- by Peter Farmer
- The Guardian
- Issue #2203
Graphic: wannapik.com (CC0)
The NDIS bill has passed the Senate after Labor made a deal with the Coalition. The bill is designed to cut costs by reducing budgets as well as by cutting the number of people who can use the scheme.
After the new rules have been introduced, by 2030 more than 240,000 people are expected to be dropped from the scheme.
People with Disability Australia (PWDA) Acting CEO Megan Spindler-Smith said disregarding thousands of submissions and the documented harm of removing people from the NDIS, placing caps on essential supports and shifting responsibility onto families, carers and already stretched mainstream services was a betrayal of the deep expertise and experience of the disability community and its allies.
Health Minister Mark Butler said that the changes would protect the integrity of the NDIS.
Greens senator Jordon Steele-John said that the stress the cuts would create would be “beyond imagining.” He pointed out that the bill would cut supports that now allow some disabled people to “go outside, maybe once or twice a week.”
New analysis from The Australia Institute estimates the planned cuts are equivalent to around 51,600 full-time jobs and 94 million hours of paid care every year by 2029-30. It also estimates that, after accounting for inflation and population growth, NDIS funding in real terms would be around 10 per cent lower in 2029-30 than in 2026-27.
PWDA Interim President Jarrod Sandell-Hay said those figures expose what is really at stake.
“These cuts mean smaller lives for people with disability,” Sandell-Hay said.
“Those 94 million hours of support don’t simply vanish. They are hours of support people need to leave their homes, go to work, study, see friends, participate in our communities and live safely.
“People with disability will either go without or our families and carers will be left scrambling to fill the gaps.
“It is cruel to ask people with disability to sacrifice our independence, our participation and our opportunities because the government has made the wrong choice to cut the NDIS.
The government has sought to make the cuts more acceptable by hiving off areas of the NDIS – for example, setting up ‘Thriving Kids’ which essentially puts the problem on to the states. Others thrown off the scheme won’t have any alternative.
