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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Outsourcing responsibility to an algorithm,and compassion to the dustbin, all cloaked in the all encompassing weasel word of sustainability…Labor’s go – to word of choice.Butler has obviously been tasked with wielding the largest razor for this coming budget, who will draw the short straw next time?It should be the clown Marles, but that won’t happen.
And where is Albo in all this? On another nappy run begging for oil and rehearsing his set piece, arms length managerialism.
Unfortunately our media outlets have been focused on those receiving daily homecare visits for showering, toileting, dressing and other such services and evidently paying independent contractors at a rate of $50 per hour for such services.
In Queensland and possibly elsewhere in Australia Blue Nurses or Blue Care as they are now known, provide those daily services by qualified nursing staff who attend in-home as required with no cost to the participant.
Surely, if we are to be providing these services as part of the NDIS program, government needs to enter into ongoing agreements with organisations such as Blue Care who, in effect, become the only external community contact that these folk have on a day to day basis.
Such personal and intimate services must be provided by salaried and professional, qualified nursing staff as there are safety considerations when we allow independent contractors who are profit driven and possibly unqualified to be entering people’s homes and bathrooms on a daily basis?
No thought of applying sustainability measures to Defence and AUKUS of course. I realise that, as an ordinary person, I cannot know the full implications of the AUKUS agreement, that is for people like Marles and the new Chief of the Defence Forces, but among the Hoi polloi I mix with, not one person thinks AUKUS is a good deal for Australia and we wonder, if we can see this, how is it that the entire Labor Government blunders on supporting a hugely expensive boondoggle with us on the losing end? If Chalmers was serious about making savings, two of the first areas he should look at are the subsidies to private education and private health insurance, now there are rorts which could save billions.Well maybe just millions.
Naturally the sensible decision would be to cancel Scummo’s post-politics job creating programme known as the USUKA sub debacle, freeing up about $425 BILLION for the correct use of benefiting Australian taxpayers rather that foreign corporations building unwanted defence weapons, or worse, subsidising the construction of American subs for the use by the US Navy.
THAT saving alone would go a long way to improving the public infrastructure in regional centres that has been too long ignored by Macquarie Street and the Canberra Bubble.
Retched Mediocrity take note.
Back to this Blairite neolib junk.
Albo has had ample excuses over time for dropping AUKUS and keeping ifrastructures well.
Also, the “revenue issue”, they have dodged since getting elected?
It is a worn out record that keeps spinning (See articles on AIMN by Dennis Hay and others), but a country that issues its own currency does not need to increase taxes to pay for services. Likewise it does not need to brutalise social services to reach a supposed “surplus” on a spreadsheet somewhere.
If the Feds run a surplus budget of say $1 Billion, it means that there is $1 Billion less circulating through Aus society.
Most people have trouble getting their heads around this subject so search out articles by Prof Bill Mitchell & Prof Stephanie Kelton, etc.
As an exercise, ask yourself what happened to the $1 trillion deficit from the Morrison years. Apparently our grandchildren were going to be paying that off for their whole life.
Politicians just love talk of the Budget being in ‘surplus’ or ‘deficit’, but the only task the Feds have is to release or withhold funds based on inflation pressure and whether there is enough capacity in the workforce and materials/equipment to absorb the extra funds.
I wish somebody would call out the Political class and the MSM for perpetrating this falsehood.
Absolutely disgusting from one and all in Labor, kicking the least capable whilst they are down and totally reliant on people and systems to support them.
It’s a terrible thing to think, however I sincerely hope that every one of these nerds find themselves in circumstances where they absolutely need to rely on NDIS and find that the bin is empty, just like their goddamned souls. After all, you have shown your true colours.
Maybe put them last like they have done to everyone else, ambulatory or not, and time to install an Independent Government and Senate.
the same problem as the employment services rort – bring all of these services back under public control. CES worked perfectly fine for the unemployed back in the day, and now it’s all about private providers making their buck on the back of jobseekers. NDIS needs to handled in house, and the carers licensed by the government, not a private 3rd party. Terry Mills cites Blue Care in QLD – there are bound to be similar groups in every state. These people do a magnificent job, often for meagre recompense, but the idea that an elderly, or disabled person should pay $50 per hour for some help with a shower is insane.
The NDIS MUST be sustainable, it must make best use of money, and handing it to private providers is NOT the answer