Anyone with the remotest direct knowledge of the NDDNIS or of anyone attempting, against all odds, to access it – I know two such people, very well – will know that it is not fit for purpose.
Of the two totally and permanently work-disabled people that I know, one has just had his second application denied, and the other has been waiting – unable to leave his own house without help – for two years and is only now getting them to come and see him.
I can only assume that many hundreds of thousands of Australians are in a similar boat.
After the ongoing UniParty climate scam and ScoMo’s hopefully once-off, near trillion-dollar Covid scam, the NDDNIS would have to be the greatest rip-off in the history of Australian public policy. No doubt, there are other contenders, but we can set them aside for now.
The NDDNIS has it all – a non-solution not only in search of a non-problem but actually creating a new, massive problem; a centraliser’s utopia; a seed-bed of crony socialism; and a source of misery for gazillions and of largesse for the inevitably outsourced “service providers” who have created a whole new industry, courtesy of the generosity and naivete of Howard-era privatising and out-sourcing theoreticians.
There is more than enough meat here for both political scientists and public choice economists.
The cost of the scheme is as follows:
Total expenditure from the Commonwealth and the states and territories on the NDIS is estimated at $36.7 billion in 2022–23 and is expected to be $41.9 billion in 2023–24, a growth rate of 14.4%. In the subsequent 3 years, the annual growth rates are projected to be 11.6%, 10.9% and 7.9% respectively …
It costs about as much annually as Medicare and aged care (another disaster of public policy) combined. It cost a mere one billion to set up, in 2012. Philippa Martyr noted then, at Quadrant Online:
The Federal government has recently committed $1 billion to start up a National Disability Insurance Scheme for as many as 20,000 people with serious lifetime disabilities, and their carers and families.
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2012/08/ndis-coulda-woulda-shoulda/
20,000 folks in 2012. The numbers now are, well, pretty arresting.
The NDIS Quarterly Report shows there are now more than 550,000 Australians with disability receiving life changing support from the world leading Scheme. The NDIS Quarterly Report for 30 September 2022 shows 554,917 participants are receiving NDIS support, with 23,137 new participants joining the NDIS this quarter.
So, over half a million now, with more than the initial number now joining every quarter! Now, that is one mighty growth industry, right there. We seem to be becoming a disabled nation. And, as I said at the outset, genuinely disabled people cannot get a start. Unless your medicos have the secret sauce, the magic code words to use in applications for entry to the scheme. Of course, one of the many outsourced industries that has sprung up is the “I’ll get you into the NDIS for a fee” brigade.
While on the current NDDNIS budget, by comparison, we spend about $50 billion on defence these days, a core task of government in a world facing multiple global threats. We spend nearly that on not helping people with genuine disabilities while feathering the nests of every crook under the sun. It is little wonder that our economy is in the toilet, and relying on the Ponzi, mass immigration boondoggle to look like it is staying afloat.
Speaking of scammers, this is the current big story about the scheme, but it is only one of many. We have all heard tales – or, perhaps, we haven’t – of recipients getting trips to Vanuatu for massage therapy. These clearly only scratch the surface. The scheme has even recruited a senior copper to lead scam investigations.
The scammers are part of the whole out-sourced cartel that, for the statisticians and Bernard Salt types, goes to the endless growth of the “social assistance” sector. A social assistance sector that does little in the way of socially assisting. And just about Australia’s only steadily growing industry, outside renewable energy. Here a better word than “scam” might be “rort”.
The Australian Financial Review noted in 2022:
The federal [Labor] government is reviewing a major loophole that has allowed 90 per cent of National Disability Insurance Scheme providers to be unregistered, largely avoiding safety and quality requirements and exposing the [then] $30 billion scheme to fraud and scams.
“Many people are shocked to learn that the fastest-growing part of the Australian disability sector is unregistered and effectively unregulated,” said Jordan O’Reilly, co-founder and chief executive of online disability support provider Hireup.
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation noted more recently:
Criminals manipulating participants in the National Disability Insurance Scheme have used their money to buy drugs, holidays and new cars.
Among the instances of fraud of the $42 billion scheme were a $20,000 holiday, and a $73,000 car.
NDIS participants have also been forced to hand over cash for criminals to buy drugs, and later harassed by the fraudulent providers.
Officials told Senate Estimates on Monday evening courts can't keep up with the number of cases of exploitation of participants by organised crime, with reform needed to stop manipulation of participants.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-06-04/ndis-scam-fraud-participants-manipulated-australia/103934188
Then there was The Australian:
Billions in NDIS funds are being used to buy illicit drugs and other items “not consistent” with participants’ plans, as agency officials revealed evidence indicating up to 90 per cent of plan managers were committing fraud.
Source: The Australian, 4 June 2024, paywalled.
90 per cent? Not a “few bad apples” problem, then. It is an endemic rort, not a minor scam. It is one for the public choice theorists, who have told us over time about the way government agencies are captured by industry. Regulatory capture, to those in the trade:
For public choice theorists, regulatory capture occurs because groups or individuals with high-stakes interests in the outcome of policy or regulatory decisions can be expected to focus their resources and energies to gain the policy outcomes they prefer, while members of the public, each with only a tiny individual stake in the outcome, will ignore it altogether.
A good general source on public choice theory can be found here:
https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc1/PublicChoiceTheory.html
In the case of the NDDNIS, government created the agency AND the industry all by itself. Like Jerry Seinfeld throwing his car keys to the homeless person in the street and nodding meaningfully towards his body odour-infested BMW. That is quite an achievement.
Finally, we go back to the AFR, which reports a senior “integrity” official with the scheme saying “it is too late to prosecute”. Oops.
Of course, the NDDNIS was the brainchild of one Julia Gillard.
It counts, sadly, as one of her few “achievements”. Of course, the other, equally hollow non-achievement was being our first female prime minister. She now is Chair of the Wellcome Trust, a British-based global eugenics outfit. I guess she might also claim the four hundred-plus million-dollar Royal Commission into Getting the Catholic Church into Strife over an ancient and over-hyped problem. That as payback for a priest-chasing Victorian (where else?) lawyer called Vivian Waller, who had helped young Julia get a seat in parliament in the 1990s.
The NDDNIS is now oversighted by the endlessly grumpy looking Bull Shitten, another Labor failure and credibly accused rapist. Everyone forgets that, and the alleged victim (Kathy Sherriff), oddly in these times of moral panic over sexual assault.
https://kathysherriff.com/
Of course, it all worsened on the Liberals’ watch. They were there for nearly a decade. I know it wasn’t their idea. Of course, Shorten blamed the Liberals for the mess, without saying how they had done this:
Minister Shorten said a decade of Liberal mismanagement of the Scheme had left Australians with the worst of both worlds: an NDIS that will cost $50 billion by 2025-26 but that too often under-delivered for people with disability.
https://www.ndisreview.gov.au/news/ndis-20-new-hope
Bull Shitten is both right and wrong. Inevitably glib, of course. But you either can these things altogether, or fix them. Some insiders have, indeed, concluded that the NDDNIS is beyond repair. Would the 2020s Liberal Party be brave enough to ditch it and start again? It will be yet another of many tests for the next government after the seeming first term implosion of Airbus Albo’s bedraggled Government.
The to-do list is already long, and growing exponentially. Leave the last, hideously ironic and prescient word to Philippa Martyr (speaking in 2012):
Sadly, this catalogue of over-administered political bankruptcy tends to point to one conclusion: the NDIS will become just another unauditable and potentially tragic botch-up. Only time will tell.
Well, time has told.
Philippa (who writes regularly for The Catholic Weekly) is a smart lady. But you probably didn’t need to be a genius to have concluded, pretty sharply, at the time of the NDDNIS’s arrival, that it would quickly become a slowly moving train wreck.
Paul Collits
12 June 2020
Indeed. It was going to be anything but a cash cow, Being paid to take people out to lunch just bewilders me.
I self manage my daughter’s and I used a plan manager for a very short time to assist with a review. Expensive and their help underwhelming.
I also had an OT write a report that was dismal and ridiculously expensive. I found there was no where I could have their shoddy work reviewed. OT association took no interest.
I have also shaken my head at the plan reviewers. After going to the trouble and expense of submitting 7 reports, they were obviously not read or read and not comprehended.
I’ve a tertiary degree so I’ve been able to navigate the process. But it’s so difficult I know why folk reach out to plan managers. Carers lives are more chaotic than most and staying on top of the paperwork is a must when self managing.
I look at the high streets shop fronts and now I see all the NDIS practitioners occupy the spaces. OT, Physio, speechie, plan managers etc.
The nation’s growth sector is definitely the dis-abled and/or damaged (vaccine injuries).
Ambulances are constantly on the roads, no longer an occasional sight.
Excess deaths, all cause mortality has risen from 3% to 18%+, we no longer know how high they are because the ABS has changed their model and removed transparency.
There is a war going on - silently - because the mainstream media is captured.