The death of a Tasmanian man forced to wait months for a bed through the National Disability Insurance Scheme has prompted a powerful demand for emergency action.
Greens senator Jordon Steele-John grilled senior officials about Tim Rubenach's death during a Senate estimates hearing on Friday.
The 31-year-old died from pneumonia just over a week ago. He contracted bacterial meningitis as a baby and suffered from severe epilepsy.
"A man is dead, a family is grieving the loss of a son," Senator Steele-John put to the heads of the National Disability Insurance Agency.
The senator said Mr Rubenach's family endured a prolonged crisis - not just around delays in delivering vital medical equipment, but in the lack of support worker hours allocated to him through the NDIS.
"You could not have written a more obvious cry for help if they had written 'help me' in the letters they have sent us, and the letters they have sent the NDIA, and the letters they have sent the minister," he said.
Senator Steele-John, who uses a wheelchair and is a vocal advocate for disability rights, was not satisfied with apologies from the heads of the agency including its chief executive Robert De Luca.
"I would imagine - not wanting to speak on their behalf, and speaking very frankly - that they would not give a s*** whether anybody in this room is particularly sorry about the death of their son," he said.
"They would want to know that the agency owns the failure that is represented in the death of their son, as does the government who currently presides over it."
He described Mr Rubenach's death as a failure of the federal government and the disability scheme.
"What I would like to hear from you, Mr De Luca, is that you acknowledge not only that you are sorry but there are multiple elements of failure here that you are proactively looking into rectifying," the senator said.
"I do not want to be sitting here in three and six and 12 months time, talking about another death, and another death, and another death, because we just couldn't get a hospital bed to a man in time."
Senator Steele-John said it was not good enough the local hospital had to lend Mr Rubenach a bed after months of delays.
Social Services secretary Kathryn Campbell described the death as sad and tragic, but said the department was not in a position to attribute blame for the death totally to the NDIA.
Mr De Luca accepted there had been failures in handling Mr Rubenach's case.
"All I can say is the actions that we're taking to address the things that we can control we're taking," he said.
"We need to make significant progress in the ability to actually streamline processes so situations where people need things urgently get what they need urgently. You have my complete commitment to that."
