NDIS: Possible Failure Modes Are Dark

There's often a temptation to look at a whopping big new social services line item and say: we didn't have this before, and everything was fine. If we just get rid of it, we'll save a bunch of money and be back to square one, right?

No. Not even a little. That is not how any of this works. The NDIS has changed the situation in ways that can never be fully undone.

The NDIS is vital. It's precisely this fact which means that its failure modes are much darker and more serious than many realise. We need to talk about them.

I'm not bringing them up because I think they're likely to happen; I'm bringing them up because their expected outcomes are almost unthinkably bad.

Structural Change

The most important thing to understand about the NDIS is that it's not new in the sense that many assume. What we had before it was an elaborate network of friends/family, council programs, state programs, outpatient programs, nonprofits, community groups, informal networks and (often misused) aged care facilities — some fit for purpose, many decidedly not.

The NDIS, with a single piece of legislation, swept up this entire ecosystem into a single Federal program.

That's a one-way trip.

Dismantling the NDIS as quickly as it was built would create a social, legal and medical disaster of a scale never before seen in Australian society. That elaborate network takes decades to rebuild, and in the meantime, other government systems would be in existential danger from the load they're no longer built to carry.

There are proposals to split parts or all of the NDIS into a tiered council/state/Federal model. They are politically implausible and would almost certainly recreate many of the problems they are supposed to solve.

In short: we're stuck with it.

Haircuts

I estimate that the NDIS reached peak generosity roughly during the COVID years (2020-2022). The reasons for this are not directly because of COVID itself (story for another time), but the timing is a neat landmark. It has effectively operated under continuous tightening ever since, and I don't realistically see it becoming more generous than it is now in our lifetimes.

Endlessly tightening plans is a creeping, quiet way of harming the Scheme, and the public discourse is growing numb to complaints of plans cut to the bone. What's really deceptive about this is that these cuts have downstream costs of their own: every dollar of support taken out of the NDIS can end up costing other social services, the medical system or the criminal legal system many more.

No matter how much tightening occurs, the inherently costly nature of NDIS plans (given they pay professional wages) means that it's effectively guaranteed to be a top-tier line item going forwards.

Data

When a Centrelink customer applies for a Disability Support Pension, they have to provide extensive documentation.

They'll generally have to provide medical information, maybe some functional assessments, and basic information about their financial and social circumstances. Risk will be assessed, impairment points will be assigned, and an outcome will be made. If their application is successful, in most cases that's the last that'll be heard about it. They might get reviewed one day, but probably not.

When someone applies for the NDIS, they must at minimum provide a similar level of documentation to get in the door. In reality, they'll usually have to provide significantly more detailed functional evidence to clear the bar.

Unfortunately, a successful NDIS access request is where the data collection begins.

The data collected during your first plan will be detailed and personal at a level you will never have experienced before in your life. It will not merely cover your impairments: it will cover your informal supports, meaning closest friends and family. It will cover your living arrangements. It will cover your career history. It will cover your crisis plans and coping mechanisms, and it will even cover your dreams and aspirations. Very few Australian Government services have ever assembled such a detailed snapshot of citizens' lives at this scale.

Much of this information will be actively updated every time your plan is reviewed.

Nearly universal participant experience: your first plan will not be enough. Your OT will know that for the first few reviews, they need to frame it as the delegates under-assessing your needs in order for you to receive what you actually need, and to make this correction they will need to overstate your impairment. The tug-of-war between OTs and delegates means that a large amount of professionally attested documentation will be created catastrophising how severe your impairment is.

Powderkeg

The NDIS is too embedded to unwind, too labour-intensive to cheapen, too politically exposed to leave alone, and too data-rich to fail safely.

We have a very large Federal budget line item which cannot be significantly cheapened without significant consequences.

We are entering into a new and uncertain political, economic, military and cybersecurity world.

There is significant political polarisation across the world, and a push from the far-right even here.

Australians spent many decades being exposed to Murdoch rhetoric about fiscal responsibility.

The NDIS has already experienced a large-scale data breach in 2023.

My biggest concern is that a fiscal panic or social destabilisation could turn participants into an easy scapegoat, and all of that rich and detailed data could become targeting infrastructure if leaked.

I genuinely hope it doesn't. But this needs to be talked about.

Please let this age badly.

🔗 Checkin

Version: 1

Written: 2026-03-09

Written on: 7.5mg olanzapine since 2025-11-11

Mental health was: very poor - estimate 10% brain