ADDRESS TO PARLIAMENT - BILLS - National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Getting the NDIS Back on Track No. 1) Bill 2024 - Second Reading

If only the name of this bill—the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Getting the NDIS Back on Track No. 1) Bill 2024—was exactly what was going to happen, because, if there is any piece of legislation coming before this House, and if there's any aspect of society that needs to get back on track, it's the NDIS.

In my first of, so far, five terms in this place, the Gillard government brought the NDIS to fruition. The difficulty was that there was no money attached to it and, when the coalition took over government in 2013, we had a lot of work to do. I supported the NDIS from the outset. I remember the former New South Wales Legislative Council member John Della Bosca, and one of his portfolios between 2008 and 2009 in the New South Wales Parliament was as Minister for Health and Medical Research. He ran the 'Every Australian Counts' campaign. I remember it, and the red T-shirts. He went around with a written quote bubble showing the words, 'Every Australian Counts' on it. I was happy to get a picture in one of those shirts with one of those placards. I can remember getting criticised at the time, because we hadn't agreed to every aspect of it—it was something new, put forward by Labor—but I thought I needed to do a couple of things about it. The first was to ring Kurrajong in Wagga Wagga in my electorate, which has been providing disability services for six decades. I rang Kurrajong and spoke to Cathie Smith to see what she thought of this approach, and Kurrajong was supportive. I thought, 'If Kurrajong is supportive, then I should be too,' As I said, it was something that was new. It was something that the Labor government was proposing and it does remain, I believe, a legacy of Julia Gillard, our first female prime minister. I have respect for former prime minister Gillard for a number of things, not least of which is this, but it is now mired in mess.

There are more calls to my office in relation to the NDIS than for any other thing. In fact, you could add up every other call to my office, and they still wouldn't match the number of calls to my office that come in in relation to the NDIS. They are heartbreaking calls. They are fraught-with-despair calls. I asked my electorate officer who deals with most, if not all, of these matters, to give me some cases. While I won't and wouldn't publish the names, they are very pertinent to this debate. First is a vulnerable man who lodged his change of circumstance in November 2023. As at 11 April 2024, his claim had still not been finalised even though he was going to run out of money then. If he doesn't have support, there is a danger he will die. Another case is a woman with multiple sclerosis whose change of circumstance was lodged in February 2024. Her plan had run out of money and her support coordinator was paying for the supports. When the plan came through in late March, the plan was worth less than this woman's plan was two years ago. A reviewable decision has now been lodged.

Another situation is a young 18-year-old man whose mother had to take him to the NDIS office within the Wagga Centrelink to prove he was nonverbal, even though he had been nonverbal for his whole life. There's a father who put his son's review of plan in November 2023 and was continually told it was being escalated but that nothing would happen until the plan had a thousand dollars left in it. In early May 2024, the plan was about to run out of money and dad has had a promotion at his work. But he will have to tell his boss he can't start, because he'll have to stay at home to care for his son. Yet another case is a man with MND, motor neurone disease. He lodged a plan, a review for assistive technologies, in November and December 2023. It wasn't finalised until the end of April 2024.

And this is the kicker: this is the departmental wording at the end of a lot of emails in relation to the NDIS that recipients receive through my office: 'Please accept our apologies for the delay in resolving this matter for your office,' there's a line redacted there, 'and for any stress this may have caused. If the participant requires crisis support, the participant or their support should contact their local GP, hospital or mental health crisis team. Alternatively, they can contact Lifeline on 131114.'

My electorate officer has worked with me for more than 20 years in various capacities, and she is one of the most diligent people I have ever met. She's a patient person, a caring person and an empathetic person. She said to the NDIS, 'If you dealt with these matters in a timely manner, our constituents would not be getting stressed out,' and she feels it. But it's more than her feeling it, because she can go home at the end of the day and concentrate on her family and do other things. The pain and suffering that those families are enduring are ongoing. They don't finish at five o'clock, turn the computer off and stop answering the phone. Their enormous grief and stress is 24/7. It's hard.

I hear reports—and I note that other people who are speaking on this bill have also mentioned it—that the NDIS is taking up—in fact, like a big sponge—many of the workers who would otherwise be doing other work, perhaps in aged care, perhaps in child care. Goodness knows, we need more and more people in those two sectors! But why would you want to do the heavy lifting of a person who can't get out of bed and strain your back, when you could be getting paid three times as much—a lot of money per hour—as an NDIS carer, to take somebody to the pictures or tenpin bowling or to the gym? These are some of many circumstances that have been relayed to my office. This is such a shame because the NDIS is taking a lot of people out of other sectors, being a big drain.

There are circumstances in which people are being paid NDIS who are, let me tell you, anecdotally, questionable. There are other people who just simply can't get the support. There are people who have Down syndrome and yet have to prove every year that they have this condition. It is just so difficult, so I say: if this legislation were to get the NDIS back on track, all well and good, but I doubt it very much.

I received some very telling texts from a fellow by the name of Mark Pietsch this morning. Mark once lived in the Central Western New South Wales town of Forbes. He's now the New South Wales state director of Physical Disability Australia. He wrote several texts to me this morning that are very concerning. He said, 'I know people in the Central West already struggle to access reliable disability services, and this bill, as it sits, will leave families worse off, and passes the buck to non-existent services.'

There's a bit of a rub there—'non-existent services'. I know when the NDIS was first starting out there were shysters, I would call them, out there trying to get part of the action with the NDIS. People who were not like Kurrajong in my electorate in Wagga Wagga and beyond, who were not people with years of experience, years of care, years of concern, years of compassion and years of professional experience. They were just coming into the NDIS thinking they could make a fast buck out of people and families who, quite frankly, were being dudded out of what they should have been receiving under this new system.

Mr Pietsch continued, 'Bill Shorten knows that these changes'—these are his words not mine—'will make the NDIS more like aged care and will force families to relinquish care of their disabled brothers, sisters, mothers and fathers, and force them into homes living with two others with a disability. Like me, no-one plans on or wishes to end up with a disability. They are living in a country where we still have the chance to live a meaningful life, have a family, work and have the same opportunities as others, which is something Aussies have come to be proud of. Studies undertaken by the NDIA, as a participant of the review, show that the public have a sense of ownership and want to protect the disability community.' He's right, because I know all Australians and all parliamentarians would want the best for those people who are, unfortunately, through no fault of their own, having to call on NDIS services.

Mark continued, 'The problems we see with the NDIS today are tied to poor administration, inflated and inefficient systems and red tape that would call for an OT to write a $400 report for a $20 item, and fraud that is allowed to occur because the NDIA commission use surprising strategies that disregard quality services and encourage cowboys.' I called them shysters before, but there are, unfortunately, cowboys in this sector and in this system. Mark continued, 'More red tape is not the answer, especially for rural communities. We need common sense and bureaucrats who actually speak and engage with the system they wish to change.'

He said, 'Later today we're expecting statements from a number of peak bodies highlighting concerns on the contents of the legislation.' That sentence from Mr Pietsch worries me, because I know that Labor, when they came to office in May 2022—and more's the pity they did—said that they would—

Mr Conroy: Shame!

Mr McCORMACK: Yes, shame! I could take that interjection, but we move on. I know he was being facetious. It was a shame, because we heard that we were going to see more transparency and more probity, but quite the opposite is the case. Labor should have consulted more widely and broadly for this particular legislation. They will claim they have. I doubt that.

The text from Mr Pietsch continues that the most problematic is section 10, which is likely to be shot down by the human rights committee as it cherrypicks only some of the sections of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with a Disability.

Mr Pietsch is right. He's got skin in the game. He knows that the NDIS as it stands is riddled with problems. It is draining people who would otherwise be engaged in other activities from those activities into this. It is a whirlpool of money that really needs to be addressed. I can remember the then New South Wales Premier, Morris Iemma, a Labor Premier, talking in the nineties about the fact that the health budget, if it were left to run as it was, was going to take up almost all of the state budget. He, as a former minister and then a premier, strove to do something about it. I pay tribute to him for doing just that. He was, in essence, a good premier.

This is the same. We face a grave dilemma here with the NDIS: that it will, as a money whirlpool, suck so much out of the budget—and I appreciate that much of it is uncapped. We need to do a thorough investigation about where the money is being spent, why people who have lifelong conditions have to consistently and continually prove that they have those conditions and why there are such delays, I appreciate that in the budget we're getting 36,000 more public servants. No doubt most of them will be occupied on shiny seats here in Canberra. If we're going to have that many thousands more public servants, they need to be doing gainful activities, and that is perhaps on the NDIS switchboard and making sure we address some of these cases, making sure we go through them so that people such as those in the case examples that I read from my electorate office aren't happening more and more.

We have to listen to people like Mark Pietsch, who knows what he's talking about. It's one of the main reasons he had to move from Forbes to Wollongong. It's forcing people with disabilities out of local communities into the cities to access services. This is not fair. This is not equity. This is not right in the Australia that we live in in 2024. The government has to, must and should do better.