Andrew Wallace (Fisher, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's like the Great Barrier Reef! This is a scheme that was designed by the Labor Party, and we supported it because we understand the importance of looking after our vulnerable. That's the difference in Australia. I think, generally speaking, Australia does it pretty well. We're not the European model of ridiculously high taxes and superwelfare, although we're certainly headed in that direction. We're not the United States model, where if you get sick it's virtually a death sentence unless you're very wealthy. Generally speaking, Australia, over successive governments, has walked that path pretty well. We, on both sides of the House, believe in things like a universal healthcare system, Medicare. The coalition supports Medicare, despite what those opposite say. They roll out their 'Mediscare' campaigns at every election. They say that we don't support the NDIS. It's all rubbish, of course, and to my last breath I'll support Medicare and the NDIS because I don't want to see a country like Australia end up with a health system like that of the United States. I love the United States. It's the land of the free and home of the brave—just don't get sick there.

But we have walked a much more humanitarian pathway in this country. We acknowledge that, if you have a significant and permanent disability, you should get cared for through the NDIS, subject to some other restrictions. But we have moved beyond that. We've moved beyond 'a significant and permanent disability', and significant bracket creep has entered into the scheme. Even though it's not capped, I am certainly hearing complaint after complaint from my constituents who are saying: 'What I was getting I'm now not. My circumstances haven't changed. It's just that the government have decided that they are going to clamp down on everything and everybody.'

There is absolutely no case or tolerance for fraud. There is no tolerance for fraudsters. We know that the NDIS is being rorted by a lot of people—certainly not everybody. It's a small number of people who are rorting the system, but they are making it difficult for everybody else because what that means is that governments of either persuasion get political pressure and have to try and create a more bureaucratic system. That means service providers' costs blow out.

For all of the complaints that I'm receiving about the rorts, I've got a lot of service providers in my electorate of Fisher who are actually telling me: 'You know what? You can keep your NDIS, because I can't make money out of it anymore. It is being locked down with such bureaucracy that I'd just rather not deal with it, because it's costing too much money to be able to provide these services. So I'm out.' In a city like Melbourne or Sydney or Brisbane, that might be okay because there'll be other people that will pick up the slack. But, in rural and regional Australia, there are not the service providers that we need. If a service provider says, 'This is too hard. You're making it too difficult for me to be able to run a business, with all of the red tape and bureaucracy and everything I've got to do. I'm just going to go back and have a 100 per cent private practice,' then those people who live in rural and regional Australia will not get the supports that they need and deserve—the same supports, in the same way, as if they were a child or a person with a disability who lives in the city.

That's the fine line that we've got to walk. We've got to ensure that we crack down on the shonks but, at the same time, that we don't make it so damn difficult for the service providers that they just close up shop, go back to private practice and get rid of the NDIS. That would be a bad thing for people who need their services like physio, like speech pathology and like all the other many and varied services that people need.

Australians are doing it incredibly tough. We are in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis. I know what it was like pre NDIS. We were constantly putting our hands in our pockets for the myriad of specialists that my daughter needed. Back then, I was a barrister; I could afford it. But many, many families are not in that situation. The vast majority of Australian families were not and are not in that situation. That's why we have to get this right.

On the current trajectory, the NDIS is expected to cost a hundred billion dollars a year within 10 years. If we don't get this right, then, at some point, some future government is going to say: 'That's it. We can't do this anymore. The NDIS is gone.' That would be a disaster for families like the member for Herbert's, mine and those of 760,000-odd Australians around the country. We've got to make this a better system, we've got to make it a fairer system and we've got to crack down on the shonks. Hopefully, this bill will do that, but we'll keep a close eye on it from the opposition.

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