Why Australia needs to talk about the National Disability Insurance Scheme

The state and territory-based system for supporting Australians with disabilities was "inequitable, underfunded, fragmented and inefficient", a major 2011 review from the Productivity Commission showed.

A new scheme was needed - a National Disability Insurance Scheme - to assess and then provide care and support to roughly 410,000 people with significant and permanent disabilities.

As a wealthy nation, Australia was capable of finding the estimated $13.5 billion each year needed to fund an NDIS, the commission concluded.

In any case, the economic benefits were expected to "significantly exceed" the costs.

This was a social reform the nation needed and could afford.

"Our current system is inadequate and indefensible. It must be replaced," then-prime minister Julia Gillard said as legislation to create the NDIS was introduced to Parliament in November 2012.

Almost a decade on, that nation-changing social security scheme has reached a critical juncture.

The NDIS has been rolled out across the country , transforming the lives of Australians with a disability and their families along the way.

It is, as Australian of the Year and disability advocate Dylan Alcott said last week, "bloody awesome".

But the scheme has also grown much faster and become bigger and more unwieldy than its architects had envisaged or hoped.

The NDIS is on track to cost $50 billion in 2025-26 and keep growing, a trajectory which has some warning it is at risk of collapsing under its own weight unless drastic changes are made.

For many participants and their advocates, the scheme itself has become a maze of red tape and bureaucratic barriers, a perpetual source of stress, frustration and despair.

There is waste, inefficacy and fraud.

What appeared so clear cut in the Productivity Commission's 2011 report has not proven so in reality in 2022.

Even the scheme's most ardent supporters admit the NDIS needs a course correction.

Something has to change.

That is why The Canberra Times is today launching a new series: "We need to talk about the NDIS."

Through in-depth interviews with decision-makers, peak bodies, advocates and participants, the series will examine the pressing and difficult questions which need to be asked.

What's behind the surging costs?

Does the scheme need to be restricted to those with the most complex disabilities in order to remain sustainable?

Have the states and territories dropped the ball? Is the scheme delivering the economic benefits the commission had forecast?

And what of the National Disability Insurance Agency? Is it fulfilling its role? And why are so many participants languishing in hospitals and aged care homes as thousands of suitable properties sit vacant?

These are complex issues and The Canberra Times is not so naive to think there are easy answers or silver-bullet solutions.

But it's a debate the nation has to have.

Australia needs a strong NDIS.

We all have a stake in its success.

Read more from The Canberra Times' campaign examining the future of the scheme: