The National Disability Insurance Scheme will go down as the biggest piece of public policy largesse in Australian history.
I work in a public mental health facility.
I’m asked to approve their packages.
It’s difficult to say no to families wanting more services, but desires tend to be infinite and the uncapped NDIS is not well designed to set limits.
Once packages are approved, there is an incredible lack of transparency and unaccountability for the spending.
It’s striking that the NDIS has helped transform many of my bleeding-heart co-workers into anti-welfare ideologues.
The state health systems also don’t mind me shifting costs to the federal government.
Now costing thirty billion dollars a year, growing at over ten per cent and destined to overtake Medicare within a decade, the entire initiative is a vampire squid sucking from the country’s budgetary future.
It has completely failed one of its core aims, which was to enable more people with a disability to move into the workforce.
When Julia Gillard launched the program, disability advocates went so far as claiming it would pay for itself by promoting improved economic participation.
Such claims, in spite of their appropriate aspiration, have proven to be entirely bogus. Instead it skews incentives for people to be labelled as sick and remain sick.
Nor does the blame lie solely with the Labor party. Repeated terms of conservative governments did nothing to tame its excesses.
Former minister Linda Reynolds meekly caved in to the disability lobby after the then-government’s attempts to bring in independent assessments of claims.
The very concept of disability has evolved to one incorporating medical and human rights perspectives. Its current formulation as any functional, long-term disorder that limits participation in social roles casts a large tent.
The nature of the term disability is also shifting away from physical injuries and towards intellectual disability, behavioural disorder and chronic mental illness.
A third of the half a million clients receiving funds are diagnosed with autism, placing pressure on people like myself to rubber stamp the label.
The autism diagnosis has quadrupled in the past two decades.
Yet the face of disability and the NDIS is overwhelmingly linked to severe physical ailments. The Australian of the Year, Dylan Alcott, for example, suffers a spinal injury from a childhood tumour. This is an inaccurate representation of the trends.
And like in any market, if you pay people to be disabled, more people will be disabled.
In terms of monetary costs of identity politics, the NDIS ranks as one of the most expensive in the world.
Symbolic appointments such as Kurt Fearnley to the chair of the National Disability Insurance Agency are indicative of the program’s emphasis on emotion over pragmatism.
The huge dollars sucked up by the NDIS are shifting the rest of the economy to cater for those labelled as sick.
The latest census figures show disability and caring among the fastest-growing job segments; drivers, cleaners, cooks and even someone to walk with you to the grocery shop.
And why wouldn’t you when you can charge a premium for your service if it’s linked to the NDIS, knowing accountability and transparency are lacking.
Even sex workers are going out completing disability certificates recognising there is better-paid, secure work in the sector. They call it ‘support work’ on the necessary forms.
If I was more entrepeneurial, I would be pitching an NDIS-funded brothel offering such supportive work to the growing ranks of the disabled. Let’s see if that entices investors on the next series of Shark Tank.
On current trends of growth, a considerable chunk of the population will either be disabled or be employed by someone categorised as disabled.
When I make home visits I see the sheer scale of the worker outlay.
Modest housing commission homes are flooded with staff worthy of a palace, with three and four workers coming in a few times a week mowing the lawn, cooking meals and cleaning the bathroom.
The agencies offering such services have become sales-type organisations employing high-pressure tactics not out of place in a used-car lot. There is almost always another service that can be pitched, many of which are mundane day-to-day tasks that family and friends would traditionally provide.
This is another curious aspect of the scheme.
There is little expectation that family and friends have any obligation to their disabled relatives.
Granted, some people do not have supports. Likewise the vast majority of family do their utmost to help their disabled loved ones, but the NDIS renders such supports invisible in their measurements.
Many kids with autism receive weekly horse-riding and piano lessons in parallel with speech therapy. A portion of this is appropriate, but a great deal is excessive.
Beyond autism, another quarter of NDIS clients fall into the loose category of psycho-social disorders, which is a broad reference to mental illness.
The overmedicalisation of problems of living is combining with the loose nature of the term disability to send NDIS costs sky-high.
The label is catching all sorts of people who in past generations might be seen to have lost confidence, are failing to adapt to a changing economy or have made the choice to take drugs and play video games.
Now they can be called disabled and live on the public purse.
More importantly, they are stripped of agency to acquire dignity through being useful to others. For all the enormous waste of funds, this is the bigger crime.
Let me give the usual proviso there is a lot of good such disability services do provide. There are also many people with serious needs that struggle to attract the NDIS funding they deserve, often because they can’t find the right people to do the onerous paperwork. This is especially true in regional areas.
But history will rightly judge the NDIS and its last decade of irresponsible largesse harshly.
Shorten may have launched an investigation for potential cover to gain control of spiralling costs, but the task of budgetary repair is an urgent one for the Labor government. It is highly unlikely they will be up to it.
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