NSW lifts annual funding for $22bn National Disability Insurance Scheme

NSW to lift annual funding for NDIS by a further half percentage point as it becomes first state officially to sign up to full scheme.

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian. Picture: AAP.

The NSW government will lift its annual funding for the $22bn National Disability Insurance Scheme by a further half percentage point as it becomes the first state in the country to officially sign up to the full scheme, granting it access to $3.1bn in money that had been locked away.

Malcolm Turnbull and NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian this morning announced the agreement which will increase the state’s $3bn commitment in 2018-19 by 4 per cent each year, one of the recommendations from last year’s Productivity Commission review into scheme costs.

NSW Premier @GladysB: Today is the first time in our nation that the state and the federal government have come together to sign the NDIS agreement...we're proud to be the first state to do so.

MORE: https://t.co/ykweMevBOK #SkyLiveNow pic.twitter.com/4WQ3n2Kfsa

— Sky News Australia (@SkyNewsAust) May 24, 2018

The announcement comes less than a month after the NDIS was delayed by at least half a year in South Australia.

When Julia Gillard raised the Medicare Levy by half a percentage point, the money was diverted to the Disability Care Australia Fund which states could access but only once they met key rollout milestones and agreed to full launch.

“The agreement will enable NSW to access $3.1bn of DCAF payments between 2018-19 and 2023-23,” Mr Turnbull said.

“Over 84,000 people in NSW are already benefiting from the NDIS, including more than 16,000 people who had not previously accessed government-funded specialist disability supports.”

The commonwealth will still pay the balance of NDIS costs in NSW, expected to be at least hundreds of millions of dollars a year, but the state and federal governments will also established a “shared fund” to create an NDIS reserve “to provide greater flexibility” to manage the scheme’s sustainability.