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

Having listened to the minister over the last few hours in this committee stage, I think that even the scriptwriters of Utopia would not believe that this amount of incompetence over the last 2½ years could be remotely plausible. My heart genuinely breaks for the thousands, if not more, of participants and their family members who will be watching this this evening. I think a little bit of truth-telling about this is actually required. Let's go back in history a little bit. Four to five years ago, when we were still in government, the scheme had been implemented far too fast. The scheme started in 2013 and it took about five years, as it developed, to realise that there were some serious structural flaws in the legislation and also in the intergovernmental agreements that needed addressing. As everybody in this chamber knows, when making serious and meaningful reforms to a creature of the federation, states and territories need to agree. This is not just for amendments to the intergovernmental agreements but also for the categories of reforms in the federal legislation.

It is a fact that just under five years ago, the coalition, and the then minister, Minister Robert, came to the opposition and came into the parliament and said, 'We need to make reforms.' In the legislation, it said there needed to be a needs assessment, and we didn't yet have one. In good faith, the minister developed one that was to be paid for by the government. He went through a process of consultation, and then, when I became minister, I inherited it. I put out the hand of bipartisanship to the then shadow minister, Bill Shorten, and instead of saying, 'Yes, we will work together on it', he saw it as an opportunity to play politics. Nobody else can quite do it like he does.

He went out and scared the living bejesus out the sector and said we, the government, were lying. He said, 'There are no problems with the scheme.' He called us every name under the sun—the only invective Bill Shorten still uses. He said: 'Don't worry, they're lying. There are no problems with the scheme. Trust us. We will make no cuts to the scheme if you trust us and vote for us.' Anybody in this country can google it. You will find probably hundreds of examples of that. Despite that, and despite what the minister has just erroneously told this chamber, when I was minister, I got two pieces of significant legislation through this place. I had the full support of states and territories. I had the support of the sector because we actually consulted with them. We had exposure drafts. We went around the country. We didn't have non-disclosure forms for the selected few. We didn't keep it secret. We had exposure drafts. We changed the drafts before they hit this place and we got two pieces of legislation passed, and yes, Bill Shorten did support that legislation.

Two and that half years later, when Bill Shorten came into government, he probably thought: 'Oops, I've just told everybody there are no problems. I knew there were problems. The budget showed there were problems. Thirty reviews into the scheme showed there were serious problems. But now I've got a big problem. I just said I'm not going to make any changes.' He didn't do the right thing as a minister of the Crown and say, 2½ years ago: 'Oops, I got it wrong. There actually is a problem with this scheme and I want to work with everybody in this place and with the sector to fix this before it gets worse.' The problem with the scheme is the scheme and the Commonwealth government cannot control either of the two drivers of cost: the number of participants and the packages they receive. No other insurance scheme in this nation, probably in this world, has a scheme where you can't control the drivers of cost so that it has to live within its budget.

Instead, what did Minister Shorten do? He called another review which took nearly two years. Guess what? The review found exactly the same things the previous 30-odd reviews had found: the scheme needed urgent reform. So what did Minister Shorten do then? Nothing. Going back, I'll tell you what he did when he came into government. I'd actually started the process. After cancelling the independent assessment process, I commissioned the IAC, the Independent Advisory Council, to start preparing a new system, co-designed, for needs assessments. Guess what Minister Shorten did? He stopped everything. He stopped all of the co-design reviews that were underway and said: 'Don't worry. Trust us. We'll have this review. We'll find out what's wrong. We'll talk to lots of people. We won't listen to them. We'll have this review'—that you've been sitting on for seven months and that apparently now this bill is implementing. But the minister just then couldn't even tell us how it was implementing the review. He said he was reading from the review itself.

Roll forward 2½ years—a review, doing nothing. Now they're trying to ram through this piece of legislation because they've got a problem, because they haven't taken measures, in 2½ years, to work with the states and territories to start to find solutions to functional assessments, to all of the things about which the minister is now saying: 'We'll put them in regulations and we'll work it out later. We're sure the states aren't going to mind paying all this extra money. I'm sure we'll get them on board.' Well, I don't know what rock you've been hiding under, because every single state and territory have said that you have bungled the process, and they ain't on board.

So why is the government really doing this? I think it comes down to Shortenomics. Shortenomics goes something like this: 'We've got a problem. We'll shunt this legislation through the Senate. We won't give the sector or the Senate time to review it. And, by the way, we're going to throw in another 50-odd amendments as you're trying to review the bill, because we realise how bad it is in the first place. We'll get a few people we like to sign NDAs. We won't let the rest of the sector look at it. There'll be no exposure draft. And we'll just try and ram it through this place.' Well, I tell you what: it is a disgrace, and I feel so sorry for every single NDIS participant, who will now feel incredibly unsure about the future. You've had 2½ years. You knew the problem when you came into government. You've got speechwriters. You've got RedBridge to manage the messaging. If only you'd spend half that time talking to the states, talking to the sector and actually getting solutions.

Minister, I'd like to come to questions now on Shortenomics. You said earlier that this bill doesn't make cuts to the scheme. Well, Minister, in your last budget I counted 18 times—there may be more but there are at least 18 times—where in the budget papers it said that this legislation was required to realise $60 billion worth of savings, cuts to this scheme, over the next 10 years. That is stripping out $60 billion from the budget, and, when the fourth-quarter report comes out, I think it will be at least $70 billion, if not more. Could you explain to this place, please, how, when it says 18 times in the budget that $60 billion worth of savings are going to be realised through this bill, nobody in the inquiry could explain to any of us where those savings were coming from? The poor actuary, who is a very good man and a very honest man, was clearly told not to answer the questions. So we still haven't got any data on how this piece of legislation is going to realise $60-plus billion worth of savings. When you're answering that question, please also explain this to us. My recollection was that it was going to be about 14 per cent, but it's still going up at 20 per cent. So how on earth is this government getting it down to eight per cent?