Kate Thwaites (Jagajaga, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Morrison government is running an unacceptable scare campaign designed to allow them to rip apart the NDIS. It's disgraceful behaviour, targeting people with a disability and their families and carers, and I am determined to call them out for it. In the lead-up to this year's budget, the government got caught out faking a cost blowout in the NDIS. The government dropped stories they'd designed to suggest that NDIS costs were unsustainable and on the trajectory of being more expensive than Medicare costs. Yet all it took was a quick check of projections to expose that these claims were a fake, a scare campaign.

We know there are a number of areas of the NDIS where the government is trying to scare people with disability and their families and carers, such as independent assessments. I have had call after call from people with disabilities and their families in my community who are scared, who are worried about the proposal for independent assessments, because they know that this is code for this government wanting to cut the support they get. They know this means they're going to have to do what they were told they wouldn't have to do: tell their story over and over again, prove their disability. Well, this government is making them do that. That's the proposal. That's what is on the table with these independent assessments. It is a scare campaign. It is the government undermining the NDIS. Labor backs the NDIS. Labor built the NDIS. We will always support it.