Monique Ryan (Kooyong, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

The NDIS is a foundational scheme which is extraordinarily important to those Australians who are lucky enough to be engaged with it. We know that 5½ million Australians live with a disability, but only 700,000 Australians are currently on the National Disability Insurance Scheme. We know that those people who are on it describe it as life-changing. For many people it has offered them an opportunity to exercise the choice and control within their own life that they have never previously enjoyed. It is an incredibly important scheme. But all of us in this place know that the cost blowouts we've seen in recent years threaten its viability. Unfortunately my colleagues on the right have for many years viewed the NDIS as potentially something which could be scrapped and which could go, so the NDIS has been under considerable political pressure for a long period of time.

Those people who work within the scheme—the providers, whether they be allied health professionals or medical professionals—find it to be an endless source of frustration. I can tell you that having worked within the scheme for many years as a medical professional. The government's recent changes to the scheme, which were made far too quickly and without consideration, have caused those medical professionals and allied health professionals undue stress, trauma and tension at a time when there's already uncertainty and anxiety around the future of the NDIS. The Australian Physiotherapy Association, which I'm very proud to have centred in my own electorate of Kooyong, has expressed extreme distress at the speed and extent of the changes the government has made to funding around the scheme. Occupational therapists, speech pathologists and play therapists have all expressed the same concerns.

The reality is that these changes have been pushed through far too quickly. They have caused great distress to the therapists who provide these services, and they've exacerbated the ongoing stress on recipients of the scheme resulting from the sound and fury emanating from the health and disability minister at this point in time. Given the uncertainty about the future of foundational supports and how they can possibly be rolled out in an adequate timeframe to the extent they are required in this country, the speed of these changes to service delivery and supports is just exacerbating a situation of unacceptable uncertainty and anxiety for those people who rely on the NDIS and those people who work within it.

What we need the government to do is give all those participants of the NDIS—and those people who are not currently supported by it but who would benefit from it—the foundational supports the minister has suggested, which are a good idea but for which the current mechanisms are, to be frank, non-existent. What we need is a timeframe and certainty around how we can best support all Australians. We need to give those people who are already struggling with the difficulties, the sadnesses and the loss associated with having a disability or having a family member with a disability the certainty that the government is here for them—that it will always ensure the services they need will be provided and will be funded adequately. The government's recent legislation around NDIS service delivery has not done that. It has exacerbated the uncertainties that consumers, constituents, individuals living with a disability and the people who care for them are experiencing. To that end it has been actively unhelpful, and it is something the government should rethink and remediate as a matter of urgency.

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