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ANOTHER BROKEN NDIS PROMISE
THE HON MICHAEL SUKKAR MP
Shadow Minister for Social Services
Shadow Minister for NDIS
Shadow Minister for Housing
Shadow Minister for Homelessness
MEDIA RELEASE
Thursday, 3 November 2022
ANOTHER BROKEN NDIS PROMISE
NDIS Minister Bill Shorten has once again broken faith with NDIS participants and their families with his latest comments on the current funding sustainability of the NDIS.
Bill Shorten went to the election promising that no plans would go backwards under his watch and that the Scheme was sustainable as it is. Now he claims the Scheme is ‘growing in its cost base too quickly’.
In the lead up to the May election he even tried to argue the former Coalition government made cuts to the NDIS, even though the Coalition government rescued the NDIS by investing a record $157.8 billion over four years to support more than 550,000 Australians living with disability.
In an interview in September, Bill Shorten was asked whether he thought the Scheme was sustainable – to which he said, ‘I don’t buy that there’s some catastrophic disaster happening in the NDIS’.
Earlier in the year he also said, ‘You can’t move around the corridors of Parliament in Canberra without tripping over a Coalition minister whispering the Scheme is unsustainable… I’m here to tell you today that is a lie’.
He now not only questions the sustainability of the NDIS but blames young people with autism and those with psychosocial conditions for these cost pressures.
NDIS participants and their families need honesty from this Minister, not just to be used as props for cheap headlines and photo opportunities.
In opposition, Bill Shorten raised the hopes of the disability sector and NDIS participants and now he’s seemingly been mugged by the reality of a complex and growing Scheme.
The NDIS is helping more Australians than ever and is only at risk from mismanagement and incompetence that we are already seeing under Labor.
NDIS participants and their families deserve to have confidence in the Scheme, a first step would be a Minister that lives up to his pre-election promises, not one who’s sneakily trying to break them now in Government.