“The treatment of people with impairment in Australia is a disgrace,” said Bill Shorten last year.

The then-Parliamentary Secretary for Disabilities and Children’s Services was speaking in Perth at a pre-arranged conference, during the election campaign. Putting aside the Labor powerbroker image with which he had become so strongly identified since that June, Shorten fired up on the treatment of Australians with disabilities.

“You know what I’m talking about. It’s the silent, aching struggle, ever-infused though by love, affecting these millions of lives which I’ve referred to, which fall beneath the radar of Australian public opinion. This is happening daily, quietly and inexorably. And it has been going on for too many years, to count or know; it is invisible, or at least so accepted and entrenched in our society that we fail to see that at it’s most fundamental it is an infringement of human rights and dignity.”

The speech is worth reading in full. It is very, very good, regardless of what anyone may think of Shorten. He calls people with disabilities “eternal exiles in our own country” and goes on to brutally dissect the problems disabled people and their carers currently face.

There is, alas, too little of Shorten’s anger in the Government’s response to the Productivity Commission’s report. The PC recommends providing appropriate services for people with disabilities based on their needs and not how they acquired their disability or where they live. Shorten himself, since promoted, will have a role in leading the reforms relating to catastrophic disability. But the Government’s response on a National Disability Insurance Scheme is to declare it will sit down and start considering the reforms with the states. The latter are already making noises about refusing to cooperate.

There is considerable efficiency to be gained from establishing a national, streamlined approach to providing services for people with disabilities. But that’s not really the point: this is about correcting an infringement of human rights and dignity that has persisted for too long. The Government seems intent on ensuring that reform will only take place over an extended period. That may be politically astute, but in doing so we will perpetuate what Shorten called a two-class society.

The time to end the exile for Australians with disabilities is now.