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 7 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 members in the other place to address questions about the government's NDIS reform agenda, and it is pursuing that 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 has previously outlined that we have claimed public interest immunity over the requested document 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.

We are here today discussing this issue because of Labor's broken promises. Let's be really clear. The Australian Labor Party went to the election promising the disability community that they would prevent any cut to the NDIS. They went to the election promising transparency, promising accountability, promising genuine co-design with disabled people, yet, when in government, they got together with the states and territories—behind closed doors—and signed an agreement to cap the NDIS. Caps have consequences.

The decision to artificially restrict the amount of money available to disabled people to meet our individualised support needs has real impacts on our lives. The government's complete and total ignorance and lack of care in relation to these impacts are causing people real harm, right now. I and my team hear from constituents across the country every single day, bringing to us the latest examples of plans that have been cut, slashed and almost burned to the ground. People's disability supports, their vital supports that keep them alive, are being absolutely trashed and taken away because this government is already trying—desperately—to cut the funding of the scheme, to cut the amount spent to meet the requirements of the cap signed up to behind closed doors.

I want to read to the Senate just a couple of examples of what we are hearing from people who are participants of the NDIS and are being directly impacted by this Labor government's cuts to the scheme. One person in WA reached out to us having experienced a 50 per cent cut to their plan. There was no consultation on the decision. The agency simply informed them that they had been directed to slash and burn. The consequence of that approach is that this person is having to, right now, re-prove a condition they have had for 30 years to be able to continue to receive the therapies they require in the community.

Another participant shared with our team that their plan has been cut by 71 per cent. It was, they said, 'a cookie-cutter rationale given with no warning'. They rightly described the devastation that this has brought into their life and have shared that now they clearly do not know how they are going to make it. The government has clearly indicated that it is willing to stop at nothing to implement its agenda of cutting the NDIS. The government has had opportunity after opportunity to come clean, to give to the Senate the information we demand: How many participants will be affected by these cuts? How many people will lose supports because of Labor's decision to do this deal? How many people will be harmed by what they have agreed to without us, deliberately blocking us out of the spaces where we could have contributed?

The agency recently heard from a young person whose only remaining parent had just passed away. A change-of-circumstances request was submitted to reflect the loss of this immediate support, and the response of the agency, the response of this government, was to cut their plan by 77 per cent. What was the reason? The death of a parent, who was their primary support, does not mean they require, in the view of the agency, additional funding. So not only did they not get the additional funding; the funding was cut by 77 per cent. This is a broken promise, a betrayal of disabled people, and no amendment to this bill done behind closed doors, without disabled people, will meet the needs of the community.

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

We're here again. It's 'NDIS Monday', and it's just becoming a joke. It is a running joke that a government who came to office claiming they would be transparent have done everything they can to cloak themselves in secrecy when it comes to the NDIS. We're going to come to a bill, maybe, a little bit later on today that seeks to reform the NDIS.

The NDIS is, I acknowledge, one of the biggest items in the budget. It is too big. I'm the parent of a participant and I'm happy to acknowledge that there are too many people on it. The Greens and us on this side of the chamber don't actually agree on terribly much, but what we do agree on is there should be transparency. We do have different views about who should be on the scheme. We do have different views on how some of the scheme should be operating, but we do agree that there should be transparency. Yet those in government are determined to not be transparent, not only with the Australian people, when they have already put these savings into the budget, but with the 660,000 participants in the scheme and their families.

I think that number is too high—absolutely, that number's too high. There are too many people in this scheme who do not have a permanent and lifelong stability, which is what the scheme was set up for. What we're seeing now, in this desperate bid to curb the cost of the scheme, is plans being cut for those that most require them. The people that are most vulnerable and are most in need of supports in the community are having their plans cut so that, in some ways, those who shouldn't be on the scheme can remain on the scheme. They're not brave enough to step up and take the political hit by acknowledging the people that should come off the scheme, but what they want to do is just somehow—because it's a demand-driven scheme. You either cut the number of participants or cut the value of the plans. That's the only way you save money.

But we're being told, including through inquiries, that the NDIA is seeking efficiency measures. In the hearings that were held over this, we heard Mr Shorten say that there was all this cost being borne by the taxpayer by not passing the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Getting the NDIS Back on Track No. 1) Bill 2024 sooner and that having additional inquiry hearing dates were unnecessary. Well, just to be clear, this series of hearings was less than 25 hours in total. Less than 25 hours of hearings were allocated because, as we know, the government has the numbers on that committee, so the government senators were always too busy to have an inquiry or to have a hearing. We could never get any insights into what this bill was actually trying to achieve, so it's an absolute joke to claim that there's been enough inquiry into this bill. There hasn't been.

It's disappointing, though, that we did invite the states and territories to come and meet with us. Hopefully they could have given us some insights into what this framework was going to look like and how they were going to make these savings because, at the end of the day, it's the states that are supposed to be responsible for delivering these foundational supports. But no-one knows what a foundational support is. What is a foundational support? There's no definition. For those in the gallery, this is actually something that's delegated legislation. They're rules that are going to be written by the minister when he feels like it. We don't know what they look like, but, most frighteningly, the states, who are going to have to deliver them, don't know what they look like. They don't know what they're going to have to do. They don't know how much money they will have to spend.

I asked a premier, a treasurer, a health minister, an education minister, a justice minister and a disability minister—six ministers from each of those state governments—and not one of them had either the guts or the temerity to turn up and tell us what they knew, what they thought or what they'd been signed up to. We've just had a statement come out from the Premier of Tasmania, who was invited, and I'll acknowledge he's a Liberal premier. He didn't turn up, but now he's put out a statement asking for the legislation to be pushed back because the states don't agree to what was signed up to and don't agree on their ability to implement it. But, of course, no-one knows where this is going to land, because there's been no transparency, no discussion and everyone's been too scared—hiding.

The fact is that Bill Shorten, the minister, has made claims about the cost of the delay. I've got two questions for him. The first one is: what's the cost of your inaction for 2½ years since you've been the minister? For 2½ years, he's been the minister. He was the shadow minister before that. He was actually one of the architects of the scheme with Jenny Macklin back in the day. It's been 2½ years, and this is the first piece of legislation he's brought forward. We'll have more to say about what the actuary told us last week about his ridiculous claim of what the additional inquiry days were costing because it's based on completely false numbers and facts. They're completely false facts and numbers, which is all we seem to get from this government.

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

This would be farcical if it weren't so serious for over 650,000 Australians with serious and permanent disability, who are now, in record numbers, contacting those of us in this place and the other to beg us not to pass this legislation. It is totemic of the shocking, appalling government that has been delivered by the ALP over the last 2½ years.

Four years ago, the then coalition government—the then minister Stuart Robert and I—approached the Labor Party and Bill Shorten, and we said: 'This scheme is starting to head into trouble. We need serious legislative reforms. We need serious engagement with the states and territories to reform this scheme so that it can be financially sustainable and focus on delivering everything that it was designed to provide for our most seriously vulnerable'—that is, those Australians who were in group homes across this country in appalling conditions. Yet, four years ago, Bill Shorten started ridiculing then minister Stuart Robert. Shorten said that he was evil and that he was going to cut the plans. He said that we didn't need an assessment process in an insurance scheme. He whipped up the sector and whipped up the politics, and he said: 'There's nothing wrong with the scheme. I see no evidence of anything wrong with this scheme. We don't need to do anything. They're all just making this up.' He accused us of being 'pearl-clutching Kabuki theatre'.

Despite everything in the budget, everything in the quarterly reports, saying the NDIS was a scheme in trouble, that it was starting to trend towards 20 per cent above budget each and every year and was completely unsustainable, what has Minister Shorten done over the last 2½ years? Instead of coming clean and saying, 'I got it wrong; now is the time to start working together to improve and save this scheme,'—we had 30-odd reviews that clearly identified what was wrong with this scheme and what was needed to be done by the federal, state and territory governments to fix the scheme and to extend support to other Australians with disabilities who were not covered by the NDIS—he had another review, which the minister representing him has just gone through: 'We did. We consulted all these people.' And guess what? They found what every other review has found.

That review was delivered to the Labor government, to Minister Shorten, in November last year. The government still have not provided a response, and they're saying that this legislation—that's supposed to be before us in five minutes time—will fix it, will implement the review. It doesn't implement the review. It probably implements five per cent of the review. Even Labor's reviewers said that review had to be implemented as a package by the federal government and the states and territories.

This legislation is a debacle. We're due to start in committee on this legislation, and guess what? We haven't seen the amendments. We're supposed to be debating something that this incompetent and hopeless government, after saying this legislation was so urgent and necessary—we're going into debate in less than five minutes. I don't know whether anybody else in this chamber has seen the amendments. What are we going to be discussing? It was so urgent that we had to rush through and not answer the questions.

We still don't have answers to some of the questions that we asked in committees. In fact, with many of them, they ducked and weaved and didn't answer the questions, and we are at this shameful position today. Every Australian who relies on the NDIS, whether they be participants, families, friends or people who work within the scheme to provide those supports, should be worried. Where is the bill? Where are the amendments? What a shame.

David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to join with my colleague Senator Steele-John in supporting this motion. It is extraordinary, isn't it? If you cast your mind back two and a bit years to Labor in opposition and what they said about how government would be under Labor, I seem to recall, from the Prime Minister down, they had a mantra of 'transparency, transparency, transparency' and—quite rightly—called out the appalling dying days of the coalition government with its multiple secret ministries, secret deals and secret agreements. They pointed to the coalition and said: 'We won't be like that. We won't do these secret deals. We won't do this secret behind-closed-doors non-disclosure agreement stuff.' This was going to be a bright sunshiny day under Labor.

What do we have instead? We have layers of secrecy that, at different times, the coalition probably hadn't even dreamt up—new ways of doing secret national deals. At the heart of that is the NDIS financial sustainability framework secretly developed by the Albanese government, with Minister Shorten, no doubt, drafting in the dark, under candlelight somewhere on a Melbourne terrace in secret meetings. The only way you could come to a secret candlelit meeting with Minister Shorten was if you signed a non-disclosure agreement where you promised not to tell where you met, who you spoke to and what was discussed. Then they knock up a framework to cut billions and billions of dollars from people with a disability in this country—all done in secrecy.

As far as we understand, they created the framework in July last year and they then started a further series of secret consultations with premiers and chief ministers around the country. Then in April this year—Senator Steele-John will correct me if I'm wrong—in another secret meeting with premiers and chief ministers, headed by the Albanese government, they sign off on a secret deal, a secret framework. Meanwhile, it turns out that Minister Shorten has been having these candlelit, secret negotiations, and he's come forward with legislation that wants to, over the next decade, cut $14.4 billion from people with a disability. The legislation that they've introduced has been roundly opposed by those 4.4 million Australians who live with a disability, who have seen it proposed that $14.4 billion is to be taken from them, their friends, their supporters, their carers—all based on a secret deal and a secret framework.

We say: if there is any credibility to the financial modelling and if you want to stand by the financial modelling and the arguments that you say support taking $14.4 billion from people with disability, then show us the framework, show us the modelling, show us what it's all based on. Of course the Senate should see what it's based on before we vote on the legislation.

I come back to what this government said about transparency, in its election commitment. They persuaded about one-third of the country to vote for them on the basis that they were going to be different. Almost one-third of the country voted for the Labor Party on the basis that they would be different and would learn the lessons of the coalition government, which so rapidly drove the coalition into disrepute and saw millions of Australians reject that as a model of government. On the promise of transparency, about one-third of the country voted for Labor. About one-third voted for the crossbench, too, not necessarily believing Labor's promises in the election campaign. Very smart people those—

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

Good call.

David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Good call—as it turns out, very good call. But about one-third of the country voted for Labor on the promise of transparency and on being different. They, kind of, are a bit different: they're less transparent, even less transparent than the coalition. We could point to the attacks on whistleblowers. The coalition kicks off prosecutions, and Labor puts whistleblowers in jail. The coalition sees delays in FOI, and Labor blows them out to new untold delays—year-long delays, half-decade-long delays.

Show us the framework. Live up to the promises you gave to the Australian people when you got elected. Be transparent.

Question agreed to.