Brutal NDIS cuts will hurt the most vulnerable

Some parts of the NDIS reform bill focus on the right things: fixing flaws in the scheme’s design, including inconsistency in assessing people’s eligibility and setting their budgets, over-reliance on markets, and inadequate governance.

But it also includes short-term measures that are deeply concerning: a 50 per cent cut to every Social and Community Participation Supports budget and a 10 per cent cut to every Capacity Building Daily Activities budget. These cuts will deliver $13.2bn of the savings projected over the next four years – one third of total NDIS savings.

While the structural reforms do the heavy lifting by bringing long-run growth down to a sustainable 5-to-6 per cent a year, these brutal and immediate reductions are a real terms cut, a chainsaw slashing growth to only 1.1 per cent a year over the next four years, well below inflation.

To enable these cuts, the bill would give the minister, or any future minister, power to arbitrarily reduce funding for groups of supports at any time should he or she declare it necessary for the scheme’s financial sustainability. This power is sweeping and would allow any future minister to cut supports from people, essentially on a whim. A minister could reduce support for people without showing that their needs have changed, that their plans were wrongly calculated, or that the supports are poor value in their circumstances.

The government’s immediate proposed use for this power, to cut Social and Community Participation budgets by 50 per cent and Capacity Building Daily Activities budgets by 10 per cent, would undermine core objectives of the NDIS: to support people to live independently, build capability, exercise choice and control, and participate in their communities.

Social and community participation is central to the purpose of the NDIS. These supports help people with disability to build independence, form relationships, and engage in society. An across-the-board cut of this magnitude will have a devastating impact on many people.

And, worse, the social and community participation cuts would strip the most support from the most vulnerable people in the NDIS. People in supported independent living or specialist disability accommodation – among those with the highest level of need in the NDIS – have average social and community participation budgets more than five times as high as other people in the NDIS – so will lose five times as much support.

Social and community support makes up more than a quarter of the average plan for people with a visual impairment, psychosocial disability, Down syndrome, or intellectual disability. For people with profound functional limitations, these supports are often the practical bridge between a funded plan and actual community life. These blunt cuts would deepen the social and community exclusion the NDIS is intended to reduce.

The case for such deep, early cuts has not been sufficiently made and is underpinned by dubious policy logic. The scheme can be put on a sustainable footing for the long term without resorting to blunt cuts to add to budget savings in the short term.

And even if early savings were necessary, such a deep cut to Social and Community Participation Supports is far from the best way to achieve them.

The rationale for the reduction appears to be that these supports are less important than supports that address basic physical health and safety such as toileting, showering, meal preparation, and in-home care. That is too narrow a view of disability support and of the NDIS. The scheme was created to support independence, choice, and social and economic participation. Social and community participation should not be treated as a lower-order support simply because it goes beyond immediate physical care.

Social connection is a major driver of wellbeing and health, and people with disability already face elevated risks of isolation and loneliness. Reducing social and community participation reduces support in an area where disabled people already face significant disadvantage.

A scheme that funds only the minimum required to keep people clean, fed, and safe would not deliver the NDIS that was promised to Australians with permanent and significant disability.

An NDIS reform bill needs to pass to ensure the government can get on with the hard work of structural NDIS repair. But the current bill must be amended to remove these immediate cuts, which fix nothing, but would worsen outcomes for some of Australia’s most vulnerable people. The government’s insistence on these cuts shows it is prioritising the short-term budget bottom line over real reforms that could make the NDIS sustainable, while continuing to deliver for disabled Australians well into the future.