Hollie Hughes (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Mental Health and Suicide Prevention) | Hansard source

Well, here we are again. I have to commend Senator Steele-John, because this is an area where he does want to see some scrutiny. Unfortunately, we've just seen another guillotine hours motion from the government because they can't manage the chamber, once again supported by the Greens to cut scrutiny, but at least in one area the Greens are keen on a bit of scrutiny: the NDIS. They are not so keen on scrutiny relating to sheep or farmers in WA: 'See you later. We can get rid of your work conditions, your jobs and your industry.' But, when it comes to the NDIS, at least the Greens will stand up for a bit of scrutiny when we're ignored by this government.

And why are we ignored by this government? Why are we here? For the benefit of those in the gallery, the reason we're here is that the government has said it's going to cap growth of the NDIS but we don't know how. We don't know how they're going to cap the growth. Apparently, the states are going to come to the party and roll out these foundational supports—all the supports that they stopped delivering when the NDIS came into play, because the NDIS was basically like a plane built once it had taken off. The Labor government under Bill Shorten, now Minister for the NDIS, and former Prime Minister Julia Gillard were so keen to get this NDIS up and running. They had bipartisan support and could have taken the opportunity to actually map it out, but no. They had to get it up in the air—a plane that was not built yet. One of the factors with that was that the then Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, said to the states: 'Don't worry. It doesn't matter how much the scheme grows. The Commonwealth is going to pick up the tab outside of what you contribute.' So the states went: 'You beauty! Let's get rid of all the community health services that we delivered—no more community OTs or community speech therapists.' Any of those supports are gone. As for local psychologists, we don't have them anymore under the community health system, because the states vacated the field.

But then it got worse, because all of a sudden in education, on supports that are the responsibility of the state government to make sure that kids can go to school and are supported appropriately, the NDIS comes in and the education departments go: 'Ripper! We don't have to fund those anymore, because we're just going to tell parents, "Get more NDIS funding, and you can do it all after school."' So we're seeing continually rising rates of school refusal. We know that in the classrooms there are kids who need supports and are actually disrupting classrooms, not being supported and not being able to access the appropriate education. Don't worry about that, though, because the Gillard NDIS was going to pick up the tab for everything!

So we've now got to this point. When we were in government, we said: 'There are sustainability issues here. This thing is getting too big, too quickly, with too many people and services, and we cannot keep paying for this at the rate that it's going.' 'No, no, no,' said then shadow minister Bill Shorten. He said that we were pearl-clutching kabuki theatre players: 'There's no problem with the sustainability. It's all good. ' So then Minister Shorten comes in, finally has a look at the books of the NDIS, and says, 'Oops, this is getting bigger than Ben Hur, and there are sustainability issues.' So Minister Shorten's now decided that he's going to cap the growth of the NDIS. How do you cap a demand-driven scheme? You cap it with the number of participants or you cap it with what the costs of their plans are. We don't know, because this government will not provide the financial modelling that allowed it to make the claim of an eight per cent growth cap.

But what's even worse is that we're currently looking at a bill. The only reason we're still looking at the bill is that we managed to get through the Senate an extension of the Community Affairs Legislation Committee inquiry into this bill, which had previously had 2½ days of hearings. We have very kindly been granted another two days of hearings, so there will be 4½ days of hearings in total for some of the biggest reforms to the NDIS, which is life-changing for 660,000 Australians and their families. But we are being denied the financial modelling, because it will somehow upset the relationship with the states. Well, let me tell you: we're going to hear from the states during those two days, because we're going to find out what foundational supports they think they've been signed up to—because they don't know. You've only got to listen to every education minister, premier and health minister at a state level—even the justice ministers at a state level. They don't know. A lot of these states have just had budgets, and guess how much money went into NDIS foundational supports: zero. So to every single NDIS participant and their family I say: we will keep coming back until we get some answers. (Time expired)