Shadow Portfolio — 31 March 2026

Senator Anne Ruston, the Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Senate, used the 31 March sitting day to pursue two distinct lines of attack against the government — NDIS fraud and sustainability on the one hand, and aged-care reform failure on the other — while also securing a substantive legislative win by way of a government-agreed amendment.

On the NDIS, Senator Ruston confirmed the coalition's support for the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Integrity and Safeguarding) Bill 2025 but framed that support as conditional on the bill being understood as necessary rather than sufficient. The scheme has grown from a designed capacity of 410,000 participants to over 760,000 [TA-260331-senate-32a8f9c5c8fe:s006], and Senator Ruston used that figure to anchor the urgency of the integrity measures in the bill: stronger civil and criminal penalties for fraudulent providers, antipromotion orders targeting advertising of non-covered services, enhanced powers for the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission including provider banning authority, and a 90-day cooling-off period for plan changes.

The financial stakes Senator Ruston put before the Senate were stark: the Australian National Audit Office estimates 6 to 10 per cent of NDIS payments could be non-compliant, incorrect or fraudulent, and at 2025 spending of $48.83 billion a 10 per cent fraud rate equates to $4.8 billion in annual losses [TA-260331-senate-32a8f9c5c8fe:s006]. She reinforced the scale of the problem with a sequence of recent enforcement cases: a March 2026 Federal Police raid on a suspected $3.5 million fraud syndicate in Sydney, a February 2026 prosecution of a Darwin NDIA employee for alleged $5 million fraud, and South Australian cases involving a provider overclaiming for undelivered services and two men defrauding the system of over $465,000 [TA-260331-senate-32a8f9c5c8fe:s006].

Senator Ruston also noted that approximately 94 per cent of providers operate unregistered, which she characterised as a regulatory blind spot enabling much of this activity.

The coalition's strategic position on the bill is that tougher penalties are a floor, not a ceiling — the contribution of direct fraud controls and stronger oversight mechanisms to early detection is central to how the Opposition is framing its ongoing engagement with NDIS legislation. That framing was immediately followed by legislative action: in the committee stage Senator Ruston moved amendments closing the loophole in the 90-day cooling-off period that would have allowed a correspondence nominee to withdraw a participant from the scheme, or cancel a withdrawal, against the participant's wishes [TA-260331-senate-32a8f9c5c8fe:s016].

The amendments require that withdrawal notices also be given to the participant's plan nominee, and anchor decision-making authority with the participant rather than any intermediary [TA-260331-senate-32a8f9c5c8fe:s016]. The government agreed to support the amendments — a tangible opposition legislative win within the same sitting session as the second-reading debate.

The aged-care attack, delivered separately in the same sitting day, extended the coalition's critique beyond disability policy. Senator Ruston accused the government of a deeply flawed rollout of aged-care reforms, citing costs for home-care services rising due to additional red tape and rigid rules, interim packages delivering only 60 per cent of assessed care needs, and more than 234,000 older Australians waiting for support — including more than 131,000 waiting an average of 10 months for assessed packages [TA-260331-senate-32a8f9c5c8fe:s040].

She argued the government is allowing an algorithmic assessment tool to determine care needs without human override capacity, and that the Minister for Aged Care has deflected responsibility to the regulator rather than addressing the government's own failures [TA-260331-senate-32a8f9c5c8fe:s040]. The Opposition's central charge is that the rollout has broken the government's promise that no older Australians would be worse off under the reforms.

Taken together, the day's activity shows the coalition running a coordinated dual-front strategy: in the NDIS space, supporting legislation while simultaneously tightening it and signalling the government has not gone far enough on fraud prevention; in aged care, pressing a separate accountability case around a promise the Opposition says has been broken. Both lines converge on the theme of government delivery failure across social-care programs.