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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones. This is 7am.

Outgoing Labor Minister Bill Shorten says he’s leaving politics at the end of the month confident with the state of the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

As Minister for the NDIS, Bill Shorten has been focused on making massive reforms to the scheme in an effort to rein in its growing costs and ensure its sustainability.

And while the Government says the changes are largely about cracking down on fraud, it turns out a third of the savings will come from pushing children off the NDIS.

Today, senior reporter for The Saturday Paper Rick Morton on the children targeted in the NDIS crackdown, and the real intent behind the cuts.

It’s Thursday, January 16.

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RUBY:

So Rick, I thought we could begin by talking about the letters. So the NDIS, the National Disability Insurance Scheme, has been sending out letters to some of its participants telling them that they are no longer eligible for support. You've seen one of these letters. Can you tell me about what it says?

RICK:

Yeah. So they've been sending out about 1200 eligibility reassessment letters a week and they're asking for more information, more evidence about a person's disability, because they believe they may no longer qualify. And if after 28 days these people are unable to furnish that evidence or what they give the NDIS agency in charge doesn't meet whatever mysterious requirements they have. They tell them they're no longer eligible and they literally just kick them off the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

I've seen one in particular where there's this young girl, she's got childhood apraxia of speech, which is quite a severe communication disability. It's a neuro impairment. And the NDIS has said, look, there's no doubt that your daughter, to the parent we've chosen not to name, requires intensive support and will continue to require intensive speech therapy, but we're not going to fund it. That is the job of the health system, the National Disability Insurance Agency says. And the health systems are run by the state governments and you need to go and get your support from them.

So these letters are, you know, very blunt and there’s thousands of them every week in what is essentially a scattergun approach, often without prior communication or explanation. They're just spat out of a system. It's a process where according to people I've spoken to, there are KPIs with staff feeling forced to meet a certain number of targets.

RUBY:

Right. Okay and so 1200 letters like this going out a week. Do we know, Rick, how many children are being told this, that they're no longer going to be supported in this way?

RICK:

Yeah, they've actually got targets. So the target for the financial year just gone was 6 per cent of all children on the scheme they wanted to remove. They ended up removing about 3.5 per cent of the 180,000 children under the age of nine on the NDIS. Children are the biggest and have always been the biggest part of the NDIS. They've been the fastest growing. And a lot of that comes down to the fact that the modelling that was done when the NDIS began just wasn't accurate and they didn't know how many kids with autism or how many kids who had developmental delay or needed therapy, particularly early intervention therapy. And so they've never coped with the numbers, which is one side of the equation. But of course, the other thought is that having written the legislation as it is, that allows kids to get access and their families to get much needed support, much needed therapy. The NDIS has decided they don't want them anymore and to the fullest extent possible they are targeting them. They are quite open about this. They write about it in their annual report. They track it in their quarterly reports. They have graphs with the numbers of how many kids have ultimately left the scheme. And in the last financial year alone there were 6087 children under the age of nine who were revoked and another 4450 who ended up qualifying for full disability under the NDIS and going on. So 3.35 per cent of all of the kids.

RUBY:

Right, so this isn’t something the NDIS is trying to hide, but why are they doing Rick? What are they saying about why they think these children no longer need their support?

RICK:

Now, the NDIA is selling all of this as a massive success story. They actually claim in their annual report that there are more children leaving the NDIS because they have, quote unquote, “achieved their goals”. Now, when I put that to an advocate, they were like “that is an outright lie”. They don't even measure it. They can't measure it. The data is missing. And they're actually, as we've spoken about in the letters they're sending to the family, saying, your daughter needs intensive support. She hasn’t met her goals at all, she's got childhood apraxia of speech and they're claiming this as a win. It's misleading in the extreme.

But also we've seen many decisions where people have had their access revoked, who should not have and who because they fought it, had it overturned. So there was a mistake in the agency's decision making. They got it wrong. They had to overturn it. But not everybody is able to fight. And so the process by which this is happening, I think it is a blunt instrument and I think it is catching a lot of people off guard. And it's also hurting families who actually don't have anywhere else to go. And whose kids need support now, lest their disabilities become worse over time.

RUBY:

And so for these children and their families who are being kicked off, sometimes completely unfairly, and that's I suppose shown in some of the reversals. They're being told that they should be cared for by the health system, but does that work? Is there any room for them in the health system?

RICK:

No. You know, you might be able to get some chronic health funded items under Medicare, for example, with childhood apraxia of speech. You might get access to maybe six weeks of speech therapy and then it cuts off. And according to the NDIS’ own admissions on the letter sent to the family, this child in particular will need intensive support ongoing.
And what happens when you don't quite qualify for the NDIS is that there should be service systems, mainstream support in schools, in childcare settings, outside of the NDIS funded by the state governments but also the Commonwealth that will support your child. Now the moment the NDIS started, state governments got out of service provision and it was a complete disaster and should never be allowed to happen, but it did. And what we have now is where families, the only place they can get the support they need is the NDIS. What the government did was say, well actually we're going to fix that and we're going to start kicking everyone off now before we fix it. And so there isn't this promised foundational level of support which isn't due to begin until July this year and it is probably not going to be ready. It doesn't seem to be ready in New South Wales. I query whether it will even be what was promised anywhere, but either way it doesn't exist yet.
The bold fact of the matter is that they're exiting people to nothing from the NDIS and all of the talk we were getting and hearing now about NDIS reform is about fraud and rorting. That's a crackdown on fraud and people are like yes, yes, get the bad people. But that's not actually what we're seeing in terms of the savings being realised under the NDIS reform.

RUBY:

After the break, do the figures around fraud add up?

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RUBY:

So Rick you've been reporting on the savings that the government is finding by kicking children off the NDIS. But what we've heard again and again is that there is so much fraud happening within the NDIS and it does need to be cleaned up. So if we look at the bigger picture, how much of the savings that the government is making come from actually cleaning up fraud versus changing who it is who actually receives funding for their disability?

RICK:

Well, this is a fascinating question because almost none of it. And yet to listen to the rhetoric, it is all fraud. It's all rorting all the time.

Audio excerpt — News Reporter 1:

“The National Disability Insurance Scheme set up to help our most vulnerable is being rorted by around $4 billion dollars every year."

Audio excerpt — NDIS Integrity Chief:

“Examples just in the last week a $20,000 holiday, bought a car brand new $73,000, rent subsidies, alcohol…”

Audio excerpt — News Reporter 2:

“The revelations made by the scheme's integrity chief who told Parliament, name it, it's on the list. Including illicit drugs like heroin, cocaine and ice.”

RICK:

And in fact they were told that if you want to sell difficult reform that cuts the cost of the NDIS, the way to do that is to focus on talking about fraud and rorting. And they got the Labor aligned polling and research group Redbridge to do three or four rounds of market research where they tested messaging people. What they came out with literally they said, “you can induce qualified tolerance for difficult NDIS reforms if you talk about fraud and rorting”. And to a tee, that is what the NDIS Minister Bill Shorten has done ever since.

Audio excerpt — Bill Shorten:

“The rorts have been rife for years. The NDIA did not have a system to see, deter, or detect. We are making up for years of bad systems.”

RICK:

And the thing is it works because it's true, in that there is fraud and rorting. No one disagrees with that.

Audio excerpt — Bill Shorten:

“I know that everyone in this house wants to stamp out the rorts but I have to say it takes a Labor government to fix the NDIS.”

RICK:

But using Bill Shorten's own figures of crackdowns on payment integrity, so not even fraud, but suspicious payments or payments that they say we don't fund, which is different to a fraud case. They reckon they’ll save $200 million over the next four years. Now, the value of kicking kids off this game is $125 Million in three months – their own figures. $500 million a year of revoking access to kids. And yet the fraud and rorting, saving these $200 million over the next four years. Now, in the annual accounts, after the NDIS legislation reform package passed and with future proposed reforms, the difference between what the NDIS would have cost and what it is going to cost now is $19 billion less. So they're making $19 billion worth of savings to the forecasts. Only $200 million of which is coming from fraud and rorting.

RUBY:

Right, that’s not much at all. That’s only about 1 per cent of cost savings actually coming from fraud?

RICK:

That's correct and that's just from actually, I mean, not to overcomplicate it, but that is actually just from payment integrity. The fraud savings has a funny little footnote in the annual report for the NDIS, which says, actually for the fraud saving for last financial year 2023/24 was meant to be $30 million or thereabouts.

RUBY:

Right, so would you say then that the rhetoric around fraud is disguising the government's true intent here when it comes to cuts to the NDIS?

RICK:

I think it disguises the reality, which is that they are making really difficult decisions and I think some of them are difficult decisions that were always going to have to be made, but they don't want to be honest about what they're doing. I've covered the NDIS since it began in 2013. For the longest time until Bill Shorten came to power, the NDIS agency would tell me in official statements the NDIS is on track and on budget and there is nothing to see here. And of course now it's a crisis.

RUBY:

Yeah it is a crisis for thousands of children who are losing support. And Rick, it seems obvious that if this assistance is pulled and there is not a safety net in place, then this will likely mean worse outcomes for them in the immediate term, but potentially a real knock on effect for their lives.

RICK:

Yeah what we’re seeing is evidence the agency is failing on a large scale with everyone. I mean their own metrics have fallen through the floor. They've collapsed.

And so this is not a story about how the NDIS does not need to be reformed. It is a story about how the NDIS reform is happening in a topsy turvy way that is actually hurting people who should not be hurt. And they know about enough of this now to know better. And they're doing it anyway.

If you save money in the NDIS budget, but the budget of Medicare goes up and the budget of state services goes up, are you actually saving money? The shortsightedness of some of these decisions is quite mind boggling because it's become, again, as all things in Australian politics tend to do. How much is the budget for this one siloed thing? And if that money goes somewhere else, who cares? Because the person who came up with these NDIS reforms, Bill Shorten, is retiring and will no longer be a minister as of a few weeks, gets to say I fixed the NDIS and I just think the story is much more complicated.

RUBY:

Rick, thank you so much for your time.

RICK:

Thanks, Ruby. I appreciate it.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today

A 49-year-old man has been charged with murder after the body of an Indigenous woman was found near the Todd River in Alice Springs.

Police say the 51-year-old woman was the partner of the man, noting she’s the NT’s first alleged victim of domestic violence homicide of 2025.

And advocates say the case is the first domestic violence homicide of the year in the country.

Last year 78 women were killed in acts of gender-based violence, according to the Counting Dead Women project.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women are eight times more likely to be victims of homicide than non-Aboriginal women.

And

Hamas has accepted a draft agreement for a ceasefire in Gaza.

The proposed ceasefire involves the release of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners, greater aid access to Gaza and eventually a full withdrawal of Israeli troops from the Gaza strip.

The plan still needs approval from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Security Cabinet, with one minister threatening to resign if the government agrees to the deal.

I'm Ruby Jones, this is 7am see you tomorrow.

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