Senator GALLAGHER (Australian Capital Territory—Manager of Opposition Business in the Senate) (15:01): I move: That the Senate take note of the answers given by the Minister for Families and Social Services (Senator Ruston) to questions without notice asked by Senators Brown and Gallagher today relating to the National Disability Insurance Scheme. What a question time we just had. We had the Leader of the Government in the Senate nursing his ministers through question time, providing them with suggested responses to questions from Labor senators. We asked some very straightforward questions to both Senator Ruston and Senator Colbeck. In terms of the questions to Senator Ruston, it was to try to elicit information about the waiting list, the demand for services that people in the community are experiencing or the wait for those services through the enrolment or lack of enrolment through the NDIS system. The reason we're asking these questions is that, for any person who's elected in this parliament, right across the country, if they have a range of top constituent issues that come through their door, there are complaints about the NDIS. Of course, Labor built the NDIS. We support the NDIS. We believe it is the right framework to provide services to people with a disability. It will empower people with a disability to make decisions about their own care requirements and will give independence to them and their families that hasn't always been available before. We support the extra investment in the provision of it. But we don't support a government that's botching the rollout, that leaves people under-resourced through their packages or that makes it very difficult to get packages approved, with people enduring long waits for either equipment or services. That is the issue we have. We know from the budget paper that there have been significant underspends in this program. Those significant underspends are propping up the government's bottom line. There is no doubt about it. You can't have underspends totalling $6 billion over two fiscal years—and we'll wait for the update tomorrow—and pretend that that is not helping you when you're trying to deliver a budget surplus. Absolutely it is. It is a big program with big underspends and a lot of unhappiness in the community about it. Those are the questions we're asking, and what did we get? We got non-answers. I have to say this is becoming a feature of this government's attitude to question time. The response from us is that we will have to take points of order because our questions aren't being answered. We are experiencing non-answer time. It looks like every minister either isn't across their brief or has been given specific instructions not to answer any question they may get asked. Questions may, if we're lucky, get taken on notice. I've rarely seen one of those come back through. But these details that we asked about today should be known to ministers and those representing other ministers in this place. What is the waiting list? How long have people waited for care? What is the current wait time for the NDIS package? How many people with disability and their families are going without vital services because of the government's delayed rollout? Can the minister confirm that people are receiving just 50 per cent of the approved value of their first NDIS plan? All are quite simple questions that deserve an answer, and they deserve an answer because people are coming to our offices and complaining about the difficulty they have in accessing NDIS services or in getting the care that they need. We can go through a number of examples where people have reached out to Labor offices to talk about the difficulty they've had in getting a response from the NDIA. We're not going to blame this all on the NDIA. They have been unfairly restricted by the staffing cap that this government has imposed on them. They can't employ the staff they need to deliver the services that people are demanding. That's one way to control demand. We heard from the minister that it's a demand driven system. It's actually hard to deliver that when you don't have the people in the jobs to approve the packages and support the people to transition to the NDIS. That is a conscious decision of this government. They are the ones who could overturn that and ensure that the NDIA is properly resourced with the skills and capabilities that are required for the long term instead of relying on contractors to come in and deal with a crisis. That would allow more people to get through and for those people to have the support they need through their own packages and to make their decisions—delivering the vision that was always intended for the NDIS. Unfortunately, this government has taken a different approach. It's constraining demand and it is, at the same time, propping up its budget. We will see tomorrow just how much of their final budget outcome is propped up off the back of people with disability not receiving care.