'Blanket wipeout': Families in fear as 160,000 people face being booted off NDIS
Updated . First published
More than 160,000 will be booted off Australia's National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) as part of the government's multi-billion-dollar crackdown, prompting fears that participants will slip through the cracks.
New eligibility rules and stricter provider vetting will slash the cost of running the NDIS by a projected $15 billion by 2030 after the government admitted the scheme was growing too fast to remain sustainable.
The new assessments will be based on a person's "functional capacity that impacts their day-to-day living" rather than basing it on diagnosis alone, Health Minister Mark Butler said yesterday.
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New eligibility rules will slash the cost of running the NDIS by a projected $15 billion by 2030 Nine
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Families who rely on the NDIS are now waiting to see if they will be kicked off or face undergoing repeated eligibility tests despite no changes to their disability.
"Even now in the scheme, participants often complain about having to be reassessed and nothing's changed or and it's not a pleasant experience," chief executive and founder of NDIS tech platform Kismet, Mark Woodland, told Nine.com.au.
"It is a big concern, people's dignity... sitting through those assessments.
"There's a lot of stress that can build up."
Describing the changes as "hard but unavoidable" decisions yesterday, Butler said the NDIS was built to support around 410,000 people with a disability.
Today, there are 760,000 people on the scheme.
"While new eligibility rules need to be worked through, our initial modelling will see the number of people on the scheme reduce to around 600,000 by the end of the decade, instead of growing to well over 900,000," he explained.
The cost-cutting measures will also see NDIS funds for social and community participation per participant wound back from an average $31,000 per person to around $26,000.
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Woodland said the government's ambitious plan to remove 160,000 people from the system by 2030 needs to be "carefully" executed.
While he said most providers are supportive of structural reform to get the NDIS under control, Woodland warned that proper consultation should be in place to ensure families who need the scheme to survive are not overlooked.
"People are going to have to be very sensitive and work quite carefully through this process," Woodland said.
"It breaks my heart thinking that people may be missing out and all they want to do is support their children and give them the best start in life.
"It is going to be a significant challenge that people need to work on super closely to make sure that genuine needs aren't being missed, and it doesn't just become a blanket wipeout."
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Greens senator and disability advocate Jordan Steele-John said his reaction to Butler's announcement is one of "shock and deep sadness".
He told the ABC yesterday that the disability community is now terrified of what is to come.
"What this means is that thousands of families will live for weeks, months, if not years, in the anguish and uncertainty," Steele-John said.
Butler was clear that the NDIS would no longer be an "ATM for shonks, grifters, fraudsters and crooks".
It is estimated that around $1 billion in NDIS funds were misused by dodgy claims in 2023, according to the government's Fraud Fusion Taskforce (FFT).
Woodland argued that a large chunk of misused funds were due to structural loopholes.
"There's structural challenges that creates unintentional fraud by definition, which is incorrect codes, wrong payment, someone mistakenly spelling someone's name incorrectly and the wrong payment going somewhere else, and then someone refusing to pay that money back," he said.
"So there's so many bigger structural issues and inefficiency is probably a better word than fraud."
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