Something’s got to give
The surge of temporary spending during thepandemic coincided with the ramping up of the National Disability InsuranceScheme, which in just a handful of years has come to absorb $1 of every $50 inour economy. Nearly equal to our national defence budget, and on track tovastly outpace it, with or without the nuclear subs.
The NDIS funds 610,000 recipients to the tune of$76,000 each on average per year, and under even the most wildly optimisticforecast this will double over the next 10 years. Just to fund it today, we’dneed to take an additional $3400 a year from every single Australian taxpayer,and in 10 years – well, you do the maths.
If you scroll through Reddit, you will read manyhundreds of detailed accounts of fraud, rorts, and waste in the NDIS. Seeminglyon purpose, its creators have birthed a mass two-sided constituency that willfight to keep that gravy train flowing.
But the scale of the waste is so outrageous thatit’s hard to see the NDIS surviving. And in that event, it would be thehundreds of thousands of legitimate recipients who would tragically suffer.
But something’s got to give. Slowing growth from20 per cent to 9 per cent won’t even touch the sides. It needs to be cut inhalf. The only alternative is for our living standards to be consigned to yetanother decade of stagnation.
