Justine Elliot (Richmond, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The National Disability Insurance Scheme was designed, created and fully funded by Labor in government, and it's one of the greatest social investments of our generation. Labor understood that the old system of disability support was broken and needed to be fixed. That's why we acted. When the NDIS is fully rolled out in 2019-20, more than 460,000 Australians with severe or profound disability will be receiving the care and support they need. For people with disability, their carers and their families, the NDIS will be truly transformational.

Unfortunately the government's planned rollout and growth of the scheme has not been up to standard. People with a disability and their supporters want and need the NDIS rollout to be made clear and much more efficient. In my electorate of Richmond I've been contacted many times by constituents or their carers who are experiencing delays and difficulties with accessing the NDIS in its initial rollout phase. One particular family advised me that they'd made a request to start a plan after being approved several months ago for the NDIS. They'd still not been contacted after very lengthy time frames, despite constant phone calls being made by both the daughter in the family and their social worker, and this was causing a great deal of stress for them, of course. The woman in question remains stuck in limbo in a local hospital. She urgently needs her NDIS plan to be implemented so that she can get a motorised wheelchair to provide her with some freedom and also to fund some form of housing so she can finally be discharged.

Another family who were extremely stressed had been waiting months after requesting a review of their current plan. They were promised, after several phone calls to the NDIA, that their case would be escalated. They were then advised, weeks later, that the request for review had been approved, but they could not guarantee how long the process would take. Fast-forward six weeks, and her two carers had not been paid a cent for their services. After contact was made with the minister's office, the problem was again escalated, and once again it was unable to progress, because of an administrative problem. Finally the changes that this family wanted did happen, but the fact is that these changes are relatively simple and straightforward. This family does have the ability to advocate on their own behalf, yet it still took so long. The review process is inadequate, and the time taken for reviews is simply unacceptable.

Whilst I understand that of course there are so many who have benefited from the rollout of this scheme, there are many participants who have issues with accessing this important service. Participants with psychosocial disability and those who struggle to navigate the system are most at risk of experiencing poor outcomes, as are people who are living in outer regional and remote and very remote areas and those with complex, specialised or high-intensity needs, and of course also our older participants. There are also lengthy waiting lists for some providers and types of support because of the absence of local providers, along with some concerns about quality. So I call on the Turnbull government to invest more resources to ensure that the quality of this rollout will improve to provide much better and more accessible services to those in our community who need the support the most and those who need to access the NDIS in a timely and efficient manner.