Lisa Goodwin’s twins are autistic. She applied three times before they were accepted onto the NDIS, then spent years fighting funding cuts through appeals, each round requiring her to prove, again, that her children were still autistic, still struggling, still real. When the government announced its latest round of cuts she used two words: “a betrayal.” Not a concern. Not a worry. A betrayal. Keep that word in mind as we go through what Mark Butler is cheerfully describing as getting on with the job.
The job, as currently defined, is slashing NDIS spending growth from ten per cent to five or six, for a scheme costing $52 billion annually. That translates into two to two and a half billion dollars immediately carved from projected budgets, with deeper cuts to follow. Among participants already hit with new three-month funding reviews, one in five have seen their plans reduced, with average cuts of 22.5 per cent.
Bonnie fears her sister Claire, who has a degenerative condition, will be left to rot in a group home as her condition worsens. Families are using the phrase “overwhelming sense of doom.” These are not the voices of people angling for a lurk. These are the voices of people who have been told by a Labor government that they cost too much.
In January, Butler launched the NDIS Sustainability Taskforce, chaired by senior bureaucrat Anthea Long. The press calls it a razor gang. Its mandate is to deliver cuts sufficient to hit the government’s growth targets and, in the process, tighten eligibility in ways projected to exclude tens of thousands of current participants over the next four years.
The word doing the heavy lifting throughout is “sustainability,” which is the polite administrative term for a deliberate political choice that the government would prefer you not examine too closely. Sustainability. It is as though the NDIS were a cancer: a feral organism consuming the budget from within, rather than a scheme that the Productivity Commission, when it was first designed under Julia Gillard, assessed as returning $2.15 for every dollar invested. Not a cost. An investment. A scheme that pays its way and then some. The government that once argued this with passion now argues the opposite, from the same benches, apparently having concluded that the lesson of office is that principles are for opposition.
Labor MPs Michelle Ananda-Rajah and Mike Freelander, both physicians, have been deployed to lend clinical authority to the argument, insisting the NDIS has expanded beyond its original purpose to include too many people with mild or moderate needs, particularly autistic children. The scheme is “robbing us of fiscal space,” says Ananda-Rajah. Fiscal space. Which is the phrase you use when you mean autistic children are taking up room that submarines need.
Because here is what fills that fiscal space. On 16 April, the Albanese government unveiled its 2026 National Defence Strategy: $425 billion over the next decade, dominated by AUKUS and undersea warfare. Paul Keating calls the submarine program “failed by design.” Retired Rear Admiral Peter Briggs deems it a “wasteful folly.” Malcolm Turnbull, not a man prone to sentimentality about defence spending, calls Australia the “rich dummy” subsidising Britain’s ailing nuclear ship-building industries.
These are ships we may never crew, travelling slowly toward conflicts that drones and hypersonic missiles will have settled before we dock, under effective American operational control. Yet the fiscal space supposedly drained by disabled children and their exhausted carers is being held open for this. $425 billion. No questions asked. Governments “just get on with the job.”
The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, a body that never saw welfare, well-being or health as an investment, has demanded $50 billion annually stripped from social services, specifically targeting the NDIS, childcare, aged care, and health. Labor is obliging. The business lobby calls for cuts. The government delivers. The submarines get funded. The children get rationed. That is the anatomy of “budget repair” when the priorities are already fixed before the argument begins.
The Australia Institute has been consistent and precise on this point: the NDIS is not a budget crisis. It is a political preference masquerading as a fiscal emergency. Australia is a wealthy country that has chosen, systematically and with great administrative care, to shield capital, fatten the military-industrial complex, and send the bill to the people least positioned to refuse it.
Then there is the algorithm. From mid-2026, most NDIS participants will have their plans and budgets generated by a digital assessment tool called the Instrument for Classification and Assessment of Support Needs, I-CAN v6.
Under the new model, human discretion will be dramatically reduced. External review bodies will not be able to change the total amount of funding in a participant’s plan. Dispute your budget? You may request a reassessment using the same tool that produced the decision you are disputing.
Greens Senator Jordon Steele-John, who lives with ADHD and uses a wheelchair, has translated this into plain language: “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.”
Remember Robodebt? Scott Morrison’s automated welfare debt system that sent false debt notices to hundreds of thousands of Australians, drove people to suicide, and collapsed into a royal commission, billions in compensation, and criminal referrals.
The government that described Robodebt as a moral catastrophe, a dehumanising assault on the vulnerable, proof that the Liberal Party had abandoned any pretence of decency, was Labor. The same Labor Party that is now installing I-CAN v6 and removing the right of appeal. The same Labor Party that was born in the shearing sheds, that marched against Vietnam, that gave us Medicare and the NDIS, and that has apparently decided, from the comfort of the Treasury benches, that what it built and what it stands for are two different things.
The Productivity Commission said the NDIS returns $2.15 for every dollar. Cutting it is not budget repair. It is budget vandalism, performed at the expense of people with degenerative conditions and autistic children and exhausted families and a woman in Adelaide named Lisa Goodwin who applied three times and fought for years and heard the word betrayal arrive in her mouth before she could stop it.
Mark Butler is getting on with the job. The job is the managed dismantling of the idea that a wealthy society owes its most vulnerable citizens something more than an algorithm, a waiting list, and a government that has learned to say sustainability with a straight face.
The shearing sheds would not recognise it.
This article was originally published on URBAN WRONSKI WRITES
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