The federal government is manoeuvring to reduce the NDIS to simply another dysfunctional welfare program.
Why are defence funding or infrastructure funding considered job creators, while care funding is seen as a cost burden?
Every dollar invested in the National Disability Insurance Scheme is estimated to unlock returns of $2.25 for the broader economy, mainly in employment, and yet we persist in seeing social services funding as some kind of purely moral allocation: a discretionary line item in the budget, much like the fruit bowl in the office kitchen.
I’ve written previously about this issue in the context of aged care but it also happens in disability.
As Emma Dawson, head of independent think tank Per Capita has pointed out, it seems that blokes in hard hats and high-vis building things is still a more compelling vision for government than women in scrubs and sensible shoes caring for people.
The NDIS is one of Australia’s most significant bipartisan social and economic reforms: converting a complex ‘problem’ into a huge social and economic opportunity by using the market to address individual disability, directly creating 270,000 jobs and billions in economic activity in the process.
In fact, the economic contribution of the NDIS in FY21 is conservatively estimated to be around $52.4 billion.
And yet, less than a decade after its establishment, we find the federal government manoeuvring to reduce the NDIS to simply another dysfunctional welfare program.
Some of this is explicit; there are repeated statements from the federal government about the scheme being in ‘crisis’. However, the majority of manoeuvring has been cloaked in bureaucracy, government speak and secrecy.
• The National Disability Insurance Agency’s 2019-20 annual report found that NDIS costs were largely in line with the modelling, and yet a year later the same body inexplicably predicted a 54 per cent blowout by 2029-30. While reported regularly in the media, this projection can’t actually be tested because the federal government refuses to provide the substantive underlying data or modelling assumptions.
• Brutal cuts in plans for participants are happening across the NDIS with particular impact on people with the highest level of disability and their informal carers. It is almost impossible for participants to challenge these cuts on their own.
• A recent Bill introduced to parliament, under the guise of legislating a “participant service guarantee”, gives unprecedented and discretionary powers to the NDIA and the minister to vary participant plans without consultation, and also reduce eligibility for the scheme with limited oversight by parliament, or sign-off from the states and territories, which are joint funders of the scheme.
Last time I looked, Australia was a democracy but that, by definition, requires the consent of the governed. Consent, in turn, requires that we be able to inform ourselves about action being undertaken in our names and to understand what the true agenda of the government of the day is, including whether it is a political agenda.
Transparency exposes politicians to scrutiny, so it is perhaps understandable why a government would prefer to work out of public view.
But no-one ever promised that governing was easy, and right now the government case for NDIS cost reduction seems to be in direct conflict with what we know.
The federal government needs to be more explicit about its intention for the NDIS scheme and to release the data and assumptions it is relying on in setting this intention.
The state and territory governments need to be holding the federal government to account on this. After all, it is their public health systems that will suffer if the NDIS fails.
Most importantly, the public needs to get in front of this issue. It’s estimated that for every $1 billion the NDIS is under-funded, we can expect significant negative outcomes to occur across the economy.
• A drop in employment of around 10,200 jobs.
• A decline in total economic activity of $2.25 billion.
• A 0.14 per cent reduction in total GDP.
And guess what? While we’ll all feel the pain, people with disability, their families and those ladies in scrubs and sensible shoes will bear the brunt disproportionately.
Discussions about ‘affordability’ are important but decisions on the NDIS need to be based on robust and transparent analysis. We did not elect a ‘just-trust-me’ government and we shouldn’t start falling for that line now.
• Amber Crosthwaite is a commercial lawyer specialising in seniors living, aged care and disability
