Labor created a seemingly unstoppable Gargantua with the NDIS. Will the same people who birthed this all-consuming monstrosity have the courage, let alone the will, to put it out of our misery.
The NDIS — National Disability Insurance Scheme — was just one of the many brain-fart policies of the Rudd-Gillard government. A government whose sole achievements were laying a seemingly endless series of fiscal landmines. But the legacy media ate it all up, of course. So progressive! So socialist! Who cares who pays for it all, or how.
History not being without a sense of irony, the albatross is coming back to hang around the necks of the very people who killed it. Not just another Labor government, but a Labor government largely composed of the very same people as the Rudd-Gillard years, including those directly responsible for the all-consuming NDIS monster.
The cost of the NDIS is growing by an average $75m every month and jumped by $900m in the year to January, with a peak disability expert saying the added budget pressure of AUKUS now gives the government “permission” to make radical changes to the scheme.
Costs jumped by nearly a billion in a year? The NDIS on track to outstrip even Medicare in government spending? How can this have happened to Gillard’s allegedly “fully costed” scheme?
Analysis of monthly data from the agency also showed an average 6000 participants were added to the NDIS each month, leading to total participants increasing by 14 per cent in the year to January.
Between December and January, an extra $200m was spent in monthly NDIS payments, bringing total monthly payments to $2.94bn; the average payment per participant rose from $57,600 to $58,500.
Lay out a bottomless pot of taxpayer-funded honey, and the ants will swarm. If NDIS figures are to believed, Australia is an autism nation, where a staggering one in 10 boys is now “autistic”. Is this even remotely believable?
Professor of autism at the Telethon Kids Institute Andrew Whitehouse said the eye-watering price tag of AUKUS provided the government with “permission” needed to look at reforming the scheme and the number of participants – particularly children with autism – being added to the NDIS.
“The simple fact is there are more people within the scheme, including autistic children, than the NDIS ever thought was possible and we need to look at those numbers and realise as a nation we need to reimagine how we provide support to these kids,” he said.
Or admit that we’re being conned by unscrupulous grifters, for whom the NDIS is a river of gold to beat anything else the welfare state has ever offered.
It follows another leading autism advocate – Sylvana Mahmic – revealing to The Australian this month that private diagnostic service providers were charging parents more than $5000 for an autism diagnosis to secure a place on the NDIS, with the cost being described as “a guarantee of funding for life” for their child.
How is any government ever going to find the balls to reign in this colossal grift? Maybe when they admit that we’ve got some real threats to face, and that the taxpayer isn’t a bottomless money pot.
Peter Dutton earlier this week indicated he was supportive of “budgetary savings” being made in order to fund AUKUS – due to cost up to $386bn over the next three decades – and quickly pointed to his desire to make the NDIS “more sustainable”.
The Australian
Don’t count on it, not with the very idiot who oversaw the creation of the NDIS, Bill Shorten, back in charge of it. Nor with well-organised activists campaigning hard to keep their claws on an ever-growing pile of other peoples’ money.