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

I'm actually really over this. It's been a year that this government has been required to provide these documents, and yet again we come in here with this mealy-mouthed statement claiming that, somehow or other, announcing or sharing the framework around sustainability is going to damage relationships with the states and the territories. We wake up to news this morning that Minister Shorten is now proposing a new tranche of reforms. This is not something that has been discussed with the opposition. As Senator Farrell just acknowledged, the opposition is working with the government for reform, and we do want to see reform. There are too many people on the scheme. The scheme is blowing out.

But we wake up this morning to news about registration. It's something that the opposition actually put forward as an amendment, saying there should be scalable registration within the scheme, which would ensure that sole providers—sole traders—are able to be registered but would not face onerous audit costs that would thin an already thin market. But we're now learning the minister is looking at not only complete registration of all providers; he's also targeting self-managed participants. I find this extraordinary, and perhaps, if he'd bothered to pick up the phone to me or to Mr Sukkar in the other place, who is the opposition NDIS shadow minister, I certainly could have told him that the CEO of the NDIA explained at estimates that the lowest level of fraud is actually within the self-managed sector. That is because people who self-manage plans, either for themselves or their loved ones, have direct contact with the service provider. Those service providers tend to provide better customised services because they're not part of mass, previously block funded organisations, who quite often deliver nothing but glorified babysitting services. Again, this government is looking at the wrong people to see where fraud and misconduct is occurring.

But the minister is also looking at the wedding-tax style of increasing costs for NDIS services, particularly for what we refer to in the scheme as 'consumables'. That's things like wheelchairs and walking sticks, or needing rails put up in your bathroom for access and support. We know that the reason these costs blow out is the regulation around how these are provided. Someone explain this to me, because basic economics tell you that, when you add more red tape, costs go up. The NDIA has listed registered providers who are the only people who can deliver these consumables, rather than someone who is managing a scheme, like the parent of a participant who requires support rails. I know of a story around this. For support rails in the bathroom, they were quoted in excess of $3,000 by one of the NDIA's registered, approved providers for these sorts of materials. As they were waiting—because there's a time to wait, because there are so many people requesting these kinds of services, and there are limited registered providers, so they can charge whatever they want—a father had had enough, went to Bunnings and put them up himself for $50.

What the minister is now trying to do—from what we see in the paper, because it's not being discussed with us—is to increase the burden on participants to use these registered providers, of which there'll be a limited amount. Supply and demand tells you that if you can't access a service then the price is going to go up. This is now making the scheme worse. We want to work with the minister to cut costs, we want to make it sustainable, we want to make it accessible and we want to make it fit for purpose. Yet this minister is barking up every wrong tree and will not provide the information to let us work with him constructively.