Louise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Tonight it is with much pleasure that I rise to speak on the important topic of the National Disability Insurance Scheme, and I was delighted to see the budget this week make such substantial progress on this important issue. I was very pleased a couple of weeks ago to join the Prime Minister and the Minister for Families, the Hon. Jenny Macklin, in my duty electorate of Cowan in WA. We held a very important forum at Jellybeans Childcare Centre in Warwick and discussed our government's plan to fast-track the implementation of the NDIS. It was a terrific forum, meeting the kids, families and staff of Jellybeans and talking about this important issue. Jellybeans is a terrific childcare centre with a specialty service for children with autism. I was particularly pleased that the Prime Minister and Minister Macklin took such a deep interest in the concern about disability services in our local community of Warwick.

I would also like to note that at the end of April a super rally in support of the NDIS was held in Perth, the NDIS Make it Real rally. Similar rallies were held right across the country but the Perth rally was particularly successful. People shared their stories, wrote blogs, donned red shirts and generally lobbied for an NDIS, and they should all be proud of the contribution they have made to making sure the NDIS becomes a reality in this nation.

I would also like to congratulate the very successful campaign organisers from the Every Australian Counts campaign. Their work on the rallies and the whole range of other activities I think has really helped build the momentum for an NDIS, and all these people should be incredibly proud. There have been over 100,000 supporters around Australia for this campaign and they all deserve our applause because, as we all know, governments cannot make big decisions like this without a mandate, and that mandate comes from the important community journey that we have been on, learning about the important issues that confront people with disability in this nation and their need to support and sustain their lifestyle.

As we know, about four million people in Australia—that is, about 18.5 per cent—are reported as having a disability. In my home state of Western Australia, about 17.4 per cent of the population are recorded as such. When you add this number to the people who are involved in the lives of people with disability—families, carers, friends, lovers, support workers and many more—it becomes clear that a significant proportion of the population know or are concerned about people with disability. It has been a long concern of mine that many of those people are not getting the services that they need. Why is this so? It is simply because our system currently in Australia, as fragmented as it is and as underresourced as it is, has not been able to handle the level and range of services that people need. It is why the Productivity Commission, at the request of the government, undertook their detailed study into these issues. A huge amount of work went into the commission's inquiry. People told their stories. People told the commission how broken the current system was but also how it could be made better. It was a really important process.

The report of the Productivity Commission was accepted and responded to by our government. Our government responded quickly because people with disability and their families and carers told the inquiry and told our government that they just could not take this broken-down system any more. I have met with many families in circumstances where indeed they have simply had enough because they are not coping anymore. They could not take the years of waiting for services, which were sometimes never provided. Indeed, many families would cope much better if there was certainty that services would be provided at a certain point in time. But when you are faced with a situation of caring for a loved one day after day, when it undermines your capacity to earn an income elsewhere and meet other goals in life, the household dynamics can often be quite stressful. To live without the certainty of knowing that your family and the person you love and care about will be able to get the care and support they need at some point in time really does get too much for people. I can see that people have been tired of trying to do it all on their own. People have been right to want choice in the types of services and choice in how they access those services—basic things. So the government responded quickly to the Productivity Commission's report and in the development of the NDIS.

One of the highlights—very much so—of this year's budget is the funding of the first stage of this great reform. As we know, the Gillard government will deliver $1 billion over four years to the rolling-out of the first stage of the NDIS. This represents bringing our plans forward by a year to get the NDIS under way. I think that is a terrific thing. Even if it means we are just getting it going in certain regions of Australia, we will be able to learn a lot from what happens in those places. As we accelerate and build it into a universal scheme, the fact that we have had that head start in bringing it forward a year is a very important thing. It means that, by mid-next year, care and support for around 10,000 people with significant and permanent disabilities will be provided for by the scheme.

It is going to happen in four locations around Australia. I sincerely hope that one of those locations will be Western Australia, and I will certainly be advocating for that. But we know beyond doubt that the scheme is going to be expanded to include even more people. I am really pleased with this announcement because we all know that the NDIS can do for disability what another great Labor reform, Medicare, has done for health care in our nation. Medicare has given people access to the services they need most, the ones that really add to their quality of life.

The NDIS has an important and defining feature—that is, that it will be based on people's individual needs. It means that people in this rollout will no longer have to make do with services that do not meet their particular needs, which were designed for a model of how things should run and not designed currently for a person's individual needs. Individual needs in some instances will relate to their disability and the kind of disability they have, and in other instances it will be about accommodating their lifestyle preferences and their other personal needs. So from July next year there will be individually funded packages, and I think that is a really terrific thing.

We will also have funding for local area coordinators who will provide an individualised approach to delivering these services to people in the launch locations. The model builds on what has been quite a successful way of delivering services to people in Western Australia. There is much more detail about the rollout of the NDIS, but tonight I really want to congratulate my government. I am very proud of them. I am very proud of the Gillard government for getting on with the job of designing and delivering this much-needed reform. I particularly want to pay tribute to the thousands of people with disability, their family members, friends, partners and people who care for and support them. They took the time to say what they needed and took action to advocate for this reform. It is because of their work and their commitment that we are about to see the implementation of this most important reform.