Mike Freelander (Macarthur, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Health and Ageing and Minister for Disability and the NDIS. How is the Albanese Labor government securing the future of the NDIS and delivering more funding and support to help Australian kids and their families to thrive?

Mark Butler (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you to the member, who knows just how much the NDIS is a proud legacy of our Labor Party. It's a world-leading program of supports for people with significant and permanent—usually lifelong—disabilities.

But when we came to government we found a scheme that was running off the rails. At a time when the scheme should already have been pretty much fully matured, it was growing at a whopping 22 per cent per year. Our government immediately started the hard work to get that growth rate down to a more sustainable level. We set a target of eight per cent growth this year, in 2026, and the mid-year budget update that the Treasurer published only several weeks ago reported that we are on track to meet that target. But I've also said that an eight per cent growth target for a scheme with a relatively stable population base is still not sustainable. On Friday, state premiers and chief ministers agreed with the Prime Minister and our government to work to get that growth rate down even further to five to six per cent or lower. Of course, we will do that work in close partnership with the disability community itself. But I make the point that sustainable growth in this scheme is not just important for the budget, although it is. It is also a critical way to ensure the long-term future of this absolutely critical scheme.

The other concern that we encountered, though, was the huge number of young children enrolled onto the NDIS, particularly young boys. One in six junior primary school boys now are on the NDIS, and in some parts of the country it's as high as one in four. This is simply not what the scheme was set up to do, and it's not the best way to support young children with low to moderate needs. That's why I was also delighted on Friday that state premiers also agreed to our plan to introduce the Thriving Kids program. I want to thank the member for Macarthur, the member for Kooyong and a number of other members in this place for their really quick but comprehensive inquiry into this program that they delivered very recently. I also want to thank the Thriving Kids Advisory Group, which I co-chaired with Professor Frank Oberklaid, for their work to set up this model of a program. It's a program that will be rolled out over the coming couple of years. It will help children with support needs be identified as early as possible. And, importantly, it won't need a formal diagnosis, which we know can take ages and ages to receive and cost thousands and thousands of dollars. Instead, support will be easy and quick to access, and it will be available where young people and their parents live, learn and play. In short, it will give every child in this country the best opportunity to thrive.