Barnaby Joyce (New England, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

I thought the honourable member opposite might want to have a say. I was there when we started this in the Expenditure Review Committee. I remember it very well. Abbott at the time was believing that if it was untenable that we couldn't support the NDIS. We believed that the then prime minister Gillard had her heart in the right place, that this was a proper thing to do. We were a bit overwhelmed by the cost. It was a bit shocking. I think they said it would cost $13.8 billion. Around the table, we needed some convincing as that was not out of the box, that we could deal with that. It was an immense payment, but it worked on the premise of something that had been discussed for quite some time, right back to 2008, and the Productivity Commission had suggested that we have an overarching scheme that encompassed so many of the forms of disability.

It was well-meaning at the time, but the problem we've got is that it has become crazy. It is completely and utterly out of its envelope. It is unsustainable. Hard decisions need to be made, and, when hard decisions are made in government, they are unpopular. But the alternative is that it hits the deck. Not only does it do that, if you don't take control of it, it is a substantial part of the financial problems of our nation. We cannot have the NDIS drawing more from the budget than Defence, and that's where we're off to. I believe right now it's more than Medicare. This is insane.

We have Public Accounts and Audit—I was there the other day—750,000 people or thereabouts are now on the NDIS. It was never ever designed for 750,000 people to be on it. It's heading towards one million people being on it. I don't think there are that many walking sticks to sell in Australia. A million people on the NDIS—it wasn't designed for that. In my belief, it was for catastrophic disabilities. We saw quadriplegia, paraplegia, schizophrenia, motor neurone disease. These sorts of issues are what we had in mind. We can't cover all these issues. It's unsustainable. And what people have to ask on the NDIS—I know how it works. I know how politics works. People come to your office, and they give an example of someone who quite obviously should be on the NDIS. But they don't bring in all the people who you'd say: 'Well, I don't know about that. I don't know about that person.' A person on the NDIS has to have the capacity to look at a person who pays the taxes for the other person not to have to go to work and say, 'I feel completely comfortable asking this person to go to work for me.' If that person feels uncomfortable about saying to that other person, 'I think you should go to work for me,' then, I suggest, they should not be on the NDIS. It won't matter what side of the political fence you're on; if we continue down this path, this will hit the deck.

When I knew we were going to lose government—I'd said, 'We're gone; we're cactus'—I remember I said to a bloke by the name of Bill Shorten, as politics does work: 'We should move some amendments on the NDIS to try and trim this right up. But, if we do that, Bill, you can't make them controversial. Let's do this for the Australian people. Let's get some amendments up, trim it up and let it through, because we're going to lose government, and, no matter how parochial you think we are, we have to put Australia in a better economic position, get some financial stringency in here and try and bring this thing under control.' Bill's a good bloke—I got along very well with him—but he couldn't come to it. He said no; he wanted to fight us. I think we still tried it, and he still fought us. I suppose he got a few points out there with people who believed that he was supporting them.

But the rejoinder to that—I remember exactly where I was in the car. We'd lost government, and I was driving from Tamworth down to Sydney. I'd just gone past Goonoo Goonoo Station and turned off to my left. I was near the truck stop that always has the bins there—these are the bins that are not filled up with other people's rubbish—and I got a call on the phone. It was one Bill Shorten. He said, 'Barnaby, about that deal you were talking to me about, can we still do it?' He was wanting to do exactly what we were going to do and didn't want us to kick up a stink about his amendments. I said: 'Well, you should have done this in the first instance. We were actually trying to help the Australian people, the Australian taxpayer, and straighten this rubbish out.' I said, 'Look, I'll give it my best shot.' The shadow minister then was Michael Sukkar, and I said: 'Sukes, this is going to be hard, but I think, on behalf of the Australian people, we've got to trim this right up. Bill is going to bring forward some amendments, and I believe we should be supporting them.' Sukes was pretty good. He said, 'He gave us a fair touch up when we tried to do this.' He really did. He took to us in the papers and dragged us through the prickles. I don't know how many amendments there were—five of them? Sukes said: 'We'll give them four, and we're going to touch them up on the fifth. Let him know that.' And that was it.

What is the point of that story? On both sides of this chamber, you'd better realise that, if we don't straighten this out, it is over—we will have to close down the NDIS. It is completely and utterly unsustainable. There has to be a bipartisan view. There'll always be the few who scream from the edges, because they never actually have to run the treasury bench. They can say what they like; they don't have to pay the bills. To bring this back under control, it needs a cap on it. It needs to be said: 'This is what you've got.' It was supposed to cost $13.8 billion. Say: 'Let's double it and add a bit, to make, say, $30 billion—that's it. There is no more money beyond that. That is it. So find your most profound disabilities. They have to fit within the budget. And that is it.'

If you don't do that, you have to say where you think the money will come from. You can't just believe in this magic—that it'll just fall out of the sky. You have to be responsible to the taxpayer and say, 'I'm really putting you on the hook for some massive expenses.' You have to say to the taxpayer: 'See these people? It is right and just that you go to work—work five days out of seven, seven-and-a-half hours a day—to pay your taxes, to pay for them.' That is morally justified. The Australian people are very generous. If they see a person with Down syndrome or a severe disability, they will do that. But the Australian people have every right to kick up a massive stink when they see someone who's gone to a prostitute and put it on the NDIS, who's gone for trips overseas and put it on the NDIS, who's gone for pony rides and put it on the NDIS or who's had Reiki therapy and put it on the NDIS.

The classic one is when one person is an unregistered provider and, in a suburb in Brisbane or Sydney, they divine that one of their friends has a child who might be a bit on the spectrum—a bit autistic. Remember that Tim Fischer, who was the Deputy Prime Minister of Australia, was on the spectrum for autism. So they get that person's child on the NDIS, and they get paid to look after that child. Then a surprising thing happens: that other family look at one of the unregistered provider's children and say, 'Well, I'll be damned! Your child also looks like they might be a little bit on the spectrum, and I, as an unregistered provider, will look after them.' So they get paid to look after your child and you get paid to look after theirs. It's a great deal! It's a scam—a total scam.

The average cost of the NDIS is $65,000 a year per person. That's $65,000 per year per participant on the NDIS. Somebody somewhere has to find $65,000 to pay for them. If I was to say to a taxpayer, 'I want you to go out and do your job and I'm going to take $65,000 out of your salary to pay for someone of the NDIS,' I know the response I would get, and it wouldn't be a good one. That $65,000 is untenable for a million people. That's crazy. What's that? We're heading towards $65 billion. It's just out of the ballpark.

So let us not confuse compassion with reality. Compassion has its ring road. It is based on logic. It's based on what you can actually do. Compassion is not wishful thinking. Compassion is actually being able to follow something through. Given where the NDIS is at the moment, it is not able to be followed through. If we are going to continue on with this—if we are going to be truly compassionate—we have to trim this up massively. If we don't and our debt keeps going up, through $1 trillion and on and on and further up and further up, I'll give you a little lesson from a little bush accountant of what will happen: our cheques are going to bounce and we'll have no money for the NDIS—we'll have no money for anything, actually.

One of the biggest issues right now in trying to bring this back under control is to really drill down and make the hard decisions that a responsible government needs to make. I would suggest to both sides of this chamber that we need a responsible Treasurer who will come up with pretty severe cuts, to be quite frank, and will say that there is a ceiling on this and it will go no further. If a Treasurer were to have that honest conversation with the Australian people, I believe they would go along with him. Then go back to what Julia Gillard and everybody thought of at the time: this is for people with catastrophic disabilities; this is for people to whom we owe compassion. This is incredibly expensive. But, with a prudent economy that opens up its coal mines, runs its iron ore, runs its gas, has dams, has cattle, digs up the gold, processes the bauxite, has coal-fired power stations, has an economy that's humming and can produce money off the assets on its balance sheet rather than borrowing it from overseas—a lot of this NDIS money is borrowed. It's on the credit card. When you build up an economy that can hum, when you work the assets on the national balance sheet, you will make the money that pays for things such as the NDIS.

In conclusion, that is the call that you have to make. Are you going to make this economy hum? Are you going to remove the ridiculous ideas of climate change policy and climate change departments so that you can put in, in their place, things that make money so that, from that money, you can pay for that compassion and your compassion can be authentic and your compassion can be paid for, or are you just a foolish, wonderful spirit?

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