Election 2022: Due more funding than defence, we need trust in NDIS

Opposition NDIS spokesman Bill Shorten. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Luis Enrique Ascui

If Labor takes office next month and Bill Shorten continues in the NDIS portfolio, as is his professed wish, he will have his hands on the tiller of one of the government’s largest spending programs.

Shorten will have two significant groups of constituents to serve – the 500,000 NDIS participants, their loved ones, and the workers who care for them, but also, and crucially, the taxpayer.

By the back end of an Albanese government’s first term in office, Treasury projects the cost of the National Disability Insurance Scheme to be outstripping defence spending. Last month’s budget put the projected 2024-25 NDIS spending at $42.8bn, and just over $46bn the following year.

This is seriously big coin, and taxpayers are entitled to be sure it is doing what it is designed to – providing the support people with permanent and significant disability need.

It is no surprise that Labor’s NDIS policy platform plan outlined by Shorten on Tuesday offers little additional funding beyond the ongoing costs of the scheme, apart from a $10m boost over four years to disability advocacy.

Instead Shorten wants to “restore trust” in the NDIS, which he says is threatened by the criminal activity and fraud of some care providers, the arbitrary cutting of some participants’ schemes by the National Disability Insurance Agency and the excessive use of high-priced private lawyers to fight appeals against those cuts.

Labor’s plan revolves around a series of new reviews of some of these matters, and better resourcing of the NDIA.

This addresses key concerns raised by disability groups, which say they have seen a “death by a thousand cuts” approach to finding savings in the scheme through reducing, they say unfairly, NDIS plans.

Shorten wasn’t going to miss the opportunity of a policy launch for a political drive-by, sinking the boot into the government and the NDIA for lining the pockets of high-priced lawyers tasked with stripping people with disability of their entitlements.

But his plan to bring forward a review into the scheme’s design, operation and sustainability, a job the Productivity Commission had set for next year, could be the circuit-breaker needed to re-establish trust for both participants and taxpayers in this important pillar of national social policy.