Susan Templeman (Macquarie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to speak to this bill relating to the mobility allowance paid to people who cannot easily use public transport or need substantial assistance to do so because of disability, illness of injury, provided that they are travelling to or from home for paid work, voluntary work, study or training or to look for work.

Labor acknowledges that this legislation covers an important funding gap for current recipients of the mobility allowance who are ineligible under the NDIS. We are currently considering the legislation and await the completion of today's hearing and the Senate inquiry process.

I first want to explain why access to a mobility allowance is so important for an electorate like mine. Macquarie is 4,300 square kilometres. The area is traversed by long and winding roads along ridges of the Blue Mountains. They go for kilometres, with small roads leading off them into valleys and lovely country lanes, but of course there is very little in the way of public transport. It is hard enough to travel the distances if you are fit and healthy, let alone if you have an injury, an illness or a disability.

If you live on the Blue Mountains rail line you can get up and down the mountain—including to Penrith, where many of our services are based. However, if you live on the Hawkesbury side of my electorate, you could almost fly to Darwin faster than you can get to and from Penrith by public transport. You could definitely fly to New Zealand.

It is an irregular, slow bus ride to Richmond or Windsor station, then a train trip to Blacktown, then another train back to Penrith. To do this with any sort of disability, injury or illness is even more of an arduous task. From Bowen Mountain it might only be 40 minutes by car, but it is nearly three hours by public transport. From St Albans it is more than an hour and a half to Penrith via river ferry, but there is no available public transport route to travel that 85 kilometres. So getting around the electorate is hard work at the best of times, and a car or special vehicle or service is really the only reasonable option, which is why mobility allowances—and community transport, for that matter—are so vital.

I will just take a moment to talk about one amazing organisation that does provide community transport. They are called Great Community Transport. They assist people with disabilities, carers accompanying clients, people receiving cancer treatment and others who are in some way transport disadvantaged, even in the short-term. In particular, I would like to acknowledge the work of Helen Walker OAM, who retired from that organisation after 30 years of service just last Friday.

Helen identified in the early eighties that transport assistance was needed in the Blue Mountains and then she set about fixing the problem. Mountains Community Transport was originally funded through the Home and Community Care program in New South Wales. It began with Helen, a driver, and a shared room with another community service in 1986. The Blue Mountains service amalgamated with the Nepean service in 2004, and they provided assistance for everything from shopping, medical and hospital transport, transport to centre-based meals and social outings—all of this provided by paid and volunteer workers. Now, 30 years on, it has 26 employees, over 100 volunteers, 25 vehicles and two offices. Today the organisation provides transport to more than 3,000 people a year, with a total of 78,000 trips. It was a privilege to be able to thank Helen for her vision and her work on behalf of the community that she has served around such a challenging issue.

So to the bill: the mobility allowance is a fortnightly payment of $93.20. That does not go a long way in an electorate like mine, but it is a help nonetheless. There are currently around 60,000 mobility allowance recipients; however, the NDIS trials have demonstrated that around 30 per cent—that is 18,000 people—of these mobility allowance recipients will likely be ineligible to receive an NDIS package of support. This group includes around 4,000 recipients who would be aged 65 years or older and approximately 14,000 recipients under 65.

In the 2013-14 budget, it was agreed that funding for the mobility allowance was to be rolled into the NDIS, to help fund its implementation, with transport assistance to be provided through the NDIS for participants. This bill will provide $46.5 million in the 2016-17 budget, to ensure that current recipients of the mobility allowance who are not eligible for the NDIS will be supported in the short to medium term.

The legislation covers a really important funding gap for current recipients who are otherwise ineligible under the NDIS. Without this funding they would simply have to stay at home. It is important that current recipients continue to receive this continuity of support during the rollout of the NDIS so that no-one with illness or disability is worse off. It is also important that the disability sector has consistency and stability as the rollout of the NDIS continues.

I would like to take this opportunity to speak a bit more broadly about the NDIS, which is obviously the reason we have this bill before us. It was of course Labor's decision to roll the mobility allowance into the NDIS, just as it was our decision to develop the NDIS—and, I should add, to fully fund it. But, as I said, we do have concerns that some of the changes in this bill go beyond the precise argument of rolling the mobility allowance over.

In Macquarie, while the NDIS is transforming people's lives for the better, it is not there yet for a number of clients and their families. I have recently heard one amazing story from 'SJ', who lives in Blackheath. SJ had an accident and is now wheelchair-bound and in need of care. She has a young son, Hamish, who is also a fantastic support to her. She has found that receiving her plan from the NDIS and working through the process has been an incredibly empowering experience—as it should be. That is exactly how it should be. And SJ is going to be a fantastic example of the very best that NDIS can achieve.

But not everybody in the Blue Mountains and the Hawkesbury has had the same experience. We were part of the early rollout last year, and it has become clear to me that we and this government could be doing a lot more to make it a smoother process. I have estimated that, some weeks, one of my staff is working virtually full-time on NDIS issues, liaising with the NDIA on behalf of constituents who feel like they have been beating their head against a brick wall just trying to get the same level of support—let alone more support—than they previously had. We have mums who are told that their plan for their child has been approved, but they do not know what to do next, and no-one is available to help them work out the next steps.

I am also concerned about the story one mother told me about the lengths that she had to go to in order to secure the same access to respite care that she had previously. She had to declare that she would not be able to care for her daughter at all without a certain level of respite and that she would give up being a carer completely. While we clearly need guidelines, we need to have person-centred carers. They are the way to go. Going through this process—like this mum, who has cared for her daughter for 26 years—feels like an unnecessary humiliation for people who have given so much of their lives to caring. The service providers in my electorate are also frustrated, as the rules keep changing and the advice varies, and having issues resolved is really coming down to the determination and persistence of a few people.

Let me give you a few examples. We know about the NDIS portal. I am told it is still terribly slow and that staff are wasting significant time when processing bookings and invoices. It is really practical stuff that is troubling them. You cannot set access levels for different staff, and messages received go to the entire business and organisation. There is no breakdown of who is charging what and no detail on how much of a budget has been booked. My service providers and consumers experience significant delays in speaking to an operator at the NDIS contact centre. There is no capacity to leave messages and there are long wait times. When they do get through they often find that the NDIA frontline staff, even though they are working to the best of their ability, simply do not have the answers. Feedback differs, depending on the operator; it might be that it is the wrong office, or that they cannot see the same screen as the service provider can. Some of the NDIA staff have clearly not had the training that would really benefit them, and they are not familiar with the request for payment booking process. The most common complaint is that the advice from two different people is contradictory or simply inaccurate.

What we are seeing locally, in some cases, is that, when the first plan is received by somebody, the plan reflects what people are already receiving—or less. We are finding that, in many cases, input is ignored, including specialist reports, documentation relating to the individual and recommendations of key planning people. Plans are also being unilaterally approved by NDIS without discussion. These sorts of things are frustrating to families, who are turning to the service providers. There is also some confusion about what role the service providers can play, so, all in all, for some people it can be a really frustrating process—and it should not be.

What we would really love to see is for the government to put more resources into this. There is no genuine review process in place, which is another issue. If the plan is not right, there is very limited ability to seek review. One family who raised the issue of a reduction in the former mobility allowance to a lower transport funding was actually advised by an NDIA person to trial it for a few months and see how they go. This is not the sort of certainty that families need. They were then further advised that any review would take approximately six weeks. When you are asking people to manage their package and make decisions, they need to know that it is a package that they can live with and that it is going to ensure that the person being cared for is not worse off. We would like to see people better off and better supported.

It is a fact that reviews cannot be done within the last three months of the plan, and that really leaves open the possibility of funds running low or running out if they have been utilised incorrectly or for emergencies. These are some of the really practical issues that we would like to see addressed. I am grateful, though, for people like Andrew Daly from DARE, John Le Breton from Greystanes, the team at EMPOWERability, Kath Harrison from Katoomba Neighbourhood Centre, Belinda Colombrita from Thorndale and Denise Heath from NADO who, in spite of these challenges, come together to work through them. There is so much goodwill and there are so many people doing hours of work to make this whole system work. I think it will be thanks to them that we get through this difficult period.

As I say, we see a lot of goodwill towards the scheme on all sides. But people's patience is running thin, and the minister really must step up. Labor will continue to work to make sure that people with disability are protected and are receiving the support they need. After all, that is what the NDIS is all about. That is what we are here to improve, and we will work in any way we can to see that that happens.

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