Minister Bill Shorten starts multi-million dollar NDIS cost delay tracker

Bill Shorten is not happy that reforms to the NDIS have been put on hold by the Coalition and the Greens. His new cost tracker will tick up by $1m every hour until the legislation passes.

NDIS minister Bill Shorten. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

The Labor government will run a ticker over the winter parliamentary break tracking what it says is the cost of the Coalition and the Greens delaying key reforms to the $42bn National Disability Insurance Scheme.

NDIS Minister Bill Shorten said the scheme’s actuary had calculated the two-month delay would add more than $1bn to the cost of the scheme over the budget’s forward estimates.

“It’s about $23m a day, according to the actuary, or nearly a million dollars an hour,” he said.

The delay threatened to jeopardise the path to the 8 per cent cost growth target by 2026 imposed by national cabinet last year, Mr Shorten warned.

One of the reforms in the legislation would stop NDIS participants being able to automatically top up their plans if they ran out of funds, a practice that had accelerated in recent months.

“The agency informs me that about two-thirds of these applications … are not for legitimate reasons,” he said.

The NDIS bill was sent back to a parliamentary committee for further consideration after the Senate voted on Wednesday to delay a final vote.

Mr Shorten said the delay was pointless and a “vanity show” given the likelihood that the ­Coalition would support the NDIS reform bill when it came to a vote.

And the Coalition’s reason for deferring a vote on the bill, that there had been insufficient consultation, didn’t pass muster, he said, pointing to the 5200 people attending town hall meetings in the wake of the NDIS review.

Mr Shorten also provided a list of disability organisations that said they didn’t support “delay for delay’s sake”, including the Disability Advocacy Network, National Ethnic Disability Alliance and Women with Disabilities Australia.

If the legislation was delayed, it would cost “the equivalent of giving 60,000 kids on the scheme their average package for a year,” he said.

The government is under pressure to meet the 8 per cent cost growth target, with the NDIS flagged by Jim Chalmers as a key budget priority.

The independent NDIS review recommended the states provide more disability support outside the scheme as part of its pathway to sustainability, including crucially in schools, but the state and federal governments have yet to reach agreement on the details.