Rowan Holzberger (Forde, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you to the Deputy Speaker, who is becoming a regular audience of mine in this chamber. I'm glad to be able to make a contribution to this report. It's unplanned, but it's also something which is very, very close to my heart. In fact, in many ways, I'd say that I've come to this place with a few priorities that are very important to me. My head priorities are probably cheaper housing and cheaper energy, but my heart priority would be the NDIS and looking after the disabled in my community.

I have a very close family member who is autistic. We decided as a family that we wouldn't pursue applying to the NDIS, because I know through the work that I've done in the community that the supports they would have got through the NDIS just would not have been worth the headache and the hassle of going through that process of diagnosis and making an application and going through that torturous project. But, as it has been said, the NDIS is the only lifeboat in the ocean, and with everybody trying to climb on it because there's nothing else there, it has collapsed the system.

I did promise never to read a speech from my phone, but it was literally 39 minutes before I walked into this chamber that I got a follow-up message from a constituent that I tried to help last year. She came to my office with her three-year-old autistic child, who was non-verbal and biting. It was so difficult for her to even have a conversation with me while she was trying to manage his behaviour, that it was just unfathomable what it must be like for her everyday trying to manage that behaviour alone. She saw me because she was about to run out of funding for her child, who was in a specialist day-care centre, because, of course, there are very few day-care centres that are set up to take kids with those sorts of behaviours. She was desperately worried that she was going to lose the funding for that child care. That result would mean that she would have to leave her job, and because of that, it would mean that she would then be living in a car with her severely disabled three-year-old child.

Try as hard as I might to help, I got this message 39 minutes before I walked into this chamber, and she is going to say it better than I could. There are a couple of spelling mistakes, and I just might stumble through it a bit, but the sentiment will be clear: 'Sorry I haven't reached out. My son and I have had a rough few months. After we spoke last, the provider spoke with me and told me a week before Christmas that my son needs the funding if he wanted to return this year. I was devastated. I didn't have time to organise a review or even try to do anything. My housing arrangements fell through because I had to leave work and my son was no longer in care, and the person I was living with could not handle him. We lived in our car for a week before YFS put us in emergency housing. We have been in a motel for two months now, with my son's behaviour getting worse and worse and no end in sight. I'm really not okay, and I can't get anyone to understand or help.'

Probably it would be best to leave my contribution as that, because I'm not going to be able to say anything. I think nobody, none of us, could say anything that would match the power of that. That is a story that, as MPs, I'm sure we see all the time, and it's just unfathomable what people are going through.

I was very pleased with the contribution from the member for Fadden. I think there is a genuine sense that we all want to make this work. It was really very good to hear him list those things that the opposition are setting as preconditions to support Thriving Kids—not that a first-term MP like me is going to be able to hold the government to any of them, but I'm sure the sentiment is something we all agree on. I hadn't understood what the opposition's position was on this, so I was very, very pleased to hear the member for Fadden go through that.

In the electorate I represent, Forde—and these figures are three or four years old now—there's something like 7,000 people on the NDIS. Compare that to another electorate—an inner-city electorate, in fact. I remember the comparison with Griffith. There was something like 3½ thousand people on the NDIS. So, in a working-class area like Forde, you've got twice as many people as you do in an inner-city electorate. Among the schools in Forde there's Eagleby South State School and Waterford West State School. I never quite get the term right—I think it's called an inclusion term or something—but generally it means kids with disability. Something like over 40 per cent of children at that school have a disability. Not only are all of those families and all of those kids really set back to begin with; the 60 per cent of kids in that classroom with them are also struggling with the behaviours. The teachers are struggling with those behaviours, and it holds the whole community back.

So, while there are 7,000 people in Forde who are actually getting the NDIS, it probably makes you think maybe there's another 7,000 people that should be getting the NDIS, but the scheme was never meant for that. In fact, there's one number I know that comes to mind. The Productivity Commission said that the NDIS in Queensland was supposed to cater for about 95,000 people. Right now there are 175,000 people on it. It's totally unsustainable. We all know in this place that, when a scheme like that is unsustainable, as it is, it will lose community support. So it is vital, in order to maintain that support, that the community have faith that it is actually returning value for money and doing what it's supposed to do.

I've got 10 minutes. I could go on forever with the problems. There's one other problem I suppose I would just want to say, which is that, even with all of this money being spent and all of these participants in this system, there are still businesses going out of business. They still can't make the money work. I'm not sure whether it's called Centrecare, but the Catholic Church's arm in Queensland that was looking after it has exited the field because they could not make it work. With a scheme costing—what is it?—$50 billion a year or somewhere around there, they couldn't make it work. Something is going wrong from the end to the beginning, and there have to be changes. Those changes, as has been mentioned, are causing anxiety in the community. So, again, it was very good to hear the opposition's contribution that people need to know the kids aren't going to be worse off—that anybody who's getting the NDIS at the moment is going to continue to get the NDIS, for a start.

This is not about trying to just shove people back into a dark corner, which is what existed prior to the NDIS, but about trying to come up with something better. It may be at the school level, though of course they won't be able to cope with everything. It may be back at the community level, though they will need to be better resourced. What is true is that it's not working now and we have to come up with something else.

While I've got a minute, there are many people in Forde that do an incredible amount of that personal advocacy. One of them is Shannon Manning, who I want to give a shout-out to today. She is a mum who has, well and truly, real life experience, with one severely disabled child and a younger autistic child as well. If there is any woman who is an example of how you do not lose if you keep on fighting, it is Shannon Manning. She fights not only for herself—and when I say 'herself' I mean her kids and her family—but for many parents that I send her way as well, including the woman that sent me that text today. Obviously, we lost that fight. But, together, I think this parliament and people in the community with good spirit will keep fighting and will keep winning for the millions, the 20 per cent, of people in Australia that live with a disability.

Debate adjourned.

Federation Chamber adjourned at 17 : 35

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