NDIS saving spent on HECS

Bill Shorten has made a good start in his attempts to rein in spending on the National Disability Insurance Scheme but the Albanese government has immediately squandered its new-found fiscal prudence with an unjustifiable multibillion-dollar giveaway for student debt relief. Economist Chris Richardson has identified the key problem with an election measure that looks timed to draw attention from the travel scandal engulfing Anthony Albanese. Reducing the repayment burden on graduates will benefit people who already are likelier to earn more across their careers. It doesn’t deliver incentives to study or encourage anyone into work. The scheme also works against efforts to shield the nation’s finances from other misguided acts of largesse. It is a measure of the task before government that a claimed $1bn in savings on the NDIS will hardly touch the sides of what has become a poorly regulated expenditure juggernaut.

The issues that need to be addressed are clear. They include fixing the lax approach that has been taken to eligibility for support and the poor oversight of those on the system. The result has been a program that is failing the people it was designed to help. Mission creep has resulted in large financial packages being provided to many who would never fit the definition of what most people believed the NDIS was all about. As health editor Natasha Robinson wrote on Saturday: “The rorting, commercial opportunism and welfare mentality of sometimes undeserving applicants that the NDIS’s largesse has spawned is simply sickening.” Most worrying is the fact the NDIS is breeding a culture of entitlement among recipients and dismay in the community among those who cannot compete with government for workers and witness the waste on services that are being put on the taxpayer tab.

Withdrawing services that have been previously granted is never easy. But the government has no one to blame but itself. Mr Shorten soon will begin the process of mandatory registration for all of the 170,000 providers and potentially the nearly 200,000 NDIS participants who self-manage their plans. Incredibly, only about 16,000 providers in the NDIS are registered, leaving the NDIS Commission with limited oversight of what the other 154,000 are doing with the public funds they have access to. Self-managed recipients have been left to directly employ and direct disability workers and choose the services they want.

No wonder costs have blown out and funds have been spent on activities that would never pass the pub test. The NDIS is a classic example of good intent colliding with government incompetence. The student loan arrangements must not be pushed further in that direction.