Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

This is an important motion which calls out the governments latest efforts to privatise the NDIS, cut funding and force participants into a one-size-fits-all scheme which is set to be run by a multinational company. Australians may well say: 'I haven't heard about this. Where did this come from?' The government has innocently named these changes the 'independent assessment regime', but it is privatisation of the NDIS by stealth, and the government's trying to sneak this through. They buried it deep in the budget papers, and it will hurt nearly half a million vulnerable Australians in the coming years if it is not stopped.

The changes will deprive Australians living with a disability of the dignity they were promised when the NDIS was legislated by Labor: access to individual, tailored and goal-orientated support, giving people living with a disability the fair treatment, the recognition and the dignity they deserve. Individual, tailored and goal-oriented is what people were promised. But, under the government's independent assessment regime, prospective and current NDIS participants will be forced to have their eligibility status and their current entitlements assessed, not by their own doctors, but from a government-approved list, for a limited time, to undertake a complex assessment. Just imagine that for 10 years the same doctor has helped you manage your complex set of disabilities—they are a person you know you can trust and someone who knows your conditions—only to be now told by the government that they know your disability better than you and your doctor. Even worse, these independent assessments are set to be undertaken by a private multinational company. Currently, it's the NDIA's job. The NDIA is not perfect. The government has staffed it mainly with casual labour hire workers. But I believe the government's full privatisation of assessments to a multinational company is fundamentally wrong. Citizens should have a right to have these assessments performed by accountable government agencies in the Public Service.

We've seen repeatedly that privatisation doesn't save money and that service quality suffers. One thing it does do, though, is help the Prime Minister avoid his responsibilities. He loves the announcements and photo-ops but never takes responsibility for what actually happens. Just like in aged care or bushfires, privatisation of the NDIA assessments will allow the government to say: 'Hey, it's not us. It's just the independent assessor in that private company who cut your plan. We've just got to follow what they say.' That's how these changes will work. An Australian with a complex disability and multiple practitioners supporting them will have their plan come up for review. That happens regularly. But now the NDIA will say, 'You must see this doctor on this date for two hours.' The assessment will come back and, using the government's outsourced standardised assessment tools, the anonymous practitioner will cut $70,000 from their plan. The NDIS participant will complain to the NDIA and—you can hear it now—they'll say: 'Sorry, that's the independent assessor's job. It's not ours. We can't do anything about it.'

What this one-size-fits-all privatisation plan of the NDIA boils down to is that disadvantaged people will suffer while the government avoids accountability. We saw it before with robodebt—'It wasn't us; it was the algorithm.' We saw it in aged care—'It wasn't us; it was the nursing homes and the states.' With bushfires and home quarantine, they said, 'It's certainly not us; it's the states.' Whenever vulnerable Australians come into contact with the government, they end up worse off.

This is just the government's latest attack on the NDIS. Since coming to office over seven years ago, they've constantly chipped away at its funding and integrity, stripping $1.6 billion to help build their fake paper surplus, which didn't even happen. But the truly outrageous thing, as we heard from the previous speaker, about their privatisation plan is that it's based on a big, fat lie. The government are pretending that the Productivity Commission and the Tune review recommended these changes. They didn't. That's not true. The Tune review found that the NDIA should not restrict the number of medical practitioners able to provide assessments. The Productivity Commission recommended a strong oversight and appeal process, not privatisation and dodging of responsibility. The government's one-size-fits-all privatised independent assessments will destroy the very essence of the NDIS—individualised, tailored support to help every Australian achieve their goals and potential and live in dignity.

The privatisation of public services must stop. The government should put these plans on hold, withdraw the tender and go back to the drawing board, making transparent the evidence that they say is there to support these changes.

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