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

We're here again. It's 'NDIS Monday', and it's just becoming a joke. It is a running joke that a government who came to office claiming they would be transparent have done everything they can to cloak themselves in secrecy when it comes to the NDIS. We're going to come to a bill, maybe, a little bit later on today that seeks to reform the NDIS.

The NDIS is, I acknowledge, one of the biggest items in the budget. It is too big. I'm the parent of a participant and I'm happy to acknowledge that there are too many people on it. The Greens and us on this side of the chamber don't actually agree on terribly much, but what we do agree on is there should be transparency. We do have different views about who should be on the scheme. We do have different views on how some of the scheme should be operating, but we do agree that there should be transparency. Yet those in government are determined to not be transparent, not only with the Australian people, when they have already put these savings into the budget, but with the 660,000 participants in the scheme and their families.

I think that number is too high—absolutely, that number's too high. There are too many people in this scheme who do not have a permanent and lifelong stability, which is what the scheme was set up for. What we're seeing now, in this desperate bid to curb the cost of the scheme, is plans being cut for those that most require them. The people that are most vulnerable and are most in need of supports in the community are having their plans cut so that, in some ways, those who shouldn't be on the scheme can remain on the scheme. They're not brave enough to step up and take the political hit by acknowledging the people that should come off the scheme, but what they want to do is just somehow—because it's a demand-driven scheme. You either cut the number of participants or cut the value of the plans. That's the only way you save money.

But we're being told, including through inquiries, that the NDIA is seeking efficiency measures. In the hearings that were held over this, we heard Mr Shorten say that there was all this cost being borne by the taxpayer by not passing the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Getting the NDIS Back on Track No. 1) Bill 2024 sooner and that having additional inquiry hearing dates were unnecessary. Well, just to be clear, this series of hearings was less than 25 hours in total. Less than 25 hours of hearings were allocated because, as we know, the government has the numbers on that committee, so the government senators were always too busy to have an inquiry or to have a hearing. We could never get any insights into what this bill was actually trying to achieve, so it's an absolute joke to claim that there's been enough inquiry into this bill. There hasn't been.

It's disappointing, though, that we did invite the states and territories to come and meet with us. Hopefully they could have given us some insights into what this framework was going to look like and how they were going to make these savings because, at the end of the day, it's the states that are supposed to be responsible for delivering these foundational supports. But no-one knows what a foundational support is. What is a foundational support? There's no definition. For those in the gallery, this is actually something that's delegated legislation. They're rules that are going to be written by the minister when he feels like it. We don't know what they look like, but, most frighteningly, the states, who are going to have to deliver them, don't know what they look like. They don't know what they're going to have to do. They don't know how much money they will have to spend.

I asked a premier, a treasurer, a health minister, an education minister, a justice minister and a disability minister—six ministers from each of those state governments—and not one of them had either the guts or the temerity to turn up and tell us what they knew, what they thought or what they'd been signed up to. We've just had a statement come out from the Premier of Tasmania, who was invited, and I'll acknowledge he's a Liberal premier. He didn't turn up, but now he's put out a statement asking for the legislation to be pushed back because the states don't agree to what was signed up to and don't agree on their ability to implement it. But, of course, no-one knows where this is going to land, because there's been no transparency, no discussion and everyone's been too scared—hiding.

The fact is that Bill Shorten, the minister, has made claims about the cost of the delay. I've got two questions for him. The first one is: what's the cost of your inaction for 2½ years since you've been the minister? For 2½ years, he's been the minister. He was the shadow minister before that. He was actually one of the architects of the scheme with Jenny Macklin back in the day. It's been 2½ years, and this is the first piece of legislation he's brought forward. We'll have more to say about what the actuary told us last week about his ridiculous claim of what the additional inquiry days were costing because it's based on completely false numbers and facts. They're completely false facts and numbers, which is all we seem to get from this government.