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

Here we are yet again on this most inauspicious and quite disgraceful of occasions today. Today marks 12 months that this government has shamefully hidden the most basic of information from not just senators in this place but also the entire NDIS community. We've just gone through the disgrace, and I have to correct something that Minister Farrell just said. He said that I voted for this legislation. I did not vote for this legislation. I worked with my colleagues on this side of the chamber and the Greens to try to make the most appalling of bills remotely tolerable, and, while we've improved it, it is still a disaster for those on the scheme and for those now in the endless queue of people who are not being accepted into the scheme and who should have been.

It has now become very clear with Minister Shorten's announcement that he is leaving this place why he tried so desperately to hide the information. There is still no government report on the review, even though he's squeezed this legislation through this place. We still have no detail of the assessment process. We haven't even got a plan to have a plan to develop it yet. We've got no idea of what foundational supports there will be. We have no agreement with the states and territories. As Senator Hughes just said, they are absolutely outraged with not only the lack of transparency by this government but also the lack of detail. We had national cabinet last week on Friday. I thought, right, let's have a look at the communique; there will be something about the NDIS, something about discussions and agreements with the states and territories on the future of the NDIS—how they are going to afford it, what the states and territories will have to provide in terms of foundational supports, what they are, how they are going to fund them, who is going to take those people with significant disabilities who have their services cut on the NDIS or don't get in at all. There were three pages of the national cabinet communique and not a single word about the NDIS.

Given the disaster that the minister is now leaving behind—the fact is, he has got his legislation through, but he has left an enormous mess after 2½ years. When we were in government, we offered to work with Bill Shorten who was then the shadow minister and the Labor Party to start addressing all of these problems that had become apparent in the scheme and that needed fixing three years ago. They said, 'No; there's no problem with the scheme,' and then they wasted the last two years doing a review that was entirely unnecessary because we knew what the problems were.

We needed a government that had the competency and the ability to be fully transparent, to work with the Greens, to work with us on this side of the chamber and to work with the sector to fix the scheme, to make it sustainable for those who needed this scheme the most, the most seriously and profoundly disabled in our communities, and to make sure that the states and territories lived up to their end of the bargain to support the remaining four million people in Australia with some form of disability and to provide that support in the community. They have done none of that.

What will Minister Shorten now do? He will be praying for an early election so none of this comes out and he doesn't have to release his government's response to the NDIS review, because that will show that this legislation does not implement the review. Despite Minister Farrell's claptrap, the legislation that this place passed does not implement a fraction of that review. If Minister Shorten had any decency, he would resign today as minister—he is leaving anyway—and the government, if they could find a single competent minister in their ranks, could start making the changes. Instead, they will keep spinning and spinning, and thousands—