National Disability Insurance Scheme

Ms COOK (Hurtle Vale) (15:32): Today, I would like to talk about concerns raised with me through my office as the shadow minister for human services. My community, many people within it and also within the broader state, support, care for and advocate for and on behalf of people living with disability. Of course, it is not new that there are issues and that many challenges are being faced by people with disability. This is not new, and over the years we have seen many improvements being made to the lives of people with disability because of changes in policy and changes in how we do things.

This week, we are being faced with some really challenging information coming out of the Royal Commission into the Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability. Some of the things we have been seeing and hearing have been horrifying and really confronting. We have seen the move of funding from the state government to the NDIS, under the federal banner, and of course that has shown such promise. It can be brilliant and it can work for some people, but others do fall through the cracks.

There are significant underspends. I have spoken many times about the fact that, on average, around 60 to 65 per cent of our allocated $1.5 billion of NDIS funding is spent per year, which leaves an enormous gap, a gap which this government, under the Minister for Human Services in the other place, does not change, does not do anything about and really does not advocate strongly enough for.

There are some key areas where we have seen some issues arising in the last few years. A couple of years ago, I spoke in this place about some terrible concerns that had been raised in one of our largest providers, Minda. I called on the government then to invest in that provider and provide some support as they transitioned to the NDIS and were clearly struggling with some challenges around their workforce, and this was leading to some significant consequences. Only in the last couple of weeks, we have again seen allegations being made that there are shortfalls in staffing and some serious incidents happening as a result.

Minda is not the only place. There are a number of care concerns and gaps being highlighted to me. The minister has been advised of many of these and says that passing these concerns on to Quality and Safeguards is the only course of action they are taking at the moment. I think they need to invest more in the workforce, more in the culture and more into investigating these issues, and that has again come to light this week in the royal commission.

We heard the story of Mitchell. About three years ago, he and his family were the subject of actual threats to life and safety. There was an entirely inadequate investigation, which did not pinpoint the origin of these letters and certainly did not come out with any changes in the department that would resolve this. In fact, the Ombudsman stepped in purely because of a referral or a suggestion made in the Community Visitors Annual Report to get the Ombudsman to investigate this to see if they could come up with some kind of answers to the awful threats which had been made to this family and which had caused great distress.

We found out there was a letter to the minister and a letter to the Premier calling on them to provide some assistance. We know the Ombudsman made recommendations about this incident, requiring further investigation. After saying that it had investigated it fully before this, the department went away and again investigated it. Today, we hear from the royal commission that the response of the bureaucrat who was there was that it was totally inadequate.

This government has to do a lot more for people living with disability. We see many gaps in the system. We know that the Annie Smith case is still ongoing and it is horrific. We know that there is not enough safeguarding, and we know that a hands-on approach is not being used by this government. For hands-on problems, you cannot have a hands-off approach, and that is in fact what this government is doing.