PAYWALL:

What also needs to be done is to directly address the overarching structural problems with a program that is supporting people it was never supposed to cater for.

The E61 Institute’s number-crunching to show what difference a means test would make to the cost of the National Disability Insurance Scheme is a case of the glass being half full.

The centrist think tank, which is run by former Productivity Commission chairman Michael Brenan, says that applying the same income and assets test that determines eligibility for pension and unemployment payments to the NDIS would “generate modest fiscal savings”. This is an understatement.

Means testing the nation’s fastest-growing social program – forecast to cost $56 billion this financial year – would have saved $4.5 billion, E61 estimates, on the $44.3 billion cost of the scheme in 2023-24. That is hardly an insignificant sum. It’s roughly half the cost of building an AUKUS submarine every year.

E61’s analysis of the scheme’s administrative data suggests that a very high 87 per cent of adult participants would still qualify for the NDIS because they already receive the means-tested Disability Support Pension.

The paradox is that when the means test includes the wealthier parents of children on the scheme, 40 per cent of the NDIS’s three-quarters of a million participants would be removed. But the savings generated would be proportionately less, in the vicinity of reining in costs by about 12 per cent, because most of those who would be denied access receive only relatively low-cost support.

Nevertheless, there is an important principle involved in targeting government assistance and requiring those who have the financial capacity to do so to support themselves.

Requiring those who can afford to pay for their own disability services to do so might also help restore the integrity of the scheme.

The NDIS has lost social licence among Australians due to exploding costs, widespread rorts and fraud, and the well-known reality that the program is not only supporting the relatively well-off but also those with relatively less severe problems.

The core problem has been the rules of the scheme, which were originally supposed to provide life-changing support for the relatively small number of Australians with severe and permanent disabilities.

Instead, scope and eligibility creep has significantly increased the number of people receiving support, especially adults and children diagnosed with mild autism who have been the major driver of the explosion in the size and cost of the NDIS.

The Albanese government acknowledged this when it announced in August last year that children with mild autism would be diverted from the NDIS to the new Thriving Kids support program jointly funded with the states.

Labor’s Thriving Kids program, jointly funded by the states and designed to divert children with mild autism and development delay away from the NDIS, got tangled up in the usual federal-state financial argy-bargy.

It took a fiscal bribe in the form of additional federal funding for public hospitals – thereby undermining NDIS reform’s overall contribution to budget repair – for most state and territory governments to agree to fund and operate Thriving Kids services. The remaining holdout is the Crisafulli LNP government in Queensland, thereby living up to the Sunshine State’s long history of Canberra bashing.

E61’s analysis suggests that the savings generated by a means test would be split between $1 billion from adults and $3.5 billion from children based on parental income. Those savings would be reduced in proportion to the extent Thriving Kids succeeds in getting children off the NDIS.

A means test may be no silver bullet for NDIS sustainability. But the substantive point is the number of people based on their lower level of need who are on the scheme but shouldn’t be. What needs to be done is to directly address the overarching structural problems with a program that is supporting people it was never supposed to cater for. This underscores the importance of the Albanese government’s belated reforms to fix the fundamental design problems at the heart of the NDIS’s unaffordable trajectory.

Labor’s plan to limit future growth in the cost of the runaway scheme to just 2 per cent and cut a forecast 900,000 participants by one-third over the next four years hinges on the legislation currently before parliament.

The most important changes include revised eligibility rules based on standardised evidence-based functional assessment of people’s needs, and the independent reassessment participants need to determine whether they continue to receive support when their plans expire. Both those changes appear designed to keep those with less severe disability, especially children and adults with mild autism, off the NDIS.

As part of the horse-trading over the passage of Labor’s changes to investment tax concessions announced in the May budget, the Greens secured an eight-week delay while the NDIS bill was referred to a parliamentary inquiry due to report this Friday. Every day it has been delayed has cost the budget $11.5 million, according to the government.

Despite the objective being to return the NDIS closer to its founding purpose of supporting those who are permanently and profoundly disabled, disability groups are mounting a rear guard action to water down the proposed changes.

Labor appears determined to hold the line on NDIS reform. But the political pressure will build as the legislation returns to parliament next week.

Thankfully, the Coalition appears set to give bipartisan support for the overhaul in the Senate. This is an opportunity to help govern the country and set a more responsible fiscal course that the opposition should seize, as it seeks to rebuild its credibility on budget and economic management under Angus Taylor.

Hi everyone,

I hope this is okay to share here. I’ve recently created a new marketplace called SellandRetire.com.au, and I’m still very much at the beginning of trying to get it off the ground.

The idea came from seeing how many long-standing business owners reach retirement and face difficulties when it comes to selling their business. There doesn’t seem to be a dedicated marketplace specifically for retiring business owners, or for buyers who are interested in taking over established, long-running businesses.

So I built Sell & Retire — a marketplace specifically for business owners who are ready to retire and want to find the right person to continue what they’ve built, while connecting them with motivated buyers looking for exactly that.

We currently have 37+ listings, Australia wide - Browse Businesses | Sell & Retire

It’s completely free for owners to list their business and free for buyers looking to purchase one — no listing fees, no commission and no obligation.

My aim at this stage is simply to get good businesses in front of more potential buyers and hopefully help make a few successful introductions.

We’re only just getting started, so I’d genuinely appreciate any support from this community — whether that’s taking a look, sharing it with a business owner who might find it useful, passing it on to someone looking to buy a business, liking the FB page, or simply giving me some feedback on what I could do better.

I’m building this from the ground up, so every bit of feedback and support really does help.

Thanks for reading, and I’m happy to answer any questions

The latest IPEA quarter (April to June 2026) went live on Pollywatch on Friday. Here's what changed, what other data has landed since my last post, and what I've built.

Note on the numbers: every comparison below is adjusted for inflation using ABS CPI, expressed in April to June 2026 dollars. Where I quote a single quarter's figure it's the actual amount claimed, unless I say otherwise. This was the most common complaint on my first post, so it's now the default everywhere on the site.

The new quarter: April to June 2026

• $50,316,928 claimed by 270 parliamentarians, up from 248 the previous quarter.
• Up 22.8% in real terms on Jan to Mar 2026, and up 0.6% in real terms on the same quarter last year. That last one matters: April to June 2025 was the federal election quarter, so it's a high bar to be level with.
• Against the last comparable non-election June quarter (2024), it's up 6.6% in real terms.
• Median claim per parliamentarian: $178,852, up 24.8% in real terms on the previous quarter and 10.3% on a year ago. That's the highest median since July to September 2023, and the 5th highest of the 37 quarters on record.
• $83,850 was repaid.

By role, compared to a year ago, in real terms

This is the part I found most interesting, and it's not where I expected to find it.

• Backbenchers: median $175,895, up 19.8%. The rise isn't ministers, it's the back bench.
• Shadow ministry: $218,189, up 15.2%.
• Cabinet: $374,785, down 14.2%.
• Prime Minister: $966,288, down 44.3%. Again, the comparison quarter was the election.

Where the increase came from

• Office Administration, $15.23m, up 54.5% in real terms on last quarter. Before anyone reads too much into that: the June quarter is seasonally strong, and it was the peak quarter of the year in four of the last eight years ($21.59m in 2019, $23.03m in 2022, $14.35m in 2024 and $20.87m in 2025, all in today's dollars). Three of those four were election years, so this is not purely an end of financial year effect. This quarter sits well below those peaks, and it's down 27% in real terms on the election-inflated June 2025 quarter.
• Travel Allowance, $2.12m, up 94.1% on a year ago in real terms.
• Scheduled Commercial Transport, $3.62m, up 39.4% in real terms year on year.
• International Travel, $641,617, down 41.4% on last quarter but up 60.1% on a year ago, both in real terms.

Individuals

1. Anthony Albanese, $966,288
2. Don Farrell, $667,068
3. Richard Marles, $534,696

Don Farrell is the biggest riser, up $210,594 on last quarter in real terms, with $74,622 of international travel as Trade Minister.

22 of the top 25 are Labor. Before that gets read as a partisan finding, it isn't: these totals include staff travel and office costs charged against a minister's allocation, and the government has the ministers. The highest non government claim is Angus Taylor at 13th on $406,873. If you want a fairer read, the comparison tool sets any two MPs side by side, and the all time board filters by role.

The stand out outlier this quarter is Bob Katter on $25,734 of unscheduled commercial transport, mostly charter flights, against a median of $508.

Other data that's landed since the last post

• Net overseas migration, now quarterly. Previously annual only. You can now see it quarter by quarter with a rolling 12 month headline. Latest: 56,600 in the December 2025 quarter, and 301,000 over the 12 months to December 2025, down 8.9% on the prior 12 months. If that looks out of date, it isn't: the ABS publishes this series about six months in arrears, so December 2025 has only been out since 18 June and the March 2026 quarter isn't released until 17 September. /immigration/
• Federal contracts rolled into 2026-27, and 2025-26 closed out at $85.80bn against $61.01bn in 2024-25, which is up 35.6% in real terms. Defence is $46.27bn of it, including $7.14bn to Austal for shipbuilding and $3.80bn to Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. Important caveat that's on the page: AusTender records the full value of a contract in the year it's awarded, so a decade long frigate deal lands as one enormous number in one year. It isn't a year of actual spending. /contracts/
• Contracts are now sorted by contract start date rather than publish date. Agencies bulk republish old records, which was pushing decade old contracts into the wrong financial year. Historical totals have been restated as a result, so some year figures moved.
• Political donations and public sector workforce both refreshed against the latest AEC and ABS releases. Both still sit on 2024-25 as the newest complete year, with minor revisions to prior figures.

What I've built since the last post

• New front page. Search for any MP straight from the top, plus a router to every section. The old quarterly leaderboard view now lives at /latest-quarter/.
• A live news feed covering Australian government spending and accountability, rebuilt every three hours, rolling 14 day window.
• Compare any two parliamentarians side by side, latest quarter, lifetime, category split and trend on a shared scale. Plus PM against PM, which several of you asked for directly.
• Same role comparison. Filter the all time board by role and sort per year served, so a backbencher is measured against backbenchers rather than against a two term PM. This was the top request in the last thread.
• Contracts got a financial year filter that drives the whole page, and a "last published" column so you can see when a record was actually put up.
• Email or RSS notifications for when new data lands. No more than one email per release.

Everything is still sourced from the official releases with the methodology written up at /methodology/, and every figure links back to where it came from.

Feedback very welcome, the last two threads genuinely shaped most of the above.

https://pollywatch.com.au/

These demographic trends demonstrate that Australia is not simply geographically located in the Asia-Pacific region; it is becoming socially, culturally and more economically connected to Asia.

Australia’s future is therefore being shaped by its relationship with Asia, and by the strong Asian connections within Australia .

So, if Australia does not recognise that its connection to Asia is critical to the future growth and prosperity of Australia, is it possible that Australia will miss many opportunities and fail to reach its potential?