Crass political horse trading aside, the millions dreaming of an NDIS should take heart

Gillard at NDIS rally

UNLIKE many of my friends -- and a couple of million Australians who are severely disabled or live with and care for someone who is -- I no longer wake each morning with an almost palpable sense of desperation and anxiety, praying for the introduction of the National Disability Insurance Scheme. But that's only because my disabled son died a year ago last week, aged 21.

So for now, until or unless my life is again affected by severe disability in some shape or form -- as anyone's can be, believe me -- the unedifying political game-playing and haggling over money in the lead-up to the establishment of one of the most fundamental social and economic reforms in Australian history is of no direct personal relevance to me.

But I still feel terrible for those other Australians for whom the introduction of an NDIS is as vital as it was for me and my son until the early hours of the morning he silently slipped away. To turn something as visionary, and as vital, as the NDIS into a political football -- into a crass, pathetic squabble over money between federal and state politicians -- seems almost obscene. Are we not better as a country, as a nation, than this? Apparently not.

Nonetheless, I cannot feel total despair. In fact, I feel quite uplifted about what has occurred in the relatively short time since a handful of humane and highly intelligent Australians began dreaming their seemingly impossible dreams of transforming, in one grand, Whitlamesque sweep, this country's ramshackle disability support system.

And I believe all those clinging on by their fingernails waiting for the NDIS should bear in mind the events of recent years, keep this week's circus in Canberra in perspective and take heart. Think about it. Four years ago, when a man called Bruce Bonyhady put together proposals for an NDIS for presentation at former prime minister Kevin Rudd's 2020 Big Ideas Summit, you could probably count on one hand the number of people who thought his efforts any more than a total waste of time.

As an issue on the national political radar, disability policy was nowhere. Australians with severe disabilities and their family carers were not only a tiny minority of voters, but invisible to the wider community.

Nobody whose life hasn't been touched by severe disability ever thinks it's anything that could happen to them. Nobody but a tiny minority of voters cared, conventional wisdom had it. Disability funding was a state-territory responsibility, and state-territory leaders had far more electorally popular things to spend money on than better services and supports for people with disabilities.

When Rudd appointed Bill Shorten to the exceedingly junior position of parliamentary secretary for disabilities in late 2007, it was universally interpreted as a slap-down to the ambitious MP and former union leader.

But here this week, just a few years on, were a Prime Minister and eight state-territory leaders, vying and jostling at a nationally televised, post-COAG media conference to demonstrate to the electorate which of them cared most about Australians with severe disabilities, which of them was most passionately committed to the introduction of an NDIS, and which of them had allocated as much money as possible. It would take a heart of stone, as they say, not to laugh out loud.

So, no, I did not believe this week's COAG brawl and political brinkmanship presaged the tragic unravelling of a grand vision, even before NSW and Victoria capitulated just two days later. What we witnessed was a standard bargaining process, eminently predictable in the Australian political context, between federal and state politicians, all keen to get the maximum political benefit from the introduction of an NDIS at the lowest cost to their own treasuries.

But make no mistake, they all do want the NDIS. And this means that sooner or later the bargaining and jostling will be resolved in some sort of compromise funding deal and the NDIS will continue to be rolled out, as is already beginning in Tasmania, South Australia and the ACT.

My one reservation is a fear that the Liberal-run states of Victoria, NSW, Queensland and Western Australia are -- or were -- not just holding out for a better financial deal but stalling for time in anticipation of the election of an Abbott government which, they may very possibly have been quietly assured, would ditch the concept of a uniform national scheme and go for a federated model, which the Productivity Commission considered to be a feasible, but an inferior, option. I suspect NSW Premier Barry O'Farrell may have been hinting at that when he complained about how much federal money was being spent on developing the infrastructure for a new national scheme.

And if that is what's going on, it becomes more urgent than ever that the Gillard government introduce legislation into federal parliament for the creation of the National Disability Insurance Agency, which will administer the NDIS, because the more firmly that is set in place the harder it will be for any future government to roll back. Expect, therefore, to see the necessary legislation introduced very, very soon.