Jamie Chaffey (Parkes, National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Agriculture) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

While those on the other side of the chamber were busy planning a trip to Sweden and the UK, one of my constituents, a 16-year-old I'll call Maddie, who is from Dubbo and has a diagnosis of cerebral palsy, will not get the support she needs to transition to her new school. Maddie is one of the real-life regional Australians whose life will be impacted because of the recent changes to the National Disability Insurance Scheme. Changes to section 33 of the NDIS act that came into effect earlier this year mean that funding for each person now needs to be staggered across the year.

But clearly, life doesn't work that way. Sometimes all of the expenses and the requirements come at once. While Maddie has enough sessions approved to assist her, she can't access half of her sessions until after she starts at her new school. That means no timely training for her support staff. This is an example of those changes being made behind a desk a long, long way away from rural, regional and remote parts of New South Wales and the homes of the people who desperately need these services. A trip to Narromine, Lightning Ridge or Dunedoo by a caring and qualified allied health worker seems a very small price to pay when funds are available for business-class trips to the cosmopolitan capital of Stockholm.

These are children and adults who have no option but to rely on the NDIS. They don't have the services available locally. They would have to spend many sometimes-painful hours and considerable expenses to travel to visit a service. Some need a specially modified vehicle that's not available and, once there, they don't get the same tailored advice and assistance they would receive at home. Drastic cuts to the travel allowance have meant that dedicated service providers who have visited clients in rural, regional and remote areas for many years—who have helped children communicate at school, helped people access community services and generally made many more lives liveable—will have to stop. Some of them have told me they can't sleep at night, worried about the choice between a viable business and clients that need them. Already, some have made the difficult but necessary decision to cease services in some areas.

In the city, where services are a short distance away, some of these changes might not mean much. But, to a parent in a remote western New South Wales area whose child already faces so many challenges, they are heartbreaking. These changes to the NDIS have been made without consultation with service providers and without consultation with the people who absolutely rely on their help. The NDIS is a vehicle—the only vehicle—that provides absolutely essential services to people in need. Those people deserve care, they deserve practical, affordable assistance and they deserve to be listened to before the decisions that weigh so heavily on their lives are made.