When the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) was first launched in 2013, it was widely seen as the much-needed reform to address the discrimination, service access and social justice inequities disabled people faced.
No one expected a magic bullet, but it was embraced as a good start and had bipartisan support. Julia Gillard’s Labor government talked it up as an investment rather than a cost.
The Productivity Commission agreed, having released a report showing for every $1 put into NDIS, Australia could expect a $2.15 return. The National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA) was set up to manage the scheme with the independent NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission to oversee compliance and providers.
The hope and relief in the disability community was palpable.
But, as with disability itself, the devil is in the day-to-day management detail that no one else sees.
The scheme was launched with three sleeper grenades at its core. The first of these was the NDIA recruitment framework. In the critical early stages, it did not sufficiently prioritise across-the-board recruitment of people with a disability at all levels, including the board. This has now been addressed and 19.1% of the NDIA workforce and 12% of Senior Executive Staff (APS) are now people with a disability. But the agency is still playing catch-up.
The second was the NDIS specific price list. It initially over delivered on pricing, to attract providers, but under delivered on integrity and risk management, rolling out without sufficient guardrails into a privatised market.
Last year’s annual NDIS Pricing Review made the most significant progress to date, after finding some people were still paying up to 68% more than Medicare rates for the same service under NDIS pricing.
Third was the damaging combination of under-estimation of need combined with a severely under-staffed disability sector workforce. Disabled people began to find themselves pitted against each other for scant services and fighting the NDIA over inappropriate funding.
Some were allocated support budgets that were woefully inadequate for their needs. Others were given funding they were unable to spend due to no service being available, particularly in regional areas. The Administrative Review Tribunal went into overdrive and horror stories of neglect, fraud and shocking deaths of NDIS participants began to appear in the media.
Six years and two changes of government later, the 2019 Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People With a Disability was launched. It soon became obvious from testimony that the scheme was not running as well as it should have been and disabled people were getting seriously hurt.
The Scott “Robodebt” Morrison government in 2021 tried to find a shortcut to cost savings and to address inconsistencies in the NDIS program. It wanted to introduce “independent assessments” using privatised allied health contractors and algorithms to automate plan budgets.
There was fierce opposition from disability advocates to the threat posed to participant control, potential cut to support and the reduction of people to “data points”. Labor agreed the process was flawed and dehumanising.
The fall-out against automating the core pillar of quantifying the needs of a disabled person with complex needs was so bad that Morrison was forced to dump the idea, as the Royal Commission caravan rolled on.
NDIS Review
Given this, the Anthony Albanese government’s 2022 appointment of Bill Shorten as the minister to run the NDIS Review, sparked hope again.
The final NDIS Review Report was released on December 7, 2023. Shorten outlined the key findings in his address to the National Press Club that day. He said “the NDIS is here to stay” with a renewed focus on sustainability, fraud management and provider compliance to get the NDIS “back on track”, a core 2019 campaign promise.
Shorten also announced a “foundational supports” agreement between the Commonwealth and the states for needs not funded by NDIS. He said he was committed to “putting people at the centre” of the scheme, ensuring people with disability were “central to the design and implementation of reforms”.
The NDIS amendment bill, Getting the NDIS Back on Track No.1) Bill 2024, was subsequently introduced but contained changes contrary to Shorten’s promises. It immediately came under fire, including by WA Greens Senator Jordon Steele-John who described it as “retrograde”. He pointed out that more than $14 billion in funding cuts to the scheme and several other key changes were the “exact opposite” of Labor’s previous promises.
Last year, the NDIS cost $52 billion. Labor has continued to cut tens of billions from the scheme, cutting people's funding and spending tens of millions on legal fees to defend itself against disabled people’s tribunal appeals.
Steele-John told Green Left that Labor will not even talk about the economic gains set out in the original Productivity Commission Report. “You can’t even get them to look at it,” he said, noting the newly diverse NDIA Board comes a distant second to budget considerations.
Steele-John does not believe the public cares nearly as much about the cost of health and the NDIS as the government. “I think most people just want the government to do its job and fund the hospitals … and fund the services needed.”
In the context of the federal budget, the NDIS scheme is far from the biggest hole in the bucket.
Labor is prepared to spend $268 billion on AUKUS alone while “investing” a further $53 billion in additional defence spending in a single year. It spends $15 billion annually in fossil fuel subsidies and another $20 billion a year on negative gearing and capital gains taxes while talking up the “biggest ever back to back surpluses” in history.
Yet the original architects of the NDIS and Robodebt’s biggest critics want to hand the two most humanly important functions of the NDIS over to an algorithm in the name of budget restraint.
If Labor had not also removed human oversight entirely with no right to appeal decisions it might have made some sense. But they did. When The Guardian broke the story last December 3, condemnation from all quarters was swift and visceral. Peak advocacy bodies, data analytics experts and the disability sector all said the government must reconsider.
Steele-John, who lives with ADHD and is a wheelchair user, is scathing. “They want to bring in an untested assessment process, feed the results into a computer algorithm no one can see and let that decide how much support a disabled person gets … And if the outcome is wrong, people won’t be able to challenge it through appeals anymore.”
Steele-John also noted that while initial assessment is not marked for automation, assessors will no longer be required to have allied health qualifications and will “probably only do a short course in call-centre assessment”.
Worst of all, Labor’s plan removes the Administrative Review Tribunal’s current powers to alter a person’s plan or reinstate funding.
However you spin it, greater “robo-planning” against a backdrop of weaker appeal rights and low government accountability marks a further drift away from the NDIS core principle of responding to disabled people as individuals.
It also shows Labor’s disconnect from the same potentially catastrophic frontline risks it once shouted about in opposition when the Robodebt scandal broke.
At the end of last year, MPs emptied out of parliament into a fleet of air-conditioned, taxpayer-funded Comcars for the summer break. Meanwhile disabled Australians were left facing another Christmas of care gaps, funding drain from public holiday rates and renewed fear for the future of the NDIS.
Labor seems to have forgotten the biggest lesson from the Morrison government; when it comes to policy for the most vulnerable, there are some risks you just don’t take.
[Suzanne James is a vision-impaired journalist and a former carer for her paraplegic partner. She has a background in writing policy and risk management frameworks for government and the private sector.]