David Pocock (ACT, Independent) | Hansard source

The NDIS has transformed so many lives. It's brought people out of their homes and into society. As the minister said earlier, the NDIS is one of Australia's greatest human rights achievements. The government has brought forward a bill that has deeply distressed the disability community. Over 100 people with disability, their families, their carers and their clinicians attended a community town hall I hosted last month. I heard overwhelmingly that people support reform. People want reform. We all share in the benefits of an NDIS that is sustainable, that is well governed, that is protecting against fraud and exploitation, and that gives people with disability autonomy in their own life and equality of opportunity. Ask anyone on the NDIS whether they think that the NDIS could be reformed and could save money and they will likely tell you yes. This came up time and time again at the town hall I hosted, where people said, 'If you want to see savings, I can show you where you can make savings.'

What the Senate has in front of us is a bill that represents the largest change to NDIS since it was introduced. These are difficult reforms. As Senator Kovacic said a little earlier, people are genuinely afraid. The minister is right to say that the sustainability of the scheme is necessary to ensure that it can be available in the future, to ensure that it does maintain its social licence and that significant work is needed to rebuild structures outside of the NDIS for people with disabilities such as in our health system, which is rapidly becoming unaffordable for many people in communities we represent. The minister is also right in saying that we need to deal with fraud. That is a matter we should treat very seriously. Each dollar defrauded is preventing someone with a disability from obtaining the services they need.

This discussion paper is about the very serious cuts to social and community participation that the government is putting forward. The bill gives unprecedented power to the minister to cut everyone's personal, social and community participation benefits by up to 99 per cent, and they can start doing that the day after the bill is passed with almost no safeguards. It's actually not limited to social and community participation. It gives the ministers the power to cut people's funding for activities of daily living—that is, the funding that helps people to have a shower, to prepare meals, to literally live and breathe. Now the government has said that they don't intend to cut activities of daily living, so why do they want the power to do so? If you say that you're not going to do something, you don't need that power. Why give it not just yourselves but to any future minister?

It's important for us to consider the importance of social and community participation funding. This is funding that helps people leave the house, to go to work and to be part of the world, and that is what the NDIS was set up to do. It was never supposed to be a scheme to provide the bare minimum necessary to just keep people alive; it was a scheme that was supposed to allow people to be part of society, a society that we all here in this chamber enjoy. But, importantly—and this is critical—social and community participation stops isolation, which we know can be deadly. The royal commission told us that, when people with disability are isolated, they are vulnerable to abuse, to neglect and to exploitation.

I want to read out a part of the submission to this inquiry by Women With Disabilities Australia and the truly tragic case of Ann Marie Smith, a woman who lived with cerebral palsy in South Australia who died from criminal neglect. It said:

Ann Marie Smith's death shows why community participation is a safety issue. She had cerebral palsy, lived alone, received NDIS-funded care and had very limited contact outside one closed support relationship. Police said she had been left in the same chair day and night, was malnourished, in septic shock and died in circumstances described as "likely preventable". Isolation was identified as a central risk factor, with advocates stating that safeguarding requires "multiple eyes" and "multiple people" in a person's life. The Disability Royal Commission examined what had been learnt since her death and stated that individual cases must identify the "policy and regulatory issues" needed to give practical effect to Australia's human rights obligations. Reducing social, civic and community participation supports risks cutting away the regular contact, visibility and informal safeguards that help people be seen, known and able to report harm. For women with disability, who already experience higher rates of violence, these cuts risk deepening isolation and worsening conditions where violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation are hidden.

This is what we have to grapple with in this bill that the government has brought forward. Every single person who came to the inquiry told us, 'If you cut social and community participation budgets indiscriminately without ever considering someone's personal circumstances, you will leave people in unsafe situations.' It seems, from the committee process and what we've been able to get out of the government and the department, that the government has essentially sought to make savings and retrofitted some sort of policy around that, and, clearly, there wasn't an understanding of what a 50 per cent cut to social and community participation would mean for participants on the NDIS.

If you take, for example, people with Down syndrome, these cuts to social, civic and community participation will mean that many of them will lose their employment. It seems like the government and the department weren't actually aware that Australians with Down syndrome use a big chunk of that funding to get to work, to participate in society, to feel valued and to feel like they are contributing and like they're part of a team and something bigger than themselves. We were told at the Senate inquiry, 'This won't have an impact on employment for people with Down syndrome,' yet you talk to people with Down syndrome and you talk to Down Syndrome Australia and Down syndrome ACT, and they say: 'Of course it will. A big chunk of that bucket of money is used for the supports that enable people to get to work and to stay at work.'

Big reforms like this deserve considered scrutiny. I absolutely support calls for this inquiry to be extended. There is much for us to look at. We need to give people more time to provide feedback. Really critically, what became almost farcical through the Senate inquiry was that the timing of when states and territories presented their submissions. On the morning of the final day of hearings, they basically said, 'Listen, we have no idea what supports we're going to have to provide to who and when.'

How can the Senate be considering a bill when we're told, 'Don't worry, there will be alternative supports provided by states and territories'—most of whom have very serious budget issues; look no further than here in the ACT. We're meant to believe that somehow, even when the very states and territories that will provide these supports are saying, 'We don't even know what we're meant to be doing.' This requires far more scrutiny, and I urge the Senate to ensure that we're doing our job scrutinising this bill, looking at the intended and unintended consequences.

I really welcome this debate in the Senate. This will impact the lives of hundreds of thousands of Australians, and it is very right that we take the time to debate it and to push the government to allow more scrutiny. There's been a very worrying trend lately where we're seeing bills being rammed through this place with little scrutiny and the Senate not actually being able to do their job.