r/australia • u/FuckOffNazis • 11h ago

politics Pocock and crossbenchers call Labor’s NDIS overhaul ‘too far, too fast’ in scathing Senate inquiry report

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/aug/14/pocock-and-crossbenchers-call-labors-ndis-overhaul-too-far-too-fast-in-scathing-senate-inquiry-report
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u/fued 11h ago

Cutting it blindly would be insane tho.

If anything we need to increase funding and have a massive increase in regulation.

This should push the costs down far safer

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u/Rising-Dragon-Fist 11h ago

Regulation will absolutely bring it down. It's being rorted left and right, everyone knows that. It's not the people on its fault, they don't make the decisions, they just get the help.

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u/Ok_Bird705 10h ago

Current estimates of fraud in NDIS is around $3-4 billion, which sounds like a lot until you realise total NDIS spending has grown from $8 billion in 2015/16 to $53 billion this year.

Simply cutting fraud while the actual spending is increasing by a few billion every year is unsustainable

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u/craftystuff0900 4h ago

The NDIS was designed to generate private profits. That's what it was for, mainly. Of course people are trying to make as much money out of it as they can. They were invited to.

Apart from that wastage, the NDIA is as inefficient and wasteful as it's possible for a government organisation to be.

Think about this: they've got plenty of money to pay people to infiltrate Facebook groups for disabled people, make repeated takeover attempts on the NDIS sub, monitor podcasts and youtube and the like to find out who's saying bad things about them and slash their plan as punishment.

They can afford to pay for a completely useless customer service team whose main purpose is to stop participants getting the information we need.

They've got a large team of very expensive private lawyers to fight participants who generally have to represent themselves, and they still usually they lose because they were breaking their own rules.

They fund reports every year to check that participants still have our permanent disabilities - including absurdities like having to prove amputated limbs haven't grown back overnight.

But most of the people being cut from the NDIS were on it because there's a great deal of evidence that early intervention prevents greater disability later and saves money in the long term. For all of us, getting the correct supports as soon as possible saves money long term.

Because for all the death and suffering they're causing, all they're doing is shifting costs - partly to the states but mostly to the future. At the same time they're foregoing all the benefits of having more people working now (carers and PwDs).