The National Disability Insurance Scheme began as an act of decency. It was meant to fix the quiet cruelties of the old system, the waiting lists, the rationing, the families stranded between agencies that argued about cost. But in the decade since its creation, something stranger has happened. What began as a project of justice has swollen into a moral economy of its own. It is now a $41-billion machine governed by the language of compassion while quietly discarding the discipline that compassion requires.

Nobody designed the NDIS to become a racket. But that is what happens when a system is built on a vocabulary that forbids scrutiny. Every public failure – the rorts, the spiralling costs, the cottage industries of support coordinators who provide very little support  –  is wrapped in the same moral bubble wrap: lived experience, inclusion, access, support needs, wellbeing. These are not neutral words. They are shields. They stop argument, disarm criticism, and keep the public at a polite distance. This is the quiet genius of Australia’s compassion industry. It turns moral sentiment into governance. If the language sounds righteous, the structure must be righteous too. And while the public nods along, the incentives underneath drift further and further away from their purpose. In the process, the NDIS has become a system with the emotional architecture of charity and the financial footprint of a mining boom.

An honest observer notices quickly that the NDIS does not operate like a normal public program. In a normal system, money flows toward the problem. In the NDIS, money flows toward whoever has learned to speak the right language. The profoundly disabled, the people most Australians assumed this scheme was built for, are not the primary beneficiaries of its rapid expansion. Their needs are significant but stable. The volatility comes from somewhere else entirely. It comes from a vast ecosystem of private providers, consultants, quasi-therapeutic services, plan managers, and third-party operators who orbit the scheme like contractors around a defence project.

The fastest growing areas are not wheelchairs, ventilators or skilled therapies. They are the soft services. Support coordination, psychosocial plans, lifestyle programs, behavioural coaching, capacity building, life skills mentoring. Each sounds noble, which is precisely the problem. Their moral presentation is so pristine that nobody dares to ask the simplest question: does any of this work? Impact is treated as insensitive. Outcomes are seen as cold. The appearance of care now outranks the evidence of care. Providers quickly learn the incentive structure, describe everything in emotive terms and justify nothing in practical ones.

Participants are caught in the drift too. The system unintentionally encourages them to describe themselves at their lowest possible point, because that is how people qualify for maximum support. Independence is financially punished, vulnerability is rewarded. None of this is fraud. It is simply the architecture of the scheme. A system built on emotion will produce emotional incentives. And emotional incentives are the most expensive kind.

Every failing system invents a language to protect itself. In the NDIS, that language is compassion, not the neighbourly kind, but the bureaucratic kind. Compassion as currency. Compassion as credential. Compassion as professional accent. Once compassion becomes the governing vocabulary of a system, it stops being a moral impulse and becomes an instrument of power. The words soften, the incentives harden. A scheme built to deliver help becomes a scheme built to deliver entitlements. Care becomes a feeling rather than a duty. Support becomes a right rather than a responsibility. Wellbeing becomes a halo word; warm, broad and immune to scrutiny.

This is moral inflation, the steady devaluation of moral vocabulary through overuse and misapplication. And like any inflation, it erodes value silently while increasing cost loudly. Spending no longer correlates with benefit. Billions flow into programs whose effects are unclear because unclear is now considered acceptable. Providers are paid for rhetoric, not results. Participants lose the incentive to move toward independence. Oversight is framed as hostility. That is how you build a compassion racket, by redefining every act of scrutiny as an act of harm.

We have seen this pattern before. When Closing the Gap launched in 2008, its language was precise – measurable targets, clear timelines, strict accountability. Today, the phrase functions as a moral incantation rather than a measurable commitment. The words survived, but their meaning drifted into symbolism, and the program itself began to unravel. That is what happens when language becomes aspirational instead of descriptive. The vocabulary inflates, the institution hollows out. The NDIS is now at the same linguistic crossroad. If the language continues to expand while the outcomes stagnate, either the language collapses or the institution does. Australia must decide which one it is willing to lose.

The great unspoken truth is that the NDIS is now defended by an entire professional class whose livelihoods rely on its expansion. Not the disabled, but the operators, the coordinators, the plan writers, the consultants, the service brokers, the housing providers, the therapists paid by the hour for engagement rather than improvement. These are not villains. They are rational actors responding to incentives. The problem is the culture surrounding them. Accountability is treated as cruelty. Efficiency is treated as heartlessness. Financial limits are treated as immoral. A system that cannot bear to be measured will eventually fail the people who rely on it most.

Australians will pay extraordinary sums for a system that works. What they will not tolerate is a system where compassion is used to shield incompetence, where the loudest moral arguments come from those with the deepest financial interests, and where outcomes are optional as long as the language sounds caring. The NDIS still matters. It still saves lives, stabilises families and supports people who deserve far better than what they had before. But without honesty, the hard, unfashionable kind, it will collapse under the weight of its own sentimentality. The fixes are obvious to anyone who has worked in real systems, but politically poisonous, which is why no government will touch them until the scheme reaches its breaking point.

Compassion is not a governance model. It is not a budget. And it is not a substitute for responsibility. If Australia wants the NDIS to survive, it must relearn a truth that every old charity worker understood instinctively. Compassion without discipline is not kindness. It is neglect with good manners.