On Thursday 22 August 2024, I made a speech in Federal Parliament about Labor's proposed cuts to the NDIS. You can watch the full speech here or read the transcript below.

Transcript:

Today is a very sad day for the disability community. They have been absolutely betrayed by the Labor government, a government that has broken its promise. The promise was that there would be no discussion about cutting the funds to the scheme. What passed the Senate today will see the most significant changes to the NDIS since it started more than a decade ago. This is a huge blow to the disability community, a proud community that deserves so much better from this government. So today I'm angry, I'm sad and I'm so disappointed that I will have to return to my constituents—people who I admire and who have come to me for help to navigate the already plagued system of the NDIS—and I'll have to tell them that this government has ripped billions of dollars of funding from a system that was supposed to support them.

We already know that the NDIS can't handle the current workload even with its current funding. It doesn't take a genius to realise that a $14.4 billion funding shortfall and an increase in workload for staff mean that people are going to fall through the cracks and suffer. It's so clear that this is a thinly veiled attempt to remove support for people or kick them off the NDIS altogether. They're going to restrict support, remove provisions for individualising plans and try to standardise assessments—mandatory assessments that this government is trying to make people, who will likely have had their funds cut, pay for themselves.
Disability is not standardised, and it should never be treated as such. We've already seen the fallout of this sort of attempt at categorisation in menstrual products being wrongly classified. The minister apologised for this mistake only after advocates brought it to the attention of the media. That's fundamentally the problem with the sorts of lists that they're proposing in this bill. They just shouldn't exist. They attempt to categorise complex human needs into bureaucratic tick boxes, ignoring people's needs, their experiences and their choices.

Many people on the NDIS have shared with me already the feeling that the government doesn't care about them, and this rubs salt into those wounds. Labor has sent a very clear message to disabled people. They don't care about your goals, your aspirations or your agency. The Albanese government boasts a $9 billion surplus, but, to be crystal clear, that surplus is off the back of the NDIS, off the back of every single person that has needed to access this support. The government should be ashamed.