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

I rise in support of the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Integrity and Safeguarding) Bill 2026. In doing so, I acknowledge the contribution of the member for Lindsay in speaking for the opposition. I do appreciate the depth of support that you expressed in your speech for the NDIS and your desire for it to be sustainable. I want to acknowledge that.

Of course, there are some things in that speech that I think also need to be addressed. One is that, when the opposition talk about the NDIS growing unsustainably today, I think it needs to be pointed out that, when we came to government, it was growing at about 22 per cent—totally unsustainable. After the opposition oversaw its implementation, from the trial period until we got into government, we really saw it being completely mismanaged in terms of the number of growth. Something else the member for Lindsay said is that we now have a scheme with about 720,000 people on it. In Queensland, I know when the Productivity Commission was first designing the NDIS, it was designed for somewhere around 95,000 Queenslanders, but, in effect, we've ended up with somewhere around 175,000 Queenslanders—totally unsustainable at those levels.

I'd like to acknowledge the work that the minister, Senator McAllister, and the health minister have done recently to get the NDIS back on track. I'd also like to acknowledge the work that the former minister, Bill Shorten, also did. He's somebody who is perhaps more responsible than anybody else for the beginning of the scheme and was, unfortunately, witness to it being so badly managed while Labor was in opposition. The work that he did when we got back into government in 2022 really began to get it back on track. We are headed to that short-term target of eight per cent growth, down from 22 per cent.

The member for Lindsay talked about there not being a plan. There absolutely is a plan, and it's being rolled out now. Unfortunately, it's being rolled out while the scheme is as big as it is, when it could have been dealt with at the time. It is pleasing to hear the opposition talk positively about their attitude towards the NDIS and the future of the NDIS because it is a scheme that Australians rightly should be proud of. It is a world-leading scheme, and it changes people's lives for the better in a way that would have been inconceivable in the past.

I remember being a young staffer to Peter Duncan, the former member for Makin, in the nineties. One memory, more than almost any other memory, that sticks with me was visiting community centres where there were parents of disabled kids that were just desperate for any assistance that they could get. The emotion that I felt on those visits is something that has stayed with me for decades. From talking to families who were involved in Disability Services Queensland, it is worlds apart from what the NDIS is, with all of its flaws, compared to what it was like when it was through Disability Services Queensland.

I'm no political professional—I feel like I need to make that point before I go on to my next point. I ran a construction company and worked on the land, but then I found myself working for a senator in 2018, Senator Murray Watt, doing all of his constituent work, all of the electorate work. In 2018, we saw the NDIS go from being a trial to being fully implemented, and we began to have a trickle of complaints come into the electorate office.

One story that I remember really stands out from that time. A severely disabled child, an autistic child, was trying to get an assistance dog, and the dog cost 20 grand or something like that. They're not cheap. The NDIA approved $5,000 worth of reports—OTs, psychologists, whatever—and then another $2,000 for support coordination to get those reports together. So it was $7,000 in total for reports, which is ludicrous in itself. The family duly went away to the professionals, who said, 'Yes, this child would benefit from a dog; it's a reasonable and necessary support.' It's ludicrous in itself that it should be $7,000 to get it, but guess what the NDIA said when it got the reports? No dog. If it weren't true it would indeed be funny.

This family then began the journey that so many families undertake of going through the review process, going to the AAT, fighting the agency all the way and having the agency fight tooth and nail back at them. I remember it was during COVID because the family, on the night before the hearing, had got a COVID test so they could attend the hearing. But on the night before the hearing—and the agency had spent $7,000 on the reports and potentially tens of thousands of dollars on a top-tier legal firm to fight this family all the way—the agency caved in and gave them the dog. It is those sorts of stories which we saw in 2018 and 2020 that, on a personal level, turned me off the NDIS so much.

I've got a family member who's autistic and needs a bit of help, but, after taking part in decisions about whether or not we pursue the NDIS, I thought that the supports they would get through the NDIS would not be worth the hassle that it would take for them to go through the process of applying and then fighting for those supports. Of course, now we know that there are no other services that exist outside the NDIS. They've all been allowed to die on the vine, so the NDIS is, as is often said, the only lifeboat in the ocean, and now that family member is going to have to try and get some supports through the NDIS. But it was such a horror story that I witnessed in my time in Murray's office that it really turned me off even trying to get the NDIS supports for that family member.

What we saw back then was the opportunity, when the scheme was beginning, to tackle the problems as they arose, but, instead, the problems that existed in 2018 just scaled up as the scheme scaled up, and it was left to the rest of us not in government to sit there and watch it careen completely out of control. Now, any member in this House would know that the NDIS is probably the single biggest issue we hear in our constituents' concerns. That trickle that we witnessed in 2018 has really turned into a flood, and we knew all along that something was fundamentally broken, and this government is trying to get it back on track.

I feel like I need to be careful when I say that because the NDIS is so life changing and so important for people. I think the message needs to be that it will continue to grow. With the short-term goal of eight per cent growth and the longer term goal of five or six per cent, in line with the growth of Medicare and aged care, it will continue to grow. People, I think, need to have faith in that. Within that growth, the changes that the government is making through this legislation are part of its wider plan of reinforcement. Getting back to what I said to begin with, I'm very pleased to see that the opposition has that long-term optimism about the success of the NDIS.

There are a couple of features of this bill that I think are really worth emphasising. One is the promotions order. I know that some of the things I'm about to mention here are illegal anyway and would already be caught up by the law as it is, but this is the extent that some providers will go to to get business. These are both anecdotal stories. One was from a very good source—a local Indigenous health service, in fact. They said that there are now providers literally trawling supermarkets in Logan and going through the train station, looking for obviously vulnerable people and trying to sign them up to the NDIS or trying to sign them up as part of their plan—absolutely disgraceful. Again anecdotally—this may not be as good a source as that first one—there are stories of providers offering cashbacks if you sign up to the NDIS. Unfortunately, it's believable. It's believable when you realise that some providers see a participant as a prize cow. Somebody with a million-dollar plan is treated as prize cattle.

That is, incidentally, a concept that fundamentally undermines choice and control, which is supposed to be at the heart of the NDIS. If your plan is seen as not profitable because of the supports they'll need to provide, you won't be able to get that provider. So what sort of choice and control is that, when you're not actually able to choose your provider because the provider doesn't see you as profitable enough?

The other thing I'd just say on fraud is that it is probably the central problem that the community has with the NDIS. This is the best example of where the opposition just completely took their hands off the wheel. This government is now reviewing more claims of fraud every single day than the previous government reviewed in a year. It is almost unbelievable that that is possible. It took investment; it took an investment in systems and it took an investment in people. Perhaps it was their ideological obsession with not employing public servants, outsourcing and trying to cut costs. We saw it in so many areas, whether it was 41,000 veterans waiting for their claims to be processed when we came to government, or whether it was robodebt and the heartache that was Centrelink. The NDIA also suffered that. I think that that is absolutely worth underlining. That's a stunning figure—that we review more claims every single day than the previous government reviewed in an entire year.

This party was responsible for the birth of the NDIS. Unfortunately, we weren't there while it turned into a delinquent teenager. But we're back. We're back now. At the heart of this government's approach is what the disability community says, which is 'nothing about us without us'. That is the approach that we are taking. We are working in lock step with the people from the disability community who this affects. I think that is the Labor way. It is unsurprising that it is only the Labor Party that is able to actually fix the NDIS and get it back on track. As I said, I'm pleased, despite the politicking that goes on, to know that the opposition in their hearts want to see it work, because I think the Australian community wants to see it work as well. But it's going to take a lot of effort, and it's going to take a lot of us working together to make it happen. This is not the beginning of the process to fix it, but it is an important step along the way. There is a lot more to be done. I commend this bill to the House.

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