Speech from Minister McAllister, Business Council of Australia – 4 August 2026
Media event date: 4 August 2026 Date published: 7 August 2026 Media type: General public **CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY** One of the humbling features of my job is that people are often keen to share a slice of their life with me that I may not otherwise get to hear. At BBQs and street stalls, in taxis and indeed at lunches just like this I’m often told about someone’s personal connection to disability.
A mother with early onset dementia. A nephew with cerebral palsy. An accident that left a person with a spinal cord injury.
Let me tell you – disability does not discriminate. Next week is the census. The last time we filled in our forms around 1 in 5 Australians identified as having a disability.
The NDIS is a sensible and empathetic answer to the question – what if it were me, or someone I care about? This isn’t a philosophical thought experiment. This is of course a question of human rights.
But it is also of economic significance and that is the focus of my remarks today. Because this is a question of risk. I use the term “risk” deliberately.
Because it is a risk – in the purest, most economic sense of the word possible. And the NDIS is an insurance scheme because of it. The NDIS is a response to a risk that is a literal misstep away for any of us.
As the PC noted in its original 2011 report: "Most families and individuals cannot adequately prepare for the risk and financial impact of significant disability. The costs of lifetime care can be so substantial that the risks and costs need to be pooled.” One of the features of public policy over the past forty years has been the slow transfer of more and more economic risk to households.
In some cases this has allowed individuals to access new opportunities and create wealth. But in other cases it has left families more vulnerable to shocks and exposed to risks they aren’t equipped to manage. Many of our government’s cost of living relief policies serve a parallel function of helping households manage economic risk that feels beyond their capacity.
The NDIS likewise helps households manage risk. And the economic significance goes beyond the consumer confidence survey. Could I still meaningfully participate in my community if I had a serious accident?
Would I have to quit my job if my child was born with a disability? These are economic questions about risk. The NDIS answers these questions in ways that unlock workforce capability for the economy, and productivity for employers.
The quality of our social care spend matters – for individuals, for families and for the economy. But what does high quality disability spending look like? It is notoriously challenging to measure productivity in the care sector.
In 2024 the Productivity Commission did some good work considering broader healthcare outcomes. The Commissioner pushed back against simply considering cost of care in that context. She said: “Looking at the outcomes our system creates for patients provides a much truer picture of its productivity.
A healthcare system that gets people in and out of hospital quickly and cheaply isn't much good if those patients aren't getting better.” It’s a useful antidote to the claim that’s sometimes made by opponents of NDIS reform – that spending on disability is a proxy for impact, and that the curbing the cost of the scheme will affect outcomes. It’s just not true.
I’ve now served in a few portfolios across government. And in my first few months in this job I had a truly unusual experience – stakeholders told me that government didn’t need to spend any more. I heard it from providers, from disability advocates, academics, and carers.
There was enough money being spent on the NDIS, it just needed to be targeted better. I think this reflects a truth that had become blindingly obvious to anyone who spent time with the system. The quality of spend in the NDIS doesn’t stack up at the moment.
When Minister Butler spoke at the Press Club in April he set out the pillars of our reform agenda. Some have gotten a lot of attention – like the changes to who will be eligible to access the scheme, and the reforms to social and community participation budgets. But I don’t think there has been enough attention to the other reforms that are designed to improve the quality and productivity of the services the market offers.
The driving purpose of our package is to ensure that the NDIS is here for the long term. And so throughout our policy design process, I have been asking – what do we want the scheme to look like 10, or 15 years from now? I don’t think anyone believes it should involve the NDIS paying for-profit providers $70 per hour to take people with disability to sit isolated in a public place.
Its hard to honestly describe this as “social and community participation”. Its equally difficult to discount the value that an otherwise isolated person obtains from being supported to a doctor’s appointment or to visit a friend. Or to ignore the significance of a school leaver being supported into work, building independence, connection and meaning in the way so many other young people have done before them.
These are interventions that secure the human rights of disabled people. We want reputable providers, paying skilled workers, to efficiently deliver supports that make a material difference in the outcomes for people with disability. We are a long way from there.
The particular characteristics of this market means we can’t assume it will get there on its own: The average non-SIL NDIS plan has a 68% utilisation rate. That headroom means many participants aren’t automatically price sensitive. The nature of disability supports means the switching costs can be high, even if there are concerns about quality.
Research shows that many participants stick with a single provider for long periods. Our data shows limited price competition between providers – almost all charge at the top of the cap We’re tackling this problem from a few different angles. We are introducing new types of plans that will give participants more flexibility about how they spend their funds – and more incentive to get value from them.
We’re registering high risk providers We’re using a panel of academics and experts to assess the evidence for particular types of treatments and supports so we can spend precious funds on things that actually work And we’re commissioning some services in order to set standards and drive quality. Together these changes will take the NDIS closer to the principles of “insurance” that are in its name and its DNA – such as efficacy of spend and sequencing of spend over lifetime.
And will hopefully provide the market signals needed for the NDIS to deliver high quality, lower cost services into the future. The productivity and efficacy of our social spend matters. But the quantum matters too.
Not only does our spend on the social and care economy make a difference to households – it matters a great deal to taxpayers and our budget bottom line. That is why we are taking action to return the NDIS to its original purpose. Because there should be a broad consensus across Australian society about the NDIS.
It shouldn’t be hard to say that the scheme is a vital part of our social fabric. It also shouldn’t be hard to say that it can’t continue to grow at more than twice the level of GDP growth. That it shouldn’t cost the budget seventy billion dollars by 2030.
That the fraudsters rorting the scheme are real, and they are undermining the NDIS’s social license. There should be a broad consensus about these issues because the future of the NDIS depends upon being able to maintain public support. But that support isn’t as strong as we would like.
Six in ten Australians believe the Scheme is actually broken. Even in these circumstances, our prospective parliamentary partners to shore up that support can’t automatically be relied upon. On the one hand, the Australian Greens, who should be some of the strongest supporters of a secure, sustainable NDIS, appear deeply opposed to any reform of the scheme at all.
In fact, their position is to roll back the reforms put in place by Minister Shorten in 2024. This would return the NDIS to a growth rate of twenty percent or more. That’s not a sensible proposition.
What’s proposed by the Greens won’t restore community trust. It would erode it. Meanwhile, our prospective partners in the Coalition have spent the better part of a year talking about the need for fiscal rectitude.
However, they are yet to decide whether they’ll support the government’s bill to comprehensively reform the scheme. The Coalition had an opportunity to begin this work – something that’s absolutely in the national interest – in July of this year. Instead, consumed by short term political considerations, and by their electoral competition with forces further to the right, they failed to grasp that opportunity.
The Coalition have spent a great deal of time asserting that the Government isn’t doing enough about fraud in the scheme. I want to address this directly. The annual cost of the NDIS in 25-26 is projected to be $50.7 billion.
Integrity leakage and fraud is estimated by the NDIA to sit at 8.3 percent per year. This equates to $4.2 billion per year or $11.5 million every day, going to fraudsters, instead of helping the people who need it most. Its why we’ve spent $1.3 billion building the compliance architecture that was so obviously lacking when we came to government.
Its why we’ve passed new laws to stiffen penalties for criminal behaviour. But there is further to go. It has been 82 days - as of Tuesday August 4 - since the NDIS Bill 2026 was introduced on 14 May.
In that period of time more than $900 million has been lost to fraud and integrity leakage. By the next sitting fortnight, that figure will be over $1 billion This is not something the Australian public should have to put up with. They expect us to work across the parliament to address it.
The measures to deal with fraud in the Bill before the Senate are clear. They include: Empowering the NDIA with greater monitoring, investigation and enforcement powers New penalties for refusing to provide information to the NDIA or where nominees fail in their duties to participants Registration of all high-risk providers, so 90% of funding will go to Agency-approved providers A new payment system, to ensure the legitimacy of claims and providers.
And a genuine plan to reform the market for NDIS services, beginning with fixing how the market for plan managers works. These measures in the bill could have been passed weeks ago. But the Coalition’s inability to meet the moment at the time Australians needed them to has cost us, in terms of the quantum, and in terms of the scheme’s social license.
The good news is that they can remedy that, and our discussions – especially with Shadow Minister McIntosh - have been productive. However, the time has come for the Coalition to make its position clear. And I hope it’s that we can work constructively to pass this bill together.
It’s important that we do. Because placing the scheme on a sustainable footing is one thing. But if the NDIS loses its social license, then the whole of Australian society will pay a very heavy price.
That’s why we are taking action to return the NDIS to its original purpose. It is not just worth saving. We must save it.
Because we know what the alternative is. There was not always a scheme like this. Many will remember what life for disabled people and their families was like before the NDIS.
I well recall attending a meeting of families of people with disability in 2001 as a candidate in that election. I remember how tired, how frustrated and how alone everyone in that room felt. The people in that room felt like they were invisible to the rest of society, and that things would never get better.
I remember thinking, “This is totally unacceptable. If we are elected, we have to do something.” Of course, Labor was not successful in 2001, but six years later we were. The work then began to build a genuine life changing social policy for people with a disability.
That is what the NDIS is today. And while the scheme needs urgent reform, one thing should be very clear. We are never going back to the world faced by those people in 2001.
As long as this Government is around, The NDIS is here to stay. Senator the Hon Jenny McAllister Disability and carers Accessibility We acknowledge the Traditional Owners and Custodians of Country throughout Australia, and their continuing connection to land, sea and community. We pay our respects to them and their cultures, and to Elders both past and present. © Commonwealth of Australia