On Friday, without warning, after his meeting with national cabinet, the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, announced he would be taking action to cut the growth of the national disability insurance scheme.
The current growth in the NDIS is around 14% every year, but the prime minister wants to get the growth under 8% by July 2026.
And after that he wants to reduce the growth in the NDIS even further.
The prime minister said: “We know that the trajectory of NDIS expenditure is just not sustainable into the future.”
What does this mean for us, people with disability and our families?
Will it make it harder for people to get on to the NDIS?
Will we miss out on essential support because our funding packages will no longer keep up with the growing costs of services?
The truth is, we don’t know. But we are concerned and we need the government to engage with us openly about what this means and how it will affect our lives.
This is what we do know …
Before the election, the Labor party promised to stop the cuts, rebuild trust with our community and put people with disabilities at the centre of the scheme.
The minister for the national disability insurance scheme, Bill Shorten, walked beside us as we marched the streets to Defend the NDIS.
In my podcast before the election, he promised to restore trust. He said: “We’ve got to take the anxiety out of the scheme.”
But now, once again, we are anxious and we don’t know who to trust.
We are afraid that cuts are heading our way.
We are angry that the government has broken its promise to include us in decisions that affect us.
A growth cap is a dangerous precedent for the NDIS. It puts the scheme at risk of death by a thousand cuts. Disabled people will be forced to hold our breath before every budget round, wondering whether we will be forced to cut back on the number of showers we can have, or whether we will be forced to live in a nursing home.
The government and the community needs to understand that the NDIS is an investment, not a frivolous expense. It provides life-saving and life-changing supports that are essential for Australians with disabilities to live a good life in the community.
Of course we want the NDIS to be sustainable. So we need to stop the fraud and stop the businesses profiteering and overcharging. And there are other things we can do to reduce costs without impacting on the essential supports we rely on. And that’s the conversation we should be having, in the spirit of codesign.
The government needs to work closely with the disability community. We feel blindsided by Friday’s announcement and want to remind the government and the minister of their commitment to codesign and put us at the centre of the NDIS.
And the states need to step up, the NDIS was never intended to replace inclusive education and health systems and accessible housing and transport. All systems and all levels of government need to be inclusive and respond to the needs of people with disabilities, not just the NDIS.
So was this a broken promise?
Ten years ago, the NDIS became law and the government fulfilled its promise to deliver an uncapped and demand-driven lifetime support scheme for people with disabilities. I hope the announcement on Friday leads to a collaborative effort with the disability community to find sensible cost savings.
But if the government bulldozes ahead with cuts that hurt disabled people, then it is a broken promise that we will call out and fight against.
• Dr George Taleporos is independent chair of Every Australian Counts. He has a podcast series and you can find him on Twitter @drgeorgethecrip
