At a National Press Club address on 22 April, Health Minister Mark Butler announced major cuts to the National Disability Insurance Scheme. They included a plan to reduce the number of participants to 600,00 by the end of the decade, an overhaul to the eligibility criteria from a diagnosis-based model to a functional capacity assessment model, and a slashing of budgets for support workers in community engagement. The intention is to reduce annual spending on the NDIS from its current projection of $75 billion by the end of the decade to under $55 billion, which is just a bit more than what will be spent this financial year.
Given there are currently 760,000 people accessing the scheme, with that number predicted to reach 900,000 by 2030, these cuts will potentially leave up to 300,000 people without the support they need, and reduce the services available to the remaining participants.
The NDIS was always going to be a disaster—it was established in 2013 as a for-profit based scheme with negligible oversight, prime for profiteering and exploitation. But given that people with disabilities now have little else to fall back on, it must be defended. The proposed changes will only make things worse for those with disabilities, and they are being driven by the government’s desire to invest more in the military and future wars, not to improve the living conditions of NDIS participants. What is needed, and still needs to be fought for, is disability support organised around meeting people’s needs on a rational, planned basis, not a for-profit model that turns disability into a business opportunity.
For all the inadequacies of the NDIS, participants who are kicked off the scheme have limited options, since most state-based services were privatised or defunded following its establishment. Accessing existing services outside of the NDIS is extremely expensive, the price caps imposed on service providers through the scheme in effect having become baseline prices. Occupational therapy, an essential support, is an example—it currently costs around $190 per hour, meaning many families will need to decide if they can afford to access these supports or simply go without.
People with disabilities locked out of the NDIS will be forced to rely on foundational supports announced by the government, which do not yet exist. Nearly one-half of the $10 billion that is expected to be spent on these services will go to the Thriving Kids program, aimed at getting kids with autism and mild developmental delays who don’t require much support off the NDIS. This leaves many other people in an extremely precarious position, with the states refusing to commit to filling the service gap.
For those who will be kicked off the NDIS and want to appeal the decision, options will be limited. With the number of people being removed from the NDIS, it is likely there will be a significant backlog and long waits for decisions, leaving participants in the lurch in the meantime.
According to Disability Advocacy Network Australia chief Emma Beninson, if people are removed from the NDIS without access to adequate replacement support, “we [will] see people going off the scheme and into an abyss” and “probably see people taking their own lives if they are forced off the scheme without a safety net”.
The funding Labor is targeting for cuts, in the area of social, community and economic participation, has been derided in the media as money for haircuts and sex workers (which is not true). In justifying the 30 percent reduction in funding, Butler attacked the workers involved, stating he had heard stories of “support workers being on their phone while on the job”. As if it is the workers and the participants, not the rort-enabling, for-profit scheme that Labor set up, that is responsible for the NDIS’s dysfunction.
In fact, the community support slated for cuts typically involves one-on-one support worker hours that enable participants to attend appointments and complete tasks like grocery shopping, therapy sessions or group activities that they would be unable to access without this help. Depriving people of these services is depriving them of access to community connection and will leave them increasingly confined to their homes.
With these services cut, the slack will ultimately fall back on family members—and disproportionately on women. This will not only increase the load carers already carry, but will also potentially force them to reduce their paid working hours to care for loved ones, meaning greater poverty for families with disabled members.
Those without family support will have either to do without—and deal with the risks and deprivation that creates—or use whatever private funds they have to make up for the gap in support, leaving them in a financially more precarious position.
To add further insult to injury, Butler has used the longstanding slogan of the disability rights movement of “Nothing about us without us” to give political cover to these cuts, promising that people with disabilities and their advocacy organisations will be consulted on how best to proceed with the butchering of their rights.
What neither Labor nor the right-wing media will admit is that it is the private, for-profit nature of the NDIS that is the real problem. Providers have been given a blank cheque to extort, exploit and hold disability services to ransom in the most unregulated market in Australia, with fewer than 10 percent of service providers registered with the NDIS and the rest outside the purview of the NDIS regulator.
Shonky providers have forged documents, given cash kickbacks, extorted and intimidated people on the scheme. False and inflated payment claims are prevalent and almost impossible to trace in the tangled payment systems that are often overseen by financial intermediaries who approve these payments.
Where regulation does exist, such as the price caps imposed on certain services, this has become the standard price, as providers maximise profits regardless of the quality of the service being provided.
People with large NDIS plans are often targeted. In 2024, a 27-year-old Melbourne man was separated from his family and had his $670,000 plan taken control of by NDIS providers who were not his authorised carers. Predatory providers can funnel hundreds of thousands of dollars into their dodgy services by various intimidatory means. The man’s parents described the experience as like a “consensual kidnapping”, because they were deprived of contact with their son and he was plied with drugs and vapes to keep him in the rogue providers’ group home.
While more providers will likely be required to be registered and subject to oversight under the government’s proposed changes, even this limited measure does little to guarantee that the service is of a standard that people deserve.
In 2020 Anne-Marie Smith, a woman with cerebral palsy, died in hospital. She had spent a year without moving from her chair, even to go to the toilet. She had severe pressure sores, which led to septic shock, finally resulting in multiple organ failure.
Her carer was sentenced to six years’ jail for manslaughter, and the company responsible, Integrity Care, was fined just $12,600 for failing to report her death within 24 hours. The company had previously failed four performance audits, had not completed any mandatory NDIS worker screenings until after Anne-Marie’s death and had been banned from working with Disability SA. Despite this, it was still a registered NDIS provider at the time of Smith’s death.
This death could have been prevented, but the logic of a for-profit system means making money comes before people’s wellbeing. The market-based system implemented and overseen by the Labor Party has totally failed on every metric.
Scheme architect Bruce Bonyhady stated in the NDIS Review:
“Markets in the NDIS have not worked as originally imagined. Competition has not encouraged innovation or increased the diversity of services for all participants in all locations. In some cases, it has led to poor, or even no services. Of greatest concern is that a failure of competition and regulation has opened the door to exploitation and abuse.
“As the Disability Royal Commission has rightly identified, this cannot be allowed to continue. Critically, the focus on market competition has neither driven inclusion nor helped to nurture connections with family, friends and community. In fact, sometimes the exact opposite has occurred.”
The groundwork for these cuts has been laid for some time, on the back of a brutal campaign against the NDIS from the ruling class, the press, Labor and the Liberals to strip back support to the most vulnerable people in society.
But it has been the tension with military spending that has really tipped the balance and exposed the rotten priorities of Australian capitalism. It is no coincidence that Butler’s speech followed the announcement by the defence minister that there would be an increase of $55 billion to the defence budget, to bring Australia closer to the 3 percent GDP NATO targets, projecting a total increase to $425 billion on defence spending over the next decade. Killing people, dominating the Asia-Pacific region and assisting US military adventures come ahead of caring for people with disabilities, as well as health, education and every other measure meant to improve people’s lives.
The cuts to the NDIS should be opposed; they are cruel, brutal and callous. Five years ago, it would have been unthinkable to cut the NDIS in this way. But with global powers lining up for war, the Australian state’s priorities are clear.
The NDIS is a deeply unfair system that is taken advantage of by grubby, money-hungry capitalists who see it as an easy payday, but cutting the funding does not fix the problem; it only deepens them. Cutting funding will only isolate the disability community further and put their families under greater pressure.
People with disabilities deserve a fully funded, public system that is able to give people a genuine say in the support that they are provided: a system that places people before profit and gives genuine dignity and respect to those who need it. The destruction of the only oasis for the disabled is nothing to be supported, and we should all fight to tear down the brutal capitalist system it spawned from.
