Jordon Steele-John (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—I move:

That the Senate take note of the statement.

Let's recap where we are. We are seeing confusion reign when it comes to the NDIS and the legislation that is meant to support it. The changes that the government rammed through last year are wreaking havoc in the lives of so many disabled people, their families and their allies. Participants are receiving conflicting information from staff. Agency staff are not interacting in a trauma informed way. Planners continue to not read the evidence they have been provided with and that they have often requested. There is a continual pattern of planners and agency delegates making a call, giving a view, in relation to clinical evidence that they are not qualified to assess. Meanwhile, we also continue to see agency staff breach participants' privacy through the sharing of confidential information without the consent of participants and email the wrong people with the wrong information again, again and again.

This new three-month funding period that has been introduced by the government continues to limit choice and control because—guess what? Some people's funding needs and the expenses that go with them don't fit neatly into a three-month funding period. Sometimes they need intense supports, requiring additional funding for longer periods than three months. It just does not make sense. It's the type of bureaucratic nonsense that the NDIS was created to eliminate.

The biggest casualty, though, of the new NDIS National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Getting the NDIS Back on Track No. 1) Act 2024 is the fact that the legislation no longer considers 'reasonable and necessary' in its determination of funding or of supports. And what we have seen as a result of that? We have seen over 700 new appeals to the tribunal in May 2025 alone. It also seems, by the way, that the participant service guarantee, much celebrated when it was passed, has just been chucked out the window. In March 2025, in that quarter, only nine per cent of people who applied to get access to the NDIS had that request actioned in the required 21-day period—nine per cent. Meanwhile, the agency continues to make unreasonable requests of participants, like saying that participants have two business days to reply in relation to the progression of complaints—an unreasonable deadline in itself—and then in fact closing the complaint as the agency hadn't received the information within their own two-day deadline.

We are continuing to see participants kicked off the scheme because of what appears to me to be a culture in the agency that prioritises media management over supporting participants and their families. We're seeing participants kicked off their supports because selectively edited bits of information were presented to a minister by a shock jock during an interview, resulting in a diktat to kick that participant off the scheme. What happened? Ten months later, after appeal after appeal after appeal, they got their funding back because—guess what?—the information the agency had was not sufficient to make the decision and, in fact, when the evidence was looked at, the person very much did meet the requirements and needed those supports.

This is an absolute shame on this government and, indeed, on the entire body of the political system dominated by the major parties. The Liberal Party, the Labor Party and the National Party should hang their heads in shame when they hear what is happening to NDIS participants right now—the fear and uncertainty, the cuts and the pain of people that deserve so much better. Well, we in the Greens will keep fighting for disabled people and their families.