NDIA consultants’ gravy train

Australians with severe disabilities need the security and support the National Disability Insurance Scheme provides. Almost from the outset, after its hurried, incompetent establishment by the Gillard government in 2012, the agency has relied heavily on contractors and consultants to meet its goals and sort out its organisational structure. Seven years on, however, it’s time for the Morrison government to rein in some of its costs, especially the cost of consultants not engaged in providing services to the disabled.

Today, Rick Morton reveals the National Disability Insurance Agency spent more than $430 million on contractors and consultants in 2018, almost a 50 per cent increase since 2017. Social Services Minister Paul Fletcher should demand answers about several major outlays. Management consultant McKinsey Pacific Rim, for example, was paid almost $4m in a single month to correct work for which it had already been paid $5m. After commissioning the firm to review the cost of various therapists, the NDIA was unable to implement some recommendations because they would have ruined therapists’ payments. Despite millions spent in the establishment phase of the NDIS, “organisational redesign work’’ remains ongoing, with Ernst & Young paid $1.75m over two months last year for such services. The firm also received $1.3m in labour hire contracts and another $2.5m over four months for consultancy and business services.

The NDIS is expected to cost $22 billion in 2019-20, its first full year, rising to $30bn each year by the end of the next decade. Morton recently reported that information about the financial sustainability of the scheme is being withheld from state and territory govern­ments because it would threaten “co-operation and trust” between jurisdictions and reveal details “at variance with certain … state expectations”. Administrative and financial shortcomings within the NDIS should have been ironed out by now. The difficulties will only worsen as the scheme approaches its full size and scope. Two months before the May election, it’s a problem neither side of politics can afford to ignore.