Thank you, acting Deputy President. When I was about 10 years old, I started using a manual wheelchair for the first time. The state run disability service system in Western Australia at that time gave you the option to choose between three wheelchairs. I tried them out. Tried them. None of them fit properly. All of them hurt. None of them had the right type of cushion. And none of them had side guards, simple bits of plastic so that the dog poop that you might run through or the MUD or the rain water wouldn’t get on your clothes, wouldn’t get on your skin. And because none of those chairs worked, because they lacked a cushion and those basic pieces of plastic, me and my family had to fight and fight and fight to get a wheelchair that actually worked. Because the wheelchair that worked, the cushion I needed, the guards I needed, weren’t on the government approved list for wheelchairs in WY. Now, eventually we got him. We got them because of a great team of allied health professionals. And I got them because of a mom that had spent 20 years as a social worker in the United Kingdom and had the scale to push back on the system. God, it was hard. And it was so stressful. And it was so degrading to sit in the office of the person who could approve these changes and have to justify why I need it. The wheelchair that worked for me, it made me feel terrible. At one point during the conversation, that government employee said to me, well, Jordan, if we give you a wheelchair that cost that much money, we won’t have enough money to put safety belts on buses for kids to go to special schools. And when I ask, please, can I have the pieces of plastic so that the dog poo doesn’t get on my clothes and go into my skin? I give me a precious soul.
The response was, well, the rules here say all we meant to do is fund you for a wheelchair in your hand. This was the reality of the state based systems before the NDIS. You had to fight against a government approved list. A list of. Yes. Or now you had to burn yourself into the ground to get anything. And there were only a couple of government approved providers that you could choose from.
It was a terrible, disconnected system that led people to be abused, that constrained us, harmed us, made life more difficult for us and for our families. And so we campaigned together, disabled people, our families, our allies, our organizations, the people that work with us, for a better way, for a nationally consistent system of supports that would enable you to get funding for the services that you need, for the equipment that you need, for the therapies that you need, for the support workers that you need to live a life with dignity and life with independence and purpose and aspiration that would provide you with individual supports based on your specific needs and empower you to have agency over how they were used, that would empower you to be able to decide who came into your home, who gave you a wash. That would enable you to live independently on your own, if that’s what you choose to do. That would enable you to build a network, a professionals around you that were paid properly for their time so that they could provide you with their expertise.
A scheme that would enable disabled people to live, our families to live, and the barriers in our society and community to be brought down. We campaign for our NDIS and a decade ago, we want it and we together spent that next decade fighting to protect it.
We knew all too well that the establishment of the NDIS did not mean that the barriers would vanish. It meant that we had established a foundation stone upon which to build I like for ourselves, hope for our communities and our families. And that we were now charged at disabled people with its dogged, undetermined defense. Because as disabled people, we know that government, if left to its own devices, makes choices about us without us. In every space, from whether there is a accessible entrance wave or public building, to whether we are forced to live together in institutions, to whether we get to live or exist at all. Government, if left alone, makes the choice about us without us, with catastrophic consequences.
And so we defended it again and again during all of those years of Liberal government, we defended it. And the labor government at the last election pledged itself to that course, to the defense of our NDIS promise that if they were elected that they would stop the cuts and they would end the awful culture that had taken root within the agency that treated disabled people and their family members as though we were trying to get something we weren’t really entitled to, that we were criminals. Try to get access.
So things we knew we shouldn’t have. And they promise more than anything else to make any change about our scheme in deep co design with disabled people, acknowledging that co design requires consent of the parties to the process of co design.
And so can you imagine the reaction of the Australian disability community and our families and our allies and our organizations when after two years of giving our time and our emotional labor in extending our trust to review after review to the disability Royal Commission, to endless numbers of task forces. Can you imagine our reaction to be landed in March of this year with a Bill that goes so far beyond anything that we had asked for, so far beyond anything the evidence supported as to almost make a dark joke out of the commitment to co design, out of every sentence that had to that moment dropped from the mouth of the minister.
Let me make very clear, this Bill removes choice and control from the NDIS. This Bill removes the ability to have individuals specific supports funded in our plan and replaces that ability, replaces those principles with a government mandated list of yes and no. A government mandated list of supports created by, wait for it, ministers of the crown of the state and federal governments, not a disabled person in sight among any of them. They get to choose under this Bill behind closed doors what they believe we as disabled people should be able to receive when none of them understand what it means to be a disabled person, when none of them have demonstrated in their careers actual understanding of what is needed from government to make the community more accessible and inclusive. And yet they will decide the federal government in this Bill is granted the ability to divide disabled people into classes and into groups. How are we in 2024 ask to consider a Bill that gives a government the power to divide 20% in the of the population into a class.
This Bill gives the government the ability to force upon us mandatory government assessments, regardless of how many we have already endured, regardless of how much trauma we may be of subjected to and regardless of whether as a First Nation’s person, you know well for those tools designed by white people, designed by academics in some far off place will not represent your needs, your support, your life, or your culture. These processes become mandatory. This assessment is exempt by this Bill from review. And the result of that assessment is then translated into a cap budget. How is it translated, you might ask? Well, by a method. That’s all the Bill says. What will be in that method? How will it translate a number of complex needs, assessments and personal contacts into a budget?
We have no idea. But trust us, says the federal government. Trust us that we’ll get it right. Trust us that will give you what you need. Give us all the power now. All the power to decide what you may be funded for and how you may be funded for it and who provides it and when it is provided, and we will do the rest. We promise that we’ll do it with you.
Even though the way in which we made this Bill was the literal definition of designing a piece of legislation behind closed doors. Trust us that we will consult. Trust us that we will make the right decisions for you.
Well, no. The disability community do not trust this government. The disability community have been profoundly betrayed by this government. That disability community do not accept this Bill. The disability community reject. They spell. And we do not accept that it is appropriate to ram a piece of legislation that affects the lives of 660,000 Australian citizens and their families and their friends and their organizations through this parliament with two and a half days of hearing when the amendments offered by the government to this point, a little more than lipstick on a pig. An insult to the intelligence of any disabled person, any lawyer, any advocate her raise them. We do not accept this.
Now, I asked you earlier to imagine what it was like to live as we lived before the NDIS. I asked you to imagine how far, how hard you would fight for something better. And I now ask you to imagine how hard you would fight to defend the scam, the supports, the services that you need to live a good life, that your child needs to live a good life. I ask you to imagine it. And if you fail, don’t worry. Because we are about to show you just how hard we fight, just how much we are willing to give. Adjust how many of us vote.