Tony Sheldon (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Four point six? I'm sorry; I'm corrected. It is $4.6 billion that states have been told they cannot access to fund people with disabilities to have access to essential services. It's come from 'underspending', in layman's language, on the NDIS. We're talking about billions of dollars the government is supposed to spend on people with disabilities, but it's now apparently using it to balance its books. It is using people with disability, people with dire need for support from our community.

In fact, as senators on the other side who spoke previously have said, this was an initiative that the opposition at the time and the government at the time came to a consensus on. I can remember those negotiations and those arguments. I can remember when Tony Abbott was brought kicking and screaming to the table. The reason why is that good, thinking people of all politics outside the Liberal Party, including people who voted for them, turned around and said that what Labor was proposing made sense. It gave people respect and it gave them an opportunity to look after their families and have some assurance about their families into the future. Now we see what they're doing. Now we see them turning around and doing budgetary tricks.

It's not just Labor who are angry about this government hobbling the futures of people who just want to go about their lives and be the best they can be. New South Wales Liberal minister Gareth Ward, who himself is visually impaired, has blown the whistle on his own side. They haven't answered that argument yet, have they? They haven't answered the argument that's been put forward by one of their own. This senior Liberal minister in the New South Wales government said that these are 'people who sit in a room all day with no support, looking at the four walls' and talked about the cruelness of this government holding onto its money. Those are not my words. Those are not Labor's words. That is one of their own saying how devastated they are by the lack of action, the inappropriate steps and the lack of appropriate steps by this government.

The minister has gone public with stories of despair of people who desperately need speech therapy or occupational therapy to be able to live a full and dignified life but simply cannot get it. That the Morrison government is calling this denial of funding an underspend in the first place is a disgrace. We all know how Scott Morrison and Stuart Robert have mismanaged the NDIS system. Don't believe it because I'm saying it—believe it because one of their own is saying it. In actual fact—and even more importantly—people with disability and their carers are saying it.

My office, like many others, has received so many representations from constituents who have been affected by the callousness and inhumanity of this government. We received correspondence about a Meals on Wheels service who had booked $20,000 to $30,000 worth of work supplying meals for high-need individuals. They were left high and dry for 18 months. NDIA was not paying them, and they ended up basically supplying meals to hungry and vulnerable people at a loss, limiting the reach of their program.

Then we had representations from the father of a young man, who we'll call Jack, with several disabilities, including being completely blind. He had been given less than a third of the funding he needed to have any semblance of a normal life. Jack did everything that he was required of the NDIS. He had a comprehensive plan prepared for him by an approved not-for-profit NDIS provider. The plan provided for all of his disabilities. It was holistic and comprehensive, taking into account his carers' needs—his carers being his mother and father.

Instead of funding the comprehensive plan, the NDIS funded less than one-third of it. The funding ran out in December last year, and Jack has been at home since then. He cannot use a phone or feed himself. His father has had to take the last month off work to relieve his mother, because Jack feels unsafe without having someone there with him. He, in fact, was learning to use the phone with the funding that he previously had that was cut off. But funding for those lessons were cut two years ago. He was told that the NDIA could only see him as being blind and could not see him as having other disabilities such as autism, OCD and anxiety, despite having submitted reports from both a psychiatrist and a psychologist.