NDIS: new cuts to an unfit system
Bill Shorten’s parting announcement as he left parliament was new cuts to the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS).
As NDIS minister, in 2022 Shorten announced a review to “reduce the needless waste happening in the NDIS”. This was followed by months of confected media outrage, fuelled by government announcements about NDIS participants and suppliers engaging in fraud, and that bullshit services (psychics, crystal healing and tarot cards featured a lot) were being funded by the scheme.
This produced a predictable result. In August 2024, new NDIS legislation passed with bipartisan support to reduce the growth in NDIS spending by $14.4 billion over the next four years.
Many valid critiques have been made of companies that have rorted the system, most notably through the practice of charging more for products and services because a client is on the NDIS. But this isn’t the key problem—it’s a symptom of a for-profit disability service overseen by cost-cutting bureaucrats.
The overriding goal of production under capitalism is profit, not helping people. What determines what is produced, and how, isn’t whether a product or service fulfils a genuine need, but how much profit it will make for the person selling it. This is as true of private healthcare provision as it is for any other commodity. Profit is integrated at multiple levels of the NDIS, from the companies that provide a workforce of poorly-paid support workers, to those companies (“support coordinators”) that manage people’s cases because the complexity of organising your own support services through the web of private providers is almost impossible.
Long before the NDIS, governments were already defunding and privatising disability support services. This was part of a longer-term drive across the globe, stemming from the economic crisis that began in the 1970s. Bosses and governments attempted to shore up falling profit rates at the expense of the working class. Some of this was in the form of attacks on wages and conditions and union rights. Some of it was in the form of cutting back government spending on social services needed by workers. Privatisation was a mechanism for both.
When the Gillard Labor government introduced the NDIS in 2013, its goal, stripped of the rhetoric of empowerment and individual choice, was the complete privatisation of disability support—to open up disability services to profit-driven corporations that have already wreaked havoc in health, public housing, aged care, education and other vital social services.
The NDIS was not designed to help the majority of the 5.5 million people living with disability in Australia. The scheme covers only 650,000 of them. The latest legislation aims to further reduce that number—not because people have become less disabled, but because they have become less eligible.
Forget the talk about “waste”. Forecast to cost $41.4 billion in 2024-2025, the NDIS is the second most expensive government welfare program in Australia, after the age pension. The driving force behind the latest cuts is not that it is too expensive, but that Australian capitalism has other priorities. The Albanese government is boosting defence spending by $6 billion this year. The budget projects this figure to rise to $100 billion by 2033-34, not including the hundreds of billions for the nuclear submarines that are part of the AUKUS pact. So-called “excess spending” is only a problem when it comes to helping people. For warfare, the sky’s the limit.
It’s hard to tell what the cuts to NDIS funding will look like when they come into operation on 3 October 2024. This is itself a source of stress to anyone accessing the scheme. What we can be sure of is that it will be cost-cutting at the expense of quality of life. People using the NDIS already must battle to have equipment such as noise cancelling headphones needed to cope with sensory overload classified as “disability items” rather than the “everyday expenses” they are expected to fund themselves.
The ABC recently reported the story of a mother who has been unable to access an early intervention service for her daughter who has been diagnosed with level three autism due to NDIS funding cuts. To be diagnosed at level three on the autism spectrum means you require very substantial support. Accessing it is another matter, as more services are deemed ineligible for NDIS funding.
These cuts disproportionately impact lower-income families. If those needing support are assessed as not eligible for a NDIS package, or their package is inadequate, they can still buy the services they need—if they are rich enough.
What is needed is a free, universal, publicly funded scheme organised to meet the needs of those living with disability. The trajectory of the NDIS takes us ever further from that.
