NDIS: Shorten's problem child runs wild

The NDIS needs more than rebooting. It must be re-engineered from the bottom up. BY NIck Cater.

It’s 14 years since Bill Shorten first uttered the fateful words “National Disability Insurance Scheme” from the podium of the National Press Club.

“This is a big idea,” he told the April Fool’s Day lunch in 2009. “It’s as big as the original idea for Medibank. But I believe it is a good idea that demands serious debate and investigation.”

This year the cost of the NDIS will hit $35.5bn, some $5bn higher than the cost of Medicare and $8bn more than federal support for hospitals.

It’s the second-fastest-growing item in the federal budget after the cost of servicing government debt. The bill for the NDIS will reach $60bn by 2032 if left unchecked, more than the cost of Medicare and hospital funding combined.

Last week, Shorten addressed the NPC again. He began by referring to the previous speech given as a minister in the Rudd government. “We’re all a bit older … and hopefully a bit wiser,” he said. “But with every precious minute in the job as NDIS Minister I do feel I’ve been given a remarkable second chance to serve where my passion beats.”

Shorten’s beating passion is not in doubt. Nor is his legacy as the minister who campaigned against an injustice that was then seldom discussed: the inadequate support given to disabled Australians by a fragmented, underfunded and harsh system. Despite the NDIS’s chronic failings, it has improved the quality and choice of services.

Yet the Productivity Commission’s optimistic prediction in its seminal 2011 report that “the additional costs of the scheme … are much lower than many people might think” proved wide of the mark.

The commission estimated that 410,000 Australians would be eligible for the scheme. The latest reported number is 585,000 and is rising at a rate of 6000 a month.

The cost of each individual plan is rising in double digits. How large the scheme might grow under the current rules is anybody’s guess, since the definition of disabled is now somewhat fluid. In his 2009 National Press Club speech, Shorten said “it would not be an exaggeration to say that 2 million Australians are affected every day by disability”.

Last week he began by acknowledging “the one in five Australians (or approximately 5 million) living with disability”. That said, it was relief to hear him acknowledge that the NDIS had “lost its way”, that the cost had overtaken the return on investment and that the scheme “was not delivering the outcomes Australians with disability need and the Australian public expects”.

Shorten promised to work tirelessly “to get the NDIS back on track”. Which is all very well, except that the NDIS has never had any rails to run on in the first place, a congenital defect about which Shorten of all people should know since he was one of the scheme’s principal designers.

The NDIS is essentially a powerful, fuel-guzzling locomotive sloshing gravy as it travels at breakneck speed without rails, fasteners, sleepers or ballast to control its path.

Shorten’s failure to acknowledge that the chief flaws of the NDIS lie in its design, not its execution, renders him unsuitable for its reform.

He may be understandably besotted by the imaged genius of his own creation, trapped by the arrogance of believing the complicated model built from scratch in less than four years was perfect.

That is not the view of those condemned to run the thing, its beneficiaries or even those in the growing NDIS industrial complex who extract billions of dollars in profits every year. It is certainly not the view of the shonks whose lucrative business model relies on the scheme rortability.

Yet it is evidently the view of Shorten, who ungraciously lays the blame at the feet of the “administrative vandals” in the Coalition.

Last week he attacked the former government’s “malign neglect”, criticising the Coalition betraying disabled Australians by “leaving the NDIS wide open to fraud”.

His gratuitous and partisan attack on the Coalition, which has offered unwavering in-principle support for the NDIS from the very beginning, was demeaning of Shorten. He knows any genuine attempts to help make the NDIS more efficient and effective will be eagerly supported by Opposition Leader Peter Dutton.

Why? Because Dutton fully expects the Coalition to return to government one day, perhaps with himself as prime minister. He would dread the thought of inheriting the mess the NDIS has become since he can expect no help from Labor to reform it.

In 2021, when Linda Reynolds, the minister then responsible for the NDIS, put forward the modest proposal that NDIS claims should be independently assessed before payment, Shorten led a colourful attack against her and then prime minister Scott Morrison.

He called Reynolds’ plan “an anti-disability monster” and said she should “put a stake in its heart – not just delay it”. He labelled an independent task-force established by the NDIS oversight body, the National Disability Insurance Agency, as the Coalition’s “razor gang” and a “disgrace”. It was, he said, “the latest leak of a broader plan against the NDIS and participants” that the government was hiding “because even they know it is shameful”.

Shorten’s crude attempt to smear the opposition as the flint-hearted, iron-fisted enemies of the downtrodden is, sadly, par for the course in an era of gross political intemperance. Yet it betrays a blind spot in Shorten’s understanding of the problem child he himself conceived.

The NDIS needs more than the rebooting he is promising. It requires re-engineering from the bottom up. It must remove the incentives for providers to maximise the size of packages, the gross disparities between payments to beneficiaries with similar needs, and remove the overflowing bowls of sugar left sitting on the table waiting to be scooped.

It needs radical restructuring to restore the original promise of assisting NDIS recipients to become more self-sufficient over time, rather than rewarding those who profit from extending their disability. It will require claims to be subject to the kind of independent oversight the Morrison government was prevented from introducing by Shorten.

Above all, it requires ministerial leadership that seeks bipartisan reform in the national interest, a task for which Shorten appears unsuited. His chances of turning the NDIS into something resembling his original bold vision rest on his ability to balance his deficit of courage with a surplus of conceit.