australians do want to ensure that the scheme is supporting those who are genuinely in need and supporting families who have much greater care requirements for family members than other parts of the Australian community. But they also want to know that what is being provided under the NDIS is being provided to people who are genuinely needy and that what is being provided are things that help them live fuller and more meaningful lives. So that's not holidays overseas, not new cars, not streaming services, not massage therapy and not any number of other things we've heard about which no-one expects the government to pay for. Whether you're on a disability support pension, unemployment benefits or the age pension, the expectation is government, as a social safety net, will provide and fund some of the basic necessities of life to allow you to live a life of dignity and meaning, but everything else is discretionary spending and, rightly, is on you or your family. The government and the NDIS should not be supporting discretionary spending.

To conclude, this bill is an important step forward, but it has come far too late—two years too late. It has involved insufficient consultation and transparency with proponents, supporters and beneficiaries of the scheme, and it has come from a government and a minister that have been in denial about some of these issues which we've been seeking to raise for the past few years. There is a lot more work to do to put the NDIS on a sustainable footing and what has been done to date is insufficient.