Bill Shorten has hit back at “online trolls” after he was confronted with claims that dodgy disability support providers offering sex work services have yet to be shut down.
It comes as Labor prepares to move a bill into Parliament on Wednesday to lay the foundations for sweeping changes to the National Disability Insurance Scheme.
Ahead of the Bill’s introduction, 2GB host Ben Fordham accused the minister of lagging on a crackdown on potentially fraudulent providers and said people who belong to the scheme were desperate to access it.
He raised reports of a disability provider reported to Mr Shorten’s office in December last year offering NDIS recipients visits to the strip club to be paid for by their disability plans.
“I’ve referred it to our investigators but I don’t know if they’ve shut them down or not but I certainly have acted,” Mr Shorten said.
“Do you want me to tell you?” 2GB host Ben Fordham replied.
“Yeah go on, surprise me,” Mr Shorten said.
The radio host said the business remained open and was advertising to take disability support recipients on pub crawls and to a cannabis festival in Byron Bay using scheme funds.
Mr Shorten conceded that laws to clean up the scheme should have been introduced a decade ago and vowed that the new legislation would pressure fraudulent providers to close their businesses.
He said more than $1bn worth of NDIS payments and 100 prosecutions and investigations into fraudulent uses of the scheme have been initiated since a criminal task force was established in November 2022.
“If you want to read my social media, the trolls and the people who say I only have bad things to say about service providers I want to be very clear – most people on the scheme are trying to do the right thing but there is a cohort of dodgy people trying to have lend of the scheme,” he said.
“What I’m going to do is make sure the money gets through to the people for whom the scheme is designed.
“(It) doesn’t make your criticisms wrong, but the one thing I will disagree with is this sort of view that somehow we’ve just been sitting back doing two bits of doing bugger all.”
The government’s first tranche of reforms marks the first official response to a landmark review in December that called to rehaul of NDIS eligibility to base it on individual needs assessment, rather than medical diagnosis.