Bill Shorten (Maribyrnong, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for the National Disability Insurance Scheme) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—On behalf of Labor, I would like to welcome this committee report. I think the chair and all the members of the committee have worked with an open mind. I think they have identified important and necessary reforms. When Australians look at the state of politics in 2019, I think this committee report is a little pinprick of bright light in that it shows what people can do. It shows what the Labor MPs and senators—Senator Chisholm, the member for Corangamite, the member for Canberra and the deputy chair, Senator Carol Brown—can do.

The NDIS is a good idea, but it's a good idea which I worry is bogged in the sand. There are plenty of good examples of life-changing support, which this scheme was set up to deliver. But I do worry that sometimes the bureaucratic red tape which surrounds people seeking modest supports for disabilities is in danger of strangling the process. I get concerned, as I've reimmersed myself in the world of disability since the federal election, that sometimes the decision-making structure within the National Disability Insurance Agency is designed to protect the agency from criticism rather than to focus on choice and control for participants.

People will recall the Terminator series of films back in the day when the former governor of California was an actor. They go back in time to fix up the Skynet system. In this fictitious world of Terminator, Skynet is a computer system designed to protect the human race. The problem is that, at some point, Skynet flips over and becomes the enemy of the human race. I'm not saying that NDIA is Skynet, but I am saying that this is now an organisation which too often is about protecting itself and not about the participants in the scheme.

So, on 3 December, the International Day of People with Disability, this report refocuses the scheme onto looking after participants. There is a saying on the Facebook groups of people with disability and participants and their families that dealing with planners can sometimes be planner lotto. You can get a very good planner or sometimes you can get planners who just aren't aware of the world of disability and how it all works and the struggles and the challenges of participants and the people caring for them.

I have to say that the member for Menzies is taking a legislator's approach to reforming the system. Reforming NDIS is not a left-wing idea or a right-wing idea. It's not a Liberal, National, Green, One Nation or Labor idea. It should be governed by common sense. But I would encourage the government, as opposed to the legislators on this committee, to take the same approach to these recommendations that the people on the committee have. The recommendations include the hardly revolutionary notion that a detailed plan which may cover tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for a participant in a year should be presented to the participant and their family as a draft before it's finalised, so, rather than presenting a final plan as a fait accompli, but where the planner may have missed important parts, if they get the draft, the family can work it through. This only makes sense. Do a rough copy before you submit the final version. That's what we tell people.

The second thing is that we think that having planners meet the participants face to face is hardly revolutionary but eminently sensible. So much grief and delay could be obviated by just talking to people. I think that you should be able to review part of the plan. These plans are quite complex documents, and, if there's something which isn't right or over time hasn't worked out as intended, you should be able to review part of it rather than the whole plan. For example, if you get a taxi allowance and it's not meeting your needs, the whole plan shouldn't be put up in the air to review the taxi allowance. We should have more flexibility on that. If a participant says, 'I'm not happy with the plan,' and wants a review of it, what happens under this scheme is that you can ask for a review but there is no deadline for the reviewer to review the scheme. Australians don't have the luxury of telling the tax office, 'I'm not ready yet on my tax return this year.' There is a deadline. Citizens have deadlines that the state puts upon them. It is not unreasonable to guarantee to a participant that, at a certain point, if the decision-maker hasn't got around to your review, it's deemed accepted at a drop-dead date. That will certainly focus the mind on decisions.

There should be standardised terminology across the scheme and clear language. I know the minister has used the words 'ontology of classifications', 'swim lanes', 'sprints' and 'cohorts'. We need less corporate jargon and less cover-your-backside jargon and more straight talking. The planners needs training and skills. They are good people, but if you are, metaphorically, selling Telstra phones one week and then all of a sudden you are preparing plans for people with disability the next week, you do need training and familiarisation. The area of complex needs is a particular area that needs to be developed further. We need faster implementation of approvals and supports.

This is a report with recommendations which I think pass the common-sense test. In the legislation governing the NDIA and the NDIS, there's a principle of choice and control for participants, and there's also a principle that they should be funded for what is reasonable and necessary. What has happened is that, in the seesaw of these two competing objectives, 'reasonable and necessary' seems to have all the weight and 'choice and control' is sometimes given insufficient weight, so there is more to be done here. You shouldn't have to wait months and years for wheelchairs, home modifications or car modifications. Australian disability enterprises need to be funded properly and not at a rate which will lead to them closing their doors, as we keep hearing about. People with disabilities come in all shapes and sizes, like all of the Australian population, and if you have complex needs they need special attention. They can't just be treated with a cookie-cutter mould.

The challenge of mental health, of course, and the interface with people with disabilities, is inadequately dealt with currently in the NDIS. There needs to be more focus on employment. We need to also understand that people with degenerative conditions, whilst they might not have stabilised, are not getting any better and therefore should be eligible for the NDIS. I notice that the member for Warringah has put forward a petition seeking for people over 65 with profound and severe disabilities to be included in the NDIS. Labor don't have a fixed view on that, but we do accept that, whatever bucket of money the support for people comes from, if you've had a catastrophic stroke at 66 as opposed to a catastrophic stroke at 64, you need support, whether it's aged care or disability care. Aged-care funding is not meeting the needs, and of course we need to do a lot more work with the workforce.

Nonetheless, in a year when politics has been complicated, in a year when Australians perhaps sometimes feel that politics isn't delivering, I commend this report, because I think it is actually commonsense steps in the right direction to ensure that the citizens of this country are in charge, not an organisation, and the right to an ordinary life for people with disability is indeed something to be upheld.

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