The Australian government has spent years telling us the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) is broken. It has pushed that narrative in media briefings, parliamentary speeches and fabricated racist statistics about provider fraud in working-class suburbs.
Having successfully eroded public trust in the NDIS and its purpose, it is now using that to justify dismantling it.
Health minister Mark Butler announced the most significant cuts to the NDIS since the scheme began at the National Press Club on April 22. He said it was “reform” and “sustainability”. In fact, it is the largest rollback of disability rights in a generation. The people who will pay for it are the same people the scheme was built to protect.
But before a single cut was announced, the narrative had to be built.
We have had years of headlines about “rorts and rorters” and politicians talking about waste and fraud as though every participant was a suspect and every provider was criminal.
The now infamous claim about 3000 NDIS providers operating out of Lakemba, a figure that was fabricated, deliberately targeted a predominantly working class, migrant and Muslim community. The allegation was then repeated by journalists and ministers, without scrutiny. It was a racist lie and did exactly what it was designed to do. It made the public angry, eroded trust and gave the government the cover it needed.
Meanwhile fossil fuel corporations, which pay next to nothing in resource taxes, face no equivalent scrutiny.
Let us be clear about what fraud in the NDIS actually looks like. It is not participants using their funding to live their lives.
Yes, the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission has said that organised crime syndicates have infiltrated the scheme and used intimidation, cash kickbacks and threatened violence against vulnerable people. But the victims of NDIS fraud are overwhelmingly people with disability and yet the government's response is to cut the very supports that protect those people.
Butler announced on April 22 that 160,000 people will be removed from the NDIS. Many will be autistic people and people with developmental disability and they will be removed before alternative supports exist. [source?].
Overall average plan approvals will drop from approximately $31,000 to $26,000, driven primarily by cuts to community participation funding. Butler himself acknowledged the actual reduction to individual budgets will appear larger due to differences in how funding is utilised.
Community participation funding, which grew as people with disability finally accessed community life, will be reset and capped
Support coordination and plan management will be cut by 30%.
New eligibility requirements, based on functional capacity assessments will replace diagnosis-based access, despite these tools having a documented history of inconsistency and cultural bias.
The New Framework Planning rollout has been delayed again, to April 2027.
A $200 million Inclusive Communities Fund has been announced to replace the community participation supports being cut, against an annual budget heading toward $20 billion.
Huge cuts
The Labor government is cutting a $12 billion stream of support and replacing it with $200 million. The cuts to eligibility are being framed as a return to the scheme’s original intent. But the people most at risk of losing access, under the new functional capacity assessment model, are autistic people, people with ADHD and others in what the system still insists on calling “high functioning” communities.
That itself is a problem.
“High functioning” is not a medical term; it is a political one. It means you can mask up well enough so that the system does not feel obligated to support you. It means your struggles are invisible enough to be deniable. It means the bureaucracy can look at you on a good day, in a controlled environment, with every coping mechanism deployed, and decide you do not qualify.
These are people whose disability is real, whose needs are real and whose lives have been transformed by genuine support.
For many, community participation is not a luxury but a lifeline; it is often the only thing standing between them and complete social isolation. They have spent their entire lives being told they are not disabled enough or not visibly broken enough to deserve help.
Now the government is about to tell them that again, with the full force of legislation behind it.
The threat of isolation is not abstract. When you cut community participation funding, remove the support workers who help you leave the house, attend a group or connect with other people, you are not just reducing a budget line, you are closing a door that took years to open.
For many autistic and neurodivergent people, that door is already hard to open. For many it was the NDIS that finally opened it. These cuts will shut it again.
Cracking down on fraud?
Butler said he is cracking down on fraud. Then he announced a 30% cut to the people whose job it is to prevent it.
I have worked as a specialist support coordinator for more than six years and have trained others. We catch the dodgy invoices. We question providers who are overbilling, or not delivering. We help participants understand their plans, what their funding is for and what their rights are.
We are often the first to notice when something is wrong, when a provider is exploiting someone, when a plan is being gamed by a third party or when a participant is being pressured or manipulated. We are the human layer of accountability in a system that, as the government’s own Fraud Fusion Taskforce found, was built without basic integrity controls.
Cutting us by 30% does not crack down on fraud; it removes the people most likely to catch it. It leaves participants, many of whom are very vulnerable, to navigate a complex, bureaucratic, ever changing and often hostile system alone.
That is not protection; it is abandonment.
Fight the cuts
A participant I supported had a complex disability that required regular catheter changes by a nurse. It was not complicated: It was a clinical, dignified need recognised by all specialists, nurses, general practitioners and paramedics.
We fought for three years for the support she needed. That meant evidence submissions, appeals, requests for plan reviews; her case bounced between Medicare and the NDIS like a ball neither agency wanted to catch.
Medicare said it was the NDIS’s responsibility. The NDIS said it was Medicare’s responsibility. It meant a woman with a disability went without the care she needed.
We provided the evidence and followed the process. She had people in her corner fighting with her right until the end. But for three years the system failed her completely. This was not because the rules were unclear, but because the rules were designed in a way that left her need uncovered, with neither agency accepting responsibility.
Earlier this year, after three years of fighting, she decided to reject further medical treatment. She chose to end her life, rather than continue living without the care and dignity she had spent three years trying to access.
Her story is not unique. It is the logical endpoint of a system that has been designed, whether intentionally or through negligence, to exhaust people into giving up.
She is why the cuts and the delays and the funding period chaos are not bureaucratic inconveniences — they are life and death matters.
We experience the same thing in the intersection of mental health and disability. If you are autistic, the mental health system will often tell you it cannot help you because autism is a disability, not a mental health condition. If you go to the NDIS, it will often tell you your mental health needs fall outside the scheme’s scope. You end up in a corridor with two doors and both of them closed.
This systemic failure has been documented but it has been ignored for years. Instead of fixing the gap, Labor is now proposing to push more people out of the NDIS or into a tumultuous system that is extremely difficult to navigate, with fewer support coordinators and plan managers to help them and less funding to keep them connected to community.
Labor needs to stop blaming participants for the failures of the NDIS. It needs to fix the system and that means: Define the responsibilities clearly; fund the gaps; create opportunities for the agencies talk to each other; create real rules with real accountability; and stop leaving the most vulnerable people in this country to fall through the spaces in between.
Disabled people must not be made budget line items, or the collateral damage of a government trying to get its numbers up before an election.
The NDIS was built by decades of activist struggle. It will not be dismantled without a fight.
[Gabrielle McCutcheon is a disability support coordinator.]