Don Farrell (SA, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Trade and Tourism) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The government continues to reiterate its view that it cannot agree with the assertions made in this motion. We do, however, acknowledge the interest in the chamber in reforming the NDIS to get it back on track and ensure its sustainability for future generations of Australians. I also acknowledge the recent commitment by the Leader of the Opposition to working together with the government to this end.

On 8 February 2024 the government tabled the final report of the Independent Review into the National Disability Insurance Scheme, which was publicly released in December 2023. In producing this report, the independent NDIS review panel travelled to every state and territory, including regional and remote communities. It heard directly from more than 10,000 Australians, worked with disability organisations to reach out and listen to more than 1,000 people with disability and their families, recorded more than 2,000 personal stories and received almost 4,000 submissions. The review delivered 26 recommendations and 139 supporting actions to respond to its terms of reference.

In delivering its recommendations, the review provided exhaustive analysis and proposals to improve the operation, effectiveness and sustainability of the NDIS. The independent NDIS review panel has said its reforms can improve the scheme and meet National Cabinet's annual growth target of no more than eight per cent growth by 1 July 2026. Discussions have continued with senators across this chamber as well as with members in the other place to address questions about the government's NDIS reform agenda that it is pursuing together with the disability community. We look forward to working with senators in this place to get the NDIS back on track and ensure its sustainability for future generations of Australians.

In relation to the order being discussed, the government have previously outlined that we have claimed public interest immunity over the requested documents, as disclosure would prejudice relations between the Commonwealth and the states and territories. The Minister representing the Treasurer has already tabled key documents for the benefit of the Senate in addition to the aforementioned review.

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

I move:

That the Senate take note of the explanation.

After months and months and months of the Senate demanding that the government make public, that they release, the commitments they made—the details of the agreements they signed in relation to our NDIS, the details of the deal they did behind closed doors, behind the backs of disabled people and our families, which resulted in the capping of the NDIS, and their commitment to cut billions from the vitally needed supports provided by the NDIS—I still do not believe that this government really gets it, really understands why this information is important. So, let me spell it out for you in the clearest possible terms.

You made a commitment, a deal behind closed doors, to cap the expenditure of the scheme. In doing that, you sent a very clear signal to disabled people that our support needs, our services, our therapies, would now come second, behind the government's desire to balance its budget spreadsheets. That has two drastic implications: (1) How many people will therefore be kicked off the scheme? And (2) How many services and supports will be removed from people who currently need them? As a Senate we have tried, again and again, to get answers to these questions. Yet we have been stonewalled at every step, at every moment, by a government that promised transparency, consultation and authentic co-design.

Many on the government's side in the Senate may be wondering why I and so many other disabled people want answers to these questions, why we have fought for this information. Let me paint this picture. Let me try once again to give you this information. Can you imagine what it is like to sit in a wheelchair that is so small and old that it rubs pressure sores into your legs the size of eggcups? Can you imagine what it is like to be forced to live in a group home with people you don't know, with people who scare you, where you are showered only once or twice a week by somebody who doesn't look at you, by somebody who touches you, by somebody who won't listen, won't respond, doesn't treat you like a human?

Can you imagine what it is like to watch your son being bullied, excluded at school, falling behind, while knowing that if only you could afford the therapies and supports he needs he might be able to join the playgroup, might be able to learn how to read and write, might be able to be included, might be able to find joy in his time at kindergarten or preschool instead of enduring it? Can you imagine what it is like to look down at the hospital bed of your daughter, framed once again by guards, with scars up her arms, wasted away, while knowing that surely if the system had only seen her as a whole person, had only provided her with supports, rather than passing the buck, she might not be there?

We can imagine. Those were our lives before the NDIS. They are still the lives of too many of us today. That scheme gave us chance and hope to escape discrimination and to live with freedom. And you've cut it behind our backs. You do deals behind our backs. Therefore, we will not stop, we will not cease to get that answer, to get that clarity—not now and not ever.

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

Senator Steele-John, once again, you are incredibly well spoken as you stand up for so many people with a disability. But, again, it's a shameful performance by the government as they continue to refuse to respond to this Senate's demands to provide the financial modelling that underpins capping the growth of the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

Most people don't live daily around the NDIS and don't rely on it. I don't rely on it as a disabled person, but I rely on it in having a son who is a participant. I need to know, when I'm not there, that my son is going to be looked after. I need to be secure—going to Senator Steele-John's point—that he's not going to be put in a group home with people he doesn't know. I need to know that he's not going to be diminished as a person, and that every skill he is taught—as a child, through his teenage years and as we continue to teach him—will open up his world and give him opportunities. I need to know, when I'm not there to keep the fight up for him, that he will be safe, he will be treated with respect and he will be able to live a life of dignity. But I don't know because, at the moment, we have a government hiding behind opacity. They said they would be transparent, yet here we are again with just another policy area being hidden behind National Cabinet and non-disclosure agreements.

We're consistently told that they can't release this modelling because it will undermine the relationship with the states, because the states are supposed to have come on board to agree to fund what we now know colloquially as foundational supports. The great thing is, when you ask disability groups, as we have done at different inquiries, 'What do you understand foundational supports to be?' they come at us with a list of things that they wish they were, what they think they should be and what they hope they will be. Unfortunately, we don't know what they are, because this minister and this government won't tell us what they consider to be a foundational support. Is community health coming back to provide speech therapy and occupational therapy for kids who don't have a permanent, lifelong disability but need a bit of assistance? We don't know.

The government hides behind the states. I'll give you a tip, guys: your relationships are already fractured. The premiers are already out there saying that they do not have the funding. The health ministers, education ministers and disability ministers at every state level are saying that they do not have the funding to move back into the space. Quite frankly, the states should be ashamed of themselves for the way they vacated disability as quickly as they could, but we know that was a design flaw purposely put in place, fundamentally, by the Gillard government to get them to sign up. We know that the states have no concept of what these supports are and what they're supposed to look like. They don't know how quickly they're supposed to be ramping them up. They have no idea how they're going to pay for them or exactly what they're going to do. This is absolutely causing angst not just amongst children in the early childhood stream, though that is a hugely important issue, but much more broadly within the disability sector. We don't know, in a demand driven scheme, whether it's the number of participants that is going to be cut or the value of the plans that is going to be cut—because they are the only ways you can make cuts.

What I've found really disturbing over the past couple of weeks is the number of families that have reached out to me in absolute despair having just gone through a review. These were children under school age, but I also was reached out to recently because of a girl who left school last year who has an intellectual as well as other disabilities. She has been cut back to the point that she has one hour of speech therapy a month and one hour of OT a month. She has four hours of community support per week, and she was told that the level of reduction in her services was because of the new legislation—the new legislation that hasn't even been introduced to the Senate yet. It's not even here yet, but, somehow or other, the agency is already making claims to slash plans based on this current legislation. Again, this is taking away opportunity. This young girl is desperate to get a job. But, instead of underpinning the insurance principles of the National Disability Insurance Scheme, the agency is slashing and burning. For those people with a disability, it's absolutely hurting their lives and their ability to participate in the community as well as hurting them economically. Shame on you for continuing to hide.

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

Well, here we are again. For nine months in this place, Greens and coalition members have been locked as one to try and get the smallest degree of transparency from those opposite—and, yet again, they fail to provide. In some ways, it's hard to put in words how awful the situation that those opposite have put us into has become. It's been nine months of this place trying to get the most basic information from those opposite on the largest public policy reform over the last 30 years in this country. Time and time again, through motions in this place and in estimates, we have sought some accountability from the government—and debate on the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Getting the NDIS Back on Track No. 1) Bill 2024 is coming up after this business today.

This government were in opposition when I as minister, and my predecessor, started saying that this is a scheme in trouble. It was created far too fast by those opposite, instead of having a long runway to design and develop the National Disability Insurance Scheme, to trial it, to work out how to bring people in a methodical way into the scheme, to make sure they had the support they needed and to make sure that the scheme was only used by those it was designed for. But it became very clear after the first few years of implementation that things were going badly astray. As we'll talk about more today, that was because of the original legislation. Giving the benefit of the doubt to those opposite, they didn't realise—and I don't think we did either at the time—just how flawed that legislation was.

Here we are, over a decade later, and this is a scheme that, by design of those opposite, has no brakes on it. With Medicare, the PBS and all other demand driven schemes, those who control the purse strings are able to manage the two drivers of cost: people who are eligible for the scheme and how much they get paid. But, for the NDIS, that simply is not possible. Bill Shorten, the Minister for the National Disability Insurance Scheme, has spent two years after coming into government saying that there were no problems with this scheme. He has spent more time worrying about how he could insult me and insult my intelligence—and he was still doing it yesterday in op-eds. He should have spent less time worrying about all his zingers of insults and more time worrying about the design of this scheme, three years after we rang the bell that we needed to work together to fix this scheme to make sure that it provided certainty for everybody with a serious and permanent disability. But, no, what has he done over the last two years? This minister has spent the two years conducting a review that was never needed because we'd already had reviews. We know what the problems are with the scheme. There are many. None of the real problems are easy to fix, but they can be fixed. He has now left it for three years and the scheme has got worse.

In fact, over the last year alone, under his watch, the cost of the scheme—taxpayers' money—has increased by over 21 per cent. Instead of working across the chamber—and on all sides of the chamber we've reached out to say, 'Let's work on this together'—the minister has had NDAs with the sector around this legislation. He's had a review that reported in December. We still don't have a government response to it. He's now developed and is seeking to implement legislation with a completely inadequate inquiry which they've sausage-factoried through. They've already come up with a whole raft of amendments because the legislation is so bad, and yet, today, we don't have the financial figures. They spend most of their time working out how they can avoid transparency in the Senate and at estimates. At additional estimates this year, they wouldn't even provide the figures for the additional estimates variation of over $1 billion. If they had put more effort into redesigning this to save this scheme, put the controls in place and renegotiate the intergovernmental agreements with states and territories, who have completely abrogated their responsibilities to the other four million people with disability that they were supposed to look after—

Andrew McLachlan (SA, Deputy-President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you, Senator Reynolds. Senator Kovacic.

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

The NDIS website says:

Our role is to … support a better life for hundreds of thousands of Australians with a significant and permanent disability and their families and carers.

What I'm really curious to know is why this government doesn't feel that these same people deserve transparency. Why won't this government answer these questions? Time and time again, we have to listen to another minister creating more excuses as to why important documents relating to the functions of government and ordered to be produced by this Senate—in this example, following a motion moved by Senator Jordon Steele-John—cannot be tabled to this Senate. This is unacceptable. This cannot continue to go on. So long have they strayed from their promise of transparent government that they no longer even pretend to stand by that value. The transparency that we heard about over and over again no longer exists.

The NDIS provides critical services. We understand it does need some fixing so that we can afford to fund it and so that it continues to support the people who need it. Because of this, understanding the NDIS Financial Sustainability Framework is crucial. If we don't understand it, if we don't know what underpins it, if we don't know what the financial modelling is, how can it continue to effectively work? It can't.

This would not be acceptable in any commercial business in this country—or anywhere, for that matter, in my view. Yet this government believes that it can withhold this critical information and continue to withhold it, despite ongoing requests to table that information. It is our job in this chamber to be the second pair of eyes over legislation and policy, and this government is not allowing us to do our job. It is our job to scrutinise and to hold the government to account. That's what happens in a democracy. Where are the documents that we have requested to be tabled, and why won't they be tabled? How can we perform our duties when the government won't even perform theirs by producing the documents that this chamber has demanded, and rightly demanded?

Six hundred and sixty thousand Australians rely on the NDIS for support. A few weeks ago I had the honour of going to the Shepherd Centre, an organisation that provides, in its words, a voice to deaf children. I spoke to a number of parents and saw with my own eyes the significant positive impact that that organisation has on deaf children—the smiles on children's faces when they heard noises. Will their services be cut? By how much? Will the number of services they can receive be cut? Will the quantum of the services be cut? We don't know, because this government won't answer those questions. Those families, whose children need critical support in the first three years of life, where early intervention is crucial, don't know what's coming, because this government won't tell anybody. That is unacceptable.

Because we are denied this information to scrutinise government, Australians do not have the transparency they deserve, either as participants or as citizens, and it degrades the confidence in the NDIS as an institution because of the actions of this very government. You have pulled the rug out from NDIS participants, some of our most vulnerable people. This is not the transparent government that you promised us before the last election.

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

At the outset I would like to compliment the previous speakers in relation to this matter, especially Senator Steele-John, who spoke from the heart and made a lot of points of substance. I'm sure—I'm absolutely positive—that Senator Steele-John did not have to rely on the services of a $300,000-a-year speechwriter in order to make his points. I'm sure because he was speaking from the heart.

Sorry—I stand corrected by Senator Reynolds; it's $320,000. Can you believe it? The NDIS minister, Bill Shorten, has a speechwriter he pays $320,000 a year. That's extraordinary: $320,000 a year to write speeches. Those sitting in the public gallery have just heard speeches from senators across the chamber in relation to this matter, all delivered from the heart, making points of substance, and not one of them relied upon the services of a $320,000-a-year speechwriter. So I congratulate Senator Steele-John on his independently composed contribution to the Senate, and I also congratulate all the other senators on their contributions to the Senate—obviously their own work, obviously their own homework.

The NDIS system is one of the most important policy areas of this country. We all have friends and loved ones who are reliant on this system—every single one of us, every single Australian. So, when we're considering the dimensions of this terribly serious public policy issue, the Australian people—through us in the Senate—have a right to the key financial information which is being considered by governments at all levels in terms of the future of this public policy, the NDIS. That is the right of the Australian people, and here in the Senate we have been seeking the information required for that right to be exercised, for the Australian people to have that key financial information upon which the federal government is making decisions which will have lasting impacts on some of our most vulnerable Australians. That is what's happening here. We're seeking information which the government refuses to provide to us. The government refuses to provide us with the information we need—which the Australian people need—to assess the future of this scheme. We do this nearly every Monday morning of every sitting week. We all line up to make the same points, and it's about time the government listened to those points.

I want to make one point with respect to the public interest immunity claim which has been made by the government. What's happening here is that the government is saying: we can't provide this information to you, the Senate, because it might prejudice relationships between the federal government and the state governments. Now, that begs the question: how? How is it going to prejudice relationships between the federal government and the state governments? We don't know. They don't tell us. And here's the next obvious question: have they actually written to state governments and asked for their permission? Isn't that what you would do if you were saying it could prejudice relations between the federal government and the state governments? If that was an assertion made in good faith, you would contact the state governments and say: 'Look, the Senate is really keen for this information. Do you have any objection to us providing it?' Does that sound logical and reasonable? I would have thought so, but that hasn't been done. If you go to page 666 of Odgers', which is our road map forthe procedures of the Senate, this is what it says about prejudicing state government relations:

This ground, however, has appeared frequently in recent times in the following form: the information concerned belongs to the states as well as to the Commonwealth, and therefore cannot be disclosed without the approval of the states. The obvious response to this is that the agreement of the states to disclose the information should be sought and they should be invited to give reasons for any objection.

That's what our own procedures say. That is what the federal government should do, and that is what the federal government refuses to do because they do not want the Senate—and, through the Senate, the Australian people—to have the information that they have every right to have.

Question agreed to.