Maria Kovacic (NSW, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The NDIS website says:

Our role is to … support a better life for hundreds of thousands of Australians with a significant and permanent disability and their families and carers.

What I'm really curious to know is why this government doesn't feel that these same people deserve transparency. Why won't this government answer these questions? Time and time again, we have to listen to another minister creating more excuses as to why important documents relating to the functions of government and ordered to be produced by this Senate—in this example, following a motion moved by Senator Jordon Steele-John—cannot be tabled to this Senate. This is unacceptable. This cannot continue to go on. So long have they strayed from their promise of transparent government that they no longer even pretend to stand by that value. The transparency that we heard about over and over again no longer exists.

The NDIS provides critical services. We understand it does need some fixing so that we can afford to fund it and so that it continues to support the people who need it. Because of this, understanding the NDIS Financial Sustainability Framework is crucial. If we don't understand it, if we don't know what underpins it, if we don't know what the financial modelling is, how can it continue to effectively work? It can't.

This would not be acceptable in any commercial business in this country—or anywhere, for that matter, in my view. Yet this government believes that it can withhold this critical information and continue to withhold it, despite ongoing requests to table that information. It is our job in this chamber to be the second pair of eyes over legislation and policy, and this government is not allowing us to do our job. It is our job to scrutinise and to hold the government to account. That's what happens in a democracy. Where are the documents that we have requested to be tabled, and why won't they be tabled? How can we perform our duties when the government won't even perform theirs by producing the documents that this chamber has demanded, and rightly demanded?

Six hundred and sixty thousand Australians rely on the NDIS for support. A few weeks ago I had the honour of going to the Shepherd Centre, an organisation that provides, in its words, a voice to deaf children. I spoke to a number of parents and saw with my own eyes the significant positive impact that that organisation has on deaf children—the smiles on children's faces when they heard noises. Will their services be cut? By how much? Will the number of services they can receive be cut? Will the quantum of the services be cut? We don't know, because this government won't answer those questions. Those families, whose children need critical support in the first three years of life, where early intervention is crucial, don't know what's coming, because this government won't tell anybody. That is unacceptable.

Because we are denied this information to scrutinise government, Australians do not have the transparency they deserve, either as participants or as citizens, and it degrades the confidence in the NDIS as an institution because of the actions of this very government. You have pulled the rug out from NDIS participants, some of our most vulnerable people. This is not the transparent government that you promised us before the last election.