Ben Small (Forrest, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Electoral Matters) Share this | Hansard source

The NDIS is heralded as one of Australia's truly great reforms. Perhaps it's just my parochialism as a proud Western Australian, but, of the 4,400-odd folk in Forrest who depend on the NDIS for their independence and, indeed, their way of life, I am yet to meet anyone who contends that outcomes under the NDIS have been more successful than the scheme that existed in Western Australia prior to the introduction of the national scheme. I think this reflects, in no small way, the fact that, so often in government and in politics in this country, outcomes are better where decision-makers are closest to the people that they represent and impact with those decisions.

Notwithstanding that perhaps slightly parochial view, let's consider the NDIS as it stands. I'm not going to come into this chamber today and pretend it has been a glittering success under previous coalition governments and only turned to custard under the Albanese government because, when I was in the other place in this building, one particular example stood out to me. A person who suffered an accident and lost both lower legs was, after 18 months of wrangling, bureaucratic nonsense, red tape, form-filling and endless assessments, awarded under the NDIS funding for one prosthetic leg, which clearly, in the absence of two legs, did not help them live an independent life and enable them to make a contribution to society.

That was a very poor outcome under the previous government, and, unfortunately, through my time campaigning in the seat of Forrest, I've just heard story after story of folks caught up in the attempts to bring this scheme under control. I was doorknocking in the suburb of Treendale, and a police car pulled up next to me. The police officer wound down his window and inquired as to why I was loitering in the front yard of this house. Upon explaining who I was and what I was doing there, the police officer informed me that it was, in fact, his house. He was quite ready to arrest me had I had any sort of ill intent. We went on to discuss matters of the day, and his six-year-old daughter was severely autistic, non-verbal and going through a torrid time with her condition. He had sought, for more than a year, to get a communication device funded under the NDIS. In what in seems to me a very clear case of need, rather than assist that struggling Australian family, the NDIS instead lawyered up with some of the best lawyers in Perth, from a nationally prominent law firm, and put these guys through the wringer. They forced them to go through the ART, where, eventually, after great expense—I say expense not only in the sense of the tens of thousands of dollars they spent in legal fees but also in terms of the emotional and psychological impact on that family, a normal aspirational Australian family—the government and the NDIS were finally forced to give this poor six-year-old girl the communication device that enabled her to get on with life.

I say these things to the House today only to point out that there have been severe failures of this scheme to come good with the promise that it held out for Australians, and that's that it would be a true safety net for our most vulnerable Australians. I think everyone who comes to this place has a responsibility to approach a bill like this with that lens and that understanding. It's not a time to play politics, and unfortunately there has been a strong history of playing politics with this.

I want to go back to the then shadow minister for the NDIS, Bill Shorten. In the lead-up to the 2022 election, he said:

This Government has a problem with the NDIS but they'll never come out and declare it.

… You can't move around the corridors of Parliament in Canberra without tripping over a Coalition Minister whispering the Scheme is unsustainable.

I'm here to tell you today that is a lie.

The final part is a true Bill Shorten zinger. Here we are a couple of years down the track, and I'm listening to a minister in the Albanese government just now tell us that the scheme is unsustainable. It's appalling that it's taken this long to get to the realisation on both sides of the chamber that action is needed. Certainly action is needed to rein in the fraud, the corruption and the organised crime that's prevalent within this scheme, but I also think that action is needed to ensure that it's delivering the outcomes in our communities that it should. Like I said, I keep hearing these stories everywhere I go of the failures of this scheme, which is costing tens of billions of dollars a year and growing at an extraordinary rate, to actually deliver those outcomes in the community.

With that in mind, I think it is very pleasing that the coalition are approaching this with a lens of bipartisan support for important reforms but with some concern and trepidation that the savings from these measures have already been spent. In today's Australian we see that more than the savings from these NDIS changes has already been committed in this budget alone. This is the second in a series of legislative changes that the current government has made in the wake of the 2023 independent review into the NDIS, and it is of great concern to me that already the money's gone.

In April 2023, the Albanese government committed to reducing the annual growth rate of the scheme to eight per cent, and they failed to achieve that target. The minister for health and disability then went on to announce that the government would seek to reduce the annual growth rate of the scheme to between five and six per cent over the medium term. Again, that has not been achieved. Right now the growth rate in the NDIS expenditure is sitting at 10.3 per cent, which means that the proposed two per cent growth rate, which is banked in the budget coming before this House, is not only a serious and substantial reduction but also extremely unlikely to be achieved. That should be of concern to every Australian who's focused on intergenerational fairness. The national credit card is being swiped at an incredible rate, racking up some $256 billion when you include off-budget spending over the forward estimates, yet here we are today with a bill that's claiming to achieve a massive reduction in the expenditure of this program.

The reality within our communities is that those people who rely on these supports are concerned that they will be unfairly victimised by a cost-cutting initiative here in Canberra. We need comfort that those who rely on these support packages for their very way of life—those with substantial, significant and permanent disability—will remain supported and protected by this scheme. I think that, for every coalition speaker I listened to today, that has been front of mind.

When we hear important and reasonable propositions from the government when it comes to access to the scheme, things like ensuring that the scheme allows access for those who need access on the basis of functional assessment rather than simple diagnosis—that sounds to me like an important and sensible sort of reform and something that should be supported. But the problem is always in the detail. The bill is going to change that to reflect their reduced functional capacity, but there are a lot of people in my community right now who are exceptionally worried about whether they themselves—or perhaps a child, family member or a loved one—will still be eligible for support on an ongoing basis through the NDIS. The answer isn't clear, because the bill establishes a legislative mechanism to change the way that a person is assessed for the NDIS but provides no detail on what that assessment process will look like after the passage of this legislation.

It seems to me that the Albanese government has banked the savings. They've spent the savings, but they haven't yet got the detail developed and ready to show the Australian people what this looks like. That is causing a level of fear, anxiety and concern in the community because of the many hundreds of thousands of Australians who legitimately depend on this system. I think that many in the coalition have been calling for the fraud, the corruption and the organised crime elements of the NDIS to be addressed for a long time. The coalition will always seek to support measures that improve the integrity of the NDIS, measures that place safeguards to protect participants and the taxpayer.

At the end of the day, every dollar that is spent by this scheme is a dollar that the Australian public reasonably expects is going to supporting vulnerable Australians. But every day we see reports of fraud, misuse and other frivolous expenditure under the scheme. There are more than 10,000 public servants here in Canberra just within the NDIS, and yet it seems that they cannot use those resources to get on top of these very real expenditure issues. The confidence of the Australian people in the NDIS and indeed the very support for the scheme are dependent on an assurance that those taxpayer funds are actually being spent for legitimate purposes.

In the calendar year of 2025, some $48.8 billion was spent through the NDIS. If you take the Australian National Audit Office's estimate that six to 10 per cent of those claims were noncompliant, fraudulent or otherwise incorrect, we're frittering away some $4.8 billion a year on a scheme. We're taking those billions legitimately from Australians who expect that money is supporting people with disability, and instead it's going into outright fraud, deliberate overservicing, false invoicing or claims for services that were never delivered. It's subject to collusion between providers and participants. Law enforcement agencies have also warned that organised crimes are increasingly targeting the scheme, exploiting weak entry controls and fragmented oversight.

So you'd think that a focus of a bill like this that seeks to drastically curtail the growth in the expenditure of the NDIS would be ensuring that integrity systems are absolutely robust. Every dollar that is lost to fraud through this sort of leakage is a dollar taken away from Australians with a disability, those same Australians in my own community that are being denied the supports they deserve and being forced through the courts to get those supports. I just don't see that we've got far enough in this legislation towards addressing that.

The NDIS is drifting under this poor stewardship that, we have to accept, has been provided by both sides of the chamber over the 13-odd years since the NDIS was introduced. It's absolutely unacceptable, because to lose confidence in this scheme ultimately risks those people who depend on it for their independence and for making a contribution to our community—which was the whole point of it. That was the compact that the Australian people, through successive governments, entered into for a scheme that is spending some $50-odd billion a year now and growing at 10.3 per cent. That is the difference between what Australians thought they were signing up for—those Australians who have very happily accepted this through their taxes every year, as a significant impost on the Commonwealth—and the experience of the people that should be receiving the services.

In the absence of a truly great scheme, like we had in WA before the introduction of the NDIS, we should be focused on making this scheme the best possible scheme for those that depend on it. Some elements of this bill, as other speakers on both sides of the chamber have touched on, go some way to addressing it. Do they go far enough? No. Do they give those Australians who depend on the scheme comfort that they won't be victimised and targeted just for the sake of realising the aggressive cost savings the government proposes? No—and that's our concern.

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