Tony Zappia (Makin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I take this opportunity to speak on the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026. The National Disability Insurance Scheme is indeed a very important scheme, but, unfortunately, it is not operating as it was originally intended to. Only people with a serious, lifelong disability—and quite often their immediate family members—would truly understand the living burden of disability. I can recall that, before this scheme was even put into place, the then member for Maribyrnong, Bill Shorten, was the Parliamentary Secretary for Disability. We held a forum in my electorate at Tyndale Christian School, and I believe it was the very first forum that the Parliamentary Secretary held to hear from families of people with disability about how they were coping. It was a real eye-opener.

One of the stories I have never forgotten was from a teenage girl who came up to myself and Bill—we were there together—and said: 'I cannot go to school, because I will not leave my mother, who has a serious disability, alone at home during the day. I have to care for her, and that comes at the expense of me being able to go to school.' I know that Bill was very moved by that story. From there, the whole notion of setting up a scheme or doing something to help those kinds of families gained real momentum. And, today, we do have a scheme. We have a scheme that was put in place by a Labor government, and it was indeed one of the great social reforms that the Gillard government brought in when it was brought in. It's another one of the real social reforms that Labor can take credit for.

I believe the scheme was truly well intentioned. But, regrettably, it's been very badly administered. It was a reform that was not only long overdue but also badly needed. Whilst Labor introduced the scheme, Labor, unfortunately, lost office in 2013 at the time that the scheme was about to be rolled out. The scheme was rolled out under the administration of the coalition government. In my view, for the next nine years, it was badly administered. Yes, it was a new scheme, and I suspect that it wouldn't matter which government was in place. There would have been a need to review the guidelines and so on. But it was badly administered for almost nine years.

In that period, I personally came across case after case whereby it was my view that there was something not right about the way it was being administered. I would say to myself and others, 'How is it that the National Disability Insurance Agency cannot see and is not aware of these problems?' Nevertheless, they continued until Labor was re-elected back in 2022, and when we were we knew that we had to get the scheme back on track to where it should be.

At the time that we were looking at setting the scheme up under the Gillard government, the projections were that the scheme would support something in the order of 400,000 to 450,000 Australians. Today, there are over 730,000 Australians that are on the scheme—almost double their original predicted numbers. Again, it highlights not so much that there are people with need out there but rather how the scheme has perhaps been used in a way that it was never intended to be used. With those additional people—that is, the 730,000 people that are now on the scheme—it obviously incurs additional costs which were never budgeted for.

I heard the member for Mayo, who quite rightly made the point about the number of providers out there. To use her figures, because I haven't checked them, it's over 300,000 providers that are now providing services across Australia. That figure staggers me just as much as it staggers the member for Mayo. It's the same with the fact that—I think she used this figure—some 96 per cent of them are not even registered. Again, those sorts of issues have to be sorted out.

What really concerns me with the whole scheme is really this: people for whom the scheme was not intended are now on the scheme—there should be other services that those people should be getting access to—and they're on the scheme with substantial packages. That's come about because, in my view, there are operators out there who are not doing the right thing. Let me qualify my comments about that by simply saying this. There are a lot of very good operators out there—and I support them and I will continue to support them—but there are also a lot of shonky operators out there, and it is those operators that I will not support. They, in turn, seem to find ways of bringing people onto the scheme simply so that they can then case manage their package and, in doing so, ensure that they get most of the funds that are allocated to the package. I've seen that time and time again. I have also come across operators who have said to families, 'Allow me to manage your family member's package, and I will give you some money back in return.' That's the kind of shonky operator that is currently out there. Not only, I believe, is this review absolutely necessary; the changes to the legislation that we are debating in this place right now are absolutely necessary because we need to stop that kind of rorting and that kind of practice.

There's another issue that concerns me. This applies to a whole range of government services, and we see it time and time again when there is the government involved. As soon as you provide a package to someone—and this includes, perhaps, an aged-care package as well—and you have a selected group of people that are able to provide the services, they immediately increase their costs. Whether it's a product cost or it's simply a service they provide, you'll find that the costs immediately go up to sometimes two or three times what other people are paying simply because it is part of a government service that is being provided and it will be paid for by the government. Again, this sort of thing needs to stop.

We've also seen that there are people that are now running what I call enterprises based on total malpractice. I was in here when the minister gave his second reading speech, and I was pleased to see that he is going to tackle each of the issues, as part of this legislation, very clearly and very deliberately. There are a lot of issues to address. It is not something to which you can simply say, 'Look, we'll bring in some legislation and do a couple of things and that'll fix it all up.' We have to address each of the problems that have been identified with the scheme. Ultimately, it's about ensuring that the scheme is much better managed, ensuring that the rorting is stopped, ensuring that the scheme is financially sustainable and ensuring that clients get the support that they need and that the NDIA has the investigative powers that it needs to ensure that the scheme is being administered the way it was intended to and that the packages are being spent the way they were intended to as well.

As part of that review—others have touched on this, and there's some concern about this from some of the comments that I've heard. The changes will much more clearly define who is eligible for NDIS support and define functional capacity. At the end of the day, that is critical to determining who should be eligible to get a package and who shouldn't be eligible. At the moment, it seems to me that there is a lot of uncertainty, or what we'd refer to as grey areas, about who should and shouldn't be eligible. Quite often it might come down to an assessment carried out by someone somewhere, and someone else with a very similar disability who has their assessment carried out by a different person doesn't get a package. There has to be some consistency with all of that. We also need to ensure that those people that are providing services are registered in some way—at least those people who are delivering support to participants who are most at risk of abuse or exploitation.

That's what this particular legislation will hopefully do. It will ensure that the people that are providing services and managing the cases for the individual recipients are registered and know what they're doing. The registration process alone, I believe, will weed out a lot of the bad operators. I'm hoping it will, but I've got no doubt that it will. One of the things that is contained within this legislation, which I also very strongly support, is the ability for the National Disability Insurance Agency to have much stronger investigative powers. It seems to me that right now the powers they have do not allow them to go in and perhaps review cases, get the information they need and then determine whether there is any malpractice going on. We need to give them those powers. That will happen with the information-gathering powers that we're giving them, as well as the civil penalties that they will be allowed to apply as part of their enforcement procedure.

The minister will also, I understand, have additional powers with respect to this legislation, and it will certainly be with respect to the setting of the fees. That in itself is something that needs to happen as well. We cannot have a scheme whereby there are what I would refer to as too many uncertainties. We cannot have a scheme where the rules and obligations of everyone involved are unclear, and it seems to me that that has been very much the case over the last decade or more since the scheme came into effect, I think, in 2013. We need to make the scheme much clearer in terms of who is eligible for it; what kinds of disabilities will be supported; and, for the people that are going to be supported, what kinds of disabilities they have. We need to ensure that those who could otherwise be given support through other services are not necessarily put on the National Disability Insurance Scheme, as many of them have been.

I know that there are concerns out there in the community from some people who have a package right now and who believe that their package may be cut or amended, or that they might even be taken off the scheme altogether. I've spoken to some of those people in my own office, and I'm aware of the concerns that they have. The intention here is not to take a package away from people that are on the scheme if they are deserving of being on the package. The intention with this legislation is very clearly to ensure that those people that should be on a package are on a package, that the people administering the package are not exploiting or rorting either them or the government and that the scheme itself delivers on the intent that was originally spelt out in the legislation when the scheme was introduced and nothing more. To try and achieve all that requires the changes that are in this legislation. These changes came about not only because of reviews but also because of information that has been collected by the agency, by the minister and by others over the years that the scheme has been in operation.

Yes, the scheme will continue, and, yes, the scheme is indeed a scheme that I believe serves this country well, but it cannot continue in the way that it has been administered for the last 12 or 13 years. It needs to be brought back in line. Once it is, everyone, whether they are clients—the people with a disability—family members, case managers or service providers, will know and have a clear understanding of what they need to do, what their obligations are and what the scheme provides for them. It is only when you get all of the rules made absolutely clear to everyone that we can have a scheme that everyone understands and everyone will benefit from and that will continue to remain financially sustainable into the future.

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