National Disability Insurance Scheme

The Hon. A. PICCOLO (Light) (15:21): By ensuring that people with a disability and their carers receive full access to the support they need, the National Disability Insurance Scheme is dedicated to the vision of a community that values people living with disability. The NDIS was launched in July 2013, following years of discussion about the need for a major reform of disability services in Australia. It is a major and highly complex reform to the way in which disability support is funded, accessed and provided. It is jointly governed and funded by the commonwealth and participating state and territory governments.

The main component of the NDIS is individualised long-term funding to provide support for people under the age of 65 (and then until they enter aged care) with a permanent and significant disability or who are eligible for early intervention support. Participants will meet with the NDIS agency to identify a set of supports agreed as reasonable and necessary to meet their goals. Participants will be provided with funding for these supports and will have choice over how their needs are to be met, including a choice of provider.

When the NDIS is fully implemented, it is expected that around 460,000 Australians will receive support under this component of the scheme. The NDIS also has a broader role in providing information, coordination, referral and funding to assist people with disability, including those not eligible to participate in the main component of the scheme.

An important challenge to be faced in building the NDIS is whether disability service providers will have the capacity to meet the increased demand for support, and I will come to that point a bit later as it is very important. The question to be asked is: will small providers be able to adapt or will the scheme be dominated by large providers? Will there be enough disability care workers to provide support? Again, this is another important issue.

Another challenge would be containing the cost of the scheme. Potential cost pressures over time may include higher than expected demand for support, expectations of NDIS participants about the level of funding that will be made available to them and the costs for providing services. The question now is: how does the federal government intend to deal with this? The answer is quite clear. It intends to cut the benefits to other welfare recipients. Playing one group off against another group in our community, when they are both very deserving of our support and are people in need and vulnerable, is both disgraceful and grossly unjust.

The Disabled People's Organisations Australia is both alarmed and concerned that the federal government is linking budget cuts in the omnibus bill now before the Senate with funding for the National Disability Insurance Scheme. In other words, if you want a National Disability Insurance Scheme, other people in the community who are the most vulnerable have to accept cuts. To quote Therese Sands, the Director of DPO Australia:

We are shocked and troubled about this announcement from Treasurer Scott Morrison that once again links cuts to social security with funding for the NDIS.

She goes on to say:

We have campaigned over the last year against the creation of an NDIS Special Savings Fund because of our fear that it would be used in exactly this way, creating an expectation that the NDIS will be funded from ongoing trade-offs against other equally important human services expenditures.

She says further:

The NDIS provides essential ongoing support for many people with disability in Australia. These same people with disability will also be hurt by the proposed cuts to income support, childcare and family payments. These cuts are counterproductive to the aims of the NDIS, and it is simply unacceptable that funding for the NDIS should be linked to measures that will see so many other people in our community worse off.

The Government must stop this kind of politicisation of the NDIS and restore certainty to people with disability across Australia by taking the funding out of the budget cycle…

This certainty is very important, and I will come back to that in a second:

Trading off essential and vital disability support with cuts is a false economy that will hurt many people with disability and is simply not on, completely unfair, and goes no way to ensure the long term sustainability of the [scheme]…

She goes on to say that the scheme should not be a 'political football'. This uncertainty is unfortunately very unhelpful when trying to attract the required investment into this sector to make sure we have a very viable and sustainable sector in the long term to support people with disability. It is undermining the people's willingness to invest in the area, and it is also very economically unjust. One factor fuelling resentment in our society is economic injustice in our communities, and the cuts to this sector just add to that.