Ali France (Dickson, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026. I love the NDIS, I love that Labor created it, and we are not about to let it crumble. The NDIS is dignity, opportunity and independence for people with significant disability. It has been life-changing for participants and families, and that is not going to change. It is the gateway to fulfilled, happy, productive lives. But it must deliver. It must be safe. It must be equitable. It must be sustainable. The public must have confidence in the scheme, and people with a significant disability must be at the centre of the scheme.

I know many participants and families are feeling anxious and distressed by the idea of change, by the changes in this bill. Years and years of constant talk of change and cuts would be incredibly distressing for the disability community. But we've all known for some time that the NDIS is not working as it should. Thank you to the member for Forde for the examples he described in his speech. It's not running as it originally intended, and, as a community, we must be really honest about that. Having unregistered providers is not safe for participants and has led to fraud and rorts. Every time I see a story about a provider or an individual scamming the system, it makes me physically sick. The NDIS has become a rorter's paradise and a postcode lottery where many people with significant disability are missing out due to market failure. I know this, providers know this, and the general public knows this. We are livid that the scheme we love, over nine years under those opposite, was allowed to disintegrate, riddled by fraud, inequity and a complete lack of safeguards for participants. I know the majority of providers are good and the needs of people with disability are at the very heart of everything that they do. I know that they want the rorters out too.

As soon as we came to government in 2022, we ordered a review, and what I heard was worse than I ever anticipated. There were no basic fraud or compliance controls in the nine long years that the NDIS had been operating. And that's not my assessment; that comes from the National Audit Office—zero. The fact that the states and territories were given the green light to step away, to stop being the provider of last resort, to stop delivering support when no other provider was willing to set up in a country town, to stop providing support to those who need support but don't qualify for the NDIS—that left a deep hole in our mainstream systems of support. During our Thriving Kids inquiry, we heard a lot of evidence of families having to either travel or go without support because there was none available in their town. I spoke with the mum of a participant a few years ago who was absolutely thrilled that her adult son was able to move into purpose built independent living designed for his needs. For the first time as a man in his 30s, he'd lived away from his parents. But, when he moved in, he was unable to get the nursing support, despite having the funding for it. He lived a two-hour drive from Brisbane in a large regional town where there were many participants but zero providers of 24-hour nursing care. He tried desperately to get the state back involved in his care. The alternative was to go back to his parents or a nursing home. Sadly, we know that this case is not isolated. We need to change this because the impact on people with a disability in rural and remote communities is horrendous.

A diagnosis based system has also meant that many kids are missing out on early intervention supports. There are years-long waiting lists for both adults and children for diagnosis, and many can't afford to get a diagnosis, which can often cost thousands of dollars. We are losing big providers, like Centacare in Queensland, that primarily provide support for people with very complex and significant disabilities, because the current funding model for providers does not account for the level of compliance training and staff management that these organisations must undertake. Some of the very people this scheme was designed for are very gradually being left without care, either because there is no provider of last resort in remote communities or because the big not-for-profits are shutting down because they simply can't afford to exist.

Since coming to government four years ago, we've done extensive reviews. We've taken steps to curb fraud and rorts and have halved the growth rate of the scheme. However, it's clear that, in order to be able to deliver for people with permanent and significant disability, we need deep structural change. We need support outside the NDIS. The states must step back in, and I'm really, really worried about that. I can see that they are reluctant. I can see the 'it's too hard' vibes from some state premiers. It can't be too hard, because this is simply too important. We need our state leaders to step up. Changing the NDIS is going to be really hard for participants, for our community and for providers, but we must all take a very deep breath and get it done, not for participants like me, now, but for our disability community into the future.

This bill is part of our plan to secure the NDIS and return the scheme to its original intent, providing lifetime support for Australians with permanent and significant disability, and, as the member for Kooyong acknowledged, it addresses well-recognised design flaws. The changes in this bill respond directly to the disability royal commission and the Independent Review of the NDIS. It also takes up the advice of the NDIS Provider and Worker Registration Taskforce and the findings of the Audit Office's work on fraud and control in the scheme. This reform is built on the evidence, the feedback from disability peak bodies and the stories of those who have graciously given evidence to many inquiries.

The bill is made up of five schedules which collectively address issues on how people access the scheme, how their plans are managed and how we can properly regulate, monitor and investigate how money is spent. The bill also increases the decision-making powers of the minister and makes way for transitional arrangements. Key changes in the bill include a definition in the act of 'substantially reduced functional capacity' and how that will be assessed in a consistent, evidence-based way. This means access to the scheme will be based on a transparent assessment of a person's functional capacity rather than on a specific diagnosis.

Getting this part of the bill right matters, and it matters a lot to the disability community. That is why I am pleased that a technical advisory group will be established to advise on the right threshold and the right assessments, informed by consultation with the disability community and with the states and territories. The bill also clarifies what it means for a support to be 'reasonable and necessary' and what 'permanent' means for people applying to access the scheme.

We will also reduce the number of unscheduled plan reassessments. Some of those requests are being made by intermediaries—middle men and women—sometimes without the participant even knowing. Under this bill, only a participant, or their nominee or guardian, will be able to request an unscheduled reassessment, and only when there has been a genuine, significant and ongoing change in their circumstances. It introduces a legislated end date for every plan so that plans are properly renewed rather than rolled over indefinitely. Unspent funds will no longer be carried forward in a way that inflates plans over time.

This bill finally gives the NDIA the powers it needs to properly regulate, monitor and investigate the payment of more than $50 billion every year. It clarifies the definition of 'NDIS provider', which has been so broad that mainstream retailers are now defined as NDIS providers, and it introduces a range of new civil penalties so that there are real consequences for fraud and noncompliance that has gone unchecked for far too long. Right now, only one in 16 providers is registered. I completely understand that for some of the smaller providers the system that has been set up to date is not built for them. This bill builds the framework to change that.

This bill also reforms the plan management market, enabling the government to commission a panel of plan managers that are held to real standards on governance, integrity and conflicts of interest, and to commission a new, higher-quality support coordination and connection service. The bill gives the minister the power to be the decision-maker on pricing, acting on the advice of the NDIA's annual pricing review, and it gives the agency the ability to recover money from a provider when a participant has been overcharged.

If we want the NDIS to be the system it was intended to be—to truly provide security and dignity for people with disability—the NDIS needs the structural change proposed in this bill. I know these changes are going to be hard, I know these changes are fuelling anxiety and I know constantly advocating for your needs is so exhausting. For many this reform is a hard pill to swallow. But for others it is hope that help is on the way to their local town, to their community. We can no longer have a two-tier NDIS where, if you live in the cities and you have a package and you can access services and you have the health literacy to make applications for those services, you have a completely different experience than if you don't have health literacy or if you live in a regional or rural town and there are very limited providers where the market has failed. We can no longer have a system where some people with disability and significant disability are in and some people with significant disability are out.

We are committed to ensuring the NDIS delivers essential supports to Australians with significant and permanent disability not just today but for generations to come. Our responsibility is to build a NDIS that is fair, consistent and empowering—one that places people with significant disability at its heart. I commend this bill to the House.

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