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

This is a moment of pain, fear and fury for so many disabled people and our families across the country. This NDIS bill, developed by this Labor government for the purpose of cutting $14.4 billion from our NDIS, represents the greatest betrayal of our community ever perpetrated by a government.

During the course of this debate, I have felt so many emotions. I have experienced within me, intensely, that same pain, fear and fury. This will be my last contribution to this debate. When I conclude, or shortly after, the bill will pass, and yet our disability rights movement will remain. The solidarity developed during the course of the fight against this bill will remain. Our connection to each other will remain. I cannot predict what the weeks and months ahead will mean for the 660,000 people who require these supports, who rely on the NDIS, but I can say with absolute certainty that we will face this together. It is from that certainty that today I draw the most tremendous pride in the disability community.

There are so many across this country who, through the course of this campaign, attempted to persuade this Labor government to keep its commitments, to keep its promises, to listen to the voices of disabled people. There are so many organisations and individuals who have demonstrated and have reached into the most extraordinary courage—people who battle every day just to survive—who have taken up the cause together, have organised, demonstrated, protested, called their MPs, sent emails and spent hours and hours explaining to Senate committees and individual MPs precisely the dangers of this bill and precisely the kinds of harms that it will do to us as a community. There are so many organisations whose job it is to represent disabled people, whose job is to bring the voices of our communities into parliament, that have gone again and again into spaces where they were promised co-design and transparency and have instead been subjected to coercion, gaslighting, deception and deceit. In the face of this treatment by a government they trusted, they have nevertheless held fast. I am so proud of every single one of our disability representative organisations, who, guided by their membership and their board, when placed under incredible pressure by this Labor government, which sought at every turn to persuade and coerce them into celebrating this bill and backing this bill, decided to place themselves with their community and their community's needs in solidarity. They decided not to back down.

So this bill passes today. This government hides there in the corner with the full knowledge that every single one of Australia's disability representative organisations either completely opposed this bill or had called for it not to pass today because of the rafts of new amounts of information that had been dropped by this government during the course of the debate. I want to thank and acknowledge the incredible work done by the advocates and the activists who worked so tirelessly to ensure that those organisations had the information they needed to take that position. I also want to acknowledge every single person who made a submission to the Senate inquiries into this bill and to the witnesses who gave evidence.

During the course of those inquiries, we as disabled people were asked to disclose the most private, the most intimate and the most personal details of our lives. We had witnesses giving evidence to an inquiry share with us—I'm not going to sanitise it for the chamber—what it means for them to no longer be able to control their bladder and the way in which the ability to purchase cheaper products from a regular, mainstream space enabled them to live. We had somebody share with us that their ability to use their NDIS funds to have their hair washed by a hairdresser, in a way that will be prohibited under this bill, enabled them to not only live well and happily but avoid the unnecessarily humiliating experience of having to be showered by somebody they didn't know. We had people share with us that, if they were subjected to the policies intended to be enacted through this bill, they would have to leave their family home. They would face the horror of returning to the group home dynamics that they thought they'd never have to live in again.

I must acknowledge in this moment that so many people right now are frightened. They are frightened because they understand this bill, because they've read this bill, because they know this system, because they know this scheme, because they know the state of the pre-NDIS system that we clawed our way out of. They know the features of those pre-NDIS schemes—government mandated lists, government mandated assessments, government mandated plans. That's what they lived with, so their fear is well grounded. It must be acknowledged, it must not be dismissed and it must not be framed as a scare campaign. We know, as a community, what we are about to be subjected to because we have lived it. We also know that the disability community now is stronger than we have ever been before. We know that disability pride lives in the heart of that movement. We know that mutual aid and community organisation are the tools that we will reach to now.

This time of trial and shadow and grief is a time that we shall journey through together. We shall hold ourselves up, we shall grieve for those that we know we will lose, we will rage against the dying and we will remind both parties, who are about to pass this bill, that we are not only fearless advocates, we are not only community members but we are voters and, as voters, we will mark your card for this. We will remember it on election day. In the name of all we lose, and all those whom we lose, we shall go into the ballot box and deliver back to this place a parliament that will listen, a legislature that will restore our rights We will deliver a parliament willing to work with the disability community rather than against it, to correct this betrayal and to truly build a society for all. (Time expired)