Tim Wilson (Goldstein, Liberal Party, Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I welcome the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Integrity and Safeguarding) Bill because I fundamentally believe it is overdue and insufficient. It is part of the solution that we need for the deep corruption that has been allowed to permeate the National Disability Insurance Scheme and, of course, the fraud that has occurred where money has been taken from some of the most disadvantaged and vulnerable people in the community. It has been allowed to become a honeypot for organised crime fraudsters and people who seek to do ill will against the Australian taxpayer. I think it's incredibly important that integrity measures are introduced, as this bill seeks to do, but I think it is also insufficient when you look at the scale of the fraud and corruption that has been allowed to permeate under this government.

I hope and pray that they arrest it properly, because we have a fundamental design problem around how the NDIS operates in detecting issues of fraud and corruption. This is seen very clearly where there's a centralised agency providing significant amounts of public resources that are in theory designed to assist people with a disability. I have someone in my family who's an NDIS recipient. I doubt there isn't a member of parliament here who doesn't have at least part of their extended family in a like set of circumstances. The question is: are they the people who are utilising the NDIS for their capacity to live out a dignified life, or has it become the honeypot for people who see a way to suck at the taxpayer's teat but not deliver any return, value or outcome for the Australian people? Unfortunately, too many people in Australia now think of the NDIS as the honeypot for corruption. It's actually seen very much as the benchmark of how not to design a program if the objective is to help the people it's designed to serve and be fiscally prudent.

I often refer to this, and I have referred to this previously in this place. I won't mention the person by name to respect their privacy. An NDIS recipient, who I regularly see at a train station in Melbourne—I saw her only the other day in the Goldstein electorate—has been one of the most ferocious critics of how the NDIS has operated. As she correctly points out, in the situation that there is a long-term viability problem of the NDIS, someone such as herself, who is a recipient of the NDIS—she's in a situation where there is kind of a change of circumstances—and has Down syndrome, will become the target or live the consequences of any reduction in spending. Meanwhile you have the people who are clearly rorting the system, they are clearly abusing public money, they are clearly abusing public trust, they are clearly also abusing, in many cases, some of the most vulnerable people in our communities. These people have essentially been given free will under this government. It must stop. This is not enough. This bill is a step in the right direction, I'm not arguing against that, but it is not enough.

People with disability are living with the anxiety of the sustainability of the scheme because fraudsters, people who are corrupt, people who seek to steal from the most vulnerable in the community are getting away with that with essentially no real accountability on a scale that is warranted and deserved. When you particularly talk about the scale of the dollar value, the NDIA have put forward projections that up to $5 billion of the $50 billion, or thereabouts, NDIS program is going towards fraud and corruption. When the NDIA say in Senate estimates that the legal system would 'literally be clogged forever' if every single person who was defrauding the program was pursued then we've got a design problem, and I don't think that should shock anybody.

The question then becomes, what do we do about it? This bill is a part response to that. We have penalties for not providing documentation on time. Okay, well, that's providing false or misleading information or disclosure. Yes, all those sorts of things are important and they're considered now, under the bill, a 'serious contravention', a 'significant failure' and a 'systemic pattern of conduct'. The bill supports higher criminal penalties in these cases and increases the maximum penalty to figures in the vicinity of $82,500 to $3 million. But, at the end of the day, it comes down to what is the incentive in place for people to actively support the end of this corruption.

We all have an active incentive to end this corruption, because it is Australian taxpayers' money that is being defrauded, Australian taxpayers' money that is going towards corrupt activities and it is hitting some of society's most vulnerable. So we all have an interest in doing something. The problem is one of distributed information. Of course the central authorities, as is always the case with centralised government programs, they think they know all and they can solve all problems if they just seek to investigate it. But, instead, it is people on the ground, and this is where I want to give huge credit to Drew Pavlou and Pete Zogoulas, who are going out there and chasing down people who are very suspect in their NDIS activities. These two, on their social media, are looking specifically at where money is being spent, the seemingly endless number of NDIS providers located in specific communities—often multiple businesses in the same location—billing millions of dollars to the Australian taxpayer, but it's not really clear what these businesses are actually providing the Australian community.

Of course everybody has a right to innocence until proven guilty, but that doesn't change the fact that we need people out there specifically looking at where this fraud and corruption is occurring and to stand up for the Australian taxpayer. By looking at the scale of these businesses located in individual locations that often have no real clear idea of what they are providing but billing the Australian taxpayer for millions of dollars, Drew and Pete are doing a good community service. I hope that the NDIA and the NDIS are paying attention to what those two are doing, because I doubt they have scratched the surface of the scale of the fraud and corruption in the NDIS system. I just wish more people were doing that. As the previous speaker said, we want people with a disability to be able to live bold and confident lives. We want them to be able to live their lives with dignity and choice to the extent that they can do so. That is what the NDIS was designed to achieve—to enable the next generation of Australians to live a more dignified experience than those often in the past.

But one of the biggest problems when you design these grand centralised systems is that, once you design them, they seemingly work well, at least in terms of the discussion in this parliament and in the documents designed by policymakers. But it's how they're utilised by people on the ground, legitimately or otherwise, that makes the material difference to whether Australians continue to have confidence they're respecting people and they're seeking to empower people to live out their best lives. We've seen this in the context of NDIS. We've seen similar and parallel examples where people in Canberra think they can design programs for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. And of course we see them across many programs in the disability sector, where the organic development of services designed to support often the most vulnerable in the community have slowly had their capacity corroded because the system has said they no longer fit within how it is run.

One of the great community services in the Goldstein electorate is Bailey House. Bailey House is, I think, coming up to its 75th year this year, or is in its 75th year this year. It is a great community organisation supporting people with a disability, in particular residents of nearby suburbs with Down syndrome. I've always been a big supporter of Bailey House. It's an amazing community organisation full of people doing incredible work. They're a support service that existed before the NDIS. One of the biggest problems that they've had is that the NDIS has not been well designed to accommodate and meet the needs of centres like theirs because it doesn't reflect the design, support and cost structures that operate there. So they go out and fundraise, of course, as many disability and other community organisations do.

But there's an organisation that the NDIS should be working to empower, frankly, for efficiency, for scale, for service delivery, for better outcomes for people with a disability, for integrity measures. Just about every single thing Bailey House does fulfills an important gap around ownership or control of public money. To be custodians for people with disability to live better lives, Bailey House fulfils that purpose, just like their program Bailey arts fulfils that purpose. I'll never stop speaking highly of them because of the important role they play within the community. They bring others in from the community to support people with a disability. The NDIS should be seeking to empower and to support clients to be able to live out their best lives with the community services that they need.

But, instead, the NDIS has been allowed to become a honeypot for fraudsters and the corrupt to take advantage of the Australian taxpayer and, of course, people with a disability. The design failure right from the outset has caused huge losses of public money. I see one of the Labor members, who I assume is supporting this bill, smugly replying and dismissing such a comment. The government is literally introducing integrity and safeguard measures to address the design limitations and problems of the scheme that has led to—in the former minister for disability's own words—organised crime taking advantage of the Australian taxpayer and people with a disability. I don't think that's something that should be smugly dismissed. I think it should be acknowledged, fixed as quickly as possible.

The only criticism I have is that this bill does not go far enough. It probably gives a sad reflection on why so many Labor members just shrug with indifference when we talk about $15 billion of money going to organised crime through the CFMEU-Labor cartel. According to them, it is public money and, hey, we can just smugly dismiss the realities of what the Labor government seeks to empower. I think there's a time where we have to acknowledge that the government has got something wrong. The government is turning around before the next federal budget saying to Australians who have worked hard, saved and sacrificed to get themselves and their families ahead, 'We're going to add extra taxes on you, but we're not going to do anything about handing public money from the Treasury to organise crime through the CFMEU-Labor cartel.' I actually think there's something really sick and perverse about that. The tepid measures, by comparison, that the government is seeking to enact with this bill on NDIS fraud and NDIS corruption don't surprise me. But it does disappoint me that Labor members would smugly dismiss such a measure when we're talking about some of the most vulnerable people in the community being taken advantage of. Those members need to reflect on the fact that it is public money that is being used for corrupt and fraudulent purposes. More importantly, within five weeks we all know we're going to come into the parliament and they're going to propose that, while they're indifferent to doing anything about public money going to organised crime, corruption and fraud, they have no hesitation in turning around and adding new taxes onto Australians to fund that organised crime, corruption and fraud.

So I think it is so important that we support these basic measures, but I do not think they're the end. Until the government start to take organised crime, corruption and fraud of public programs seriously, and they are not, that they can turn around to the Australian taxpayer and expect people to even pay their current bills let alone ask them to pay bigger bills for new taxes because they have no fiscal constraint and no preparedness to address fiscal program design and to raid the future opportunities and aspirations of Australians to feed the undeserving—being organised crime, corruption and fraud—I think is just frankly incredible. But welcome to the Albanese government, because, when it comes down to it, in a choice between standing up for Australian taxpayers and handing money to organised crime, we know who they'll support.

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