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

I move:

That the Senate take note of the report.

In speaking to this report today, I'm very happy to be able to summarise for the chamber the key findings of the NDIS joint standing committee's work for the previous parliament. It's a committee that I have been proud to serve on for the last three or four years. It has done some incredible work, working alongside and enabled by the disability community, particularly in relation to pushing back against some of the very worst ideas brought forth by the previous government.

Alongside the disability community, the Greens have been calling—during the course of the committee's time and in response to the recommendations that it formulated after engaging deeply and authentically with disabled people—for transformative changes to the NDIS. The Greens call for an acknowledgement of these simple truths: that disabled people should be able to access, under the NDIS, every single support that we need to live a good life; and that that is exactly what the NDIS was created to do. It was created to provide disabled people with access to the supports and services that we need to live a good life, in recognition of our national obligations under international law and, on a deeper level, in recognition of the collective community responsibility to work together to bring down the barriers of structural ableism that exist in our society.

As we can see clearly laid out in the summary report of the committee, the previous Morrison government tore constantly at the NDIS. They tore at the NDIS, tore at disabled people and sought to shut us out, to kick us off, to cut our plans and to force us into the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. As my colleague Senator Shoebridge has just drawn our collective attention to, the Administrative Appeals Tribunal is cooked, is stacked and is now, in so many ways, no longer fit for purpose and in urgent need of complete revamp and reform. Indeed, in its dying days, the government and the agency leadership colluded together to basically transform the Administrative Appeals Tribunal into a final and impassable wall, which disabled people and their families found it almost impossible to get over or get under.

People were forced to go to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal to defend their rights to supports and services which they had been receiving for many years. When, finally, a day for a hearing would come or a date would be set, the agency would settle, because they knew they didn't have any case. They were just attempting to defeat the legitimate claim of disabled people and their supporters to access services, so that they didn't have to continue to provide those supports and services. They were fighting an administrative war of attrition against disabled people.

The solution to so many of these problems is twofold. First, we must recognise clearly what brought us to this moment. Now, the NDIS was created 10 years ago, thanks to the collective campaigning of disabled people, our families, our supporters and our allies. Community organising and community activism brought the NDIS into creation to fulfil the obligation to provide services and supports to disabled people so that we can live our lives equal and free in Australian society. At that key moment and juncture, disabled people, having delivered the change, were too often shut out of the implementation, and the decentring of disabled voices in bureaucratic processes and in policy creation is a key part of what has led to the brokenness of so much of the NDIS as we see it today.

But it is not unsalvageable. By giving it the appropriate resources, by ensuring everyone in it has thorough anti-ablism training, by ensuring that disabled people are empowered to lead as the CEO, as the chair, on the board, in senior management—these are the ways that we will fix the NDIS. These are the reforms that the Greens will continue to work with the disability community to see achieved, as well as ending discriminatory age capping within the scheme.