Hollie Hughes (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Mental Health and Suicide Prevention) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Steele-John, once again, you are incredibly well spoken as you stand up for so many people with a disability. But, again, it's a shameful performance by the government as they continue to refuse to respond to this Senate's demands to provide the financial modelling that underpins capping the growth of the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

Most people don't live daily around the NDIS and don't rely on it. I don't rely on it as a disabled person, but I rely on it in having a son who is a participant. I need to know, when I'm not there, that my son is going to be looked after. I need to be secure—going to Senator Steele-John's point—that he's not going to be put in a group home with people he doesn't know. I need to know that he's not going to be diminished as a person, and that every skill he is taught—as a child, through his teenage years and as we continue to teach him—will open up his world and give him opportunities. I need to know, when I'm not there to keep the fight up for him, that he will be safe, he will be treated with respect and he will be able to live a life of dignity. But I don't know because, at the moment, we have a government hiding behind opacity. They said they would be transparent, yet here we are again with just another policy area being hidden behind National Cabinet and non-disclosure agreements.

We're consistently told that they can't release this modelling because it will undermine the relationship with the states, because the states are supposed to have come on board to agree to fund what we now know colloquially as foundational supports. The great thing is, when you ask disability groups, as we have done at different inquiries, 'What do you understand foundational supports to be?' they come at us with a list of things that they wish they were, what they think they should be and what they hope they will be. Unfortunately, we don't know what they are, because this minister and this government won't tell us what they consider to be a foundational support. Is community health coming back to provide speech therapy and occupational therapy for kids who don't have a permanent, lifelong disability but need a bit of assistance? We don't know.

The government hides behind the states. I'll give you a tip, guys: your relationships are already fractured. The premiers are already out there saying that they do not have the funding. The health ministers, education ministers and disability ministers at every state level are saying that they do not have the funding to move back into the space. Quite frankly, the states should be ashamed of themselves for the way they vacated disability as quickly as they could, but we know that was a design flaw purposely put in place, fundamentally, by the Gillard government to get them to sign up. We know that the states have no concept of what these supports are and what they're supposed to look like. They don't know how quickly they're supposed to be ramping them up. They have no idea how they're going to pay for them or exactly what they're going to do. This is absolutely causing angst not just amongst children in the early childhood stream, though that is a hugely important issue, but much more broadly within the disability sector. We don't know, in a demand driven scheme, whether it's the number of participants that is going to be cut or the value of the plans that is going to be cut—because they are the only ways you can make cuts.

What I've found really disturbing over the past couple of weeks is the number of families that have reached out to me in absolute despair having just gone through a review. These were children under school age, but I also was reached out to recently because of a girl who left school last year who has an intellectual as well as other disabilities. She has been cut back to the point that she has one hour of speech therapy a month and one hour of OT a month. She has four hours of community support per week, and she was told that the level of reduction in her services was because of the new legislation—the new legislation that hasn't even been introduced to the Senate yet. It's not even here yet, but, somehow or other, the agency is already making claims to slash plans based on this current legislation. Again, this is taking away opportunity. This young girl is desperate to get a job. But, instead of underpinning the insurance principles of the National Disability Insurance Scheme, the agency is slashing and burning. For those people with a disability, it's absolutely hurting their lives and their ability to participate in the community as well as hurting them economically. Shame on you for continuing to hide.