Knox Class Action (Facilitation) Bill 2026
Mrs McINTOSH (Lindsay) (16:15): I rise to speak on the Knox Class Action (Facilitation) Bill 2026. The Knox settlement will compensate eligible group members either through fixed payments or by an individual assessment for a range of economic or non-economic loss types. The bill will amend the NDIS, social security and veterans' entitlements acts to exempt Knox settlements payments from the existing statutory recovery schemes and income testing provisions that ordinarily apply.
Under normal circumstances, compensation payments received by a person would be assessed against their entitlement to social security payments. This bill will amend the Social Security Act to exempt any payment made under the Knox settlement from being classified as income or a compensation payment to assess a person's entitlement to social security payments.
The same exemption will be applied under the Veterans' Entitlements Act to exempt these payments from being used for a person's entitlement to DVA payments. The bill will also exempt any settlement amount under the NDIS Act so as not to impact a person's NDIS plan for the funding of reasonable and necessary supports. I understand from discussions with the government that an additional bill will be introduced to the parliament by the end of the 2026-27 financial year to also exempt these payments from income tax provisions.
The government has requested that this bill pass the parliament quickly to ensure settlement payments can be made promptly and there is no impact to people's payments. The coalition will support quick passage of the bill. I wanted to take a moment, though, to highlight concerns with the Albanese government's approach to using similar automated assessment tools in aged care and now in the NDIS.
The Albanese Labor government has created an algorithm driven system used in aged-care assessments that deliberately removes the ability for trained assessors to override the decision even when it produces the wrong outcome. Older Australians and their families across the country are telling us they are being underassessed, receiving inadequate levels of support or being given the wrong priority.
This means that older Australians are going without the care that they have been assessed as needing or, worse, they are being assessed incorrectly altogether. This has led to people receiving lower support despite worsening conditions, fear among older Australians about requesting reassessments, and a surge of complaints and requests for a review. Despite the government's rhetoric, they have failed to adhere to the very lessons they preach—that there must be transparency, accountability and meaningful human oversight when using tools like this.
The government removed the ability for humans to override outcomes as part of a 2024-25 budget decision with no policy rationale apart from saving money on the budget bottom line. What makes this even more concerning is that the government cannot claim it didn't know there were problems. There have been months of warnings from aged-care clinicians, assessors, peak bodies, older Australians, carers, academics and state and territory health authorities.
In February, aged-care workers described the integrated assessment tool as cruel and inhumane, with one experienced assessor telling the Guardian he disagreed with the tool eight times out of 10 and that he ultimately left his job. By March, more than 800 people had already sought reviews of their assessments, while assessors remained unable to override the algorithm even when they believed the result was wrong.
One former member of the government's aged-care panel explicitly compared the system to robodebt. The warnings weren't confined to the sector. State and territory health officials were raising concerns about real people being harmed by the system, documents recently released show health staff were compiling lists of concerning cases within days of the tool being launched, including people who had been severely under-assessed and people experiencing delays in receiving appropriate care.
Western Australia's health director-general warned of potentially catastrophic outcomes without a discretionary pathway. And the warnings have continued. FOI documents have revealed that assessors were even warning some people with dementia against seeking reassessment, because they feared the algorithm could reduce their existing support despite the conditions worsening.
For all the prophesising from the Albanese Labor government about the mistakes of Robodebt, I fear they are repeating history. How many warnings does this government need? How many older Australians have to be underassessed?
How many families have to fight the system? How many clinicians have to say the outcome is wrong before the government accepts that the design is wrong? The ABC's investigation found that the integrated assessment tool contained more than 500 questions, yet experts found that much of the information collected does not actually feed into the algorithm.
A one-point difference at one point in the decision tree can mean a reduction of $40,000 a year in funding. A person's care needs cannot always be reduced to a neat mathematical formula. Frailty, dementia, carer exhaustion, living circumstances and the interaction between multiple conditions require clinical judgement.
The whole point of having trained assessors is that a human being can recognise when the computer has got it wrong. The Senate has already passed legislation to restore human oversight. The government could support that legislation and fix this problem now.
Perhaps the most concerning part is that the government appears determined to take the same philosophy into the NDIS. On 18 August, Minister Butler was asked why the government wouldn't simply cancel the aged-care algorithm given the hundreds of complaints and serious cases. His response was revealing.
He said that the government was doing 'exactly the same' in the NDIS as it moves to its new framework planning system, with the aim of greater 'equity and predictability' in the level of funding provided. So the question for Australians with disability is: what exactly has Labor learned from the aged-care algorithm? The coalition is not arguing that government should never use technology or data.
Technology can assist decision-making. It should not replace it. And yet, Labor appears determined to never learn this lesson, even when another generation of vulnerable Australians will pay the price.