Pauline Hanson (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

Minister, don't get me wrong: I fully support your changes to the bill and will be voting for it. But I don't feel that you've gone far enough. Hopefully, the next tranche of amendments or the next bill that you put up will go further.

You say that the costs need to be reined in, because, the way it is going, it is unsustainable and the costs are exploding. A case in point, which I have raised constantly with the minister and his office, is that support services supplied to NDIS clients are completely out of proportion when compared to what all other Australians have to pay. For example, jobs for relatively unqualified support workers in aged care are being advertised at a rate of around $30 an hour, yet if you were going with the NDIS as a support worker it's $67 an hour, and it can go to $218 an hour on weekends in rural and remote areas and higher than that in very remote areas. For professional services—say, if you were a psychologist providing counselling to an NDIS patient—you'd be receiving a minimum rate of $214 an hour. Again, the rate in remote areas is a lot higher than that; it can be over $300 an hour. The rate in very remote areas can be over $500 an hour, plus your travel on top of it. But for anyone else who requires that service—say, a veteran—you're looking at $153 an hour. So this has been a bone of contention. Even registered nurses—those in the nursing profession—may get around $50 an hour, approximately, but an NDIS worker get might $100 or $125 an hour, approximately.

So what I'm hearing from veterans and the general public is that they cannot get services provided to them because a lot of these people in the workforce are leaving their jobs and going to the NDIS to provide the services to these people. We're talking about 660,000 people, compared to the rest of the population—basically, 27 million people—in Australia. When do you intend to rein in the cost blowout in what can be charged for services provided to people on the NDIS compared to other Australians?