Linda Reynolds (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

This would be farcical if it weren't so serious for over 650,000 Australians with serious and permanent disability, who are now, in record numbers, contacting those of us in this place and the other to beg us not to pass this legislation. It is totemic of the shocking, appalling government that has been delivered by the ALP over the last 2½ years.

Four years ago, the then coalition government—the then minister Stuart Robert and I—approached the Labor Party and Bill Shorten, and we said: 'This scheme is starting to head into trouble. We need serious legislative reforms. We need serious engagement with the states and territories to reform this scheme so that it can be financially sustainable and focus on delivering everything that it was designed to provide for our most seriously vulnerable'—that is, those Australians who were in group homes across this country in appalling conditions. Yet, four years ago, Bill Shorten started ridiculing then minister Stuart Robert. Shorten said that he was evil and that he was going to cut the plans. He said that we didn't need an assessment process in an insurance scheme. He whipped up the sector and whipped up the politics, and he said: 'There's nothing wrong with the scheme. I see no evidence of anything wrong with this scheme. We don't need to do anything. They're all just making this up.' He accused us of being 'pearl-clutching Kabuki theatre'.

Despite everything in the budget, everything in the quarterly reports, saying the NDIS was a scheme in trouble, that it was starting to trend towards 20 per cent above budget each and every year and was completely unsustainable, what has Minister Shorten done over the last 2½ years? Instead of coming clean and saying, 'I got it wrong; now is the time to start working together to improve and save this scheme,'—we had 30-odd reviews that clearly identified what was wrong with this scheme and what was needed to be done by the federal, state and territory governments to fix the scheme and to extend support to other Australians with disabilities who were not covered by the NDIS—he had another review, which the minister representing him has just gone through: 'We did. We consulted all these people.' And guess what? They found what every other review has found.

That review was delivered to the Labor government, to Minister Shorten, in November last year. The government still have not provided a response, and they're saying that this legislation—that's supposed to be before us in five minutes time—will fix it, will implement the review. It doesn't implement the review. It probably implements five per cent of the review. Even Labor's reviewers said that review had to be implemented as a package by the federal government and the states and territories.

This legislation is a debacle. We're due to start in committee on this legislation, and guess what? We haven't seen the amendments. We're supposed to be debating something that this incompetent and hopeless government, after saying this legislation was so urgent and necessary—we're going into debate in less than five minutes. I don't know whether anybody else in this chamber has seen the amendments. What are we going to be discussing? It was so urgent that we had to rush through and not answer the questions.

We still don't have answers to some of the questions that we asked in committees. In fact, with many of them, they ducked and weaved and didn't answer the questions, and we are at this shameful position today. Every Australian who relies on the NDIS, whether they be participants, families, friends or people who work within the scheme to provide those supports, should be worried. Where is the bill? Where are the amendments? What a shame.