Opinion
“Nothing less than a complete all-out assault to undermine the NDIS”. That’s how Bill Shorten, then shadow NDIS minister, described the Morrison government’s proposed NDIS reforms in 2021. The charge was, in part, that the Coalition was planning to kick people off the scheme by making them submit to independent assessments of their needs. The Morrison government denied that was the intention, but the campaign was devastatingly effective. Within a few months, it had abandoned those reforms. Less than a year later, the Morrison government ceased to exist.
We’ll never know what the consequences of the Morrison plan would have been. We can be fairly confident, however, it would have been dwarfed by what the Labor government did this week. Forget kicking people off the scheme by stealth: Labor just announced it will make a virtue of it. The headline figure says Labor will cut 160,000 people from the scheme by decade’s end. But that actually understates it, because many more will have applied and been added in the meantime. A better measure is that a scheme forecast to serve 900,000 people by then would instead serve 600,000. That’s lopping off a third of participants.
You could, if you wish, mount the argument that this is true to Labor’s fundamental vision for the scheme. Indeed, that’s more or less what Shorten, who pioneered the scheme and is now outside parliament, did this week, foreshadowing “new eligibility rules aimed at restoring the scheme to its original intent – supporting people with significant and permanent disability”.
But that argument raises obvious questions. If that was the original intention, why has the scheme blown so far off course? Is Labor’s argument that the Coalition was letting too many people onto the scheme during its nine years in government? And if so, why was Labor accusing the Coalition of plotting to kick people off it in 2021, and of “secret plans for cuts” as recently as last year as though this would be unconscionable?
Perhaps that’s why current NDIS Minister Mark Butler made a much more radical case, lacerating the scheme his own party had built. It’s not so much that Butler acknowledged the NDIS was unsustainable and racked by fraud. It’s that he admitted the “fundamental barrier” to fixing these problems “is the design of the scheme itself”, that its “structural flaws” make saving money impossible. As if to make the argument as bluntly as he could, Butler pointed to eight classic “design failures” that make government programs vulnerable to fraud, before concluding “the NDIS has all eight”. Then he referenced seven fundamental building blocks for ensuring integrity, and admitted “the NDIS has none of them”. Little wonder NDIS service providers have long complained of having to compete against unscrupulous operators exploiting a system with far too little regulation, at the expense of the most vulnerable.
Butler’s argument is the kind you make in a crisis. And the Albanese government clearly sees two related crises at once. First, inflation, now turbocharged by the war in Iran, the consequences of which are so unpredictable and potentially dire that the treasurer this week admitted the economic damage could be “severe”.
Second, the crisis of public confidence in the NDIS as its costs balloon well beyond what anyone had forecast: beyond Medicare, beyond the age pension, and on track to be beyond even defence by the end of the decade. Each of these crises alone would be significant enough. Together, though, they’re radioactive.
To spend boundless government money at a time of high inflation on a scheme with declining support is to risk consigning both the scheme and the government to history. That’s what Butler means when he says without these “hard choices”, the NDIS’s “social licence will be lost”.
But if the government’s aim is to inspire confidence, it has a problem. Confidence follows from certainty, and right now, no one can be entirely sure what these changes will mean. The most seismic parts of this policy – redesigning how the NDIS will operate – are yet to be decided. That leaves a void that the anxieties of hundreds of thousands of people will fill – people for whom the stakes are extremely high. In theory, those with the most serious disabilities have nothing to fear from this reform. In practice, though, most can’t know for sure if they’re in that category because they don’t know how it will be defined.
They also can’t know what awaits them if they end up on the wrong side of that definition. The government’s idea is that other, simpler services will fill the breach, presumably at less cost.
The trouble is, those services often don’t yet exist. In many cases, it’s the states and territories that are meant to deliver them and, depending on the program, not all have agreed to do so. Queensland, for instance, is sharply critical of the Thriving Kids program, which is meant to service children whose autism isn’t severe enough to secure an NDIS position, and hasn’t signed the relevant agreement. Victoria is also yet to sign, though perhaps will soon. Such programs are therefore “a concept, not a functioning system,” says the Australian Federation of Disability Organisations, a peak national advocacy body. For the moment at least, that leaves people facing clear threats, offset only by fragile promises. And that’s a fragile state to be in.
Fragile for the government, too, because the fault lines are everywhere. Fail to tighten the scheme enough, and we’re back here in a year, the NDIS budget still swelling, and possibly becoming a scapegoat for inflation. Tighten it too much and we’ll see a parade of horror stories of people denied services they desperately need because of some misguided bureaucratic decision, or some inflexibly applied formula. At that point the government might find itself having traded a budgetary crisis for a human one. That risk isn’t a reason not to proceed, but it is to say the politics only get more difficult from here. Because with stakes this high, the government’s margin of error is vanishingly small.
Waleed Aly is a broadcaster, author, academic and regular columnist for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.
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Waleed Aly is a broadcaster, author, academic and regular columnist for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.