Kyle Montgomery gave the following speech to the No cuts to NDIS protest on Gadigal Country on May 9.
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The NDIS is not Australia’s biggest so-called crisis. Because, let’s be clear about what a crisis means to this government.
Six hundred and seventeen deaths in custody. Not a crisis.
Within a week of the NDIS cuts announcement, the Defence Minister confirmed $53 billion toward AUKUS; weapons, submarines and alliances with nations actively engaged in state terrorism. Not a crisis.
For more than two years Australia has exported weapons parts to Israel during its active genocide of Palestinians. Not a crisis.
The Prime Minister invites the Israeli President — who has signed bombs dropped on children and been found by a United Nations inquiry to have incited genocide — for a state visit. The NSW government deployed 3000 police and threatened protesters with $5,500 fines to protect him. The full force of the state used to shield a war criminal and criminalise the people who objected. Not a crisis.
There were more than 100 women killed by men in 2024. Last year a man targeted and stabbed women in a Sydney shopping centre — a deliberate act of femicide — and this country still refuses to name it as the national emergency it is. Not a crisis.
Refugees still rot in offshore detention. Migrants are exploited, disposable, essential. Not a crisis.
Racism is not a crisis to them. War is not a crisis to them. Femicide is not a crisis to them. Genocide is not a crisis to them.
None of this is accidental. None of this is incompetence. Every single one of these horrors exists within a system this government funds, arms, signs off on and defends.
That is not negligence. That is policy.
So when Mark Butler stands at a podium and tells you the NDIS is a “crisis”, understand what he is really saying. He is telling you whose lives the government has decided matter.
They found $53 billion to fund violence abroad. But they cannot find enough to fund survival at home. That is not a budget problem. That is who they are. This country has never lacked money — only a fucking conscience.
This is a human rights issue. Disabled lives are not budget liabilities.
Support is treated like charity instead of a human right — one Australia committed to when it ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) in 2008 and gave the UN power to hold them accountable.
So where is that accountability now?
You cannot remove support before building support. The government plans to remove up to 300,000 people from the NDIS by 2030. But the supports meant to replace it are not built yet. That means homelessness, hospitalisation, poverty, family burn-out and abandonment.
The Disability Royal Commission (DRC) in 2019 documented thousands of cases of violence, abuse and neglect across institutions, services, housing and justice systems. It handed the government 222 recommendations — a roadmap built from the testimony of survivors who lived through the worst of it. The government accepted a fraction, gutted others and called it progress.
Did they really hear the survivors? Their actions say otherwise.
The problem was never participants. The waste came from provider fraud, price gouging and privatised inefficiency. The National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA) has failed participants since inception — endless delays, inconsistent decisions, undertrained staff and traumatising reassessments.
Disabled people did not break this system. We should not be paying the price for it.
Reforms are being rushed without real disability co-design. We know that policy made without disabled leadership causes harm. There should be nothing about us without us.
The NDIS was never easy to access.
People with severe, complex disabilities spend years being rejected, reassessed and redirected — pushed onto the Thriving Kids Program and underfunded state systems which were never built for complex needs. Getting on is a battle. Staying on is a battle.
If you need to access disability support for the first time at 65 or over, the government sends you to aged care instead — where the funding is capped, there are fewer protections and there is a fundamentally different philosophy about what your life is worth.
Both royal commissions into care found the same thing at different ages.
The DRC found thousands of cases of violence, abuse and neglect. The Aged Care Royal Commission found routine restraint, malnutrition, sexual abuse and a system that had normalised suffering.
These were not separate failures. They were the same failure — a government that decided certain lives required management rather than dignity.
Both called for person-centred, rights-based care. The recommendations were not that different. The government's response to both, however, was.
Scandinavia funds support based on need not age. It proves the argument we cannot afford dignity for everyone is a lie. The silence around this is not accidental. It is engineered.
Therefore we must demand the following:
• Implement all viable royal commission recommendations — urgently.
• Stop the cuts and no forced exits from the scheme.
• Independent review of NDIA failures and provider profiteering.
• A federal Human Rights Act with disability protections, aligned with the UNCRPD.
• A permanently co-designed, person-centred and rights-based care model for all.
We are witnessing austerity dressed as “reform” — cutting supports, blaming participants, shifting government failure onto those already marginalised.
The NDIS was never the safety net it was sold as; people fight broken systems for years before they ever reach it. People with life-limiting disabilities are still being turned away and now the government wants to cut what little exists.
Aged care and disability care were always the same crisis.
When a society treats disabled people as expendable it echoes eugenic values — whether spoken openly or buried in policy language.
There is no disability justice without decolonisation. There is no disability justice without First Nations sovereignty, treaty and self-determination. There is no disability justice without economic justice, housing justice and healthcare justice.
We are not costs on a spreadsheet. We are people with dignity, rights and value.
The problem was never disabled people needing support. The problem was a system that chose profit over people.
Money for dignity, not for war. Nothing about us without us. Always was, always will be, Aboriginal land.