For many, NDIS is a disaster

August 29, 2025

Bravo to Richard Bruggemann for saying the unacceptable – backed by his many years of experience and advocacy. It was entirely predictable that a privatised disability insurance scheme would be a disaster, with unsatisfactory services for many participants and massive exploitation by unscrupulous service providers.

Those who created the scheme were, of course, well motivated. And there are undoubtedly many participants who have benefitted from it – in particular, those with significant physical disabilities, but both normal intellectual capacity and a degree of bureaucratic sophistication.

But for many others and/or their loved ones, it is a bureaucratic and logistic nightmare. As Bruggemann indicates, the concept of people with profound and multiple disabilities, particularly intellectual disability, “choosing” their services from a smorgasbord of options is fundamentally senseless.

The nexus between childhood autism and the NDIS has proven particularly problematic: perverse incentives for children to be assessed as more disabled than they are; perverse incentives for children to not improve; a mass movement of professionals from the public system to the private system; withdrawal of services previously provided at state level (most importantly by schools).

It is hard now to see how the NDIS can be repaired.