Dai Le (Fowler, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Health and Ageing. Minister, up to 160,000 Australians with disability will be worse off under your government's NDIS cuts. You plan to slash $7,000 per participant from social and community supports, the very thing that connects people in multicultural communities like Fowler to culturally and linguistically appropriate care. With your $200 million Inclusive Communities Fund, how much of that money is actually quarantined for the CALD community?

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

Thank you to the member for Fowler for her question. Can I take the opportunity just to say a couple of things about investments for her community in the budget last night. She will have seen $80 million provisioned for the upgrade of the emergency department at the Fairfield Hospital, part of a $630 million total upgrade. The Minister for Climate Change and Energy talks to me a lot about the importance of that to that community. The Liverpool Urgent Care Clinic is working well, and can I say to the member there is no electorate that has done better from our bulk-billing investments than the electorate of Fowler. Now 97 per cent of general practices in Fowler are bulk-billing 100 per cent of their patients. I know how often the member acknowledges the benefit of our investments in strengthening Medicare, and I thank her for those frequent acknowledgements.

But she asks about the NDIS, and I thank her for that question and her interest, particularly around CALD communities. We've had a discussion already about that. First of all, can I say how determined we are to get this scheme back on track. It's growing too fast. It's got too big. There's, frankly, too much money going to shonks and fraudsters. We see it as a very deep responsibility of a government, particularly a Labor government that put this scheme in place in the first place, to secure its future for the long term.

A series of those changes are about essentially urgent financial controls, and I will be introducing legislation this week to put those controls in place and to get that cost growth under control. But there are other reforms that will need more work, in close consultation with the disability community that will take place over coming months, and that must include CALD members of the disability community. Given that our recognition of CALD participants in the NDIS relies on voluntary identification, frankly, we're currently underdoing that engagement. Only nine per cent of NDIS participants are registered as CALD. In a country with 30 per cent of the population identifying as CALD, that is obviously an underrepresentation, and we've been working very hard to improve that engagement. Our CALD strategy was co-designed with more than 800 people working with us—CALD NDIS participants. Over the last few months of last year, we had 68 sessions, with more than 3,000 CALD participants and other stakeholders. To inform that work, we've got an expert advisory group that is advising us about implementation on things like better data and making sure that that markets and services are attuned to the cultural needs of participants. I've made the decision to expand the remit of that group's work to include the reforms that the member asked me about.