Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Climate Change and Energy) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I table a revised explanatory memorandum relating to the bill, and I move:

That this bill be now read a second time.

I seek leave to have the second reading speech incorporated in Hansard.

Leave granted.

The speech read as follows—

The Government is pleased to be introducing legislation into the Senate today aimed at securing the future of the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

I'd like to commence my remarks by putting some context for this bill.

Before the National Disability Insurance Scheme was rolled out over a decade ago, Australians with disability were too often unseen and unheard—living in the shadows.

Australians with disability suffered what was called by some 'the misery lottery'—that is, the disability support was patchy across the country.

Depending on your postcode, you might be lucky enough to get some funding to help you and your family, or otherwise you might live a life of uncertainty and, quite often, disadvantage and poverty.

It was in 2009, the then Labor Government, under Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Minister for Social Services Jenny Macklin, commissioned a report to help move the analysis and debate about people with disability in this country.

That report was titled Shut out.

What was uncovered through the consultation phase was 'intensely moving and profoundly shocking'.

It painted a picture then of people with disability isolated and alone, their lives a constant struggle for resources and support.

An article written about this groundbreaking report at the time said:

"Where once they were shut in, now people with a disability find themselves shut out. Shut out of housing, employment, education, health care, recreation and sport. Shut out of kindergartens, schools, shopping centres and community groups. Shut out of our way of life. This segregation is a national disgrace."

It was clear then that Australia needed a whole system of disability support, and a scheme like the NDIS for people with the most complex support needs.

The nation and the Parliament at that time made a decision that we would no longer let a person's postcode or financial situation dictate whether they won the disability support lottery.

The National Disability Insurance Scheme has fundamentally changed Australia. The NDIS represents the best about our country.

It fulfills a sense of collective responsibility—the essence of the fair go. It's integral to our national identity.

Its value is measured in human terms, not just economic.

People with disability should have the support they need to participate in the community and have an ordinary life.

Every Australian deserves the peace of mind of knowing that if they or someone they love acquires a significant and permanent disability the NDIS will be there for them.

And all of us benefit from building a more inclusive and accessible society.

This is a 21st century story of successful political change driven by Australians with disability who demanded more control over their destiny, and equality within their own society. After all, Australia was once referred to as having an "egalitarian society"

We can never—must never—return to the days before the NDIS. Through the NDIS, Australians have changed the way we view ourselves. It reflects the nation that we want to see in the mirror.

Australians do not see people with a disability as 'the other'.

They're family, friends, work mates, school mates, our neighbours—any one of us, to be honest, or someone we love.

Treating our fellow Australians who have disabilities as second-class citizens—too hard, too costly, someone else's responsibility—reflects an image of ourselves that I don't believe that we should recognise or like.

However, despite its life-changing impact, the NDIS has been of losing its way. It has not fully delivered on the original vision.

While the NDIS has absolutely changed hundreds of thousands of lives for the better, it is not working well for everyone. Participants have spoken about how every interaction with the NDIS can become a battle.

They've voiced their frustration at having to prove, year after year, that they still are blind or they still have Down syndrome or motor neurone disease.

This was a Scheme that, along with thousands of passionate champions for the cause, that we've worked tirelessly to help establish.

Before our NDIS people with disability were treated as second-class citizens—out of sight, out of mind.

We said, 'Never again'—never again would Australians with disability be forgotten.

We have worked every day with the disability sector to do everything we can to make life on the NDIS and life for people with disability in Australia better.

We promised to make the NDIS a priority and not penalise people with disability for wanting to live fulfilled lives.

We promised to put more people with disability on the NDIS board and conduct a root-and-branch Review of the Scheme. This is an election commitment we met.

We promised to make the Scheme sustainable so that future generations of Australians with disability would have an NDIS to access.

We made a promise to ensure that the Scheme is sustainable.

And we promised to restore trust in the Scheme.

The work began in earnest within days of the election.

We now have more people with lived experience on the NDIS board than in the entire history of the Scheme. We have our first Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander board member.

We're getting more people with disability who are eligible for the NDIS and fit for discharge, discharged from hospital rather than waiting in beds when they are medically fit to go home.

We've slashed the 4½ thousand legacy appeal cases that were languishing in long queues at the Administrative Appeals Tribunal.

We've established a partnership between the National Disability Insurance Agency and the First Peoples Disability Network to collaborate on the new First Nations NDIS strategy and action plan.

We've established the Inklings pilot with the Telethon Kids Institute in Western Australia to help families of children who are showing early signs of autism with evidence based interventions.

Early intervention is one of the key principles of the NDIS, and the world-leading Inklings program takes us from a 'wait and see' approach to an 'identify and act' approach.

Early intervention is crucial for a life with less reliance on supports later on and the chance for a child to flourish.

We also promised to make the Scheme safer for people with disability, and to tackle fraud, waste and overcharging so that every dollar goes towards a better outcome for the participant, not someone trying to make a quick, dirty buck.

In its first year, the Fraud Fusion Taskforce that we established has investigated more than a hundred cases involving more than $1 billion of NDIS funding.

Mr Michael Phelan, a former director of the Australian Institute of Criminology, and decorated former police officer, is now the Acting Commissioner of the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission.

The Commission is part of the taskforce alongside the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and the NDIA to weed out those charging more for equipment and services simply because you have an NDIS funding package.

This is wrong and it's a breach of federal law and we've upgraded the NDIS rules to make it clear that an NDIS 'wedding tax' is not on. That is when people approach a service provider and say, 'I'm on the NDIS,' and the price inexplicably goes up for an identical service.

I do say to service providers who are complaining about our campaign on price gouging: putting unfair treatment—by, admittedly, a small minority of service providers—in the too-hard basket undermines the reputation of the many very good, dedicated service providers, and ignoring price gouging and unethical conduct is a betrayal of NDIS participants and Aussie taxpayers and jeopardises the credibility and social license of the Scheme.

Further legal changes are coming, to more strongly prohibit and punish such unethical practices.

But while an enormous amount has been achieved in a short period of time, there is much more to do.

The independent NDIS Review panel undertook some of the most extensive consultation with the Australian community in the history of the Commonwealth, to set a new course for the NDIS.

The Review's final report, released publicly on 7 December 2023, made 26 recommendations and 139 supporting actions to Government, all based on what the panel heard from more than 10,000 people, disability organisations, and what they read in almost 4,000 submissions.

National Cabinet considered the final report and, as part of the initial response, agreed that the Commonwealth would work with State and Territory Governments to implement legislative and other changes in the first half of 2024.

I do acknowledge the remarkable goodwill of State Premiers and Territory Chief Ministers in agreeing to work as one for Australians with disability.

I certainly applaud their commitment last December to fund additional disability services outside the NDIS program—the 'foundational supports' that we speak of—and I also acknowledge that they have agreed to contribute more directly to the NDIS from 1 July 2028.

Since the report was handed down, Minister Shorten has held no less than 10 town hall meetings around Australia where thousands of people attended in person and online.

The town halls were held to provide transparency, to listen and to reassure. This is the cornerstone of this Government's commitment to people with disability. We have been on the frontline with people with disability and the sector always—the NDIS is testament to this—and we will not waiver from this loyalty and responsibility.

We've had almost 10 years of delay on NDIS progress working for Australians with disability and the Review Panel also tells us that any changes we make to the Scheme will take years to properly implement. The process of reform will take years.

Australians with a disability shouldn't wait a day longer than they have to for Governments at all levels to work together with people with disability to improve the Scheme.

The Albanese Government is committed to engaging and consulting with people with disability, their families, carers, representative organisations, service providers, unions, and the broader community.

We have made the promise to co-design with people with disability and the sector and we will make good on this promise.

The Bill provides the framework for broader reform to the Scheme and the Government is committed to ensuring the design and implementation of these changes will include extensive consultation and co-design with the disability community.

This will be achieved through working together with the disability community to design and implement legislative instruments to ensure people with disability remain at the centre of the Scheme.

In Australia, we have an extensive network of excellent and engaged peak bodies that are recognised as representing people with disability and carers, have members who are people with disability or family members and hold valued roles on many advisory groups.

Disability Representative Organisations will play a key role in consultation and co-design activities which will include:

We want people to know they have a seat at the table and they will be listened to. We are committed to working WITH people, not doing things TO people. It's always been the sector's humble yet powerful mantra: "Nothing about us without us".

This bill will enable new and expanded rule- and instrument-making powers. This is why we have committed to co-design.

The legislative approach taken is that we seek to establish an enabling architecture for rules and future reforms to restore the original intent, integrity, consistency and transparency of the Scheme.

These rules, together with all legislative instruments provided for in the bill, will be developed with all states and territories following the consultation with the disability community. I have just outlined.

Deep and considered collaboration with the disability sector on design is essential. This was the clarion call from the NDIS Review panel.

It will be complemented by design and development of foundational supports to assist people with a disability, including those outside the NDIS.

This principle has also been agreed by all Governments.

This bill is only the first step in this process of reform outlined by the Review. There remains an enormous amount of work to do together to implement the reforms.

The Government will work with state and territory partners, and across the political divide with The Opposition, to deliver a common vision for the NDIS.

I note the Opposition has told Australians they will support this bill and work with Minister Shorten on improving the sustainability of the NDIS.

The Shadow NDIS Minister indicated in his second reading speech that the Opposition would not oppose the Bill in the House. The Government welcomes this support,

Simply put, we wish to put the NDIS above the day-to-day political debate between levels of Government and between political parties, because Australians with disability and their families deserve nothing less.

We will absolutely continue to engage with participants, their families, carers and disability representative organisations to ensure that this blueprint for the future reflects their experience and contributions.

The bill is the next part of our journey towards an improved NDIS. It is about securing the NDIS for future generations of Australians and making sure it working for participants now and into the future.

It's also a first step in responding to the NDIS Review findings, and to the disability community who so generously shared their experiences and insights.

But I'd like to talk directly to the 660,000 Australians who are NDIS participants, to the 400,000 people who work in NDIS related occupations, to families, carers and guardians.

I know that much needed—and indeed much wanted—change can produce anxiety. I want to reassure people with disability, advocates and the sector, we have listened to your feedback and made changes to the bill to align with your advice and experience. There are four main amendments that this government is introducing into the Senate today. These are on the back of the 12 week Senate inquiry into the Bill, which recommended the Bill be passed subject to the amendments.

Talk of any change to a family battling to make ends meet can sound like a problem, not an opportunity, and I can respect nervousness which might be caused by this discussion. I just want to reassure these people who've battled hard to create an NDIS and to get their packages of support: we will work with you to make sure that people are getting the right support in the right way.

Under this Government this Scheme will continue to grow. Changes will be for the best interests of the participant.

A critical element of design and development following passage of the bill will be a person-centered model for needs assessment.

This will deliver consistency and equity for planning decisions.

In addition, access to the NDIS should not depend on how rich you are or who you know or the expert medical reports that you are able to procure.

This change that we're talking about will not take effect until design is done and new rules are made—transition will take time, and we don't seek to rush that.

Importantly, agreement by all state and federal Governments means the NDIS will become one part of a larger ecosystem of supports rather than being in danger of being the only lifeboat in the ocean.

Before I talk about some of the technical parts of the bill, I do want to flag that some of the following part of this presentation will have some technical discussion.

I'm here to explain its intent in plain language so that people with disability and their families, and disability organisations understand what is changing and when it will be changing.

What we have to do is reform the National Disability Insurance Scheme Act of 2013 (the NDIS Act) and we have four goals:

1) that the NDIS provide a better experience for participants

2) that the Scheme be restored to its original intent to support people with significant and permanent disability

3) that the Scheme be equitable, and

4) that the Scheme be sustainable.

The bill has two parts.

One section lays the foundations for implementing key Review recommendations, particularly those around planning and budget setting.

I want to go through some of that with you.

Once you're in the Scheme, you will get a plan based on your support needs.

What we all want is a more dignified, person-centered process that assesses needs to determine a consistent, accurate and fair budget.

And that that budget can be spent flexibly.

This starts with a needs assessment that we'll work on with the disability sector to make sure we get it right.

I want to be clear. 'Reasonable and necessary' remains the core basis on which your support needs are met through the Scheme.

This bill proposes no changes to the 'reasonable and necessary' core operating principle of the NDIS.

But your needs assessment will look at your support needs as a whole—and we won't distinguish between primary and secondary disabilities any longer. This government is moving an amendment to clarify this.

If over time your support needs change, because of a significant change in your function, your information can be updated with a new support needs assessment.

The result will be a budget for disability supports that are fit for you; that reflect the support needs for your disability.

You can spend this budget flexibly in line with your own support needs—because you know them best. But everyone will need to manage their NDIS budget, just as we do with our household budgets.

We will be clear about what supports can and can't be funded by the NDIS to help you make informed choices and have confidence that you're using your NDIS funds within what is allowed.

The changes to be implemented will be developed with people with disability and the disability sector. This will take time to get right. The legislation is starting to deliver our vision for a future NDIS.

This legislation is not an end in itself. Until the rules and subsequent legislative instruments are made, the current planning rules will continue to apply once the rules are in place. Flexible budgets and a whole-of-person approach will increase the ability of participants to exercise real, true choice and control and to best realise their full social and economic participation in Australian society.

The changes to budget setting aim to provide participants with greater clarity and transparency and with fairer and more consistent decision-making, and will improve participant satisfaction. Creating this budget framework aligns with the original intent of the NDIS to support people with a permanent, significant disability as part of a larger landscape of supports outside the NDIS.

Before we can introduce these things a lot of work needs to be done collaboratively with people with disability, their families, represented organisations, and state and territory Governments.

There are also some operational changes that need to be made. This is the second part of the bill. I know that some people feel anxious when we talk about Scheme sustainability—what they hear instead is, 'Do I lose something?'

There is still some media commentary that unfairly targets people with disability in a way that is stigmatising and deeply unfair, and, of course, we live in the age of social media.

To meet some of the rumors head on, I say, (1) psychosocial disability is still included in the NDIS—full stop; (2) autism is still recognised as a disability—full stop; and (3) there are many good service providers in the Scheme, but at the same time we need to have an honest conversation about the Scheme. It cannot keep growing at the same rate that it is now. It can keep growing, but it just can't keep growing at 16 per cent annually, as it has in the past few years. The Disability Reform Ministerial Council is on record as saying:

Without timely action to improve outcomes for people with disability, the NDIS is projected to grow to more than 1 million participants and cost up to $100 billion a year by 2032.

Costs continue to grow without fairness, rigor and control over this critical investment by the Australian people. We simply have to take steps to get it back on track, and that's what we're doing with this bill.

Some operational changes to improve things can happen soon after the legislation if it's passed by the parliament and signed by the Governor-General. One is the definition of 'NDIS supports'.

The legislation will, for the first time, link the definition of 'NDIS supports' to the rights of people with disability under the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. This is the first time that parts of the UN convention have been incorporated into NDIS laws. We moved amendments to ensure this did not pick only parts of the convention.

Another change relates to the provision of information-gathering for eligibility reassessment.

It is important to have the ability to request and receive information on whether participants meet the access criteria.. But let me be very clear—this will not result in people having to reprove their disability, but it will allow the CEO to determine if a participant is receiving the most appropriate support.

The process will take into account difficulties of participants in accessing information, but participants or their nominee will need to communicate with the NDIA in a way that works best for the person on the Scheme. Not communicating is not an option.

Another change that will be able to happen pretty quickly is with plan management arrangements where there is a risk for that participant, including financial risk. I want to make clear that the Agency has responsibilities here too, and will be required to be consistent in its operations with the legislation and the rules.

These are just a few of the things that you may see happen early on. Because this is such an important Scheme for so many of our fellow Australians, I want to stress that those directly impacted by key decisions about the Scheme continue to play a central role in developing the detail and the implementation of the reforms.

The biggest ideas from the Review, will take time, and we respect that process timeline There are two reasons for this.

One is that these things have to be done in collaboration with people with disability.

And the second is that the Review was very clear about the sequence of events, particularly about building the ecosystem of supports outside the NDIS. These changes will align with foundational supports in 2025

The NDIS was designed to help the people with the most complex support needs, but it was never designed to be the total Scheme for all Australians with disability. We now need to finish the job of building a more inclusive Australia.

It is why we, need to begin the work of foundational supports with our colleagues at the State and Territory level.

The States and Territories will play an important role here, consistent with the two National Cabinet agreements from last year.

This bill also includes amendments to quality and safeguarding for the Scheme Watchdog. Providing greater flexibility for the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commissioner in exercising compliance powers and building on our comprehensive fraud reforms.

These changes will boost the commission's ability to undertake compliance action.

I want to say again that, when we talk about improving the quality of outcomes for people with disability, some providers feel criticised. I put on the record that the vast majority of providers are good, decent, hardworking people. I wish to record my gratitude for the quality services they supply with care, compassion and professionalism.

But we owe Australians the truth. Some providers are literally having a lend of the system. This Scheme was not designed to put a second-story verandah on a beach house of a provider seeking to make a quick buck. We cannot ignore this and the poor outcomes that delivers for participants.

With the measures we're talking about, this is not the end of the journey or the end of the story.

We will consider more work in the future on quality and safety once we have the report of the NDIS Provider and Worker Registration Taskforce, led by trusted lawyer and disability advocate Natalie Wade.

What has been outlined above requires a national coordinated effort across all Governments and from each and every one of us as members of the community.

These reforms will not happen overnight—there will be a significant piece of work to design this pathway and we again ask for the support and the contributions of the disability sector.

This reform process has been in the making since the NDIS Review was commissioned more than 18 months ago. I want the best for Australians with disability, as I know this Parliament does across political divides.

I acknowledge there are questions and concerns from colleagues in the States and Territories, and we will genuinely work to resolve issues and allay fears. There is no arrogance or hubris with the introduction of this bill. This is, , the time to start this stage of our reform journey. It is in line with the National Cabinet agreement to introduce legislation in the first part of this year, and we're delivering on that promise.

As I say, I can only imagine that there will be some anxiety about any talk of changes within the disability sector, but the NDIS, as we all know, is not working the way it should and is not working consistently for many people.

This is our chance to make it right. This is our chance as a parliament to help finish the job. If you have a significant and permanent disability, you will be covered by the NDIS. If you have a developmental delay which can be supported by a means of support other than an individual package, you will get what you need. There is nothing to be afraid of during this transition about your future on the Scheme. We are simply seeking to put the best interests of the participants foremost in the decisions of the Scheme.

This is all about what people need. We are tremendously committed to improving the lives of people with disability and working with people with disability to do this.

The NDIS is a marvelous, world-leading Australian experiment. It is changing lives.

We cannot allow people to be excluded from the great life of Australian opportunity because of their impairment. We should be proud of the NDIS.

The NDIS enables Australians regardless of their level of ability to lead the most fulfilling life possible.

I talk of a life of independence and dignity, a life of contribution to the community, a life of improved health and personal safety, a life of connection to others.

The NDIS unlocks the great potential of Australians with disability and their families. It enables them to participate in the life of our country on their own terms.

We should never change in fear, but we should never fear to change. The NDIS is not perfect, but it's not broken.

We should never have a catastrophe mindset about the NDIS; we should just be truthful.

We can, together, make it fairer, more transparent, more compassionate and more accountable to those it supports. It's still young—growing and learning.

But it is most certainly here to stay.

The NDIS is, daily, changing the lives of hundreds of thousands of Australians with disability, and their families and the people who work with them.

I want it to keep changing hundreds of thousands of lives, long after we've left this place.

I hope that the Parliament can rise to the occasion to help secure the future of the Scheme—not just for Australians with disability but for all Australians.

I will leave you as I began—with a quote from the Shut Out report. This was an anonymous submission:

Disability is characterised by desire for positive change and striving for emancipation and flourishing. It is seen every day amongst people living with disability. It is active hope. We desire a place within the community! This place is not just somewhere to lay down our heads, but a place which brings comfort and support with daily living, friendship, meaningful work, exciting recreation, spiritual renewal, relationships in which we can be ourselves freely with others. And out of this great things may flourish.

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

I rise to speak on the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Getting the NDIS Back on Track No. 1) Bill 2024. We are two years into this lamentable government, and we finally have this bill in front of the Senate today. It's an issue that the now minister flagged as a priority when he was shadow minister, and, as with so much that this government has failed to do, we have seen nothing but hand-wringing from the government on the NDIS for the past two years. But it's good that, at the end of the long and winding road, we can be here to talk about this bill.

In essence, we've got a very peculiar situation here with this entire bill. Let's be frank: with the rhetoric from this government over the past two years, we know that the NDIS has changed lives for the better, with more than 660,000 Australians and their families in some way, shape or form relying on what the scheme is doing. The coalition is very proud of our extremely strong record in supporting the NDIS, essentially taking it from fewer than 50,000 participants to more than half a million in our time in government. We did the real hard work of taking what we inherited in its infancy, with many flaws, and turning it into a viable scheme for more than half a million Australians. We remain committed to fully funding the scheme to ensure that this demand driven scheme was able to grow where it grew.

We inherited a scheme that was underinvested in by the Labor Party. It was a scheme that was established in the chaos of the Rudd-Gillard government. In that time, however, the coalition did often make the point—and have made the point to this day—that the scheme has to be sustainable and that the scheme's very future for people with disabilities and their families will rely on the scheme remaining sustainable. We spoke about that in government, and we were absolutely criticised by the then opposition for talking about sustainability. In opposition, the now minister stood in the way, day after day, of coalition attempts to put the scheme on a sustainable footing. The now minister accused us in the coalition of 'pearl-clutching kabuki theatre', claiming the NDIS was tracking just as predicted and that the coalition was hyping fictional cost blowouts. While he was shadow minister, he also said, 'You can't move around the corridors of parliament in Canberra without tripping over a coalition minister whispering, "The scheme is unsustainable." I'm here to tell you today that that's a lie.' That's another quote from the minister.

The minister spent his time in opposition blocking every single attempt of the former coalition government to do some of the work that is now contained in this bill. He went to the election and said: 'None of that's necessary. The scheme is on track. It's tracking as predicted. There are no cost blowouts and there are no sustainability issues. It's just those terrible Liberals talking about it.' Then, the minute he got elected, the message changed overnight. All of a sudden, this scheme, that was tracking just as predicted, according to this minister, was on an unsustainable footing and needed to be reined in. Now we find ourselves here today.

Further, in the lead-up to the election, the minister tried to argue that the former coalition government made cuts to the NDIS. We know that you can't trust Labor when they talk about cuts, even though the coalition rescued the scheme by investing, at that time, $157.8 billion to support more than 500,000 Australians with a disability. So that's the great hypocrisy of it all.

I think every advocate and person in the disability sector knows that what shadow minister Shorten said before the election was entirely the opposite of what Minister Shorten has said since he's been in government. And now we find this bill—the culmination of his arguments that the scheme is not on a sustainable footing. You'd think in two years a minister who felt as though the scheme wasn't on a sustainable footing, that the scheme needed to be reined in and costs reduced, as he's argued consistently. Since the election, the minister has been very consistent. He's had one thing to say about the NDIS, which is that it has to be reined in: spending's got to be reduced, and ultimately the only way to make it sustainable is to reduce the number of people who get access to the scheme and reduce the amount that people on the scheme are entitled to. He has been very consistent about that. But when you're the minister you actually have to do things. You actually have to make changes. You just can't diagnose problems forever. He has failed to make the transition from opposition to government, where, once you get into government, your job is to not just diagnose problems but actually fix them.

The minister talks a lot about abuse of the scheme. Well, abuse of the NDIS has got worse on his watch. Abuse by people with the ill intention of defrauding the scheme has gone into overdrive since this minister has been in the big chair. It's not something he spoke that much about before the election but it's gone into overdrive. We've learned through a number of Administrative Appeals Tribunal cases what some claimants have been arguing for under this minister's framework. There are people who go to the AAT and claim that, under the NDIS, taxpayers should fund some of the following: swimming pools, sex workers and round-the-world trips. And it's all getting worse on this government's watch.

In fact, through Senate estimates and a number of different forums, we've asked the minister to rule out the use of prostitutes under the NDIS. Taxpayers unequivocally support the NDIS and are willing to support the tens of billions of dollars—$40 billion—that it costs to run the NDIS, provided that the money is used wisely.

We now see a scheme that's out of control. We've seen wait times double since this government came to power. The scheme and the agency is being run into the ground by this government, and they've been there for only two years. Boy, what could we have done in the past two years? It has taken them two years to get this bill before the Senate today, and may I say that there is a long way for this bill to go—because the litany of concerns with this bill are very long. In some respects it looks like a rushed bill, but how on earth could a bill be rushed when you've had two years to do something? This was supposed to be a high priority of this government. We're two years in.

he Senate today and may I say that there is a long for this bill to go, because the litany of concerns with this bill are very long. In some respects it looks like a rushed bill. How on earth could have Bilby rushed when you've had two years to do something? This was supposed to be a high priority of this government. We're two years in.

Here are some concerns raised by stakeholders—not all of them, because that would take up all day. But it's not clear from the bill what a participant can do if they don't agree with an outcome of a needs assessment. This particular stakeholder said: 'The NDIA decisions are notorious for being inconsistent and variable. There doesn't appear to be an avenue for review.' The second concern raised by stakeholders is: 'The new definition says the NDIS will only fund eight categories of supports. These are based on selected elements out of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. However, by leaving out other elements of that convention, the bill excludes some supports from NDIS funding. For example, the convention recognises the right to live where a person chooses and with who they choose, as well as rights to work in employment. However, this bill does not appear to include support that would specifically facilitate participants' economic participation.'

The review recommendations contained a range of numerous contentions. The drafting of the bill lacked opportunities for consultation. A stakeholder said, 'Our position and that of those we represent is that, without examination and scrutiny of the full and complete proposed changes to the bill, it would deliver a result in the future that looks akin to Frankenstein's monster.' Participants, their families and providers would be scrabbling for fair and equitable access to the scheme and supports they need. Another stakeholder said: 'What is and is not an NDIS support must not be so strict as to not allow a participant to explain why it's reasonable and necessary for a request for support to be funded.' The APTOS will be incorporated as an interim measure to determine what is and is not an NDIS support, yet it has been widely recognised that APTOS has failed. There are also no provisions about providers of last resort.

Just to stay on the point of the stakeholders being upset with regard to the lack of transparency and co-design and the approach to the development of this bill, remember that the Prime Minister came to office saying: 'We are going to be an open, transparent and accountable government. We are going to let the light shine in.' There has been a worrying trend with this government—and it seems almost uniform—in its consultations of the use of non-disclosure agreements. If they're genuinely consulting with the sector, but the sector can only find out or be consulted on the basis that it agrees—presumably by fear of prosecution by the government not to tell anybody about it—how on earth will that be genuine consultation? NDAs—that is, non-disclosure agreements—have not been a feature of genuine consultation with the federal government, but they're an Albanese government feature. It will be written that NDAs became a feature of government consultation under a Labor government, and that is not genuine co-design. They can call it co-design, but, if they're hand-picking and selecting who they supposedly consult with and those people are unable to share information with counterparts, peers or even their own members if they're a representative organisation, that's not co-design and that's not consultation. That is a very worrying feature of this government. Let's be frank: you only get people to sign NDAs when you are trying to hide something. NDAs are not there if you're proud of the product that you are consulting on. NDAs are there if you're concerned or if you want to hide something from the Australia public.

We've now had the minister concede that he was wrong before the election. Before the election, when he said that the NDIS was tracking just as predicted and that the coalition was hyping fictional cost blowouts, either he was genuinely ignorant of the truth, which is possible, or he deliberately deceived the entire disability sector, community and NDIS participants when he made those statements, knowing they were incorrect. In the end, that is up to Australians to judge.

This coalition opposition is not going to use the more than 600,000 Australians with a disability and their families as some kind of political football or some kind of opportunity to embarrass the government. They are Australians who deserve honesty. They are Australians who are realistic and understand the strengths and weaknesses of the scheme. They are the best people to turn to when you need answers as to what to do next, which is why it is so disappointing that the minister has ignored these people, that he has not consulted with them and that he has not engaged with them. It's as if this government and the minister have gone into the bunker and decided: 'We're going to reverse our position from before the election. We're going to do the opposite of what we said before the election. So let's put the flak jackets on, get into the bunker and just do this—not consult intelligently, fairly, openly and transparently with the people who these changes will most significantly impact.' Having done so, there is now huge anxiety across the community, and I think that's a fundamental error that this minister has made. The suspicion and concern now felt by many participants and their families are a direct response not just to the mixed messages from saying one thing before an election and another thing afterward but also to the thought processes of the minister and the government. Of course, an example of this that's raised commonly is children with ASD or developmental delay. We know that, since the state governments have vacated the field, parents of those children have nowhere to go but the NDIS, yet the uncertainty and lack of supports after this bill are causing huge levels of anxiety.

That said, the coalition will support sensible measures in this bill—measures that the coalition actually sought to implement but that Labor actively campaigned against. At the appropriate stage, the coalition will move amendments that will improve the scheme, preserve the scheme's integrity and ensure the sustainability of the scheme to allow it to continue, improving the lives of some of the most vulnerable in our community.

However, insufficient time has been provided for proper consultation on the bill with the sector and the community, who have expressed widespread misgivings about the current legislation. The opportunity for thorough consultation is important in bringing the NDIS back onto a sustainable footing in a manner that does not disadvantage or negatively impact on participants most in need, and it is concerning that the Community Affairs Legislation Committee was not given the opportunity. So, as I finish up, I move the second reading amendment circulated in my name:

At the end of the motion, add "and the bill be referred to the Community Affairs Legislation Committee for further inquiry and report by 5 August 2024".

(Time expired)

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

When I was about 10 years old, I started using a manual wheelchair for the first time. The state run disability service system in Western Australia at that time gave you the option to choose between three wheelchairs. I tried them out and trialled them. None of them fit properly. All of them hurt. None of them had the right type of cushion, and none of them had side guards, simple bits of plastic, so that the dog poo, mud or rainwater that you might run through wouldn't get on your clothes or your skin. Because none of those chairs worked, because they lacked a cushion and those basic pieces of plastic, I and my family had to fight and fight and fight to get a wheelchair that actually worked, because the wheelchair that worked and the cushion and guards I needed weren't on the government approved list for wheelchairs in WA.

Eventually we got them. We got them because of a great team of allied health professionals and because of a mum who had spent 20 years as a social worker in the United Kingdom and had the skill to push back on the system. But God it was hard, and it was so stressful and so degrading to sit in the office of the person who could approve these changes and have to justify why I needed the wheelchair that worked for me. It made me feel terrible. At one point during the conversation, that government employee said to me, 'Well, Jordon, if we give you a wheelchair that costs that much money, we won't have enough money to put safety belts on buses for kids who go to special schools.' When I asked, 'Please can I have the pieces of plastic so that the dog poo doesn't get on my clothes and go into my skin and give me a pressure sore,' the response was, 'Well, the rules here say all we're meant to do is fund you for a wheelchair in your home.

This was the reality of the state based systems before the NDIS. You had to fight against a government approved list, a list of yes or no. You had to burn yourself into the ground to get anything, and there were only a couple of government approved providers that you could choose from. It was a terrible, disconnected system that led people to be abused and that constrained us, harmed us and made life more difficult for us and for our families. So we campaigned together—disabled people, our families, our allies, our organisations and the people that work with us—for a better way, for a nationally consistent system of supports that would enable you to get funding for the services that you need, for the equipment that you need, for the therapies that you need and for the support workers that you need to live a life with dignity, independence, purpose and aspiration. We campaigned for a system that would provide you with individual supports based on your specific needs and empower you to have agency over how they were used, empower you to be able to decide who came into your home and who gave you a wash, enable you to live independently on your own if that's what you chose to do and enable you to build a network of professionals around you that were paid properly for their time so that they could provide you with their expertise. We wanted a scheme that would enable disabled people to live, our families to live and the barriers in our society and community to be brought down.

We campaigned for our NDIS, and a decade ago we won it. Together, we spent that next decade fighting to protect it. We knew all too well that the establishment of the NDIS did not mean that the barriers would vanish. It meant that we had established a foundation stone upon which to build a life for ourselves and hope for our communities and our families and that we were now charged, as disabled people, with its dogged and determined defence. As disabled people, we know that government, if left to its own devices, makes choices about us without us. In every space, from whether there is an accessible entrance way to a public building to whether we are forced to live together in institutions or whether we get to live or exist at all, government, if left alone, makes the choice about us without us, with catastrophic consequences. So we defended it again and again and again. During all of those years of Liberal government, we defended it. The Labor government, at the last election, pledged itself to that cause, to the defence of our NDIS. They promised that, if they were elected, they would stop the cuts and they would end the awful culture that had taken root within the agency, which treated disabled people and their family members as though we were trying to get something we weren't really entitled to, as though we were criminals trying to get access to things we knew we shouldn't have.

They promised, more than anything else, to make any change about our scheme in deep co-design with disabled people, acknowledging that co-design requires consent of the parties to the process of co-design. Can you imagine the reaction of the Australian disability community and our families, allies and organisations when, after two years of giving our time and our emotional labour and extending our trust to review after review, to the disability royal commission and to endless numbers of taskforces, we were landed in March of this year with a bill that goes so far beyond anything that we had asked for and so far beyond anything the evidence supported as to almost make a dark joke out of the commitment to co-design and out of every sentence that had, to that moment, dropped from the mouth of the minister?

Let me make very clear: this bill removes choice and control from the NDIS. This bill removes the ability to have individual-specific supports funded in our plan and replaces that ability, replaces those principles, with a government mandated list of 'yes' and 'no', a government mandated list of supports created by—wait for it—ministers of the Crown, of the state and federal governments. There is not a disabled person in sight among any of them. Under this bill they get to choose, behind closed doors, what they believe we as disabled people should be able to receive, when none of them understand what it means to be a disabled person, when none of them have demonstrated in their careers an actual understanding of what is needed from government to make the community more accessible and inclusive.

Yet they will decide. The federal government, under this bill, is granted the ability to divide disabled people into classes, into groups. How can we, in 2024, be asked to consider a bill that gives a government the power to divide 20 per cent of the population into a class? This bill gives the government the ability to force upon us mandatory government assessments, regardless of how many we have already endured, regardless of how much trauma we may be subjected to and regardless of whether, as a First Nations person, you know damn well that those tools—designed by white people, designed by academics in some far-off place—will not represent your needs, your support, your life or your culture.

These processes become mandatory. Under this bill, this assessment is exempt from review, and the result of that assessment is then translated into a capped budget. You might ask, how is it translated? Well, by a method—that's all the bill says. What will be in that method? How will it translate a number of complex needs assessments and personal contexts into a budget? We have no idea. But the federal government says: 'Trust us that we'll get it right. Trust us that we'll give you what you need. Give us all the power now to decide what you may be funded for, how you may be funded for it, who provides it and when it is provided, and we will do the rest. And we promise we'll do it with you, even though the way in which we made this bill was the literal definition of designing a piece of legislation behind closed doors. Trust us that we will consult. Trust us that we will make the right decisions for you.'

Well, no. The disability community do not trust this government. The disability community have been profoundly betrayed by this government. The disability community do not accept this bill. The disability community reject this bill. And we do not accept that it is appropriate to ram a piece of legislation that affects the lives of 660,000 Australian citizens and their families, their friends and their organisations through this parliament with 2½ days of hearing, when the amendments offered by the government to this point are little more than lipstick on a pig—an insult to the intelligence of any disabled person, any lawyer, any advocate who reads them. We do not accept this.

I asked you earlier to imagine what it was like to live as we lived before the NDIS. I asked you to imagine how hard you would fight for something better. I now ask you to imagine how hard you would fight to defend the scheme—the supports and the services—that you need to live a good life or that your child needs to live a good life. I ask you to imagine it. If you fail, don't worry, because we are about to show you just how hard we fight, just how much we are willing to give and just how many of us vote.

Catryna Bilyk (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'm proud to have served in the government that established the National Disability Insurance Scheme. The NDIS will go down in history as one of the many great Labor reforms that have shaped Australia. It was Labor that built Medicare, it was Labor that built our social security system and it was Labor that introduced compulsory superannuation. It was Labor that undertook the important economic reforms of the 1980s that contributed so much to Australia's continued prosperity, and it was Labor that built the national broadband network.

Like all these great reforms, the NDIS has had a transformative impact. Like most Australians, I know some NDIS participants personally—in fact, some are family members—and I can see that the NDIS has made a positive and life-changing difference for them. To highlight the difference the NDIS has made for participants, it's worth reflecting on the 2011 Productivity Commission report, Disability care and support. That 2011 report found:

The current disability support system is underfunded, unfair, fragmented, and inefficient, and gives people with a disability little choice and no certainty …

The Productivity Commission report also referred to the '"lottery" of access to services' for people with disability, based on their location or the timing or origin of their disability. At the time the scheme was established, I remember speaking in this place about how people in towns situated on state borders would receive different levels of support based on which side of the street they lived on and how a person with disability waiting for a piece of essential equipment would, if they moved states, have to be shunted to the back of the queue.

Another important highlight of the Productivity Commission report was the lack of control people with disability had over their services and the lack of choice of service providers. Some of the issues raised by people with disability and their families and carers engaging with the Productivity Commission inquiry included long waiting times for equipment or therapists, the requirement to complete long-winded and unnecessary paperwork—sometimes providing the same information multiple times—and the lack of support for adults wanting to move out of home and gain independence. Parents worried about whether their adult children with disability would get the support they needed when the parents died or were no longer able to care for them. People also spoke about having to navigate a maze of supports and how some people with disability got lost in the maze, particularly if they didn't have friends, family, carers or support organisations to advocate for them.

The NDIS, now that it is in place, is not only dramatically improving the lives of people with disability but is also paying dividends in other ways. Better support for people with disability means better physical and mental health outcomes, which obviously reduces the burden on our health system. The NDIS is also improving the ability of people with disability to engage in work, which helps boost productivity and economic growth, as does taking some of the pressure off informal carers such as family members. In this way, the NDIS helps all Australians, not just those with disability.

While the NDIS has been a fantastic life-changing reform for many people with disability, we know that not everyone's NDIS experience has been ideal and that there is always room for improvement. Just like all the other great nation-building Labor reforms I mentioned, the NDIS needs to be adapted and improved over time. We also need to make sure, in the interests of all NDIS participants, their families and their carers, that it remains sustainable. The NDIS is projected to grow to more than one million participants and cost up to $1 billion a year by 2032. Making sure we get the best outcomes for people with disability is why we commissioned the independent review of the NDIS last year.

Over a period of 12 months, the review engaged with around 10,000 people from across Australia. The review's engagement was extensive and wide-ranging. Submissions were received in writing, verbally, by phone, by video, by Auslan, by artwork and even by poetry. People were invited to workshops and meetings to share their experiences and ideas. The review partnered with disability representatives and service organisations to engage, in depth, on topics of interest. Review panel members attended events and forums held by the disability community and providers, and the review also drew on the evidence from previous reviews. The review panel travelled to every state and territory and met with thousands of people, including in remote and regional areas. I commend the review panel, including co-chairs Bruce Bonyhady AM and Lisa Paul AO, PSM for their work on the review and their well-considered and comprehensive report.

After considering all the evidence provided, the review's report delivered 26 recommendations, with 139 action items. The National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Getting the NDIS Back on Track No. 1) Bill implements several priority recommendations of the independent review. The changes made by this bill are broadly categorised under three thematic groups: access, budget-setting, and quality and safeguarding. The bill will provide clarity on who can access the NDIS. It will require the National Disability Insurance Agency to provide participants with a clear statement of the basis on which they entered the NDIS by meeting either the disability requirements, the early intervention requirements, or both. The bill will also clarify and expand the NDIS rules relating to access provisions, including the methods or criteria to be applied when making decisions about the disability and early intervention criteria, and the matters which must or must not be taken into account. The bill will enable better early intervention pathways for people living with psychosocial disability and for children younger than nine years old with developmental delay and disability.

The bill will also improve how NDIS participant budgets are set, making them more flexible and providing clearer information on how they can be spent. It will create a new reasonable and necessary budget framework for the preparation of NDIS participants' plans. Participants will receive funding based on whether they access the scheme on the basis of impairments that meet the disability requirements, the early intervention requirements, or both. A new definition of NDIS supports will provide a clear definition for all participants of the authorised supports that will be funded by the NDIS and those that will not. The bill links the definition of NDIS supports to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and this is the first time parts of the convention have been incorporated into legislation—the first time.

The bill also strengthens quality and safeguards by giving the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commissioner greater flexibility to exercise compliance powers. This is not targeted at the majority of NDIS providers, who are good, honest people, trying to professionally and compassionately support people with disability, but we do have to recognise that there are a few providers who are rorting the scheme, and the government needs the tools to crack on those rorts.

As the minister outlined in his second reading speech on the bill, the government is seeking to achieve four main goals when it comes to reform of the NDIS: that the NDIS provide a better experience for participants; that the scheme be restored to its original intent—to support people with significant and permanent disability; that the scheme be equitable; and that the scheme be sustainable. I do appreciate that there is some anxiety in the community about what sustainability of the scheme means for participants. It's important to understand that under this government the NDIS will continue to grow. Participants will still get a plan based on their support needs, and 'reasonable and necessary' will continue to be the basis upon which support needs are met through the scheme. The bill creates an enabling architecture for the new rules that will give effect to those reforms, which will be developed with the states and territories. The new rules will be co-designed with the disability community, continuing to put the voices of people with disability at the heart of these reforms. This bill is also about setting a pathway towards a unified system of support for people with disability.

The review talked about the NDIS being an oasis in the desert of disability support, and this is clearly not what it is intended to be. To coin another analogy, as the minister has said on a number of occasions, he does not want the NDIS to be the only lifeboat in the ocean. There are approximately 660,000 NDIS participants, but there are estimated to be over four million people with disability in Australia. These people also need to be supported, but it is clearly not sustainable to have every one of them participate in the NDIS. The NDIS must exist alongside accessible and inclusive mainstream and foundational supports. I appreciate the important role that the information linkages and capacity-building grants have had in providing many of these supports.

Recently the government announced $90 million for the recently finalised individual capacity-building competitive grant round and $50 million to offer extensions of up to 12 months for existing grants in the national information program, economic and community participation, mainstream capacity building, economic participation, and building employer confidence and inclusion in disability program streams of the ILC program. I also appreciate the $11.6 million over two years that Minister Shorten and Minister Rishworth announced earlier this year to develop and implement the foundational supports strategy. The review proposed that foundational supports comprise both general supports and targeted supports. General supports could include, for example, community care, assistance with shopping, property maintenance, peer and family supports and early intervention support. Targeted supports should include a focus on supports for specific groups, such as: children, young people and adolescents; people with persistent mental illness; and people with hearing loss. These could include early support services, independence and transition supports, individual capacity building, and aids and equipment.

Foundational supports are an important part of the disability support ecosystem, not just because they provide people with disability the support they need outside the NDIS but also because they support early intervention. They also help to put downward pressure on the cost of the NDIS. If the NDIS is the oasis in the desert, so to speak, then it stands to reason that everyone in the desert will try to get to the oasis. But if some people eligible for the NDIS feel they are receiving sufficient support from mainstream and foundational supports, they will not have to rely on the NDIS. Having said that, the NDIS will be there for them if they need it.

We could think of these supports in a similar way to how we think about the primary healthcare system in hospitals. The hospitals are there for people who need that level of care, but they're usually not the first port of call. The more you invest in primary care services such as GPs, the less people will have to rely on hospitals. A great example of a foundational support is the national assistance card, administered nationally by the Brain Injury Association of Tasmania. I've spoken about the national assistance card in this place previously. It's a tailored card for people with disability to present while out in the community to explain how their disability affects them and what kind of assistance they may need. It's particularly helpful for people who have communication difficulties, are in distress or want to avoid continually having to explain their disability. It is available nationally for people with brain injury and, through a partnership with Autism Tasmania, is being trialled in Tasmania for people with autism.

I've spent some time advocating for BIAT and the national assistance card in particular, and I'm really pleased that this project has been granted an extension of funding which will also allow it to be made available for people with autism nationally. This is excellent news, considering that many people with autism across Australia have contacted BIAT expressing interest in having a national assistance card, even though they are not eligible. This is a great example of the kind of service that is forming a useful component of our foundational support systems and that can hopefully one day have a permanent place in it. It's BIAT's ultimate aim and my hope that this card will eventually become available to people with any psychosocial disability throughout Australia. For example, in addition to brain injury and autism, the card could be very helpful to people with depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, PTSD, anorexia, ADHD, schizophrenia or even dementia.

Labor is committed to getting the settings right to develop a system of disability care and support that works for all people with disability and their family and carers. This includes having a sustainable NDIS that meets the needs of participants and puts people at the centre, complemented by a strong system of foundational supports. Unfortunately, the previous government had very limited interest in the NDIS. They bowed to public pressure to keep it, but their only attempt at any kind of reform was their misguided and disastrous independent assessments policy. That was their only attempt at reform. The bill that is currently before the Senate is a key step in the process of getting the NDIS back on track after a wasted decade under the coalition, and I commend the bill to the Senate.

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

Today, I think, will be remembered as a day of shame for those opposite. I'd like to start off by noting that the larger and more audacious the fraud the harder those who perpetrate it will fall. Eventually those opposite, particularly Minister Shorten and those who supported the charade of the inquiry into this bill, will have to front the royal commission that I think will eventually, one day, come about because of the way this government has perpetuated this fraud. As we heard Senator Steele-John say so passionately and eloquently today, this is causing immense pain and suffering and anxiety for over 650,000 of Australia's most vulnerable Australians with disability and the many hundreds of thousands of their loved ones—their parents, their siblings and everybody else who cares about them. The shame of it is that it never had to be this way.

It's very important to go back to find out how we got to the position we are in today. Let's forget the monumental effort of spin by those opposite and the spinmeister himself, Bill Shorten, who has spent three years spinning the politics of this to his own advantage, instead of working with those across this chamber and in the other place to redesign the scheme to fix the obvious flaws, which were emerging four to five years ago now and which we kept calling out. As minister, I was very proud, despite the utter criticism and invective that I got from Bill Shorten, day after day, week after week, saying how stupid I was—that I obviously couldn't read the book, that there was no problem here.

Clearly there are problems that were baked into the scheme when the legislation was introduced in 2013. This would have been more of a problem had we not had the clear realisation, as these problems started to emerge in the scheme as it started to grow, that they were not just growing pains but were baked into the scheme, through the legislation and the intergovernmental agreements, as a federated scheme. As the scheme grew and as the budget started to blow out well beyond what the Productivity Commission and governments of the day had imagined, we went to those opposite, and to the sector, and said, 'We need to deal with these structural flaws.' Like with any other demand driven scheme, like the MBS or the PBS, just because they're demand driven doesn't mean they don't have controls on them. Of course they do. Of course they have controls in terms of the two drivers of cost: the number of people who have access to the scheme and the average cost—what they can get from the scheme. But neither of those drivers is manageable by the minister and the federal government, who are responsible for delivering the scheme.

It was very clear what was required, and what did Bill Shorten do, as the then opposition spokesperson? He ridiculed. He said there was no problem. He cruelly promised everybody on the NDIS and their families: 'Don't worry; we will have no cuts. We won't cut any of your plans. Don't vote for that mob; we will look after you.' He perpetuated the fraud and the fiction that this was a scheme that did not need reform. How wrong he was! And he must have known that, because budget after budget and quarterly report after quarterly report showed that this was a scheme that was spiralling out of control. In fact, today it is the third-largest Commonwealth expenditure item, and it's on track to become the second and, if not managed and fixed, it will be the most expensive, costing, by 2032, over $100 billion annually. That is clearly not sustainable, and the scheme will fail if we don't come together to fix it.

So let's have a look at the genesis of the legislation. I don't think I could have said it any better. What Minister Shorten has managed to do is completely unite the disability sector, families and participants against this, because they are not stupid, Minister Shorten. They understand the fraud you have perpetrated on them, and they are worried. Twelve of the largest disability representative organisations have said this about the bill:

The recommendations in the report of the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee into the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) Amendment Bill 2024 are profoundly disappointing and disrespectful … Our organisations are deeply disappointed that the Senate Committee—

not even the government but the committee of this place—

did not listen to the evidence and expertise of people with disability, our families, supporters and organisations, who made extensive, and detailed submissions about the flaws in the proposed legislation.

I participated in this inquiry, and the government gave less than a month, with two days of hearings--including one hour with the NDIA, if my memory is correct—to do justice to all of these submissions. We said, 'Give us another month so we can have more hearings into this legislation, hear the voices of the community and work with you, government, on this dog of a piece of legislation, which will make the situation worse, so we can improve it.' The marching instructions from Minister Shorten that there be no extension to the inquiry were a complete disgrace.

This is what the sector has also said:

We have engaged with the Committee over three hearings and provided substantial evidence and lived experience.

Anybody who sat through and listened to this evidence could not have failed to be moved, and how those opposite, who sat through, heard and read this evidence, still forced this committee report through and are now supporting the introduction of this legislation is beyond comprehension. It is unfathomable. This is what the sector also said:

People with disability feel a loss of trust in the Parliamentary process that promises to listen to us, as we contemplate significant reform to the services and supports provided through the scheme.

That process shames each and every one of us in this Senate chamber, and I hope that, when that report comes to this chamber, we will throw out not only this bad legislation but that report, which was a complete abomination and an insult to every single person in this chamber.

After saying that there was no problem with this scheme, what did Minister Shorten do? He came into government. We'd already had 30 reviews into various aspects of the NDIS. We knew the problems three or four years ago. We knew where the solutions lay: tough discussions three years ago with the states and territories, and changing the legislation so that the scheme could be managed effectively. But no. They didn't have the guts to go through that process. Instead, the minister got his mates and did another review, an 18-month review. There were some reasonable things in the review, but none of them were new. They went out, and the government have been trumpeting how many people they have been engaging with and listening to. That review reported in December, with 26 recommendations and 139 specific supporting actions to implement. Some of them I agree with and some of them I don't, but there were a lot of reasonable suggestions in there and a number of things that actually tackled the structural problems with the intergovernmental agreements and also the legislation.

That report was provided in December, and before that, a draft of the report was provided to the government, but we still do not have an Albanese government report. We have no government report in relation to their position on this report, but what we do have is legislation that purports to implement the review. But it doesn't. It does not implement anything of substance in the review. There are three parts—maybe 3½, if you're generous—of the 26 major recommendations that are touched on in this legislation, but it claims that it's going to be entirely responsible for the $60 billion of cuts that this government has made to the scheme over the next 10 years—between $14½ billion and $15 billion over the next four years alone, over the forward estimates.

The government has not been able to say where and how this legislation is going to realise those savings. They haven't released any of the modelling or any of the assumptions that underpin the modelling—not one. When we go into Finance estimates, Treasury estimates or community affairs estimates with DSS and with the NDIA, all of them say, 'Yes, we've got these numbers, from the poor NDIA actuary.' And I said to him that I feel he is the unluckiest man in this country because everybody is looking to his planning and his heroic assumptions that underpin the $60 billion worth of savings. This bill is all about those savings, and they don't have the courage to release them. I suspect they don't because it completely reverse engineers.

What has been pretty clear is that the government have said, 'We're going to make these cuts.' They cobbled together this legislation that actually has almost nothing to do with the review, which I suspect is why we haven't seen the government response to the review, but they've made $60 billion worth of cuts on the assumption that they can get what they said was a 14 per cent year-on-year increase. In fact, over the last 12 months under Bill Shorten, year to year, the third-quarter results—which are the last ones we've got—show there is a 21 per cent increase. So they are making $60 billion worth of cuts, they say, under the sustainability framework, which is more elusive than the scarlet pimpernel. No matter where we look and no matter how we try, we cannot find anything to tell us what the sustainability framework is or what assumptions and modelling underpin it.

So not only are the government going to drop the current rate from a 21 per cent year-on-year increase down to 14 per cent, they're going to get it down to eight per cent. And the only way they could get agreement with that, tentatively, from states and territories was by saying, 'We'll take the current four per cent cap up to eight per cent, so you'll have to pay, year on year, an increase of eight per cent, after the next two years, and then we'll pay the rest.' But what they haven't made clear is that they've also promised the states and territories that there'll be a 'no worse off' clause. How is that going to work? Who is going to pay for the increase? Clearly, the Commonwealth taxpayer will. So part of the big fraud that lies behind this is that this legislation is designed in the most chaotic way that will cause, and is already causing, great angst and concern amongst the most vulnerable in our community, but the savings that the government are going to have to get and the supplementation from the budget they're going to have to keep getting is well beyond the $60 billion they've already ripped out of the scheme.

In conclusion, Bill Shorten could have actually spent less time and less money on spin. I would like to remind those in this place that the government and Bill Shorten, through the NDIA or the review—I'm not quite sure—has spent $400,000 on research and communications on four thick reports to tell them how to spin the legislation. And guess what? It is all about to how to sustain a values based conversation about fixing fraud in order to stop the exploitation of Australians. They don't talk about the cuts in this communications advice. So guess what? Bill Shorten, in his speeches, which no doubt have been written by his new speechwriter, who is getting paid over $600,000 for two years of work despite Mr Shorten having 400 communications staff across his agency and department, says, 'We are chasing down the rorts while we are building a better NDIS.' Have a look at Minister Shorten's speeches in the parliament, including his second reading speech. Everything he has said publicly is all taken straight from this RedBridge communications. It is all about the spin and not about the policy. Shame on you. (Time expired)

Marielle Smith (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I also rise today to speak on the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Getting the NDIS Back on Track No. 1) Bill 2024. Senators, as you know, the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee, which I chair, completed our inquiry into this bill in recent weeks. On behalf of the committee, I want to thank everyone who participated in our processes, particularly the witnesses.

I will just put some facts on the record about that process. We received over 200 submissions to our inquiry. We heard from nearly 50 witnesses. We held two lived experience panels. We heard from the agencies on two separate occasions over two different hearings. We held hearings across three days. Those hearings were supported by government senators on that committee. I want to thank everyone who participated in those processes and everyone who contributed to our work.

Our report made four recommendations to this place to improve the bill before us. It did this on the back of a number of government amendments which were also moved in the House of Representatives in response to concerns raised by stakeholders. There were significant concerns raised by stakeholders and those amendments sought to address many of those. As chair and with the support of other committee members, I made a number of other recommendations to strengthen the bill which go to issues like consultation and the rules. I think they are important recommendations and reflect the evidence we heard. They are a genuine attempt to try to address some of those concerns we heard, in addition to the government amendments.

I think this is a really important bill, and I think it's really important that we pass it. It is one step in a broader series of reforms that we need to make to the NDIS, that need to be made to secure the long-term sustainability of the NDIS and to ensure that every dollar of NDIS funding goes to those in our community who most need it. It is not the whole process of reform required; it is one part of it. It facilitates further reforms which came out of the broader review.

The NDIS is a proud Labor legacy. I'm proud of it. I'm proud of everything it has done to support over half a million adults and children with disability today. I'm proud that for a long time it has enjoyed bipartisan support. It is something we as Australians believe in, it's something we in this chamber have believed in and it has been a godsend for so many Australians living with disability and for their families, friends and carers, including family members of mine who are on the NDIS. It has been absolutely life-changing and a godsend for my family members who are participants in it.

But we know it could be doing more. It is not perfect. We know it could be operating far more efficiently. We need the NDIS to remain sustainable so it can continue to support future generations of Australians. We need it to remain sustainable so it can continue to maintain the support for Australians. We as a government are committed to improving the experience for all Australians with disability who interact with the NDIS, as well as their families and carers.

The Prime Minister, alongside premiers and chief ministers, announced last December that initial legislation would be introduced in the first half of 2024 to ensure the NDIS is best supporting the people it is intended to support. This included addressing several priority recommendations made by the independent review of the NDIS which was undertaken in 2023. The NDIS review was designed to put people with disability back at the centre of the NDIS, restore trust and pride in the scheme and ensure its sustainability for future generations. The review conducted deep engagement with the disability community over a 12-month period, engaging with around 10,000 people from across Australia. Its resulting recommendations included a range of legislative reforms to return the scheme to its original intent and improve the experience of participants. We have heard those recommendations. This bill is a significant step to allow governments and the disability community to start improving the scheme to get the NDIS back on track.

This bill addresses priority recommendations from this review, provides clarity on who can access the NDIS, enables better early intervention pathways for people living with psychosocial disability and children younger than nine years old with developmental delay and disability, and improves how the NDIS participant budgets are set, making them more flexible and providing clearer information on how they can be spent. Further, it strengthens compliance powers for the NDIS commission while governments consider the findings of the disability royal commission. This bill comes off the back of the NDIS review led by two prominent Australians, Professor Bruce Bonyhady AM, who we heard from in our inquiry, and Ms Lisa Paul AO PSM. The review met people where they were—virtually, face to face, online or over the phone—and we have heard that this review represented some of the best consultations the sector had ever seen. The bill implements recommendation 3 of the NDIS review to provide a fairer and more consistent participant pathway for NDIS participants. It makes it clearer what supports the NDIS provides to participants and clarifies how participants will come onto the NDIS with a needs assessment process.

At our committee inquiry we heard from witnesses who said they value the NDIS, but we also heard from witnesses who said they know it needs reform. This bill provides a framework for those changes. In addition to implementing recommendation 3 of the NDIS review, it also gives effect to interconnected elements in recommendations 5, 6 and 7 and partially implements recommendation 17. Recommendation 5 is to provide better support for people with disability to make decisions about their lives. To implement this, the bill will create new framework plans for participants, which will include a reasonable and necessary budget that participants can spend on NDIS supports without having to apply to the NDIA again and again for reassessments when their support needs change. This bill makes sure flexible funding is available to participants who need NDIS supports which aren't stated supports. This change allows greater flexibility in how participants can spend their budget, and, importantly, flexible funding is included in the plan as the default.

Recommendation 6 is to create a continuum of support for children under the age of nine and their families. This bill sets up a new early intervention pathway for children who enter the scheme. This will provide targeted early intervention support for children, which may mean that they will not need to be on the NDIS for their whole lives. Recommendation 7 is to introduce a new approach to NDIS supports for psychosocial disability focused on personal recovery and developmental health reforms to better support people with severe mental illnesses. The bill makes it clearer how to measure the reduced functional capacity of someone with psychosocial disability and how early intervention support can help someone with psychosocial needs. The bill is abundantly clear that it will not remove anyone with psychosocial disability from the NDIS and it will not disproportionately affect the mental health community.

Recommendation 17 is to develop and deliver a risk-proportionate model for the visibility and regulation of all providers and workers and strengthen the regulatory response to longstanding and emergent quality and safeguard issues. The urgent measures in this bill will help fight against fraud in the NDIS while protecting people with disability from exploitation by increasing the number of quality and safety commission officers with compliance powers. It also prohibits banned people from becoming approved quality auditors.

As I said in my opening remarks, this bill is one step, but an essential step, on the journey towards NDIS reform. It sets up pathways and supports which will be designed in NDIS rules and legislative instruments. During the inquiry, we heard loud and clear from the disability community that these rules need to be not just developed in consultation with people with a disability but truly co-designed with them. The committee's report made four recommendations in response to the evidence we received. These were a genuine attempt to try to improve this bill and to respond to concerns raised by stakeholders.

Our first recommendation was that, as it is increasingly premiers and chief ministers, via National Cabinet, who have direct involvement in decision-making on NDIS reform, and because it is clear that the impact of these reforms extends right across government's work, whether that's in health, education or budgets, the bill be amended so that first ministers are also recognised as ministers for the purpose of rule-making—that they are directly consulted on the rules made under this bill.

Secondly, in response to members of the disability community who requested reassurance that the rules made under this legislation involve genuine consultation, we recommended that a consultation statement be tabled, accompanying legislative instruments under the bill, that sets out the consultations undertaken, making it clear to the parliament and the community whether that consultation has occurred.

We also heard concerns from witnesses about the powers the bill provides to the CEO of the NDIA to gather information on NDIS participants, impose conditions on their funding and adjust or cancel a participant's plan. The government has already begun to address this feedback through the amendments I referenced, made in the other place, which would limit the CEO's power to request information directly from NDIS participants.

The committee has recommended more action. We recommended the clarification of the circumstances under which these additional powers will be used. But ultimately we recommended, once these things had been taken into account, and in line with the additional amendments made in the other place, that the bill be passed, because it's clear the urgent passage of this bill is necessary to restore certainty and sustainability for participants and their providers and to tackle fraudulent practices.

I appreciate that, over the course of a Senate inquiry, there are always more conversations and more engagement to be had on any piece of significant reform we look at—any piece of legislation. I am supportive of the three hearings we had and grateful to the witnesses who participated in our hearings. I think our report reflects a genuine desire to address the concerns raised by participants in our inquiry by making those four recommendations to this chamber in its consideration of the bill.

That said, NDIS reform is important work. It's urgent work. We all agree on how important the NDIS is for all Australians. It's necessary for equity in our country, for opportunity and for the fair go that we pride ourselves on as Australians. We also all agree that those who attempt to manipulate and defraud the NDIS should be shut down and face the severest of consequences. We remain, as a government, determined to put people back at the centre of the NDIS and to get it back on track. So I commend this bill to the Senate.

Dave Sharma (NSW, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this piece of legislation, the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Getting the NDIS Back on Track No. 1) Bill 2024, but it's worth noting that this government has now been in office for two years and, prior to the election, the minister responsible, Bill Shorten, said there were no problems with the NDIS and there was no need to get the NDIS back on track. The coalition, when in government, warned repeatedly and sought to have a mature conversation with state and territory governments, but also with the opposition, about putting the NDIS on a fiscally sustainable pathway. But Bill Shorten, the minister responsible—the member for Maribyrnong—was not open to those sorts of mature conversations. He variously accused us of running a scare campaign, said the NDIS was tracking just as predicted, said the coalition talk of cost blowouts was misinformation and ran a highly irresponsible scare campaign. Two years later, two years into office, he's finally accepted the disingenuousness of the claims he was making before the election, and now he's telling us the NDIS needs to get back on track. Well, it does need to get back on track. The NDIS last year cost us $32 billion. That's more than the cost of Medicare. The NDIS growth in costs is running at about 20 per cent per year. If that continues for the next three to four years unchecked, we will soon see spending on the NDIS eclipse the entire defence budget of Australia.

The NDIS is a worthwhile scheme. It's supporting some one in 50 Australians and their families, some 666,000 people. But it cannot be an unlimited, uncapped, untested and fiscally unsustainable scheme. If the public is to retain faith in the integrity and the worthwhile purpose of the scheme, but more importantly, if taxation is going to be able to continue to support the scheme, then it must be put on a fiscally sustainable pathway.

Two weeks ago, at Senate estimates, we heard from officials representing the scheme about the high incidence of fraud and the high incidence of claims for items that no taxpayer in their right mind would expect would be funded under the NDIS. The scheme is at a point of crisis, not only a fiscal crisis because of the growth in cost but a continued erosion in public trust and faith in the scheme because of the rampant fraud, because of things being funded which no right-thinking Australian would think should be funded under the scheme and because of the minister's unwillingness to date to grapple with the reality and prepare the public for the hard decisions and difficult compromises that will need to be taken.

This legislation supposedly puts the scheme onto a more fiscally sustainable pathway of eight per cent real growth in expenditure per year but provides no detail about how that is going to be met: Are the number of participants in the scheme going to be capped? Is the growth and the number of participants going to be capped? Are payments going to be capped or reduced? Are certain conditions currently supported by the NDIS going to be no longer supported? These are all things that the community that benefits from the NDIS and the broader Australian community deserve an answer to. This legislation and this minister have not provided that.

Soon after we heard concerns raised by experts who run the NDIS in Senate estimates, you would have thought that the minister responsible would have bunkered down, got to grips with this issue, reassured the public that there were steps in place to address it, reassured the public of his resolve to combat fraud and other abusive entitlements within the NDIS scheme, and reassured the public that there was indeed a pathway to put the NDIS on a sustainable footing. Instead, the minister found himself on a plane flying to Switzerland, to a five-star resort, Lake Burgenstock, from memory, to attend a Ukraine peace summit. I'm a supporter of peace in Ukraine, peace on the right terms, and I'm a supporter of Australia attending the Ukraine peace summit, but why the minister responsible for the National Disability Insurance Scheme is attending a Ukraine peace conference in Switzerland when the National Disability Insurance Scheme is in disarray is beyond me. You would think we would send the Prime Minister, perhaps. You would think we might send the foreign minister, or perhaps the defence minister, or perhaps any minister who sits on the National Security Committee of cabinet. While I know this government has an unconventional approach to who sits on the National Security Committee of cabinet, I'm almost certain that the minister with responsibility for the NDIS does not.

When the issues facing this scheme are so pressing here in Australia,  when—remember—the minister responsible was one of the original architects of this scheme in the Gillard-Rudd governments, when these issues are confronting the nation, when public faith in the NDIS scheme is being eroded and when the fiscal pathway for the scheme looks increasingly unsustainable, his job should be here in Australia dealing with these issues rather than moonlighting or auditioning for some future diplomatic role. I don't know what he has in mind. I don't know what the Prime Minister has in mind for him. Maybe he'll be our next ambassador to Ukraine. I don't know. If he is, he could return the embassy to Kyiv rather than keep it in Warsaw. For now, his job is Minister for the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

We heard from this minister before the last election that the NDIS's costs were tracking as expected. That was not the case. That was not the case when we were in government, and we warned as much. We heard from this minister before the last election that nothing needed to change, that the NDIS was proceeding as you would hope it would proceed and that nothing needed changing or addressing. We also know that was not the case. What we finally had, after two years in office, was a recognition that the points the coalition was making were right. This isn't, or needn't be, a politically partisan or contentious dispute. Both sides of politics support the existence of a scheme which looks after the most needy in our community and allows them to live more full and meaningful lives.

When the coalition was in office, we took the scheme from one which supported about 50,000 people to one that now supports over half a million people. We were the ones who fully funded the National Disability Insurance Scheme, presided over a significant growth in its budget and presided over the scaling up and ramping up of the scheme. We support this scheme, but it needs to be fiscally sustainable. We have offered our support. We did 2½ or three years ago, and we continue to offer support to the government to take the decisions that are necessary to restore public faith in this scheme.

Now, what this bill does is introduce a number of changes, which the coalition does not oppose, and which I support, to put in place the process to put the scheme on a sustainable footing. But it's really just the first step in what needs to be a much more detailed and exhaustive process—a process that has to involve more consultation with the community affected by this scheme, a process that has to be conducted with greater transparency and accountability than has happened to date, and a process that must involve an honest levelling with the Australian public and with the disability recipients about what will be covered in the scheme and what cannot be covered.

We have had too many instances revealed in past weeks, at Senate estimates and elsewhere, of items being funded by the National Disability Insurance Scheme which, frankly, do not pass the pub test—items which taxpayers do not think they should be supporting and which, if released publicly, would further erode confidence in this scheme. There are two parts to making sure that this scheme is sustainable. There's the fiscally sustainable part—that is, ensuring that the NDIS does not consume an ever greater share of our budget. Remember, it now costs us more than Medicare. Medicare is something every Australian accesses. The NDIS is something that 660,000 Australians—about two per cent of Australians—access, and the NDIS is growing at a cost of 20 per cent per year. If it continues to grow at that rate, it will simply consume more and more of the government budget, which will mean that other items of social welfare spending must be cut or that taxes will have to be raised considerably. No-one is making that case yet, but unless we rein in cost we will need to start having that conversation. That's the first part: fiscal sustainability.

But the other part is a more broader social licence, if you like. Fair, generous, decent Australians do want to ensure that the scheme is supporting those who are genuinely in need and supporting families who have much greater care requirements for family members than other parts of the Australian community. But they also want to know that what is being provided under the NDIS is being provided to people who are genuinely needy and that what is being provided are things that help them live fuller and more meaningful lives. So that's not holidays overseas, not new cars, not streaming services, not massage therapy and not any number of other things we've heard about which no-one expects the government to pay for. Whether you're on a disability support pension, unemployment benefits or the age pension, the expectation is government, as a social safety net, will provide and fund some of the basic necessities of life to allow you to live a life of dignity and meaning, but everything else is discretionary spending and, rightly, is on you or your family. The government and the NDIS should not be supporting discretionary spending.

To conclude, this bill is an important step forward, but it has come far too late—two years too late. It has involved insufficient consultation and transparency with proponents, supporters and beneficiaries of the scheme, and it has come from a government and a minister that have been in denial about some of these issues which we've been seeking to raise for the past few years. There is a lot more work to do to put the NDIS on a sustainable footing and what has been done to date is insufficient.

Larissa Waters (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Getting the NDIS Back on Track No. 1) Bill 2024. It's clearly on the wrong track because this is a terrible bill that will cut $14.4 billion out of the NDIS and will make huge changes that will result in significant harm to the 660,000 people who rely on the NDIS. It got sent to an inquiry for three months. There were three hearings held and over 200 submissions. Day one of the hearings saw witnesses condemn the bill and implore senators to recommend that it not pass in its current form.

The legislation, which proposes the most significant changes to the NDIS since it commenced over a decade ago, was developed behind closed doors with representatives from disability organisations, who had to sign non-disclosure agreements. On day one of the inquiry, the committee heard directly from disabled people. Just some of their concerns with this bill include:

… this will do nothing in achieving good outcomes. This will do nothing in protecting human rights. This will kill thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people.

Also:

This bill is the most dangerous piece of legislation since the changes to the DSP and robodebt.

Another was:

… this bill enables the NDIA to force me out of my home if I need eight hours of support or more. I will be forced to choose between living with my wife and my vital support needs.

Another concern was that disability:

… varies so greatly that you cannot possibly put a black-and-white mechanism, a computer algorithm, in place, much less one that is beyond being able to be challenged by a participant.

Another quote was:

Fundamentally, this bill ceases to be fit for purpose because it does not understand what it seeks to achieve, unless all it seeks to achieve is to save a bunch of money at the cost of very many lives.

There has been significant community backlash to this bill, with organisations and disabled people and their families sharing the harm that it will do to them.

The budget included a cut of $14.4 billion from the NDIS that will be achieved by this legislation. In a cost-of-living crisis, this Labor government is choosing to remove $14.4 billion in funding from the NDIS. That will lead to disabled people not getting the support they need when they need it. This government has taken an active decision to abandon disabled people. They have abandoned NDIS workers and are passing the buck to the millions of Australians who undertake informal caring roles, mostly on an unpaid basis. The Labor government have decided it is more important to fund billions of dollars in handouts to weapons manufacturers than it is to support the disability community and the many disabled people that rely on the NDIS to live happy and healthy lives.

It is clear that there is not an essential service that Labor won't cut to fund nuclear submarines and fossil fuel subsidies and handouts. This government have done nothing short of betray the disability community, and they should be ashamed of themselves. I sat listening to my colleague, Senator Steele-John when he gave an incredibly impassioned speech opposing this bill, and I implore people in this chamber to think carefully about their position on this bill. I think I heard the opposition say, after complaining about it, that actually they will support the bill. So it's going to be rammed through with the support of both of the big parties in this chamber. The disability community have every right to feel deeply betrayed by both of those parties.

Just on the process, the bill was created behind closed doors and is now being rushed through. As I mentioned before, in order to even be consulted about the bill, disability organisations had to sign a non-disclosure agreement. That is not standard practice and it's very disturbing. It comes off the back of the public revelations that the government spent $600,000 on a speechwriter for the NDIS minister. They also spent $400,000 on a RedBridge commissioned focus group with messaging to help them manipulate community sentiment. The RedBridge work provided the government with the messaging they needed in order to reach a level of community acceptance that would allow this bill to not be questioned. I'm going to quote from the RedBridge report, which is report No. 4, and it's very disturbing:

When we presented rorts, fraud, and unreasonable pricing as posing an existential threat to the NDIS, we were able to create an environment in which respondents were amenable to reforms designed to counter these things.

Informed by the RedBridge messaging work, the government has been talking about fraud, dodgy service providers and participants spending money on things like holidays and alcohol to distract the public from this terrible bill—a bill, I might add, that does nothing to address any of those concerns, if they did have any validity. Despite those claims of fraud being made by the NDIS, when my colleague asked in Senate estimates for the proof, for the receipts, none of that was able to be provided, and neither are those issues addressed in this bill. Those issues were a dangerous distraction to help this bill sail through.

So let's come to the substance of the bill. It sets up the framework for pushing people off the NDIS and into supports that the government says will be provided by states and territories. Well, reality check: there is no possible way that the states and territories can provide those supports in time in a way that's nationally consistent and that would guarantee that no disabled person becomes worse off. Removing people from the scheme and onto services that don't even exist yet is outrageously poor planning, with obviously harmful consequences.

This bill would also make it easier to prevent people from accessing the NDIS, and it would make it easier for bureaucrats to remove people from the scheme. The bill is set to prescribe specifics of what you can and can't get from NDIS. This is a blatant attempt to control the choices that participants, until this bill might pass, have been able to make for themselves. Choice and control is meant to be one of the central pillars of the NDIS, and removing it in this way makes it clear that the government prioritises their bottom line over the wellbeing of the disability community.

This bill would see a restriction of supports available through the scheme. It would limit people's ability to have NDIS plans that are based on their individual needs. And it would replace 'reasonable and necessary' with a new single definition of NDIS supports. This new NDIS support list would only provide funding for supports that meet a narrow definition as defined by the politicians holding the NDIS's purse strings. Be afraid. This bill would also allow bureaucrats to demand that NDIS participants undergo mandatory psychiatric or physical examinations within 90 days in order to make a decision about whether their scheme access should be revoked. Not only would this traumatise and retraumatized so many participants, and could result in people getting unfairly kicked off the scheme, but how is someone meant to get an appointment within 90 days with a psychiatrist to undergo an assessment, when the waitlists are over a year in some areas? This is a deliberately designed system to kick people off the NDIS, to help this government save $14.4 billion off the backs of disabled people, because they would rather give the money to nuclear submarines and big coal companies in the form of accelerated depreciation and cheap write-offs. What an absolute affront to the disability community and the 660,000 people who currently rely on this scheme to live some form of decent life.

There are so many methods and processes mentioned in the bill that haven't even been defined, including the method for turning an assessment of support needs into a budget. These vague references to methods that calculate budgets are a recipe for robodebt 2, and the Greens cannot stand for that. We will not allow it. We won't sit for it and we won't roll with it. This bill would enable the minister to make significant changes to the scheme in future without further community consultation. There used to be a phrase 'nothing about us without us,' and it's a crucial phrase that should be applying here with a system that is designed to support and assist the disability community. Yet the bill enables the minister to make changes to the scheme without further consultation with the disability community—or with anyone in the community, for that matter. I am struggling to find an example of executive overreach that has such paternalistic damage associated with it in any other piece of legislation. Imagine if a minister could just snap their fingers and remove a life-saving support from anyone's life. That is what this bill is proposing to do. It is an extreme executive power that should be resisted with every fibre of the being of this chamber.

My office and my wonderful staff provide a lot of support for people who already have some challenges accessing appropriate support under the NDIS scheme, and I want to share an example of some of the issues that we should be dealing with in this chamber, some of the issues that do need fixing, instead of considering a bill that cuts $14.4 billion out of the scheme, allows participants to be wantonly tossed off the scheme and gives the minister virtually unfettered executive power for future changes. I want to share some details of a family whose daughter, an NDIS participant, has faced some seriously egregious delays that have threatened her wellbeing and safety and that of her carers and her parents. I have permission from her family to share her story.

The NDIS participant had outgrown the stroller that she requires every day to be safely moved around by her parents and carers. After an initial delay the NDIS agreed to provide the stroller, three months after the first application, but that was then delayed by a further two months. It took five months for the NDIS to approve a simple and straightforward assistive technology request. The lack of a suitable stroller during that time—that five-month period—meant that the participant was not only deeply uncomfortable but risked falling out of the stroller and sustaining serious injury. This is totally unacceptable, and I'm sure it's just one of thousands of similarly heartbreaking cases. This is the sort of issue that this chamber should be seeking to address and fix, not this dangerous slashing of a scheme that has been supporting so many people. Sure, it has its flaws, and, yes, we need to address those, but this bill does none of that.

This bill is a wanton attack on the disability community. It was staged in a super dodgy way, requiring organisations to sign nondisclosure agreements, and it gives the minister an open chequebook for any future changes, without having to consult with anyone, least of all people with disability, their families or the organisations that support and represent them. The bill absolutely should not pass. It needs to be sent back to inquiry to give the community a decent amount of time to make their concerns known in the hope that someone in this chamber, beyond the Greens, might actually listen to the community. We need to make sure that this bill and the amendments proposed therein are properly scrutinised. Disabled people and those who love them, and anyone who cares about the integrity of government social services, should have the opportunity to make their feelings about this bill known. This Labor government is so deeply disappointing, raising $14.4 billion off the backs of people in the disability community and, instead, spending money on weapons of war and subsidies for fossil fuel extraction. I don't even understand why they wanted to be in government if this is the sort of policy that they come up with.

Helen Polley (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to support the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Getting the NDIS Back on Track No. 1) Bill 2024. I'm very proud to be part of two Labor governments which have presided over the NDIS. The Gillard Labor government founded the NDIS, and now the Albanese Labor government is getting the scheme back to where it was intended to be, to help people living with disabilities and the people that are caring for them.

In the years before the NDIS was established, Australians living with disabilities were left in the dark with little support. People with disability, and their carers, had a very fractured support base, and a lot of the time they were disengaged and entirely absent from fully participating in our society. This lack of support, together with discrimination and social exclusion, failed millions of Australians. The NDIS was created to remedy this. It emerged from the collective work of people with disabilities, the advocates and the organisations that supported them. It was a federal Labor government which was committed to not only listening to those concerns but taking the necessary action.

One of the great achievements of the NDIS has been the bringing together of the state, territory and Commonwealth governments to ensure that people across the country receive the same level of support and the same level of care. Today, over 600,000 people with a disability are being supported by the NDIS. Thousands of providers have served their participants, allowing people with disabilities to live a very full life. But there is still more work to be done.

While many people's lives have been improved and transformed by NDIS support, there have also been frustrations. Despite the usual bleating from the Greens about no-one ever doing enough and that they're the only ones who can support people with disability, the reality is that they will never form government and have the responsibility of balancing our budgets to support Australians, whether they're people with disability or they're homeless, or whether it's through our education system, our universities or our health system. It's easy to come in here and just knock the government of the day. That's what they do best. They want to scaremonger and nitpick at everything instead of getting behind us and helping to make the lives of people living with disabilities better.

The 2023 independent review into the NDIS demonstrated the need for reform. The goals of the review were to put people with disability at the centre of the NDIS, to restore trust and confidence in the scheme, and to ensure that the scheme can continue to operate into the future. The review recommended 26 overarching changes to the scheme that will result in better outcomes for those participants. This reform is the first of many amendments that will bring this vision of a stronger NDIS to life.

Recommendation 3 of the report of the independent review calls for a 'fairer and more consistent participant pathway'. This amendment will go a long way towards achieving that goal. This measure creates a new definition for 'NDIS support' that ensures funding received by participants is focused on the vital need for support resulting from their impairment. Through its many other changes, it also clarifies the process of review, bringing more certainty to individuals and carers during the often very stressful application process. As the Minister for the NDIS, the Hon. Bill Shorten MP, who was one of the original architects in our former government, noted in his speech, the time for reform is now. Making things right for people living with disabilities requires a mature and respectful dialogue between all levels of government and a spirit of cooperation that puts the interests of Australians living with disabilities first. The time for us to act is now, and this bill will help make the NDIS fairer and, most importantly, more transparent.

Getting the NDIS back on track means more certainty and transparency for participants and for carers. Getting the NDIS back on track means more money going towards the support that actually make the largest impact on participant mobility, community inclusion and quality of life. Getting the NDIS back on track will place Australians living with disabilities at the core of the NDIS. After all, the formation of the NDIS was always about the people. It was for those living with disability. But it was also to help and give support to carers.

Unfortunately, though, when the former Liberal coalition government came in a decade ago, they took their eye off the ball, like they did with the aged care reforms that we set in place at that time, because the NDIS was done at the instigation of a Labor government. They did that in aged care—that's why they had to call a royal commission into their own failings when they were in government—and with the NDIS they lost focus. They didn't have the interest, obviously—otherwise we would not have seen the deterioration of the prime focus, which was always about providing support for those with a disability. They lost focus on that because, basically, they don't have the same commitment. It's not in their DNA, as it is with a Labor government, to ensure that those people who need a helping hand get a helping hand. Those people who have a disability have access so that they can have a fulfilling, healthier life with the support that they need to fully participate. We know and understand and appreciate the valuable contribution everyone makes to make our community better, to make our country stronger.

The National Disability Insurance Agency workforce was left understaffed by the Liberals and Nationals for years and years. We know that there are many places, including in my home state, where those people that have already got a package of care have not been able to access the care that they need because there were no service providers. They took their eye off the ball and they did nothing to ensure that those people who needed those very important services—and I'm talking about millions of dollars that weren't and haven't been spent because they couldn't get any services provided to them. We also know that it was under their watch—when the Liberals and Nationals were in government, there was waste, there was mismanagement, there was unethical behaviour, there were unscrupulous providers, and, dare I say it, there were even some family members who were taking advantage of that money that was being allocated to look after a family member with a disability. That money wasn't necessarily always going where it was needed. What happened? You had to wait till there was a Labor government elected again to come in and, again, clean up another mess left by those opposite.

The core value of people on this side of the chamber, of Labor people, is to make life better for our fellow Australians—to make life better for those people living with a disability. We want to see every dollar go to where it is meant to be, and that is to the care of those people with a disability. We want to stamp out the fraud and the mismanagement, and to make sure that those people who are assessed and who have a package can get the support that they need. There will be zero tolerance for those who would take money away from those who are in need of that support.

This bill and Labor's further reforms will help support the more than 13,000 Tasmanians, from my home state, benefiting from the NDIS by creating a more just and efficient scheme. The Albanese Labor government will not only help support participants but also encourage the growth and skills of services that make the NDIS possible. This will create many opportunities for Australian workers, from direct support roles to medical specialists. In that way, the NDIS reforms will help all Tasmanians thrive. Just one other way that we are helping to support the NDIS and people with disabilities is by helping to fund a community care project in Launceston, where they are building a respite centre that will be a respite and training centre for carers, whether in the aged-care workforce or in disability. I'm hoping that will go on and be a project that can be emulated around the country.

I will always stand in this chamber—and elsewhere—and support, and advocate on behalf of, Tasmanians living with disabilities. I'm very proud to be part of a Labor government which truly cares about all Australians—not just the lucky few, not just the wealthy and not just the big end of town. We actually have empathy, respect, and compassion. They are our key, core Labor values. It took a Labor government to introduce Medicare and the NDIS, and it takes a Labor government to manage these programs correctly. Australians can trust Labor to fund and support those living with a disability. We will help deliver life-saving and life-changing programs.

The promise of the NDIS is that all Australians who are born with, or who acquire, a disability have peace of mind, knowing that that support will be there for them when they need it. People living with disability should never be left behind by any government or society. Labor's vision for the future is one where everyone can fully participate in our community life and have the freedom to pursue and fulfil their own needs and desires. That's our vision of the NDIS. We are not there yet. We still have a way to go before we reach that, but we will be working to ensure that the model which we had from the outset, and which was fundamentally going to be there for people with disability to support their carers and families, will be world's best practice. We will do everything we can to ensure that that is delivered. I understand those opposite will support this bill, and I urge those on the crossbench not to just come in and attack a piece of legislation for the sake of it or to exaggerate some of the concerns that they have in order to make political points. This should not be about politics. It should be about providing the support that people living with disabilities should be able to expect in a country as rich as ours.

Ultimately, this amendment is a first step in a long journey of changing the NDIS for the better. Progress, as I said, will not happen overnight, and amending the scheme fully will require cooperation between the states, the territories and, most importantly, the community. While we have a long way to go, this amendment is a welcome move in the right direction. It is a step that will deliver better outcomes for those with disabilities, those who are caring for them and those working in the sector. Importantly, it's a step in the right direction for Australian taxpayers. I commend the legislation to the Senate.

Maria Kovacic (NSW, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I have to take a moment! I'm speaking to the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Getting the NDIS Back on Track No. 1) Bill 2024, which is quite a misnomer. I'm a little bit confused by Senator Polley's speech which talked about not politicising, when the entirety of the speech was a politicisation of what we are talking about. Discussions about former governments are irrelevant when the current government is presenting a bill on which they chose not to adequately consult. I think we need to stop and reflect on that.

As a member of the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee, I have spent the past few months scrutinising this legislation. We have hardly got through the tip of the iceberg in terms of what this bill will do to NDIS participants. It is, after all, as Senator Polley said, the participants of the NDIS that we need to keep in mind throughout this debate. But, while we keep them in mind, we don't engage with them and we don't let them participate in discussions around the bill; we just keep them in mind and think about them. That's extraordinary! This should be about the people who need the services. That's what this should be about. I'm sure that many of us in this chamber have had our inboxes filled with messages from participants and their families asking us not to support this flawed piece of legislation. What it is doing is focusing on making it harder for participants rather than looking at those that are exploiting the system. Why? Why is that what we're doing?

We all want a sustainable scheme. It's a universally held belief that the scheme needs to be arranged so that the right supports reach the right people. We need a sustainable scheme that brings the lived experience of the participants with them, and that is what this government is not allowing to happen. This is not a scare campaign. It's not knocking the government of the day, contrary to what Senator Polley said. This is what is actually happening. I sat on the committee. I have seen what has happened. This is the reality of how this government is attempting to push through this legislation. I am bitterly disappointed that this government chose to reject the coalition's and the Greens' calls to extend the committee's inquiry into this bill. Were we being unreasonable? Did we want a lot of extra time? We wanted an extra four to six weeks to get information from key stakeholders and participants so that we could ensure that this legislation and the changes would properly reflect their needs. And the answer was a resounding no. But we could keep them in our mind, as Senator Polley said; we just won't give them a voice. As long as we keep them in our mind, that's fine. That's excellent.

The other thing we need to remember is that they did not allow us an extra four to six weeks, despite new amendments to the bill being dropped on the first day of hearings and inquiry. So not only did we not have the full picture of what we were inquiring into but participants didn't know what the rules were until the day the inquiry began and they'd already made submissions. That's a classic case of changing the rules while you're playing the game. How is that transparent? How is that fair? How is that about getting the NDIS back on track and ensuring that it meets the needs of participants? The answer is that it doesn't. Let's not pretend that it does. It's disrespectful to all of us who have spent so much time working on this to ensure that there is a proper outcome. It's much like the order for the production of documents for the sustainability framework, which Senator Steele-John has been after. The government does not want us seeing the detail. They do not want us to scrutinise their work. They want to ram through legislation without the scrutiny of this chamber. That is unacceptable.

The NDIS is not a scheme that can be altered in the dark of the night or behind closed doors, no matter how hard they try, and consultation should not be shrouded by NDAs. How extraordinary! 'Come and talk to us about this bill, but we want you to sign this document that will have legal ramifications for you if you speak about it to anybody.' How is that consultation? How is that transparency? We need to actually have a think about the fact that we have a government that has asked key stakeholders in the disability sector to sign non-disclosure agreements in conversations about changes to legislation. That's not governing; that's wielding a big stick.

The NDIS is a significant part of our system for caring for people with disability. It needs to be dealt with transparently. That is what participants want. So what are participants asking for? They're asking for more consultation, more time and more consideration of detail to understand how these changes will impact them. We're not scaremongering. We're not knocking the government of the day. We're not trying to be difficult. We would like to understand the legislation and how it will impact participants. We are trying to do our job—absolutely. I can't understand why the government does not want us to do our job. We have a shared desire to make this scheme the best it possibly can be. Why not work with us to do that?

I recently received a letter from the sister of a participant who articulated the concerns of participants and their families and the impact these changes will have. I'm going to share that with you. The letter is headlined, 'Please do not pass the NDIS Amendment Bill'. It reads:

My sister is 32 and has a great life. She rides horses competitively, works doing accessibility audits and training, and has her own small business. She cried from happiness at the Taylor Swift concert. She loves living independently with support in her own house.

However, her current life and prospects for a normal and happy future are at risk of disappearing before our eyes, due to the proposed changes in the NDIS Amendment Bill and the delegated legislation that will be made under it.

My sister has a severe physical disability and is in a wheelchair, her speech is impaired, and she's almost blind, as she has a rare metabolic disorder that is degenerative. She has 24/7 support, with one support worker with her at all times. Her support workers are all from the local community, and mostly people she knows organically—almost none of them have ever worked in disability before working with her.

The Government has said that under the Bill, housing and living supports for participants with 24/7 care will be required to be shared supports, with one support worker to three participants. This would be devastating for—

my sister—

because:

My sister will be living in a mini-institution, a life chosen for her and controlled by others. But she is a real person, and not that different from you. You, your partner, your child, or your sister may one day find themselves in a situation where they need full-time support. Is this a life that you would want for them?

The Bill has been pushed through quickly and quietly, with limited consultation and clarity on how it will impact people with disabilities. What is clear, though, is that the Minister will have huge powers to make rules down the road, without proper scrutiny or protections in place, for life-altering decisions like what needs assessment tools are used, and what funding can be spent on. These rules can be made by the Minister without proper co-design, transparency, or protections in place. These types of powers are typically found in things like customs regulations—not rules that impact the minute details of the everyday lives of people with disabilities.

Giving the Minister these unbridled powers mean living with the fear that everything can be taken away, a constant pit in your stomach. Having a sister with a disability is not a burden, but living in limbo, waiting for the next rule to be made that upends her life is.

We must legislate co-design, transparency, and constraints on the Minister's power, which this Bill does not. The Bill cannot be passed.

We know that this Bill is being introduced to reduce costs, and I'm all about making the NDIS sustainable. However, we also know that there's a huge price gouging for services and fraud committed by suppliers to the NDIS. Instead of focusing on these areas, the Bill looks to recoup money by taking it from the participants—it's easy to take from the most vulnerable Australians. However, by doing so, we're attacking the fundamental principles of choice and control that the NDIS was meant to enshrine. We can do better than this.

To pass this Bill is to put into law that people with disabilities are second-class citizens. They don't deserve the same life, rights, or decency we would want for any other Australians.

According to the letter, the NDIS participant's life:

… is now a testament to the success and promise of the NDIS, and it should be a model for others, not a casualty of cost-cutting measures. It's not too late to get the NDIS back on track with what it was set out to do—to provide people with disabilities choice and control over their lives.

That's the letter from the sister of an NDIS participant. If that does not move us to consider why we are trying to ram something through, I don't know what will.

This story is shared with the other 660,000 Australians who are on this scheme, many of whom are concerned about what the changes will mean for them. It is entirely unacceptable for a government to treat some of our most vulnerable in this way. And doing so, in the face of multipartisan support for reform, just shows how immature and careless this bill is. I say it again: the name of the bill is actually a misnomer.

Senator Polley said three things were key Labor values: empathy, respect and compassion. How does this bill in any way demonstrate empathy, respect or compassion for people living with disability? It doesn't. Labor was elected to government on the back of their promises of transparency and empathy. Where are those things today?

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

Today I rise to discuss the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Getting the NDIS Back on Track No. 1) Bill 2024. This scheme must get back on track. It needs to get back on track for the sustainability of the NDIS so that the critical role it plays in so many Australian's lives can be protected.

Australians with disability, before the scheme, were too often unseen and unheard, living in our shadows. People with disability were too often subject to the misery lottery—that is, disability support was incredibly patchy across the country, and very much so in my own home state of Western Australia. Depending on your postcode, you might have been lucky enough to have some funding to help you and your family or you might have lived a life of complete uncertainty, disadvantage and poverty. Of course, it was also subject to how you had acquired your disability, and there was much discrimination based on whether you were born with a disability or whether, for example, you had acquired a brain or spinal injury or a degenerative condition at some other point in life.

It was clear then, just as it is clear now, that we need a whole system of disability support across our nation. We need to make sure the NDIS is fit for purpose to support people with disability, particularly those with the most complex support needs, which mean they can be vulnerable to exploitation and to missing out on the critical services they need. They can be vulnerable to exploitation from providers who aren't doing the right thing to uphold the support needs of their clients.

Our parliament made the decision a decade ago that we should not let someone's postcode or financial situation dictate whether or not they get the services they need. But today there are new lotteries emerging for people with NDIS support, based, for example, on whether you have an ethical or unethical provider. This sits behind the legislation that we are debating here today. I find it startling, frankly, that the Greens and the coalition are not here to stand by to make sure that the NDIS is cleaned up to weed out unethical providers and to make sure that people can get the support that they need.

The 10 years of NDIS that we've had has fundamentally changed Australia. It represents the best of us as a nation. It represents our values—it's about giving Australians a fair go—and represents a levelling of the playing field. It should and must continue to evolve over time, in deep consultation with people with disability, in co-design with people with disability, just as this legislation sets out.

The NDIS is not currently working well for everyone. We've heard from participants about how every interaction with the NDIS can become a battle. We spoke through the Senate community affairs committee inquiry about the struggles that so many have had to go through to get the support they need, and we did our best to consult through the community affairs committee. I want to highlight the fact that this also came, at the back end, from the NDIS review process, as well as from the many town hall events that the Department of Social Services held as part of that review. Our inquiry had over 200 submissions and heard from 50 witnesses. We held two lived experience panels and we heard from agencies. We held hearings over three days, and in those hearings we heard a lot of evidence that the government has been tuned in and making changes to the legislation in response to issues raised.

Some of the concerns that were identified in the review and in our inquiry, which this legislation is here to fix, are that, while some people can manage an unregistered provider, lack of registration has led to exploitation and abuse, and there is currently very little oversight of the scheme. I would also note that the provision of unregistered services is leading to the exploitation of workers in a gig-like economy. Some of the nation's biggest disability service providers insist that their workers have their own ABN. That means they don't have to pay superannuation and can keep workers' hours low so that they don't have to pay a whole range of things. They make their workers responsible for their own workers compensation and the like.

This means that quality providers who want to provide registered services are not just being undercut by one-on-one relationships where someone wants to recruit someone of their own accord and put their own team together. I understand the need to do that. But this lack of registration is actually seeing some of our nation's biggest disability support providers exploiting workers and undercutting their working conditions. I understand that this legislation is first and foremost about people with disability, their need for the supports and the capacity of this system to provide those supports. However, I contend that, if you have providers that are putting workers out there in the system with their own ABNs when in fact the providers have thousands of workers on the books, that is not going to result in quality support and quality systems.

The scheme's integrity chief, John Dardo, told the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee about the extent of fraud and illegal activity his team were seeing and have been stopping since the team was set up in late 2022. In my view, it is incredibly shocking to hear that funding supposed to be used for packages of support for people with permanent and significant disabilities could instead be used to fund criminal activities or to purchase cars or holidays, with fraudulent providers even withdrawing plan funds from ATMs to buy illicit substances. Now, under our government, we are checking thousands of invoices every day, whereas previously only 20 invoices across thousands issued to the agency were being checked on a daily basis. Previously, if you put in a claim, it was just paid. This is why, as part of this reform process, we are making sure that we're able to clean up the scheme to catch crooks—so that people with disability get the money spent on them and their primary support needs.

Ever since Labor was elected, we've invested in a mammoth fraud clean-up job, including $126 million in funding over four years to establish the Fraud Fusion Taskforce. In February this year we announced funding of the $83.9 million program to improve the integrity of the NDIS. But improving this integrity fundamentally also means needing to change some of its regulation. The problems in the underlying regulation and law mean it is too difficult to clean up the NDIS without the law reform that is before us today. We want the NDIS to continue to be able to change lives for the better. This is an investment in people. It is an investment in our nation. We are creating jobs and careers, small businesses and innovative startups, with people delivering businesses and providing services, including many businesses providing employment for people with disability who are supporting and providing services to other people with disability. But it is too important to politicise this issue in the way that has been done and to not take the opportunity to get it right and to fix it for the future. This Labor government is absolutely committed to getting the NDIS reform right. We're committed to co-design, hearing NDIS participants and protecting this scheme now and for future generations.

Paul Scarr (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Multicultural Engagement) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The NDIS is one of the most important schemes implemented by the Commonwealth government to assist Australians with a serious and permanent disability. It is absolutely crucial that any substantial amendment of that scheme be adequately reviewed by this Senate, the house of review, to make sure that it doesn't have unintended consequences and that, for the people who are most impacted by this amendment—those who are currently in the scheme, those who are trying to get in the scheme and their loved ones—this legislation and the regulations which will be made under it have gone through adequate review, and that has simply not occurred in this case. It has not occurred.

So we have a situation where those of my fellow coalition senators who are on the Community Affairs Legislation Committee, who have spoken in relation to the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Getting the NDIS Back on Track No. 1) Bill 2024 and who are passionate about this scheme and about the scheme delivering for the people it is intended to support—the many hundreds of thousands of people who are supported by this scheme—were forced to provide additional comments of one page, and this is what they said. I want to put this on the record:

The Coalition is unable to provide fully-informed commentary on the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Getting the NDIS Back on Track No. 1) Bill 2024 … due to the government's unwillingness to grant an extension to the committee for further scrutiny on sensible and necessary measures for the sustainability of the NDIS.

The coalition sought a very modest extension of the timetable to enable not so much the senators in this place but the people who will be directly impacted by this legislation to have their say. That's our job. We're a house of review, so, when the other place, the lower house, passes legislation, it is our job to closely scrutinise that legislation, even if it is introduced with the best of intentions, to make sure it does not have unintended consequences affecting, in some cases, the most vulnerable people in this country. This place has been deprived of the opportunity to have a proper, full process of scrutiny in relation to this legislation, and that is deeply concerning.

I want to continue reading from the additional comments of the coalition senators in relation to the committee report. They wrote one page, because they simply didn't have the time or the information to provide any further discussion. That's the issue with the consultation process that's been undertaken. Paragraph 1.2 says:

We note insufficient time has been provided for proper consultation with the sector and the community—

the people impacted by the bill—

who have expressed widespread misgivings about the current legislation.

So it's not the senators in this place who are saying that there hasn't been enough time for consultation and that we don't know enough about this bill and its consequences, including unintended consequences; it's the stakeholders representing the people most impacted by the bill who are saying that. They haven't had the opportunity to have their say in relation to the consequences of this bill. So, when we get up and say there has been inadequate consultation in relation to this bill, we are speaking for the hundreds of thousands of Australians who have told us that, through their stakeholder bodies and directly through letters to us as senators. I've received my fair share as well.

Paragraph 1.3 of the additional comments from coalition senators reads:

The opportunity to properly engage with this bill is important in bringing the NDIS back onto sustainable footing in a manner that does not disadvantage or impact negatively on participants most in need.

I will predict today that there are participants in this scheme who will be impacted negatively by this bill who have not had an opportunity to have their say on this bill. They don't know what's coming down the track in relation to this legislation because there has been inadequate consultation. Then we will see the government will be scrambling, because senators in this place will come forward with the stories of those people. The government will be scrambling all over the shop to try to amend something instead of doing the proper consultation upfront, which is how the process is meant to work.

Paragraph 1.4 reads:

It was also concerning that the committee was not given the opportunity to consult the sector on government amendments tabled on the day of the public hearing.

The way this place works is a piece of legislation is moved in the Senate, and it then gets referred to a committee. The committee then organises a public hearing. Before that public hearing, stakeholders are given an opportunity to make submissions in relation to the legislation. What happened in this case was the government tabled further amendments on the day the hearing started. How are you meant to conduct an appropriate public consultation process in such circumstances? It's a shambles, an absolute shambles!

Paragraph 1.5 reads:

The Coalition notes legislative instruments and rules are still under development and the committee has not been provided with substantial detail on this to date.

This is an extraordinarily important point. I wasn't sitting on the committee that looked at this legislation, but I have had a chance to look at the bill. Some of the most important documents under this bill are regulations and rules which will come into place after the legislation is passed, but no-one has seen them. The whole package should have been put up for close scrutiny at the same time—or at least the overarching principles, so that stakeholder groups and those impacted by the scheme had a reasonable opportunity to provide their feedback. Instead, we are passing legislation in the dark. We're in the dark because we don't know what the rules are going to be. We don't know what particular ministerial instruments are going to be.

I want to give you some examples—this is from the explanatory memorandum for the bill, which goes for some pages. I picked some examples from the first 10 pages just to give people listening to this debate a feel. Paragraph 3 in the outline says the bill provides for the needs assessment process—an absolutely critical process:

and the method for calculating the total amount of the participant's flexible funding and funding for stated supports for new framework plans to be specified in legislative instruments and NDIS rules.

It doesn't get more fundamental than that. The needs assessment process, the method for calculating the total amount of the participants' flexible funding, and funding for stated supports—the new framework plans—are going to be legislated instruments and regulations we haven't seen. We don't know what's going to be in them. The people impacted by this legislation don't know what's going to be in them. We are getting only half the story. We are expected to pass legislation in the dark—legislation that is going to have a material impact on hundreds of thousands of people.

I go to page 3 of the explanatory memorandum, which says:

Proposed new paragraph 10(b) provides that a support is an NDIS support—

and this is a key question as to whether or not something is classified as an NDIS support—

for a person who is a participant or prospective participant if the support is declared by NDIS rules to be a support …

Again, we haven't been given the draft rules—we don't know what is going to be in them. We're passing legislation in the dark. The next paragraph reads:

Proposed new paragraph 10(c) provides that a support is not an NDIS support for a person if the support is declared by NDIS rules to be a support that is not appropriately funded or provided through the NDIS for participants …

Again, it is all in the rules. We haven't got the rules. We are debating this in the dark.

Page 5 of the explanatory memorandum states:

This amendment provides the statutory foundation for the future early intervention pathway—

which is an extremely critical pathway, especially if you are dealing with young children who perhaps have autism or some other disability. It says:

Operationalising this pathway will require the establishment of Category A NDIS rules.

Do we have the rules? We don't have the rules. We're debating legislation in the dark.

On page 6, in relation to subsection 25(3), the EM states:

A second note alerts the reader—

and I'm going to alert the Senate and everyone else listening to this debate—

that NDIS rules may be made under section 27 that are relevant to the consideration of the early intervention requirements.

Again, it refers to the rules, which we don't have.

Page 7 of the EM states:

This item repeals and substitutes section 27 which allows for NDIS rules relating to the determination of any matter for the purposes of the disability requirements and early intervention requirements.

Again, we don't have the rules. It goes on:

Similar to the existing section 27, proposed new section 27 will allow NDIS rules to prescribe methods and criteria to be applied, or matters that may, must or must not be taken into account—

for relevant purposes.

Then the EM gives an example, and this sums it up. This is an example of someone called Kym:

Kym applies to the NDIS based on an impairment which results in psychosocial disability.

Kym's disability is highly episodic in nature, in that its impacts on her life fluctuate from time to time.

There is currently a great deal of ambiguity about how some access criteria should be applied to Kym's circumstances.

This is the explanatory memorandum, detailing how this new scheme relates to Kim:

This new power enables a rule to be made, clarifying how certain NDIS access criteria should be applied to Kym's unique circumstances.

As a result, Kym and her health professionals have a clearer idea about whether Kym is likely to be eligible to access the NDIS, what information is required to make an access request, and Kym's access decision is able to be clearly explained to her—

except it can't be explained to Kym and her health professionals because we don't have the rules. We're expected to pass legislation without having the rules. We're legislating in the dark. It says, 'This new power enables a rule to be made.' Where's the rule? What's going to be in the rule? Where do Kim and her health professionals have an opportunity to provide feedback in relation to the draft rule so that we, as a Senate, have an opportunity to consider that feedback and discharge our obligations as senators to closely review this legislation.

So the example given that supposedly makes everything clear to Kym and her health practitioners is all dependent upon a rule that we don't know. We haven't seen it. We don't know what's in it. We don't know what principles it applies, and we don't know how it will impact Kym and her health practitioners. On that basis, we're expected to pass legislation in this place. We're expected to pass legislation without knowing what's going to be in those rules and determinations.

Here's another one. There are something like 50 pages of the explanatory memorandum, and I'm only up to page 8 in terms of the relevance of the rules. Page 8 of the EM deals with the circumstances in which a person ceases to be a participant. That's obviously a key decision point. Someone has been a participant and then someone makes a decision that that person ceases to be a participant. That is a key decision point which will have profound consequences for that person and their family. This is what the EM says:

The subsection does, however, allow for Category A NDIS rules to specify the circumstances where payments can still be made for supports provided or acquired before a participant ceases to be a participant …

So, again, we've got to see the rules, but we don't have the rules. And the people who are most impacted by this legislation have not had the opportunity to see the rules. They have not had the opportunity to see what ministerial determinations might be issued under this bill, notwithstanding that those rules and determinations will have a profound impact on those participating in this scheme.

This is simply not good enough. One of the key functions of government is to provide support to those in need in our community, and in this case to enable the people obtaining that support to live with dignity and to have every opportunity to marshal all their skills and talents and apply those to the benefit of the wider community. It's one of the key factors underpinning this legislation. The minister has driven a process whereby there's been inadequate scrutiny and whereby the objections of those most impacted by this legislation have been overridden, and the minister refuses to budge and give all the information needed for intelligent debate of this bill.

Steph Hodgins-May (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I remind the chamber that this is not my first speech. I rise to speak about the huge concerns that I hold with the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Getting the NDIS Back on Track No. 1) Bill 2024. But before doing that I want to thank my colleague Senator Steele-John for his extraordinary leadership on this shameful move by the government that will impact so many people and families right across this country. And I'm sorry, Jordan, that you're back here having to fight this, and I'm sorry to the many families that are feeling the pressure and the stress of this bill coming before the parliament today.

As the Greens senator for Victoria I am hearing enormous community backlash to this bill, with organisations and disabled people and their families sharing their despair and detailing the harm it will do to them. The bill puts into action the Labor government's $14.4 billion cuts to the National Disability Insurance Scheme, which will result in immeasurable harm to people who rely on the NDIS. Let's be clear: this bill will make disabled people's lives and the lives of their families immediately more difficult. This bill will cost lives and it will set disabled people back decades. The government has failed to engage adequately with these criticisms and has instead undertaken a bad-faith campaign to undermine the scheme by talking about fraud and noncompliance.

In a cost-of-living crisis, the Labor government is choosing to remove $14.4 billion in funding from the NDIS that will lead to disabled people not getting the support they need when they need it. This government has chosen to abandon disabled people. They have abandoned NDIS workers and are passing the buck to the millions of Australians who undertake informal carer roles. Labor has decided that it's more important to fund billions in handouts to weapons manufacturers than it is to support our community and the many disabled people who rely on the NDIS to live happy and healthy lives.

It's clear that there is not an essential service that Labor won't cut to fund nuclear submarines and fossil fuel handouts. This government has betrayed the disability community, and they should be ashamed of themselves for this bill that is being created behind closed doors and rushed through the parliament. Astoundingly, disability organisations were required to sign NDAs in order to be consulted on the bill. What does that say? The government spent $600,000 on a speechwriter for the NDIS minister and $400,000 on RedBridge commissioned focus groups and messaging. Instead of talking about the substance of the bill, the government has been doing what they do best: spinning focus groups to manipulate community sentiment. Despite these claims of fraud being made by the NDIA, they were not able to provide any proof when questioned during Senate estimates.

This bill sets up the framework for pushing people off the NDIS and onto supports that the government reckons will be provided by states and territories. But there is no possible way that the states and territories can provide those supports in time and in a way that is nationally consistent and will guarantee that no disabled person becomes worse off under Labor's NDIS plan—or lack of plan. Removing people from the scheme onto services that don't yet exist is outrageously poor planning, with obviously harmful consequences. This bill will make it easier to prevent people from accessing the NDIS and will make it easier for bureaucrats to remove people from the scheme. This bill is set to prescribe specific supports that you can and can't get from the NDIS. It is a blatant attempt to control the choices that participants make. Choice and control is one of the central pillars of the NDIS, and removing it in this way makes it clear that the government prioritises their bottom line over the wellbeing of the disability community.

This bill will see a restriction of supports available through the scheme. It will limit our ability to have NDIS plans that are based on our individual needs and it will replace 'reasonable and necessary' with a new single definition of 'NDIS supports'. This new NDIS support list will only provide funding for supports that meet a new narrow definition, as defined by politicians holding the NDIS's purse strings.

This bill will allow bureaucrats to demand that NDIS participants undergo mandatory psychiatric or physical examinations within 90 days in order to make a decision about whether their scheme access should be revoked. This will traumatise and retraumatised so many participants and could result in getting them unfairly kicked off the scheme. How is someone supposed to get an appointment with a psychiatrist to undergo an assessment within 90 days when waiting lists are over many years in some areas?

There are so many methods and processes mentioned in the bill that haven't been defined, including the method for turning an assessment of support needs into a budget. These vague references to methods that calculate budgets are a recipe for robodebt 2—make no mistake—and we will not allow that.

This bill will enable the minister to make significant changes to the scheme in the future without community consultation. This is outrageous. To cut out the voices and feedback of affected people is not how good policy should be made, and I thank you, Senator Steele-John, for reminding us of that critical principle: nothing about them without them. Imagine if a minister could snap their fingers and remove a life-saving service from your life.

As the Greens senator for Victoria, I have been inundated with emails and calls from concerned constituents and people working across the sector who are deeply concerned about this bill. One Victorian constituent wrote to me:

I am so concerned about the effect of the NDIS Amendment Bill on my adult daughter with a disability. My daughter is severely physically disabled and blind as the result of a very rare and complex metabolic disorder which is degenerative.

Her speech is hard to understand and she uses a Seeing Eye Dog. She also has complex health issues.

She currently lives independently with 24/7 support in her own house that is owned by her sister. It is not accessible and it is difficult for her and her support staff to manage. We are just about to start building a house for her that will support her high physical support needs so that she can live, work and have a normal life.

If passed in its current form, the NDIS Amendment Bill will have massive impact on her life:

This Victorian has urged their representatives to vote against the bill.

Another constituent shared with me their concerns about the bill on their sister, and I quote them:

The Bill has been pushed through quickly and quietly, with limited consultation and clarity on how it will impact people with disabilities.

What is clear, though, is that the Minister will have huge powers to make rules down the road, without proper scrutiny or protections in place, for life-altering decisions like what needs assessment tools are used, and what funding can be spent on. These rules can be made by the Minister without proper co-design, transparency, or protections in place.

Giving the Minister these unbridled powers mean living with fear that everything can be taken away, a constant pit in your stomach. Having a sister with a disability is not a burden, but living in limbo, waiting for the next rule to be made that upends her life, is.

We must legislate co-design, transparency, and constraints on the Minister's power, which this Bill does not. The Bill cannot be passed.

This Victorian constituent says that to pass the bill is to put into law that people with disabilities are second-class citizens. It is not too late to get the NDIS back on track with what it sets out to do: to provide people with disabilities choice and control over their lives.

Another constituent shared their concerns about the bill for them and their son. They said:

These proposed changes threaten to set the disability rights movement back twenty years, limiting the lives of disability and in many cases presenting serious dangers to lives.

The amendments to the NDIS threaten to narrow the scope of supports, destabilise access and impose undue burdens on participants.

According to this constituent, the proposed definition of 'NDIS supports' risks excluding essential services, undermining the ability of people with disability to live independently. 'By limiting our ability to use supports as we see fit, it limits our ability to live independently and reduce our reliance on support workers,' they told me. This constituent said:

I encourage decision makers to reject this Bill and the premise that the lives of people with disability are narrowed or compromised. I encourage you to prevent its passage through the Senate.

Another constituent said:

I'm writing this email on behalf of two very different friends with very different needs. I have seen up close how difficult their lives are and how every day is a matter of negotiating significant challenges. I have also seen how NDIS has made it possible for them, thanks to their own determination and that of loved ones, to find systems that make life not only bearable, but meaningful.

This constituent told me:

The proposed changes to the NDIS are terrifying for my friends. They are looking at the end of a world where they get to control their own destinies. They are afraid of dramatic cuts to the services that make their ongoing lives possible, particularly where they get to select and train their own support workers. This makes a huge difference to their quality of life. They need support workers who share their values and understand who they are as people.

Talking about their friends, my constituent said,

Support workers who are provided by for-profit companies, who are neither well-trained nor well-paid … Both my friends have horror stories to impart, and both of them live in fear of the day when they will no longer have a say in who gets to have that most crucial and intimate relationship with them. Trust and empowerment are absolutely crucial.

According to this Victorian, funding for basic services for their friends, like being able to swim, to receive psychological services or to take a holiday, are under threat. Small things that able-bodied people take for granted, which require organisation and assistance, make all the difference between wellbeing and a sense of powerlessness and abandonment, depression and physical ill health. This person told me that both their friends need one-to-one support. They won't survive, mentally or physically, if they are put into shared accommodation. They said the NDIS may not be perfect, but it has made lives livable, it has boosted the economy, it is 'reasonable and necessary', and it is for every one of us who needs it. This constituent urged us here in this place to do all that we can to make sure that it stays that way and that 'Shorten's proposed changes do not eviscerate it beyond recognition'.

I reiterate that this bill should absolutely not pass. It should be sent back to inquiry to give the community more time to make their concerns known and to enable further parliamentary scrutiny. Disabled people, those who love them and anyone who cares about the integrity of government social services should make their feelings known about this harmful bill. This bill will cost lives and it will set disabled people back decades. The Greens will not support this bill in its current form in the Senate.

Claire Chandler (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I also rise to make a contribution on the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Getting the NDIS Back on Track No. 1) Bill 2024. Noting that I will be put in continuation in about five minutes, I wanted to make some initial comments, first up, about the issue of scrutiny. From sitting here this afternoon and listening to the debate on this bill, it is very clear to me that the ability of this chamber to fully scrutinise the impact of this bill and to fully understand the impact that this bill will have on NDIS participants and the community that supports them has been seriously lacking, and I think that is incredibly disappointing.

I want to quote from the report into this bill. These are the additional comments that were tabled by my colleagues, coalition senators on the Community Affairs Legislation Committee, Senator Kovacic and Senator Hughes. They said:

The Coalition is unable to provide fully-informed commentary on the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Getting the NDIS Back on Track No. 1) Bill 2024 [Provisions] legislation, due to the government's unwillingness to grant an extension to the committee for further scrutiny on sensible and necessary measures for the sustainability of the NDIS.

We note insufficient time has been provided for proper consultation with the sector and the community on the bill who have expressed widespread misgivings about the current legislation.

The opportunity to properly engage with this bill is important in bringing the NDIS back onto sustainable footing in a manner that does not disadvantage or impact negatively on participants most in need.

It was also concerning that the committee was not given the opportunity to consult the sector on government amendments tabled on the day of the public hearing.

This is a direct quote from the Senate report into this bill, from the additional comments that were provided by my colleagues who sit as voting members on the community affairs committee.

As a senator who has sat in this chamber for almost five years now and who has often spoken in contributions on legislation about the importance of this chamber as a chamber of scrutiny, I think it is incredibly disappointing that senators came away from this inquiry process into this legislation feeling that, as a committee of the Senate and as a chamber, we weren't able to do our job in scrutinising that legislation, because we weren't provided with the opportunity by the government. As senators in this place will know well but those listening at home may not, these legislation committees are fundamentally controlled by the government. The direction that an inquiry takes is negotiated across the chamber, but the government are the voting members that have the final say. So we are now considering this legislation here today. We've had a very fulsome debate on this legislation so far, and I think that that will continue in the coming days. It is incredibly disappointing that senators weren't able to have their concerns fully addressed throughout the committee inquiry process.

The other important thing about Senate committee inquiries is that it's not just about us. Yes, we are the ones who get to come along and ask questions of various witnesses to understand the ramifications of legislation on our country, on various elements of our community, on individuals et cetera, but Senate inquiries are also a really important opportunity for members of our community to have a say on whether they think legislation needs work. When we are talking about a piece of legislation, such as we are today in relation to the NDIS, I would have thought it would go without saying that individuals and members of the community who are impacted by the legislation would be given a very fair and very fulsome opportunity to have their concerns heard by this chamber through the Community Affairs Legislation Committee.

Colleagues on the crossbench agree. We've had contributions from Greens senators today likewise saying that the inquiry process that was initiated into this legislation has not given these individuals, members of the community, NDIS participants and people impacted by this legislation the ability to have their voices heard. This is not simply something that is coming from us as the opposition; this is a concern that has been heard around the chamber. The concern is that, through the inquiry process, the community has not been able to have its say on the legislation, to make suggestions as to how the legislation could have been improved and to understand how the legislation is going to create change in the way that it fairly should, in the way that this chamber is set up to allow and in the way that I think most Australians in our democracy fairly expect. It is a good thing that this chamber is a chamber of scrutiny. It is a good thing that we, in whatever policy committee we happen to serve on, have the opportunity to take government legislation out of this building, out of this city, to the rest of the country—to consult, to ask questions and to understand the impact.

Andrew Bragg (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Home Ownership) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! It being 1.30 pm, I will now proceed to two-minute statements.