Sharon Claydon (Newcastle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I was thrilled to join with Novocastrians living with disability, their families and carers, disability service providers, workers and the Australian Services Union recently, to celebrate the National Disability Insurance Scheme and to ensure it is the best that it can be for everyone involved. The NDIS is a proud, world-leading initiative of a Labor government and is one of the most important social reforms in Australian history. It delivers choice and control for people living with disability and creates new business and employment opportunities. It is also one of the largest job creation opportunities in the history of this country. The NDIS works well for many, but, after years of neglect by the former Liberal government, there are inadequacies in its current design, where providers have incentives to deliver more services rather than better outcomes for participants. It's our job now, as a Labor government, to rebuild community trust in the scheme and get it back on track. That's why we have established the independent NDIS review, a new fraud fusion taskforce and an alternative dispute resolution pilot, to achieve fairer, faster and better outcomes. We'll fix the funding constraints and remove dependency on labour-hire firms and contractors, and we've created an additional 380 permanent, secure jobs in an agency to ensure a quality, professional and sustainable workforce.