E&OE TRANSCRIPT
DOORSTOP
CANBERRA
THURSDAY, 4 APRIL 2019

SUBJECTS: The National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS)
 
LINDA BURNEY, SHADOW MINISTER FOR FAMILIES AND SOCIAL SERVICES: Thank you for all coming to look at this particularly serious and odious issue today. I’ve got Jim Chalmers with me who will make some comments as well. There have been cuts to schools, cuts to hospitals and a massive underspend in terms of the NDIS. The people with disability and their families have been shortchanged by this Government. $1.6 billion of the surplus – a quarter of the surplus is actually based on people with disability. It is taking funds. It is taking resources. It’s taking hope from people with disability. Scott Morrison even this morning could not admit there was a problem with the NDIS. I have travelled the length and breadth of this country. I have met people and their families with disability. I’ve seen the distress. I’ve heard the stories. And I can assure you there are massive problems with this program. The ghost of the 2014 budget is still hanging over the NDIS. You have an arbitrary staffing cap on the NDIA, which is the organisation which runs the NDIS, that cannot possibly do their jobs. Planning for people with disability is taking months and months. Minister Fletcher himself admitted this morning it was a three month waiting time for a plan. But we know from talking to people it is six to 12 months for some people. To get a review is just as long. We are seeing families who are desperate to get through the bureaucracy and the red tape, finding it absolutely impossible and giving up. We’re also seeing that this has gone from an insurance scheme to a welfare program. We want to make it back into an insurance scheme. People with disability should not be made to prop up the budget of the Morrison Government in terms of a surplus. It is just immoral. And the final thing I want to say before handing over to Jim Chalmers, is this: is that I met a family in Melbourne with a little boy who was three years old. He could not sit up. He could not swallow. And he could not qualify for the NDIS. That is not acceptable. And those families out there are desperate. This Government, using the NDIS planned underspend, planned short changing of these people is absolutely immoral.
 
JIM CHALMERS, SHADOW MINISTER FOR FINANCE: Thanks very much, Linda. Our message to Scott Morrison is stop making Australians with a disability wait for the services that they were promised. Stop using your attacks on the NDIS to prop up your surplus.
 
On Tuesday night, we had a Budget which was like all of the other Budgets for the last six years - cuts to hospitals and schools and TAFEs and now fresh attacks on the NDIS. 
 
Bill Shorten tonight will be offering different choices for Australia - a plan for our hospitals and schools, a plan to give working and middle class Australians the same or better tax cut, and a vision for the future of this country. Labor is steady and stable and united and experienced and we work as a team. We are ready to govern. We are ready to deliver the fair go for Australia, and Bill will be talking about that tonight as well.