Melissa Price (Durack, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Social Services. Will the minister update the House on the government's commitment to the National Disability Insurance Scheme and ensuring that it is fully funded? Who supports this approach and are there any alternatives?

Christian Porter (Pearce, Liberal Party, Minister for Social Services) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for her question. As the member knows, the rollout of the NDIS to full operation in 2020 is now well underway. Moving from 30,000 participants to about 460,000 in 2020 is a massive and challenging enterprise. Already, as you are aware, 80,000 people have transitioned into and are receiving services. To give the House some idea of the scale of this enterprise, over the next two years there will be required another 60,000 new jobs in disability care.

All those critical services have to be paid for. The wages of the new disability care workers have to be funded. Labor designed the blueprint for the NDIS, and they should get real credit for that. It has fallen to the coalition to implement it, and that will take a lot of hard work. But the inescapable truth is that the responsibility to pay for the scheme falls on this entire parliament. Right now we have the opportunity of agreeing to a 0.5 per cent increase in the Medicare levy. We can fill the funding gap in the NDIS if we just agree that it is fair for the average income earner to pay $1 a day in 2019. That will fund the scheme and give financial security to the scheme and put it beyond doubt.

To give an idea of what you get in return for that dollar a day, using the example of an Australian who would be born with a disability and receive care from birth: the NDIA have said that for someone in Australia born with a disability such as Down syndrome, the estimate is that they would receive care totalling $3.5 million under the NDIS during their lifetime. That means support for an Australian family; it means the opportunity to have a dignified life, either independently or in supported accommodation when the young Australian becomes an adult. In the decades to come thousands of Australian families are going to face situations just like that. They can be fully insured for that with a $1 a day increase to the average income earner under the levy.

What indicates that this is a reasonable approach is when economists starting agreeing with each other. Chis Richardson of Deloitte Access Economics said: 'Back in 2013 it was never funded. There was a promise to do something about spending cuts into the future. But, you know, unless you actually have the courage to say what they were—so no, it was never funded. I am all in favour of the Medicare levy to help fill this hole in the NDIS.'

Saul Eslake has said: 'I do think it's justified and reasonable. It's appropriate, if this is an insurance scheme, that there's an insurance premium to pay for it. I don't think that the entire additional costs of the NDIS should be funded by the top 15 per cent of taxpayers alone. I don't understand why the Labor Party continues to insist otherwise.' Neither does the coalition.