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

For 18 months, senators in this place have been coming to ask those opposite for the most basic of information on the NDIS. I heartily endorse Senator Steele-John's comments that this government, shamefully, not only have a complete lack of transparency but have basically given a one-fingered or two-fingered-salute to senators and to the over 650,000 Australians now on the NDIS.

Apart from the colossal failure of those opposite to actually deal with the problems, time and time again in this place, when I approached Bill Shorten as the minister and said, 'We have some serious structural issues with the NDIS that we need to fix, and we need to be able to control both drivers of cost: the number of people on the scheme and also the average cost per participant on the scheme,' we heard Bill Shorten say, 'There's nothing wrong with the scheme; you're just making it all up.' He comes into government and says, 'Oh, dear; I never read the budget papers or any of the reports from the NDIS, and the scheme is in trouble.' Instead of saying, 'Oops, we got it wrong,' he just doubled down. He had another review that was completely unnecessary. He said, 'We can't really do anything until after the review's finished,' and 18 months later he said, 'Well, we're not going to make any cuts to the scheme.' Well, that was just a big fat untruth. I'll go through the numbers in a second. They have been cutting on this scheme as if there were no tomorrow, indiscriminately.

What we haven't really heard—and Senator Hughes touched on it—is that foundational supports, as they're now called, are what was called tier 2 supports when the Commonwealth government went into interim intergovernmental agreements with states and territories. The states and territories were always responsible for community based support for those who were not going to be eligible for the NDIS. Don't forget that this was a scheme for Australians who had the most serious and permanent disabilities—those Australians who lived miserable, horrible lives in state and territory facilities and who were denied the most basic human respect and dignity. Those opposite now have a strategy just to get themselves through the next election. No wonder Bill Shorten scarpered off before the election and before his financial fraud was exposed.