An open letter to the Australian Senate on the NDIS Cuts

Senators,

We are voters in every state and territory, in safe seats and marginal ones. We are disabled people, on the NDIS and off it. We are the support workers who turn up at 6am and the family carers who never clock off. We are the businesses that were invited to build a market and are now told the market has changed. We are asking you to vote against this Bill.

Australia signed the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Article 19 guarantees the right to live independently and be included in the community; Article 28 guarantees an adequate standard of living. Those are obligations this Parliament accepted on our behalf, not aspirations to be traded against a growth target. Three years ago a Royal Commission documented what happens when support is withdrawn — segregation, neglect, violence, early death. To legislate reductions while those findings sit unimplemented is not reform. It is regression.

Support is not a discretionary benefit handed to us in good times. It is how we hold rights other Australians take for granted: to work, to study, to raise children, to leave the house, to be safe at home. If the Budget were under strain, no Senator would rise to propose that some Australians be allowed fewer votes or a partial right to a fair trial. Yet the supports that let disabled people exercise exactly those rights are treated as an adjustable number in a forward estimate. One of the wealthiest countries on earth does not need to find savings here, and spends less on disability than comparable nations already. Choosing this line item, out of the whole Commonwealth Budget, is a political decision, not a fiscal necessity.

Before the Scheme, disability support in this country was block funded, and Australians should be reminded what that meant: a fixed grant to a service rather than a person, waiting lists years long for a shower rail, being washed on the day the roster allowed, put to bed at five in the afternoon, going without because the money ran out in March. It meant a great many people never left an institution or a group home at all. The Scheme was built to end that, and its founding principle was choice and control — funding attached to the person, so a disabled Australian decides who supports them, when and how. A growth cap, tighter eligibility and supports defined by instrument hand decision-making back to the Agency and the states, and hand us back the only role block funding ever offered: grateful recipient of whatever is left.

We are not seeking a better version of this Bill, and we do not accept that disabled people’s support is the problem to be solved. Be clear about what is in front of you: a growth cap set before anyone asked what disabled people need, so that every assessment becomes a rationing exercise; foundational supports promised without detail, funding certainty or agreement from the states; core decisions about eligibility and budgets pushed into rules that can change without a vote of this Parliament; and no published modelling of who loses, by how much, or where. There is no amendment that turns a cap into an entitlement.

The process has matched the substance. Legislation reshaping the lives of more than half a million people has moved on a timetable that would embarrass a local council — consultation measured in days, accessible versions of key documents late or missing, an inquiry window too short for the people who rely on workers, interpreters, advocates or a good health day simply to read a submission. Speed here is not efficiency; it is the avoidance of scrutiny.

Nor does this Bill go after fraud. It reduces entitlements, which is a different thing, and conflating the two has allowed criminal conduct by a small number of operators to justify cuts to hundreds of thousands of people who have done nothing wrong. We also do not accept the fraud figures as presented: they rest on modelling and extrapolation, and routinely fold administrative error, disputed pricing, provider insolvency and plan misclassification in with deliberate theft, while recording participants as beneficiaries of conduct they were the victims of. We are not asking you to ignore fraud. We are asking you to find out what is actually happening by working directly with participants — the people billed for services never delivered, pressured into agreements they do not understand, and left holding a debt when a provider disappears. Pursue the operators, protect the people who report them, and stop recovering money from the disabled people who were defrauded.

Taxpayers were asked to fund a scheme sold to them as a lifetime guarantee of choice, control and dignity. They agreed, and they paid. Withdrawing the guarantee while keeping the money and the credit is not budget repair.

Front-line cuts are also impossible to defend while the Agency spends as it does. It contests decisions in the Tribunal at scale, then settles a large share before hearing — paying external law firms to fight participants for supports later granted anyway. Add the consultants, the labour hire, the duplicated systems and the reassessment churn that forces people to re-prove permanent disability year after year. None of that falls on a participant’s plan, and all of it could be reduced without a single person losing an hour of support.

The damage will not stop at plans. Providers were asked to invest — to register, meet safeguarding obligations, take on premises, vehicles, insurance and staff — and are now told mid-lease that the demand underpinning those investments will be cut by legislation. They respond by trimming shifts, withdrawing from regional areas first, handing back complex clients, then closing. That is a town losing its only allied health service and an electorate losing one of its larger employers. The disability workforce is overwhelmingly female and heavily casualised, and cuts to plans do not reduce need — they move hours to unpaid overtime, or to family carers who are mostly women, many over sixty, many disabled themselves, already at capacity and already retiring into poverty for it.

And the money is not saved. Support does not become unnecessary when it becomes unfunded; it becomes someone else’s line item. Remove the worker who helps someone shower, eat, take medication and get to an appointment, and what follows is pressure sores, missed treatment, falls and long hospital stays that cost multiples of the support withdrawn — then emergency departments, mental health units, aged care placements for people in their forties, homelessness services, and children entering care because a parent lost the support that let them parent. Those costs fall on the states, and on the same taxpayers being told this Bill saves them money. There is no published accounting of that transfer.

So we are asking you, in order:

1. 1.Vote this Bill down. Not amended, not staged, not softened with a review clause.
2. 2.If it is not defeated, refer it back for at least eight further weeks, with hearings in regional Australia and in accessible formats.
3. 3.Publish the modelling before you vote: who loses support, by how much, in which postcodes, and with what effect on jobs and family carers.
4. 4.Keep every rule disallowable. No cutting, capping or reclassifying supports by instrument, beyond the reach of Parliament.

There are more of us than the numbers suggest. Count disabled people, then our partners, parents, siblings and children, 400,000 support workers, the providers and their staff, and everyone who has watched someone they love fight the Agency for a wheelchair. We are in every electorate in the country, and on this question we are one bloc. We would rather earn your support than surprise you at a ballot box, so we are saying it plainly and in advance: this vote will be recorded, published and remembered, and we will name where every Senator stood.

You have the numbers to stop this. Work with us rather than about us, and leave the legacy of the Parliament that refused to balance a budget on the backs of disabled Australians.

Vote no. Then sit down with us and do the work properly.