Sean Bell (NSW, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Australian people deserve the truth about the waste, the fraud and the abuse that are running rampant in the NDIS. The NDIS is meant to be a lifeline for Australians with severe and permanent disability. It's meant to give people dignity, support and security. It is meant to ease the burden on families and carers, who carry enormous responsibility every single day. If we want that promise to mean anything, the scheme must be protected and properly policed to ensure that we have a sustainable NDIS for the future. That is why this debate matters. The NDIS needs to be strong, fair and sustainable. It needs to serve the people it was designed to help. To do that we need to protect it from waste, fraud and abuse. That is all One Nation is asking for tonight. All we're asking for is proper investigation because we all know there is waste, fraud and abuse, yet what we see is a failure to act.

Essentially what this motion says is that the parliament should properly investigate the scale of the problem, how it's happening, where the safeguards are failing and what reforms are needed to protect the integrity of the scheme. It is a very responsible motion, it is a very sensible motion and it is long overdue. Australians expect honesty, accountability and that the money that they have set aside for people with genuine, serious and permanent disability actually reaches the people it is meant to help. That is the core issue here. Every dollar that is wasted, every false claim that is paid, every inflated invoice, every service billed but not properly delivered, every sham arrangement, every weak safeguard and every failure of oversight takes resources away from Australians who genuinely rely on this scheme.

It's about helping families caring for children with profound disabilities, about parents caring for adult sons and daughters with very complex needs and about husbands and wives caring for loved ones after catastrophic injury or illness. Yet the waste and the fraud we are seeing is diminishing our capacity and their capacity to deal with these situations. It's about carers who are already exhausted, already stretched and already carrying burdens most Australians will never fully understand. These are the people who pay the highest price when the NDIS is rorted. They are the people who lose when the money is siphoned off by dodgy providers, dishonest operators and people who see the scheme as an easy source of cash. That is why this matter deserves the full attention of the Senate, and that is why it is an entirely appropriate place to raise it.

Again, what we have seen is a failure to investigate, not just by government but by the media and by others. It's so bad that it takes people on social media. I will highlight the recent work by Drew Pavlou and Peter Zogoulas, who carried out investigations involving NDIS providers. They more or less proved that there are cleaners who attend for a very short time, do very little work and then issue an invoice far beyond what could be reasonably justified. We saw that a lot of the research they've done and the report they put out resonated and travelled through the community. People watched, were shocked and were rightfully horrified. The public knows this is going on. They see the system is being gamed and they see that too much money is leaking out through waste, fraud and abuse, and it needs to be uncovered. We see it being uncovered, yet this parliament fails to act. That is why this referral is necessary.

This isn't about headlines. We're not here to attack every provider. We're not here to try to make life harder for participants. We want to bring the facts into the open because that is how we ensure this scheme can continue into the future in a way that helps the people who need it. We need to identify where the weak points are, to test whether safeguards are strong enough and to properly examine the role of providers, intermediaries, nominee arrangements and agency processes. We need to look at worker qualifications and standards to work out whether the enforcement frameworks are strong enough because, frankly, they don't appear to be strong enough. We need to uncover what changes are necessary to restore confidence and protect the future of the scheme. This is sensible, this is eminently reasonable and this is what a serious parliament would do.

The truth is that public confidence also matters. The NDIS depends not only on funding but also on trust. Australians will support a generous scheme for people in need, they will support a system that helps people live with dignity and they will support assistance for families and carers who need help, but they will not support a system that appears soft on rorting and weak on enforcement and is unwilling to ask hard questions. When trust begins to erode, the long-term future of the entire scheme is put at risk.

That is the danger. That is the very real danger we are facing. If the public comes to believe the NDIS is just a money pit, if they come to believe that billions can be wasted without consequence, if they come to believe that nobody is really in charge, then support for the scheme will weaken. If support for the scheme weakens, it's not the fraudsters who will suffer and it's not the people grifting off the system who will suffer, because they will go and find another loophole to exploit. The people who will suffer are those with a severe and permanent disability, who the scheme was designed to protect. The people who will suffer are their families and their carers. The people who will suffer are those who genuinely need the support. That is why One Nation is so intently focused on stopping the waste and the fraud we see in the NDIS. Stopping waste is not separate from protecting the NDIS; stopping waste is how we protect it.

Frankly, it's also a cost-of-living issue. Australians are being squeezed from every direction. They are paying more for groceries, more for power, more for rent, more for mortgages, more for fuel, more for insurance, more for the everyday basics of life. Families are being told to tighten their belts. It's starting to sound like the government is asking families to start rationing fuel. Yet, at a time when the government is demanding Australians be careful with their money, the government is not taking the same steps to protect taxpayer money.

At a time like this, Australians expect governments to treat money with care. They expect government to spend money wisely. They expect government to stamp out waste. They expect, when billions of taxpayer dollars are being spent, there will be proper scrutiny, proper safeguards and proper accountability. So when people see rorting in a scheme as large as the NDIS, they're right to be angry. It's a fair response, because they understand something very simple: when governments lose control of spending, everyday Australians end up paying the price, because they pass more budget pressures through to them. They will pay more for the debt. They will pay through the long-term consequences of a government refusing to deal with waste and inefficiency. Then, if that happens and the people lose trust, then the entire scheme itself is at risk of failure.

Australians work hard for their money, and they expect that money to be spent carefully, especially when it has been collected in the name of helping the most vulnerable people in the country, because they want to help people in genuine need. What they resent is waste and fraud. What they resent is incompetence. What they resent is seeing their compassion exploited by people who know how to game the system while the government does nothing. That is what makes this is so offensive to so many people.

Every dollar wasted in the NDIS, every dollar wasted on fraud, every dollar that goes to criminals, is a dollar that cannot go to where it should. It cannot go to a child who needs real support. It cannot go to a family already under immense pressure. It cannot go to a person with a severe disability trying to live with dignity and independence. It cannot go to the genuine participant who needs services, equipment, therapy or care. That is why the victims of fraud are not only the taxpayers who fund the scheme but the participants and the families who rely on it.

That is why the Senate and the other political parties in this place should not be afraid of this inquiry. If the safeguards are strong, let them be tested. If compliance systems are working, let that be shown. If the auditing and enforcement mechanisms are adequate, let the evidence be provided. But if there are gaps, then those gaps should be exposed and fixed. If there are bad actors, they should be identified and dealt with. If there are incentives in the system that reward overcharging, overservicing or weak accountability, then those incentives need to change. If the parliament needs to legislate to strengthen oversight and restore public confidence, then that is exactly what we should do, but we won't be able to do that unless we start properly investigating the problems that are rife in this system.

We are not here to condemn everyone involved in the sector, because we know there are many honest providers, there are many decent workers, there are many people delivering important services in good faith to vulnerable Australians who deeply need support. But a scheme like this cannot be run on good faith alone. It needs rules, it needs scrutiny, it needs standards, it needs enforcement. It needs these things to be put in place, guarded and protected. Above all, it needs this parliament to have the courage to admit there's a problem and deal with it.

This motion before us today is measured. It is reasonable. It is focused. It does not prejudice allegations. It does not accuse every provider. It simply says that, where there are serious and growing concerns about waste, fraud and abuse, the Senate should investigate them properly and report back. That is not controversial. In fact, anyone who truly believes in the NDIS should support this, because a strong NDIS is not one that ignores abuse; a strong NDIS is one that confronts the abuse, the waste and the fraud. A fair NDIS is not one that allows honest families and honest participants to be pushed aside while dishonest people cash in; a fair NDIS is one that makes sure the support goes where it's meant to go. A sustainable NDIS is not one that turns a blind eye to waste and hopes for the best; a sustainable NDIS is one that protects every dollar it can for the people who genuinely need the help.

That is the principle at stake here. Families caring for people with severe and permanent disability need confidence that the scheme will be here tomorrow. They need confidence that the money is going to care, not rorts. They need the confidence that this parliament understands what is at stake, because, if these problems are not corrected, the pressure will only grow. Confidence will fall, budget pressure will continue to build, and the greatest risk is that Australians who rely on the NDIS will be the ones left exposed when the system begins to fail. We must avoid this.

We should not have to choose between compassion and accountability; we should insist on both. We should insist on a scheme that is generous but disciplined, supportive but accountable and strong but sustainable, and that is what this referral is about—protecting the NDIS, protecting the taxpayer, protecting families and carers, and protecting Australians with severe and permanent disability who genuinely need these supports. So let us investigate this properly, let us expose what is going wrong, let us identify whether safeguards are failing, let us strengthen the system, let us restore confidence, and let us make sure the NDIS remains there for the people it was designed to help.