E&OE TRANSCRIPT
DOORSTOP INTERVIEW
MELBOURNE
WEDNESDAY 28 AUGUST 2024

SUBJECTS: NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission leadership, NDIS legislation; CFMEU protests; Greens political party

BILL SHORTEN, MINISTER FOR THE NDIS AND GOVERNMENT SERVICES: I have some absolutely fantastic news [for the] 661,000 participants on the National Disability Insurance Scheme and their families, and all the people who love them, and all the people who work in the national disability insurance sector. This morning, I'm pleased to make two announcements. The first announcement is that after a competitive process independently run by the Australian Public Service, I'm pleased to announce that Ms Louise Glanville will be the incoming commissioner for the National Disability Insurance Safeguards and Quality Commission. Ms Glanville is the most distinguished public servant. Amongst her various accomplishments and her very extensive curriculum vitae, she was the inaugural deputy CEO of the National Disability Insurance Agency, and more recently she's been the Chief Executive Officer of Victorian Legal Aid. In all of these roles, she's played a strong ethical leadership. She has displayed, of course, great empathy for people with disabilities but she's also been able to extend reform and change within the public service, with outcomes focused on better quality for the people that those agencies have worked for. I'm also pleased to announce the following propositions from within the Safeguards Commission, that Mr. Michael Phelan, the acting Safeguards Commissioner, has recommended, and I agree, the appointment of Miss Natalie Wade to be an Associate Commissioner for reform, for reform and for helping implement our new registration approach. Miss Natalie Wade is a formidable human rights lawyer. She has lived experience with disability. She's represented Australia on the international stage. Most recently, she has chaired a taskforce of eminent people to answer the question, how we can better register service providers in the NDIS system. So today, Australians who care about the NDIS, which is just about everybody, but Australians on the NDIS and their families now have the emergence of a new leadership team led by Commissioner Glanville, supported by Associate Commissioner Wade. Before I hand over to these two remarkable women to say a few words, I'd also like to acknowledge the outgoing Acting Commissioner, Mr. Michael Phelan, APM. Mr. Phelan was the former head of the Australian Crime and Intelligence Commission and a senior officer of the Australian Federal Police Force before then. At my special request he has been filling in as the Acting Commissioner for the Quality and Safeguards Commission. And in that time, he and I have been able to recapitalise the Commission and see a significant increase in the resources available to make sure that Australians with disability on the Scheme are both safe, but also experiencing quality services, which is what participants and taxpayers expect. I'd like now to ask Miss Glanville to address you and then Miss Wade.

LOUISE GLANVILLE, COMMISSIONER, NDIS QUALITY AND SAFEGUARDS COMMISSION: Thank you for that introduction. And I want to first start by saying how privileged I feel and how excited I am about accepting this role as the Commissioner for Quality and Safeguards with the NDIS. This is a very important Scheme in Australia. It is being looked at worldwide and I know first-hand how challenging it is to be part of something that's still very new and still working its way through. The beauty of the Commission's role, I think, is that it focuses not only on safeguards and looking at how people with disability can have the appropriate resources and protections around them, but it focuses on quality as well. And we all know that people with disability want to be able to have services that deliver for them in order for them to live ordinary lives every day. So that is a wonderful thing. And I think the balance there about ensuring that both quality and safeguards are firmly in view is something that the Commission will be very focused on going forward. I'm also delighted to be joining with Natalie. I know Natalie. I've known her for some time. She and I have both been comrades in law at different times, but it is wonderful to be able to have a person with a disability to work alongside, and to really think about how we deliver well for the citizens of this country. So, thank you very much for this opportunity.

NATALIE WADE, ASSOCIATE COMMISSIONER, NDIS QUALITY AND SAFEGUARDS COMMISSION: Good morning. Thank you, Minister, for those remarks. And thank you, Commissioner. I very much look forward to working closely with you. At the outset, I would like to acknowledge the distress and concern that has been expressed by the disability community sector as they grapple with the reform agenda, and I hope that today's announcement will bring some relief that there is a clear commitment by the Government and by the Commission to ensure that the reform agenda, ensuring quality and safe services for people with disability, it is centred on human rights. We will absolutely be led by people with disability and supported by Government. I hope that today is an important day for all people that are invested in the National Disability Insurance Scheme, as we move forward to ensure that the Scheme is not only sustainable but ensures the progressive realisation of the human rights of people with disability. To ensure, as Commissioner Glanville has said, that they are able to live ordinary lives and the lives they would like to live, that they can be properly supported by providers and sector to live those lives, and that the NDIS continues to be one of the most important social programs that we have within Australia. I very much look forward to working alongside Commissioner Glanville as we continue this work that has been carried forward by Commissioner Phelan to date, and I look forward to working with Governments, the disability community and disability sector to deliver on reform and registration for the NDIS. Thanks very much.

SHORTEN: That's great. That's fantastic. Are there any questions?

JOURNALIST: Just on this, I guess, what are some of the main issues that need to be fixed immediately that these two women are going to be able to assist with?

SHORTEN: Well, first of all, we want to make sure that participants are safe, and that's a key priority. We also want to make sure they're receiving quality services. I'll let Commissioner Glanville and Associate Commissioner Wade get some time into the job before we necessarily fill out their full program. But one clear priority, which the Government has stated, is that we want to make sure that people providing services in the NDIS are actually doing what they say they're doing and what they're being paid to do. Natalie Wade did a power of work about implementing the NDIS review, which was done in 2022/23, which recommended there should be greater registration in the system. We then asked Natalie and a team of people to look at how would we turn that principle into a sort of working proposition? And the report proposed three levels of registration, a sort of high and medium and a low, and some services probably didn't need to be registered for other very sensible and logical reasons. Getting that right is going to be important, making sure that the audit processes are right. I'd certainly be hopeful that the Commission will, whilst creating a system of registration, make sure that it's not unduly burdensome in red tape and costly, that maybe we could work off what other parts of Government are already doing. In addition, we've got to make sure that our complaints system is transparent and that if people have concerns that they feel heard, and we've got to make sure that we're not just a paper processing shop, so to speak, that our people are out and about. The Government in the last two budgets has doubled the size of the regulator, and what we've got to do is start working in better with the states. But I picked two of the smartest women in Australia to help us make sure that the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission fulfils its promise to people with disability. And I genuinely am very excited that from the 1st of October or thereabouts, we'll start to see further work building on the investment that's already been made by the Albanese Government.

JOURNALIST: How will you look to improve access to care in remote areas, such as remote areas out in places like the Northern Territory, where the access to care is so limited out there?

SHORTEN: Well, that's also the job of the National Disability Insurance Agency. We've already funded in the last two budgets what we call alternative commissioning. I apologise sometimes for the jargon of the NDIS, its words are meant to clear things up, but sometimes in the NDIS they tend to obfuscate, but what we mean by alternative commissioning is that at the core of the NDIS are individual personal budgets to provide reasonable and necessary supports, giving people choice and control. The reality is, if you live in Maningrida in the Northern Territory or in a remote part of the Kimberley, there's not a market in the same way there is in the cities. So, we are looking, and we've already now got pilots underway, we're looking at how we can – a person has a budget, I mean they are assessed as eligible within the Scheme, they get some supports. but how do we make sure they can actually utilise the budget? First Nations people, but not just First Nations people, have been disadvantaged and they get budgets, but because of the lack of services - so what we're looking at is, is there a way in which perhaps some of the services which are allocated to be paid for in a person's budget could be delivered by Aboriginal Controlled Health Organisation, or could they be delivered by a local council who’ve got an economy of scale and already have a footprint in the region.

We're also keen to see, through our alternative commissioning approach, locals trained up to be carers. The care economy is massive, when you look at it, between aged care veterans, the health sector and of course the NDIS. It's been one of the growth engines of the Australian economy. But it's important, rather than flying in people from the coast, that sometimes that we're training up people to work in their own communities. All of these, we've now got pilots and models underway to address this issue that you correctly identify as a shortage of services, which means a person may get a package, but they can't actually get to use it unless it's paying great and inefficient cost, a whole lot of fly in, fly out expense.

JOURNALIST: When will the NDIS Act be signed into law? And what's the Agency's plan to ensure all participants are across the changes?

SHORTEN: I can't give you the precise date, but this month or sorry, it’s still August, September. And we're optimistic that some of the transitional measures. Section 10, Section 33, again, these are clauses around what you can use your NDIS funds for, and being able to question better when large amounts of money are unexpectedly expended in a person's package. Some of that from the beginning of October, end of September. We've still got a tonne of consultation to do in the next few weeks though, about items which you can spend your money on. We're very grateful to the six (thousand) or 7000 submissions we've already received, as we're trying to clarify what you can use your resources for. So, there's still a lot of intense work going there. But, end of September, that's when we see things moving. And beginning of October, the other propositions, the Act is a big enabling Act so, what it says is, it gives the states and the Federal Government the authority to sit down with the disability sector, to sit down with participants and work out how we assess when you first come onto the Scheme, what your needs are, how we plan your budgets, we've been changing that. That's going to take 12 to 18 months to roll out because we do a lot of consultation. In other areas, we've got to work out new rules for how the Scheme will work. That's going to be done in conjunction with the states. I've got a Disability Reform Ministers Council meeting next Friday in Hobart. We hope to have more to announce by the end of the year in terms of timetable. We hope to be able to roll out all our responses to the NDIS review fairly soon. So, the way I would characterise what's happened in Parliament is it's great that the states and territories have come to the party. That's good news for people with disabilities because when you're an Australian with a disability, you're not a Victorian with a disability or a Commonwealth citizen with a disability, you're just a human being having a disability. So, some of the political football has decreased which is great. But we're also able to get the Coalition to agree to a lot of our changes, to agree to our changes, which is good. That should reassure Australians that both sides of politics actually want to see the politics come out of the NDIS and it just provides certainty for people. What happened in the last two weeks is the result of two and a half years work. It's not the beginning of the end, but as someone said, it's certainly the end of the beginning. And what we think is that we've now starting to write the next chapter of inclusion in Australia. The NDIS is a big chapter, but it's not the whole book. There are millions of Australians who live with a disability, who don't need full NDIS support, but do need some support, which hasn't always been there. What's exciting is that my colleague Amanda Rishworth and the states are working on what we call foundational services. So, what we want to do is make sure that it's not the NDIS or nothing. Now that takes a fair bit of work, a lot of work between the people with disability, states, and the federal Government. There’s just a lot of work going on. But certainly, if you like, some of the political, legal argy-bargy, that start point has reached a conclusion and now we can move to co-design. And of course, we've got a whole new leadership team at the Safeguards Commission, which I think is a very exciting development. And knowing people in the sector as I do, I think these appointments will be very well received.

JOURNALIST: What did you make of Max Chandler-Mather addressing a CFMEU rally yesterday?

SHORTEN: Oh, opportunistic. I haven't seen Max at too many picket lines in 30 years. Remember, that the Greens for you, they're more like a troupe of kabuki actors than a serious contributor to the political debate in this country. It's a free country. He can turn up whatever he wants, but the reality is that workplace relations, that's something which I've spent one way or the other, having been the Industrial Relations minister and a life member of a union, it's more than just a rally. It's making sure that people have the right to safe conditions and proper wages, and it's through collective negotiation with employers. The Greens turning up was just a bit of opportunistic theatre, you know, I suspect if you had a soap box, you'd probably get Max on at any corner street corner in Australia.

JOURNALIST: What did you make of the protests generally across the country yesterday, in support of the CFMEU?

SHORTEN: People feel very strongly, construction workers feel very strongly, they've got their right to protest. My observation, though, is that trade unions in Australia has been a big contributor to our middle class in this country. The fact that we have strong minimum wages, the fact that we have collective bargaining, it's a very good thing. But of course, with collective bargaining, in a pluralist society it's fundamental, comes a responsibility never to use one's industrial negotiating strength for purposes other than the members, other than safe jobs and better jobs.The reality is that there have been allegations raised too serious to ignore, that there is a pathology of infiltration of some organised criminal activity, and trade unionism can't afford that if it's to maintain the social licence in this country. But the construction sector still needs strong unions. It's a militant, tough area. Yes, they protested, that's their right. But the Government's motivated to make sure that the union movement not only has a past, but it also has a strong future and an honest future.

JOURNALIST: Are you worried that the CFMEU are considering campaigning against Labor at the next election?

SHORTEN: Well, again, that's people’s - it's a free country. You can do whatever you want. I would say to them, though, that if you're campaigning against Labor, the alternative is you get the Liberals, and if the CFMEU think the Liberal Party of Australia are born again card carrying CFMEU members, they would be horribly mistaken. What Labor's done since we got in is we've helped push up the minimum wage. We've made sure that they have better bargaining rights. We made sure that their members get tax cuts. Under the Liberal tax regime, it was only the top echelon, the top dogs that were going to get a tax cut. Courtesy of Labor, trade unionists, many of whom earn between $42 and $150,000, are now better off. It's a Labor Government who's provided Medicare working with the unions, which means that the sons and daughters of trade unionists can go and afford to see a doctor, or their parents can. So, sure, it's a free country, people are feeling pretty angry, some people are pretty riled up. But be careful of what you wish for. A Liberal Government is no friend of the working people of this country.

JOURNALIST: The Greens will today outline $500 billion in what they're calling an excessive profits tax on big business. Is there a scenario where you'd agree to have something like this to form Government after the election?

SHORTEN: Well, you’ve got to love the Greens, they’re consistent. Everything's for free, apparently. Except, of course, then they would tax everything else. And then you've got to pay more for everything else. I mean, the Greens are to common sense in economics what burning books is to literacy. You know, it's easy when you're on the sidelines of politics to just channel the voice of protest. We've got right wing extremists, and you get left wing extremists. And both groups have something in common. They can channel your sense of outrage, but for goodness sakes, don't expect them to actually solve your problems. A Labor Government is about solving and helping people with cost of living. Anyway, the Greens are - you know, they are the Sideshow Bobs of Australian politics. They get 10% of the vote. They've got a right to exist. I will say this final thing about the Greens political party, they shouldn't make the mistake that other extremists make of thinking that they are so pure, that their ideas are so morally righteous that everyone else is either an idiot or a fool, or a sellout. What the Greens, and indeed right-wing extremists need to understand is because Australians in the middle don't agree with them, doesn't make those people bad. And I worry that as politics sort of veers to the right and to the left, I'm sort of doing that for the cameras, that as it veers that way, that we polarize this country. So, Greens love to say how they're better and more pure and smarter than everyone else. Maybe they are. But what they should also countenance is that maybe the people who disagree with them have got a right to make a contribution too, and that what they instead do, and I've seen this with the NDIS reforms, I see them do it with people struggling to buy houses, I even see them deal with Jewish Australians. The Greens just make people anxious. Australia does best when we're somewhere in the middle, moving along but bringing people with us. The Greens don't want to bring everyone with them, they just want to tell everyone where to go.

JOURNALIST: Do you think it's important to have areas, people in the Greens, though, that do try to hold the Government to account when it comes to things like environmental issues across the country?

SHORTEN: If what you're saying is it's important to have ginger groups and fringe people trying to, you know, extend the agenda, and hold to account, I get that. But never confuse a ginger group with someone who can actually run something. And always remember that you've got to pay for what you promise. And, you know, for the Greens, it's a very simple proposition. They just say, oh, we'll tax these nameless people and everyone else will have a great life. I just - I live in the real world, where you've got to pay your mortgage, you've got to pay your bills, you've got to earn your money. Your employer has got to be able to make a buck so they can employ you. Anyway, I think you understand what I'm saying, but there's two types of parties in Australia. There's the parties who want to form a Government, that's Liberal, Labor. Yeah, and sometimes it's a bit boring what the mainstream parties have to say, because it involves just hard work and not big, amazing, sort of sexy, glamorous promises. But, you know, the reality is that if the Greens were ever in charge of, say, the NDIS, heaven help us. They think that you don't need to do any change. They have - out of the 30,000 pieces of correspondence, email and phone calls my office has personally received in the last two and a half years, I've had 53 from the Greens. I've actually only ever had 11 pieces of correspondence from Green MPs, compared to 11,160. So, the Greens make up 6% of the Parliament, but they can only be writing 1% of the letters on the NDIS. And when you look at the fact that we've had 30,000 matters raised with us directly in my office, and the Greens have only to the best of my record, made 53 of them, it means that when the camera is on them, they are an outrage factory, and when the cameras are off them, we don't see them. Even if you look, as I understand, MPs who raise issues with the National Disability Insurance Agency, their spokesperson ranked 17th in raising issues. So, the Greens are entitled to an opinion. People vote for them. I take that seriously; I will deal with all parties. But when you actually look at their work rate as opposed to their outrage rate, when you look into their substance rate as opposed to their volume rate, as I say, they're just more like a troupe of kabuki actors than people who I want to see in charge of Australia.

JOURNALIST: We've seen in the territory election that was just last weekend, a bit of a shift towards the Greens in some of these seats that were held by Labor for so long. Is this a concern federally that people are shifting towards that movement, rather than voting for the parties like the Libs or Labor like they generally would?

SHORTEN: I think the Greens are in the hunt for 1 seat out of 25. Look, good on them for winning it and I want to get every vote I can. I'm a politician who believes in getting every vote. You'll never hear me say, I don't want you to vote. I do. But yeah, I'd take the Greens seriously, and they represent about 10 to 12% of the votes. The Labor Party represents about 32.5%. You know, as I said, if you want to have an outrage party, let's get the Greens along. If you want to ever get something done, party, then invite Labor.

JOURNALIST: Just on NDIS, will new staff be brought on to help with communications efforts given in the past that the Agency has seen some participants communication formats that aren't accessible to them?

SHORTEN: Yeah, that's a great point. I know that the Agency as a whole, communications strategy and making communication accessible and easy to read for people with different disabilities, I know that's a complete priority for the Agency. By the way, since Labor's come in, we've put an extra 2000 staff on at the NDIA. It was horrendously understaffed, just as the Quality and Safeguards Commission was horrendously understaffed. So, we have prioritised putting people on. One good thing is we used to have a totally outsourced call centre dealing with a 1.7 or 2 million calls annually with the NDIA. We've managed to bring a lot of those call centre jobs in-house, and in fact, 40% of the new jobs have gone to people with disabilities.