The scheme is rife with fraud. But not from the hundreds of thousands who depend on it. ---- In May, the Albanese government announced cuts of $13.2 billion from the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). The Labor party has decided that people with a disability should pay for the government's failure. ----The NDIS was established in 2013 to provide 'reasonable and necessary support' to people with a significant permanent disability. Prior to the NDIS, disability support was a fragmented and underfunded system. Most couldn't access meaningful support. People with profound disabilities relied on life-long unpaid care provided by family members (mostly women). A significant disability meant a life of extreme poverty, neglect, or both. The NDIS was meant to fix this.
Thirteen years later, the consensus position of the ruling class is that the system is too expensive. The government intends to cut costs by kicking people off the scheme, and cutting resources for those who remain. New legislation would throw 240,000 people off their support, and deny access to a further 110,000, who would otherwise qualify.
These cuts are being justified on the basis that there's too much fraud in the NDIS. And it's true-people are gaming the system to get rich. But while the media and the government shift the blame to participants, the real culprits are being let off the hook.
Public money for private profit
The NDIS isn't like other government services in health or education. Australia has public schools and public hospitals, but we don't have public disability services.
Instead, the NDIS is a glorified voucher system. People with a disability have access to funding they can use to buy services from NDIS providers. Many of these providers operate for profit.
The justification for this approach is that it provides 'choice and control': People with a disability get to pick their provider and what services they want to buy.
The reality is very different. Providers are incentivised to cut care to maximise profit. Many engage in pressure sales tactics, deceptive marketing, overcharging, and restrictive contracts.
This assumes that providers are even providing the services they bill for. False claims from providers are rampant. Provider fraud accounts for anywhere between $3 and $6 billion a year. It's not people with disabilities getting rich at everyone else's expense-it's the capitalists.
Wage theft
NDIS workers are getting ripped off too.
If Australia had a genuine public system of disability support, the workers in that system would be public employees.
In health and education, public sector workers are highly unionised and take action to defend their pay and conditions. The design of the NDIS isolates workers, and makes it harder for us to organise together.
The disability support workforce is employed by tens of thousands of private providers. Some of the largest are operated by religious NGOs, but others are entirely profit driven. Private providers increase profits by cutting standards and squeezing workers. Sham contracting, misclassification, and out-right cash-in-hand wage theft are common.
The most profitable private provider, Mable, has done away with employees entirely. The company, reportedly valued at over $1 billion, is the 'Airtasker of disability support'. Mable forces tens of thousands of disability support workers to work as independent contractors, competing for precarious work on an app. The result is an unreliable service that harms workers and participants.
Cost shifting
State and federal governments have driven up NDIS expenses in other ways too.
Labor and Liberal have both gutted healthcare, mental health services, and the education system. Both have failed to invest in public housing, generating a homelessness crisis that disproportionately impacts people with disabilities.
All of this shifts costs, and puts more pressure on the NDIS. Every inaccessible tram is another taxi ride that has to be paid for somehow.
Why the NDIS?
It was inevitable that private providers would use the NDIS to make huge profits at the expense of people with disabilities. The scheme was, by design, a grand attempt to outsource disability support. Instead of providing public disability services, the Gillard Labor government decided to pay private companies and NGOs to do this work for them.
Underneath all the talk of human rights, was the economic rationale. The proponents of the NDIS argued the scheme would do two things: boost economic activity and increase workforce participation. Actual support was secondary to getting people to work, producing value for capitalists.
The cost of cuts
The government argues that people kicked off the NDIS will be supported by other services.
But cuts to the NDIS won't be matched by genuine reinvestment in health, education, housing, transport or any other support systems. In fact, this would defeat the purpose of the cut! The whole point is to help the government's bottom line.
This means that, for many, the transition from the NDIS will be nothing short of a transition into neglect, homelessness, unpaid family care, or prison. All for the sake of budget repair.
Fighting back, and for more
Attacks on disability support are an attack on all workers. 5.5 million Australians have a disability. Any worker could find themselves disabled at any time.
That's why-far from cuts-we need a massive expansion of public services. The choice isn't the NDIS or nothing. What we need is a public system of disability support and to rebuild our health, education, housing, and transport systems.
The workers with the structural power to raise and force through these demands already work in the system. Our task is to build rank-and-file union power in the biggest providers, side-by-side with organisations of people with disabilities.
Resisting the NDIS cuts is just the beginning. The real fight is for a truly public system, where workers, with disabilities and without, call the shots.
https://ancomfed.org/2026/08/the-ndis-cuts-fighting-back-and-fighting-for-more/
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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