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

I have just learnt that a deal between the government and the opposition has been circulated in this chamber that would see this bill rammed through on Thursday. This deal means that this last 20 minutes of debate is very likely to be the last time any member of this Senate is given the opportunity to speak with substance to this bill. So, in the nine minutes left to me and on behalf of the Australian disability community, there are a few things that must be recorded here in this moment.

Never in the history of the Australian disability rights movement has a government so profoundly betrayed the trust placed in it by the community. The families and the disabled people who suffered so significantly under the 10 years of Liberal government placed their trust in the Australian Labor Party at the election that the party and the government elected would collaborate, co-design and restore dignity in the scheme. At every opportunity since coming to power, you have calibrated and carefully built a bill which now sits before this parliament with a single purpose—to cut as much from the supports we need to survive as quickly as possible to enable the redirection of those public funds towards the priorities set by and for your donors and those who offer you jobs when you leave this place.

The National Disability Insurance Scheme, founded because of disabled people and our community's collective power and advocacy, was brought into the world founded on two transformational principles: firstly, the idea of an individualised support and the end of 'yes-no' lists, template planning and the list of wheelchairs you can or can't have boiled up by a bureaucrat somewhere; and, secondly, the idea that the supports you may receive will be the result of an authentic negotiation between a disabled person and the government as to what they need. These principles transferred the power over the lives of disabled people, which was vested in the hands of government, back to disabled people. At every single moment since the passage of that legislation 10 years ago, people in positions of power, politicians and bureaucrats, have fought to get that power back. That transfer, that stripping of power from the community back into the hands of government, is the effect of this bill. Choice, control, reasonable and necessary supports are stripped from disabled people and our families with an almost surgical precision, leaving us to once again live with the fear and the horror of having our lives shaped about us without us.

During the course of this parliamentary debate, the government has sought again and again to dismiss, to gaslight and to attempt to frame disabled people and our concerns as being driven by needless fear. Tonight, if you take the opportunity to look into your inboxes and check back with your teams, you will discover that every single one of Australia's disability representative organisations have said clearly over the last 48 hours that this bill must not pass. The network for First Nations people who are disabled has said in the starkest terms that this bill is bad for First Nations people who are disabled. Advocates around the country have hit the phones, sent emails and begged and pleaded with you to listen and to see sense.

The minister comes into the chamber this evening and says in response to questions, 'Oh, period products were put on the wrong part of the list; the government no longer believes that they should be categorised as a lifestyle product,' without apparently being able to conceive of that mistake as being an example of why there should not be lists and why, in fact, somebody's individualised support should be the result of their individualised circumstances. This government, which makes such a song and dance about any tiny thing that it believes may help a person or a community in a cost-of-living crisis, brings a bill before this chamber and seeks to ram it through which would see the Australian disability community subjected to mandatory government assessments that we neither want nor need but it is going to make us pay for. And yet this is the bill that will be passed through this place on Thursday. It's almost as though you're running a bit scared, almost as though you feel that a bit more time left to look into this thing might actually reveal a couple more things you haven't thought through. I wonder how many amendments you might introduce if we gave this bill another couple of weeks. We'd come back, and there'd be 90, 100. You discovered a new agency function you had never at all, in any way, during the course of this debate considered or flagged, and you inserted it during the last week of debate. In my entire seven years here, I have never seen anything like it. We were engaging in a good-faith committee-stage process, with the government seeking to identify answers to the actual questions that remain before the community, and you move this deal, you ram it through, because you don't like being under pressure or under scrutiny. The disability community is left now to simply sit and wait for the inevitable deal to take effect.