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

You didn't have to pay for those. People didn't like them. I wasn't a big fan myself, Linda, as you know, but you didn't have to pay for them. But now here we are. This is new information. Throughout these so-called 5½ days of hearings, where we got so much testimony and so much evidence that we should have all been just bowing down and going, 'Yay! Great piece of legislation'—so great that we got 18 amendments today from the government! You were so ready to pass it six weeks ago. I might just remind Minister Ayres that, in one of his most recent previous answers, he was just saying that it needs to be done carefully and ought to be done in the most collaborative way possible but also with urgency—with urgency! Well, let me tell you how urgent you think this bill is. Let me tell you how urgent: you don't even have it listed tomorrow! That's how urgent you think it is—it's not even on the papers tomorrow! You are a joke. This is absolutely embarrassing and insulting.

Minister Shorten claimed that this bill was ready to be passed six weeks ago, then ran an absolutely rubbish campaign on the cost. We had testimony from the actuary, and we'll come to more of that too. When we asked the actuary how he derived the billion-dollar figure that these couple of weeks of delay were going to cost, the actuary told us that what he went through was that they had worked on the assumption from the day this legislation was passed that the full five per cent of savings were straightaway—straight there. All the state governments were on board, foundational supports were ready to go and the five per cent savings were immediate. Funny, though, when we asked him about what the savings were estimated to be in the next financial year—around three per cent. In 2028-29 we're getting to 4.6 per cent.

In this fallacy of a smear campaign conducted by Minister Shorten, he was claiming this great loss that was going to be felt by the scheme because of a delay from having hearings. Wow, having some scrutiny of a bill that's required 18 amendments from you today—what a joke! The actuary's acknowledged that the billion-dollar figure you came up with is a fallacy because all of the assumptions around it are wrong. He's doing a figure based on a full rollout of every single fairyland idea you have of savings. Let me tell you: with this functional assessment and a possible new cottage industry, you guys are just blowing it up. Not only is it functional assessors—we'll get to the navigators as well.

We had a great inquiry. I asked a question about the navigators. The navigators that you're doing, because they're part of the review—'recommendation of navigators'. They're like a concierge service for both NDIS participants and not NDIS participants but funded by the NDIS. I asked: would these navigators perhaps replace support coordinators? The answer was given to me: 'Oh, no. They will be on top of.' So you will have a functional assessment, probably paid for by you. You will then have a meeting with a navigator, possibly, who tells you this is where you should go. Then you'll have a meeting with an LAC—we know that's been a complete disaster of a structure, because we know how many of the LACs then have to go to review from their referrals—and you'll then go to the planner in the agency who writes the plan. It then comes out and you may have a plan manager or be agency managed. So you're hitting four, five or six people before you've hit a service provider. Before you've seen a speech therapist, before you've seen a psychologist, before you've met with the behavioural therapist or the OT, you have seen a number of people—all paid for by the NDIS—to put a plan together. And we wonder why the scheme is blowing out!

It is not the fault of the participants. The emperor has no clothes, and this legislation is the definition of that. It is appalling. The urgency side is a fallacy because you don't even have it on the papers tomorrow, not even on the red. That's how urgent it is. And now we've had a spanner thrown in the works tonight that's never come up before—we were specifically told it was about equality and fairness of access—in that participants may be required to pay for the needs and functional assessments they don't even want in the first place but are mandatory in order to access the scheme. And you wonder why the disability community is up in arms.