COMMITTEES

Senator STEELE-JOHN (Western Australia) (15:47): I'll just make a few brief remarks on the report now before reserving to continue when the Senate reconvenes. I, first of all, want to thank every member of the committee for the diligence and dedication that we brought together in carrying out this report and this work. I want to thank the witnesses that took the time and energy to share their stories with us as a committee.

And I want to thank the secretarial staff, who did such a great job ensuring that we as a committee could undertake our work efficiently and very productively. Through the course of this inquiry I have had a lot of opportunity to reflect on the realities experienced by those who are the victims of big provider fraud within the NDIS and the experiences of those members of our Australian disability community, who, right now, bear the brunt of that criminal activity while also living under the weight of public discourse around this topic.

I'll save my more detailed comments around the report for when the Senate reconvenes, but I do want to put this very clearly on the record: disabled people and our families are the people who suffer the most when fraud is committed by big providers. We're the ones that lose the services. We're the ones that lose the supports.

There is, I think, no community more passionately committed to stamping out provider fraud from the NDIS than disabled people and our families, for this reason. It has been really heavy and hard for the community to have to bear the weight of that experience while also, from day to day, seeing commentary from the government that fed a narrative—and feeds it to this day—that it is disabled people who are primarily responsible for fraud within the NDIS.

I have to say quite bluntly to the government—who, when challenged on this, will talk about the fact that they don't often talk about individual participants in their discourse around this—that what we heard very clearly in the course of the inquiry was that the Fraud Fusion Taskforce does not measure fraud. They do not have a definition of fraud. When asked about the question of fraud, Mr Dardo said, 'We don't measure it.' Instead, what do they do?

Well, they measure something called 'integrity leakage'. Now, what is 'integrity leakage'? I've got to commend Senator Kovacic for one of the most forensic examinations of government spin I've seen in a while, because what we discovered as a committee is that 'integrity leakage' is a broad term for a number of different categories of reported activity—yes, some fraud, but also accidental inappropriate payment.

If somebody is required to submit two invoices and they click 'go' and only one invoice comes through, that is bounced back and recorded as 'integrity leakage'. So it includes accidents, mistakes, genuine fraud and 'sharp practice'. Now, what's 'sharp practice', folks? 'Sharp practice' is abuse. 'Sharp practice' is the governmental catch-all for financial exploitation and abusive practice, and that figure is lumped together and reported as integrity leakage.

That's where we get the number of eight to 10 per cent of the NDIS potentially being fraud that we see in the media. That's not fraud. That's 'integrity leakage', and I just think that is so disingenuous.

We've seen, over the course of the last couple of months, the minister and other members of the government talk about tackling fraud and the need to tackle fraud, and they've quoted this figure, knowing full well that the taskforce they set up has not told them, and has never, ever told them, that fraud within the NDIS is measured accurately by the work that they do and can be reflected accurately by that particular figure.

That's just been left out there, and that's wrong, because leaving that out there as a perception—being so loose with the language—has allowed a lot of people to draw conclusions about what is happening and who is responsible. What we heard was that the vast majority of fraud that does occur is committed by large providers and that the government's response to these instances of fraud is woeful.

In the time that the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission, the so-called cop on the beat, has been in existence, since it was set up, it's secured somewhere between 23 and 25 convictions for fraud. That's ridiculous. That makes a mockery of the idea that this government is genuinely committed to tackling fraud and to stamping out big-provider fraud in the NDIS.

That's nowhere near good enough. These people running these companies need to be held to account. I've got absolutely no time for bureaucratic nonsense that talks about how 'maybe we haven't got convictions, but we have put in place processes that have made it so much harder for these people to rip off the system and to rip off disabled people, so we've diverted fraud away.

We've stopped it happening so you wouldn't see it in the figures'. Nonsense! If you want to end fraud in organisations, you send a clear cultural message by putting the perpetrators in prison for a long time, and then you watch the culture change and you watch the fraudulent practice from these companies end.

That's how you do it. We need to strengthen these systems. We need to safeguard those who would report fraud by properly strengthening the whistleblower safeguards in the act.

More than anything, this government needs to stop pretending that the legislation—the NDIS bill that it's trying to get through this parliament—was created and is intended to ever tackle fraud, because that's nonsense too. When confronted with a basic question—how much money is this government intending to raise in their budget through these NDIS changes from fraudulent providers versus how much will they raise from cutting the basic and essential supports required by disabled people and their families?—what was their response?

Their response was: 'Senators, we intend to raise $40 billion over the next four years or thereabouts from our measures, and, of that amount, less than $5 billion comes from fraudulent providers. The rest is from people's basic plans and supports.' It's an absolute outrage, and we must scrap this bill. I seek leave, however, to continue my remarks.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.