This group championed the NDIS. It says Labor is about to break its central promise

The campaign group that led to the NDIS being created is warning that Health Minister Mark Butler’s new bill to cut billions from the scheme risks breaking a central promise hard fought for by Australia’s disability community 13 years ago.

Central to their concerns are new laws giving the minister of the day broad powers to make sweeping cuts to funding or therapies across entire sections of the NDIS. That could drive down individuals’ budgets, even when people have been assessed as needing a higher level of funding.

“When governments established the NDIS, they made a promise to people with disability and our families that we would receive the reasonable and necessary supports we need to live ordinary lives safely and with dignity,” said the chair of Every Australian Counts, George Taleporos.

“This bill risks undermining that promise by allowing the minister to cut whole categories of NDIS funding, even where those cuts leave participants without enough funding to pay for reasonable and necessary supports.”

These new powers are a key way the government will be able to restrain growth, because they give Labor an instant brake on spending if costs start spiralling. Butler has said he intends to use them to cut social and community participation budgets, which have tripled overall to $12 billion in four years, and lower average therapy allocations from about 72 hours to 68 hours a year.

They sit in the bill alongside tighter eligibility criteria and more rules to deal with fraud, giving effect to an NDIS overhaul that will underpin $38 billion of the $64 billion savings that Labor banked into Tuesday night’s budget forecasts to improve its bottom line.

Michael Brennan, chief executive of think tank e61, said it was the first time savings from a single program had dominated the budget so heavily. “Perhaps never before has the entire fiscal strategy rested so heavily on the successful implementation of one budget measure,” he said.

Brennan said the closest precedent was former treasurer Joe Hockey’s ambition to save $80 billion in a decade by cutting growth in health and education. But where Hockey’s changes could have been made with the stroke of a pen, “the NDIS save is different”.

“It does not have the usual set-and-forget quality. The implementation task will be constant and complex – a daily grind of hard decisions at the coalface … If the current and future governments are unable to achieve the full save, the fiscal outlook worsens materially,” he said.

“The recent history of NDIS cost revisions is not encouraging … [It] is one of actual spending consistently exceeding projections. Time and again, governments have forecast a flattening of the curve, only to see actual spending continue on its steep upwards trajectory.”

Even if the NDIS grew at 5 per cent over the four-year forward estimates, rather than the projected 2 per cent, Brennan said the deficit at the end of the decade would decline by $6 billion – the combined effect of Labor’s major changes to taxation of trusts, property and capital gains.

It raises the stakes for Butler, who wants to start implementing major changes as soon as October after the laws pass parliament. He will need Coalition support as the Greens have joined disability advocates in fighting the laws, which were on Thursday sent to a Senate committee that has one month to turn around a report.

The government is promising to consult the disability community, but the speed and scale of cuts have nonetheless caused anxiety. Every Australian Counts – which brought together families, advocates, academics and providers in the 2010s to make the case for the NDIS – is conducting surveys, supporting protests and encouraging people to email MPs in a campaign against the cuts.

Taleporos, the chair, said people appreciated the scheme’s financial sustainability was important but that “it cannot become a justification for reducing essential supports people with disability need”.

“The NDIS was created so people with disability could live ordinary lives, leave home, participate in the community, work, study, build relationships and have choice over our supports,” he said.

“If passed, this bill risks changing reasonable and necessary supports from what people with disability need into only what government decides it can afford.

“Our lives and safety are at stake here. This Bill needs proper scrutiny and cannot be rushed through. Parliament must not pass a Bill that allows essential NDIS supports to be funded below the level people actually need.”

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