Pauline Hanson (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

The reforms in the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Integrity and Safeguarding) Bill 2025 are long overdue. The National Disability Insurance Scheme has been rife with fraud and corruption since it began. This is always what happens when the government creates a new scheme with a new pot of taxpayers' money. Governments always fail to put in place effective integrity standards and quality safeguards at the beginning. Criminals and grifters exploit the scheme, preying on the taxpayer, and the government only then realises safeguards are necessary. One Nation supports the NDIS to provide reasonable and necessary support for Australians with significant disability. We strongly believe most Australians support it too. However, that support will evaporate unless fraud and corruption are stopped. That support will disappear unless the scheme is returned to its original purpose. One Nation welcomes new requirements imposed on NDIS providers, although we believe these should have been in place from the start. This is a classic case of shutting the stable door long after the horse has bolted.

In this particular case, billions of taxpayers' dollars have gone down the drain without providing any help to any Australian with a disability. We'll never get any of it back. The coalition turned a blind eye to it for years. At least Labor has tried to implement reforms to make the NDIS less corrupt and more sustainable, and One Nation has supported these moves. We'll work with anyone, provided it's in Australia's best interests. However, One Nation understands that much more has to be done to ensure the survival of the NDIS.

I've been out and about in South Australia and the federal seat of Farrer these past couple of weeks. Members of the community have approached me with amazing stories about the NDIS. These stories reinforce the need to overhaul the entire scheme. One of these stories involves the NDIA wanting to give a family $80,000 from the NDIS, which they did not ask for and do not need, just because their son is on the autism spectrum. I am pleased the family saw this as a rort and declined. I've heard similar stories from others whilst also hearing that participants with significant or severe disabilities are not having their more urgent needs met. The NDIS was not originally intended for people with mild autism, but now more than $10 billion per year goes to participants with autism. There's now evidence that some parents go shopping for doctors and looking for an autism diagnosis for their children just to get onto the NDIS. This is plain and simple corruption, and it needs to stop if the NDIS is going to be sustainable.

We must further limit eligibility for the NDIS to Australians with significant disability. We must also limit eligibility of certain treatments and therapies. An obvious example is the NDIS payment for sex worker services, which remains illegal in some jurisdictions. Another big factor in the budget blow-out of the NDIS is pay rates. Specialists like psychiatrists and registered nurses are paid up to three times more under the NDIS than in any other health sector. Not only is this unsustainable and unjustified but it is causing a critical shortage of these specialists in other health sectors, like aged care, disability care, veteran care and overwhelmed public hospitals.

Unskilled workers under the NDIS are being paid obscene amounts of money to do things like fold laundry or drive participants to medical appointments. The basic rate on a working day in a major city is $67 per hour, rising to more than $200 per hour in regional areas and even more on weekends and public holidays. It's no wonder that a third of the new jobs created by the Albanese government are in the NDIS itself. It's no wonder that NDIS spending will reach $52 billion this financial year—almost as much as the entire Defence budget. These are the factors One Nation demands be addressed so the NDIS can survive on the continued goodwill of the Australian taxpayers to fund it.

To listen to Senator Mulholland, who spoke before me, say Labor are the ones calling for accountability and for fraud to stop—if that's the case, why didn't the government support my inquiry last week into fraud that's happening? No, they don't want to and they won't go far enough to shut down this fraud that's happening here. We're talking about 300,000 service providers out there. Only around about 20,000 are registered. People are joining the scam because it is an absolute scam, ripping off the taxpayer, which will cost the taxpayer an estimated $100 billion by 2032.