E&OE TRANSCRIPT
SUBJECTS: NDIS amendment legislation delayed
SABRA LANE, HOST: The Federal Minister for the National Disability Scheme, Bill Shorten, has lashed out at Liberal and Greens Senators, claiming they're adding a billion dollars to the cost of the Scheme while some fly overseas for cocktails in Brazil when they should be doing their jobs in parliament. The reason for that outburst? The Greens and Liberals joined forces in Parliament yesterday to postpone a vote on the overhaul of the Scheme until at least August for more consultations. The government wants to save $14 billion during the next four years on the Scheme by curbing the number of new participants and redefining who is eligible. Bill Shorten joined me earlier.
LANE: Bill Shorten, thanks for joining AM.
BILL SHORTEN, MINISTER FOR THE NDIS, AND GOVERNMENT SERVICES: My pleasure.
LANE: The Opposition's described your reaction as a tantrum.
SHORTEN: The Opposition is so out of touch with cost of living issues and the value of taxpayer money and how to fix the NDIS. I'm horrified. After twelve months of reviewing the NDIS and then another six months of discussing the Review, including the last three, a Senate committee having public hearings calling for submissions, the Opposition has used words never ever said before by them. But they want to have another eight weeks on top of twelve weeks so they can do co-design. It’s remarkable.
LANE: Let's talk about this. The bill was designed with some input from the disability community who had to sign non disclosure agreements. The group People With a Disability Australia says this bill should not pass, that it ultimately redefined finds who is and isn't eligible for support with no chances of a review ever. That sounds unfair.
SHORTEN: Well that’s just rubbish. The delay - what I've said about is not that there hasn't been consultation. We had a twelve month review with 10,000 people. I've done nine public meetings with another 5,000 different people. All around Australia, the Senate committee has had three months and public hearings. The Opposition, by delaying this bill another eight weeks is going to cost the NDIS $1 billion. There's going to be two more public hearings that the Opposition want. So, they're half a billion dollars each for these hearings. The people opposing the bill aren't going to change their mind in the next eight weeks. And for the record, there are full review procedures for any decision that the NDIS makes contained in the bill. The critic that you raised hasn't acknowledged that since then we've made it crystal clear there are review procedures as there always were.
LANE: You talk about the thorough review that was done of this Scheme. It was - the findings were handed down last year. But isn't the problem, Minister, that the government hasn't released its full responses to all of the recommendations and some of the sector say that the bill, what's in the bill, some of it, goes against the recommendations of the review?
SHORTEN: Well, first of all, it doesn't go against the recommendations of the review.
LANE: That point’s right, though we don't know the Government's full response?
SHORTEN: I'm sorry, if you'd let me finish. No, we know some of our responses because the bill represents that there's some stuff which we have to keep talking to people about. The truth of the matter is, the NDIS is changing hundreds of thousands of people's lives for the better. There's no bigger fan of it in Australia than me, but it is growing at nearly 20% per annum. And if we don't put some brakes on the rapid rate of growth, the Scheme won't be there for future generations. People - the Opposition are acting as if we've got all the time in the world. For two years, we've been working out what to do with the Scheme. A lot of people with disability, not just the source that you're quoting, are saying, hey, can you just get on with it? We want to know where we're going and how we're doing it. There's no good reason on God's green earth to have another eight weeks of review, which isn't actually eight weeks. There won't be a whole lot of new submissions coming. There won't be some brand new arguments not considered. The truth of the matter is that this is going to cost a billion dollars to taxpayers, about [sic] $15 million a day [$24.4million per day]. And when they say they want - when the Liberals are disingenuously saying they want more time for consultation, they haven't come to any of our public meetings, they haven't made submissions into the Review. They've already had one Senate investigation where they said the bill could be passed and they didn't offer any amendments. This is not about some ticking issue where the next eight weeks is going to change anything. It's just a lazy delay where for two days of public hearings to tell us nothing that we don't already know, taxpayers and the NDIS are going to be $1.1 billion dollars worse off. This is horrific and obscene.
LANE: Linda Reynolds, a former Minister of the NDIS, says this is the worst piece of legislation she's seen in ten years in the Senate. The government planned on making $14 billion in savings to the NDIS announced in the budget, with little detail on exactly how that would happen. You've talked a lot about crooks and people skimming wrongly off the top, but there are genuine, widespread concerns in the community about the changes.
SHORTEN: Okay, let's go and unpack those three or four points.
LANE: Well, there are genuine concerns in the community and you're just saying that people have had time to talk about this. But as I pointed out at the start of this interview, some people had to sign non disclosure agreements so that they can't talk.
SHORTEN: Whoa, whoa, whoa. Sorry, that's not right. There's five points there, so I'll be as brief as I can to deal with each of them. First of all, you talk about non disclosure agreements. Oh, my goodness. That was before the legislation was put into the house. That doesn't apply now. So, what we did is do another layer of consultation where we wanted to be able to talk to people before the bill even came to Parliament, which is what we did. But that doesn't apply now. So, that argument doesn't hold. Linda Reynolds is very bitter about the fact that when she was a Minister, she couldn't fix anything in the NDIS. And now that this is some sort of - I mean, I don't want to go personal, but when she says it's the worst legislation in 10 years, I think she's giving her own stuff a leave pass. And it's not the worst legislation. The third thing is that, yes, there are some people who are concerned. I have said publicly on so many occasions and in so many consultations with thousands of people, I understand that whenever there's any talk about change with the NDIS, some people don't hear the words change or reform. They just worry they're going to lose something. People are not going to lose. There's been a lot of misinformation. And finally, the implication that there's widespread disagreement about doing stuff. There are some people who don't want any change at all, ever. That's the entitled to have their position. But I've got a responsibility to all those hundreds of thousands of people on the Scheme, the hundreds of thousands of people who work in the sector and their families and the people who love them, to make sure this Scheme is there for the future. And the reality is the people saying delay and vote no, they don't have a plan to rescue the Scheme and they're the ones who are going to scream the loudest if this Scheme goes belly up, because people just gave up on the programme of trying to restrain the growth rate.
LANE: Minister, thanks for talking to AM.
SHORTEN: Super, bye.
LANE: That's Bill Shorten, the Minister for the NDIS.