House of Representatives | 27 May 2026
Mr WALLACE (Fisher) (12:07): I rise to speak on the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026, a very important bill for the future of our country and a very important bill amending a landmark piece of legislation that, yes, came out of the Gillard government. But I think it’s fair to say that it has lost its way over the last 13 years. I want to acknowledge the speech that I heard just then from the member for Mallee and the speech that was given by the member for Herbert on his very personal position on this and his personal reflections. It’s one thing to get up and read from your party’s talking points. It’s another thing to actually have a firsthand experience of what the NDIS means to one’s own family.
Like the member for Herbert, I have a child who is on the NDIS—my youngest daughter, Sarah, who’s now 23. We were told that she wouldn’t survive my wife’s pregnancy and, if she survived the pregnancy, she wouldn’t survive the birth. Twenty-three years later, she’s still with us. She just picked up her assistance dog yesterday, so she’s a happy camper. But for the NDIS, I know Sarah’s life would be very, very different. When Sarah was growing up, when she was a young kid, I was invited to go onto the board and become the President of the Sunshine Coast Children’s Therapy Centre, which she used to attend as a young child. The member for Herbert, in his speech, picked up on the importance of early access and early intervention, and he’s absolutely right. The earlier we can get on and help people, the better.
Sarah’s physical disabilities were obviously picked up way before she was born, but they didn’t actually pick up that Sarah had autism until she was 16, because—as you know as a famous paediatrician, Mr Deputy Speaker—girls are able to mask their autism so much better than boys. They do a lot a lot of things that are better than boys, but one of them is being able to mask those things. We do to be able to get in and pick up autism more quickly, particularly with young girls. Whilst, in my own case—in Sarah’s case—we were able to get all of the physical supports around Sarah with her physical disabilities, we weren’t really able to throw much support around her from an autism perspective until she was about 16. That creates problems in itself.
Having been in the parliament for 10 years, I can tell you that, certainly, since this government has been in power, the NDIS is the No. 1 issue of complaints that I receive from constituents. I receive them from mums and dads, I receive them from participants themselves, I receive them from the service providers, and I receive them from people who are alerting me to fraud. There are lots of problems with the NDIS, and it seems to me, not just having been the federal member but also having been a dad and someone who has worked in this sector as a volunteer, that a lot of the money that is paid out under the NDIS goes to people who are less deserving and not a lot of money goes to the people who really need it most. That is a cause of great concern to me.
We have some fundamental, systemic problems with the system that provide funding to people who don’t need a lot of support. I was listening to the member for Herbert talking about a friend of his who has to demonstrate that he hasn’t grown a leg back every 12 months. I mean, come on. This is not rocket science. How much does that cost the system? When the NDIS was first dreamt up, when it was first envisaged, we as a nation and we as a parliament thought, at maturity, there would be 400,000 people on the scheme. There are now 760,000 people on the scheme.
We spend as much money today on the NDIS as we do on the defence of this nation—$50 billion a year. That’s on 760,000 people. We spend more money on the NDIS than we do on 27 million people for Medicare and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme combined. If anybody can tell me how that is a system that is working well, I’m all ears.
I’m loath to give a political speech on this issue because this is an issue that really transcends politics. I’ve been listening to some of the contributions made by those opposite, and, if you listen to them, all of the problems with the NDIS started in 2013, and all of the problems were on the path to being resolved in 2022.
Mr Thompson: It’s like the Great Barrier Reef.
Mr WALLACE: It’s like the Great Barrier Reef! This is a scheme that was designed by the Labor Party, and we supported it because we understand the importance of looking after our vulnerable. That’s the difference in Australia. I think, generally speaking, Australia does it pretty well. We’re not the European model of ridiculously high taxes and superwelfare, although we’re certainly headed in that direction. We’re not the United States model, where if you get sick it’s virtually a death sentence unless you’re very wealthy. Generally speaking, Australia, over successive governments, has walked that path pretty well. We, on both sides of the House, believe in things like a universal healthcare system, Medicare. The coalition supports Medicare, despite what those opposite say. They roll out their ‘Mediscare’ campaigns at every election. They say that we don’t support the NDIS. It’s all rubbish, of course, and to my last breath I’ll support Medicare and the NDIS because I don’t want to see a country like Australia end up with a health system like that of the United States. I love the United States. It’s the land of the free and home of the brave—just don’t get sick there.
But we have walked a much more humanitarian pathway in this country. We acknowledge that, if you have a significant and permanent disability, you should get cared for through the NDIS, subject to some other restrictions. But we have moved beyond that. We’ve moved beyond ‘a significant and permanent disability’, and significant bracket creep has entered into the scheme. Even though it’s not capped, I am certainly hearing complaint after complaint from my constituents who are saying: ‘What I was getting I’m now not. My circumstances haven’t changed. It’s just that the government have decided that they are going to clamp down on everything and everybody.’
There is absolutely no case or tolerance for fraud. There is no tolerance for fraudsters. We know that the NDIS is being rorted by a lot of people—certainly not everybody. It’s a small number of people who are rorting the system, but they are making it difficult for everybody else because what that means is that governments of either persuasion get political pressure and have to try and create a more bureaucratic system. That means service providers’ costs blow out.
For all of the complaints that I’m receiving about the rorts, I’ve got a lot of service providers in my electorate of Fisher who are actually telling me: ‘You know what? You can keep your NDIS, because I can’t make money out of it anymore. It is being locked down with such bureaucracy that I’d just rather not deal with it, because it’s costing too much money to be able to provide these services. So I’m out.’ In a city like Melbourne or Sydney or Brisbane, that might be okay because there’ll be other people that will pick up the slack. But, in rural and regional Australia, there are not the service providers that we need. If a service provider says, ‘This is too hard. You’re making it too difficult for me to be able to run a business, with all of the red tape and bureaucracy and everything I’ve got to do. I’m just going to go back and have a 100 per cent private practice,’ then those people who live in rural and regional Australia will not get the supports that they need and deserve—the same supports, in the same way, as if they were a child or a person with a disability who lives in the city. That’s the fine line that we’ve got to walk. We’ve got to ensure that we crack down on the shonks but, at the same time, that we don’t make it so damn difficult for the service providers that they just close up shop, go back to private practice and get rid of the NDIS. That would be a bad thing for people who need their services like physio, like speech pathology and like all the other many and varied services that people need.
Australians are doing it incredibly tough. We are in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis. I know what it was like pre NDIS. We were constantly putting our hands in our pockets for the myriad of specialists that my daughter needed. Back then, I was a barrister; I could afford it. But many, many families are not in that situation. The vast majority of Australian families were not and are not in that situation. That’s why we have to get this right.
On the current trajectory, the NDIS is expected to cost a hundred billion dollars a year within 10 years. If we don’t get this right, then, at some point, some future government is going to say: ‘That’s it. We can’t do this anymore. The NDIS is gone.’ That would be a disaster for families like the member for Herbert’s, mine and those of 760,000-odd Australians around the country. We’ve got to make this a better system, we’ve got to make it a fairer system and we’ve got to crack down on the shonks. Hopefully, this bill will do that, but we’ll keep a close eye on it from the opposition.
[ENDS]
Media Contact: Brendan West – 0402 556 646 – Brendan.west@aph.gov.au
