Jordon Steele-John (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I seek to speak to the second reading amendment on sheet 2759 moved by my colleague Senator Allman-Payne. It is so important to disabled people, our families, our communities, those who work with us and those who advocate alongside us that the systems within the NDIS are built on transparency and trust. The processes that the agency uses to determine what kinds of supports disabled people receive, the amount of funding they are provided with, to those without a disability, perhaps to those in the Labor Party, it would seem, are just pieces of material on an excel spreadsheet somewhere in a computer; the job of a bureaucrat to implement, the job of a comms director to advise on and, ultimately, the job of a minister to deliver a report to cabinet with the No. 1 metric of success being: How much did we cut today? How much closer did we get to the $14.4 billion that we have pledged to rip out of the scheme? For disabled people and our families, for our community, these processes and how they work are the factors that determine whether we are able to get out of bed in the morning, to have a job, to eat, to be able to drink water. The result of these processes affects our lives.

'The minister shall determine the method' is one of the most frequently used passages within the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Getting the NDIS Back on Track No. 1) Bill 2024. The methods proposed in this bill—that's the term used, 'method'—shape our lives. Transparency is vital. From transparency there can be trust. Without transparency, there is rightly distrust, particularly given the way in which we as disabled people have been treated at the hands of federal governments, Liberal and Labor alike. Whether it be the disgraceful way in which the Liberal government sought to implement, and successfully implemented, changes to the disability support pension that chucked over 200,000 people on the DSP onto what was then called Newstart and into poverty, or whether it was the Gillard government beginning the changes to the impairment table process that then enabled those people to be chucked off, or whether it be this government's shameful response to the Disability Royal Commission report, we have good reason to distrust federal governments of any political persuasion when it comes to the processes and procedures used by the National Disability Insurance Scheme to shape our lives, our funding and our support.

It is in that context that the Greens offer this amendment, which calls for any method that may come out of this bill to be subject to basic transparency and the right of appeal. The right of appeal is a basic expectation that any citizen should have in relation to a government program. If a decision has been made that affects your life and you believe that the decision has been made in error, you should be able to appeal—that is a basic expectation. Yet this bill, in its current form, denies that right of appeal—denies that foundation stone of procedural justice—to the over 660,000 participants who rely on the NDIS for basic supports and to their families.

An example of one of these foreshadowed methods is the method which will be used to translate the so-called 'needs assessment report' into a participant's budget. All we know about this method, all the parliament has been told about this method—and we are about to be asked to vote for a bill that will be the foundation of these methods, that will give the minister of the day the power to create these methods and implement them—is that this method will be some kind of tool that will be developed and approved by the minister for the purpose of translating the result of a needs assessment into a total budget amount. That is all that we know, and yet we are being asked to vote for this piece of legislation.

Now, the methods developed under this bill, if it is to pass, must not, cannot, be developed in secrecy. They cannot be implemented in secrecy. There must be transparency so that there can be trust. Details about any calculations, algorithms or other components of these methods must be made available to the public so that there is a common understanding of how important decisions in relation to funding and plans are being made.

This government came to office on a promise of ending the black-box systems that the previous Liberal government implemented. Yet this bill, in its current form, empowers the minister of the day, empowers a politician, to make whatever kind of black box they may choose. When I read that section of this bill, my jaw nearly fell off! The hypocrisy, the double standards, the broken promises and the betrayal that the Labor government are perpetrating upon disabled people and their families—breathtaking!

This amendment would call on the government to ensure that methods are developed transparently and implemented transparently so that there can be a basic level of trust. The workings and outcomes of these methods also should be subject to appeal by participants and their families, especially where the outcomes are primarily determined by algorithmic methods. We cannot allow a future government—we cannot allow this government—to have the ability to craft algorithms and input systems that seek to reduce the complex individualised nature of a disabled person's needs down into a series of data points and then spit out some number, without the way in which that information translated from the result to the amount being a process that can be examined, challenged and reviewed. It is no good to say, 'Oh, well, the outcome at the end of it will be reviewable,' if the thing you have at the end of the process is the result of the flawed determination method, because you will rerun the process and you will again come out with an insufficient amount of support.

We cannot allow a bill to be passed by this parliament that creates an opportunity for the second coming of robodebt, where methods were kept secret and mysterious debts arose as the result of calculations that weren't visible or able to be understood by the key people affected. We know that these processes lead to harm. We know that these processes can lead to death. That is what robodebt did—it killed people. It was the product of a political and bureaucratic culture created by both sides of this parliament, who have given decision-makers one key indicator: reduce the cost, bring the funding down and meet your budgetary expectations—because, in the name of all that is holy, we have a nuclear submarine to fund. That is the culture that created robodebt, and that culture remains. That culture is at the heart of these methods.

Unless this Senate takes the opportunity to send a clear message to the government that, should this bill pass, it expects them to develop these methods with transparency and implement them with transparency, this Senate will be culpable for the damage done by these methods and processes, for the funding that gets removed from people and, yes, for the lives of those who are pushed to the brink by these bureaucratic processes which they cannot challenge or ask for a review of. This amendment sits alongside a number of amendments that will be moved and debated by the Greens which seek to ensure that these basic elements of transparency, accountability and proportionality are addressed and introduced into this piece of legislation. Each will give the government the opportunity to side with the disability community to ensure that their appointed CEO of the agency has their powers effectively and appropriately constrained—and there are many others which I will go into detail on as the debate progresses.

But I urge the Senate: this amendment gives you the opportunity to agree with the basic proposition of procedural fairness, procedural justice and basic transparency. Give the families, give the disabled folks and give the community the opportunity to understand exactly how their funding, their supports and the decisions that shape their lives were landed on. Give disabled people the basic opportunity. Respond to the demand of the disability community that this parliament ensure that nothing is done about us without us.