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

Let's talk about the National Disability Insurance Scheme. Let's talk about disabled people in Australia. Let's talk about fraud in the National Disability Insurance Scheme. The first thing that is so important to state in this debate tonight is that this is a debate that has been started by a party that is attempting, this evening, to position its proposal for an inquiry into fraud in the NDIS. This party is attempting to frame its request to be something it is doing on behalf of disabled people. So, in that context, let me say this very clearly. There is no community in this country that cares more about fraud in the NDIS than disabled people and their families. Because, when fraud occurs—when we are the victims of fraud—it's more than a headline, and it's more than a sound bite. It is the supports that help us out of bed, enable us to go to work, enable us to get to hospital when we're sick and enable us to see our friends. That's what's taken away from us.

In my community, there is a saying. I think it originated with Lindsay Carter. It's an acronym: PLOD, people living off the disabled. That acronym was put into our community's lexicon to try to bring a little bit of dark comedy to a deeply insidious dynamic—one that we have lived with, decade after decade.

You see, in the years after the end of institutionalisation, when brave disabled people—and our allies and advocates—broke out of the state-run, state sponsored institutions to which we had been condemned, there were, as there still are, individuals who sought to establish a parasitic financial relationship with disabled people to take advantage of our moment of liberation for their own profit. Those people existed before the NDIS was ever created. They saw a community which was put at risk by a lack of safeguarding, put at risk by the very fact that they were dehumanised and discriminated against. They took advantage of that dynamic. They saw an opportunity to make a buck.

As the NDIS was created, the government failed to reckon with that reality. It failed to put in place the safeguards that would prevent those who would exploit and abuse disabled people from continuing to do so. That is a fact. The NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission has been, at times, over and over again, a failure of a regulator. There is work now being done to strengthen it, but it is coming far too little and far too late for far too many.

We live in a moment where large corporations are buying each other at unprecedented speed, monopolising the disability provision sector and trying to find ways to financially exploit and continue to abuse disabled people. This is a reality, and this must be addressed. But this inquiry—this attempt this evening—to establish a publicly funded vehicle in the name of disabled people, under the pretence of investigating this fraud and abuse, is, in fact, its own form of political fraud. Here we see politicians living off the disabled—politicians coming into this place claiming to be the allies of disabled people, when they have made political hay for years peddling some of the most vile and disgusting ableist commentary that this parliament has seen. You just heard from a member of parliament, Senator Hanson, who put forward the idea that the social supports required by disabled people to live our lives—the very things the NDIS funds—are ridiculous and absurd. She dismissed them entirely.

She is not alone in this view. In the last couple of weeks, I have been absolutely disgusted to read the reporting of the Australian Financial Review in relation to the National Disability Insurance Scheme. The articles that they have published over the years have built a drumbeat—a false perception of what the NDIS is, what it is for and what disabled people and our families rely upon it for. But this piece takes the cake, with a headline suggesting that $12 billion was spent on haircuts. Shame on the editor that allowed it to go to print! It normalised and validated some the most harmful and most hurtful narratives about disabled people and our families.

My very good friend, the actor, activist, author, taxpayer and proud disabled woman, Hannah Diviney finally found the words today to describe her feelings as a national broadsheet used its power and place in the media to frame the supports she relies on everyday as frivolous. She said:

Having to pay people to enable the freedom that so many take for granted and having to work around their schedules as much as your own is not laziness or rorting the system. It's the reality of disabled life. A reality intentionally warped and distorted by the media, politics and people in power.

Disabled people are not the enemy. We're not a problem to push aside. We're not a budget or bottom line to balance nor a political football.

So many people work tirelessly every day including myself, to shift archaic perceptions and ideas of who disabled people are and the potential we could have. Reporting and fearmongering like this only sets us backward.

Yes, it does. And contributions like the one we just heard from Senator Hanson have no place in the discussion of the National Disability Insurance Scheme in this Senate.

If you want to tackle fraud, let's tackle fraud. Let's take on the big providers. Let's break them up. Let's hold them to account. Let's have their CEOs out on national television, and, if they've done wrong, let them go to prison. But don't you dare suggest that there is an equivalence between the parasitic, systemic and decades-long dynamic by which those with power and money extract their profit from disabled minds and bodies and the legitimate needs of disabled people and our families to be provided with the basic supports, the basic needs and the ability to go out and be part of our communities, to make friends, to have a job and to raise a family. Don't you dare. You have no right to speak in this place on disability issues until you have cleaned up your act.

May I suggest you start by looking at some of the media and some of the animations depicting disabled people which you have so frequently used taxpayer money to put into the world. They are some of the most disgusting, ablest representations of disabled people I have ever seen with no place in a modern democratic discussion and no place in a civilised society.

Your leader, in her contribution to this debate, proved that after decades in politics she doesn't need an inquiry to understand the NDIS; she needs a search engine. The basics of the scheme, the basics of the reality of disabled lives and the basics of the issue are beyond her. It is so inappropriate to use this forum to legitimise the ablest belief that disabled people and our families are rorting the system, frivolously asking for things that are totally unreasonable. I would ask any MP proposing these ideas—