Posted: 2026-01-19

🔗 NDIS and "Welfare Cheats"

The discussion is about the incentive structure surrounding the NDIS. It is absolutely a product of its environment, and this is not the result of malice or incompetence at any level of its conception or implementation. All of this was unavoidable if we wanted it to exist.

The NDIS is designed less for optimal outcomes for participants or the Federal budget, and more to survive politically in an environment which has been trained to hate "welfare", and especially people who abuse it.

🔗 Background

Understanding the NDIS at a structural level requires a bit of historical context. This context I'm giving is opinionated, but it kinda has to be so you can understand the incentives, and these opinions are from someone who has been around the block and grasps how the political environment shapes the way it works.

The single central piece of context that explains almost everything confusing about the NDIS is Howard and Murdoch's War on Welfare (circa 1990s-2010s). The specifics of this campaign have been prosecuted to death over the last 30-odd years, and there's no need for yet another attempt at persuasion. But sharing the rough structure of what happened is extremely important.

Once you have this Rosetta Stone, a lot of seemingly inexplicable decisions become completely predictable.

🔗 Budgets

John Howard's brand was almost entirely "if we pull our heads in and live within our means, we can take responsibility and pay our debts. I did it for an entire country, what's your excuse?"

This moralised scaled-up-household-budget rhetoric was politically potent, but predicated on a lack of respect for the general population's intelligence. The idea flouted even basic economics and only worked as long as few enough people realised that he was paying down those debts by selling off anything of value to allies at a discount (then renting it back at an eternal ongoing cost). It is, however, still prominent among many people who support the LNP even today. This is how you get people to directly vote against their own interests.

Paradoxically, damaging the social safety net actually worsens working conditions too — when there's a less viable plan B, employers have much more power over their workers and can readily mistreat them without fear of them quitting. Combined with the famous WorkChoices industrial reforms, we ended up with deteriorating workforce morale overall. When we add Murdoch's printed media dominance, that damage could be shaped towards a target.

🔗 Aiming

A workforce harboring more resentments is much easier to mobilise against a scapegoat; projecting onto the people who they see as illegitimately getting a pass in shared injustices feels satisfying. So we ended up with a cycle of continually worsening workplace conditions with the newspapers all providing the same easy scapegoat of "welfare cheats", and that scapegoating ironically enabling conditions to worsen further.

The structure of incentives in the right half of Australian politics consistently channelled mass resentments at Centrelink specifically. That is why so many people hold onto an incandescent hatred of "welfare" in Australia, even today. While the hatred was the product of a lot of these incentives aligning, it now exists independently of the people who benefited at the time.

If you have a deep hatred of "welfare", you should consider that it may be an engineered belief, created against your interests for partisan gain.

🔗 Gillard's Framing and Bipartisan Support

The Australian political milieu is incredibly conservative — not right wing — in the sense that it is particularly known for avoiding big sweeping reforms and dramatic, world first new policies. That makes the fact that the NDIS began here doubly unbelievable. Shorten is an actual wizard.

For the NDIS to have been created (and for it to continue to survive), it had to be able to cleanly and consistently present itself as something other than "welfare". The NDIS Act passed with roaring bipartisan support, so clearly they succeeded.

🔗 What This Explains

🔗 Newspapers Equating It To Payments

The most straightforward piece of protective scaffolding here is: the participant never gets to keep any of the money. That is not controversial to anyone who knows anything at all about the system, but papers which are hostile to its existence have deliberately gotten it wrong time and time and time again, with scandalous headlines of "$200,000 payments". They have finally lost that battle and the public is mostly wise to it by now, but it took years.

🔗 Obtaining X By Deception

It also explains the extreme hesitance to prosecute participants for even egregious misuse of funds: prosecutions of participants are so politically costly that they almost never happen. The fact that these cases are extremely rare is not protective here: it wouldn't take too many large prison sentences for participants to collapse the barrier between the NDIS and the "welfare cheats" narrative, and that barrier is keeping the Scheme alive.

Quiet suppression of severe misuse is critical to its survival, which explains why the initial wave of eligibility reassessments happened hard, fast, and grossly unfairly: it was narrative control, so that nobody asked why charges weren't laid.

We can see this very plainly in the way providers have been targeted, which looks completely different to how participants are treated. Businesses do not evoke sympathy the way people with disabilities do, and they provide a high-density and narratively safe target — which is why providers are in the news on a weekly basis.

It's worth contrasting this with the fact that Centrelink routinely go after people who have stolen alarmingly small sums.

🔗 What Enforcement Looks Like

If we take away the backstop of prosecuting participants for crimes, the enforcement mechanisms tend to end up being silent, unfair, and zero-ceremony instead: mass-scale data analysis and quiet removal of participants for vague reasons of "not using funding as intended". "Choice and control" still needs to be said out loud, but it can never actually be applied honestly without putting the Scheme in existential danger.

🔗 Assessments/Reviews Are Driven By Reducing Risk Exposure

Every single delegate is holding all of this in mind with every single assessment and review they make (along with the cost of the program). The Scheme will fail if it becomes too costly, but it will also fail if the optics of a single funding decision are sufficiently scandalous. Delegate are (and must be) incredibly conservative about what they'll allow; if a request is even slightly weird the answer will simply be no.

🔗 Insurance Framing, Means Testing And Pressure To Work

The average person, when they see the NDIS in action, will likely be a bit confused as to how the "I" (insurance) in the acronym applies. You see support workers and allied health, those are visible on the ground floor. In what way is this an insurance scheme?

The straightforward explanation is: it was supposed to get more people into work (or to free up carers so they can return to their jobs) creating a return through taxation, and there is a mountain of high-end actuarial work done on the backend (at quite a high level — most delegates never see any of it) to find payoff ratios. This was meant to be the central endgame for the whole thing.

We can't discount that this actually has happened; it absolutely has. The question is whether or not it has happened enough to come anywhere near projections and to provide a realistic prospect of overall breaking even within our lifetimes, to which the answer is a resounding no. There are massive downstream economic benefits from the stimulus this program has given providers, and this is a particularly good form of stimulus, but that's outside the scope of what we're talking about.

NDIS support is not formally linked in any way to whether or not a person has a job, but employment history is a material consideration when doing access requests, and the practical reality is that if you're working full time there just straight up isn't much time outside of work hours to be supported to achieve goals, especially when you'd rather be resting.

🔗 Artificial Blindness of Intersectionality

Poverty is explicitly out of scope for the NDIS. That is deliberately and consciously Centrelink's remit.

The problem is that most people with severe disabilities are on the Disability Pension, which is well below the poverty line. With Rent Assistance it currently (2026) tops out at $1,394.10 per fortnight. A one bedroom apartment in the area I live in is in the range of $400-500 per week, leaving somewhere in the realm of $400-600 per fortnight for literally everything else including bills (if you can even get a rental). Rice and beans would be luxury food; you're realistically looking at rotating through food charities to avoid dying of scurvy.

Pretty much everyone with a severe disability who doesn't own their home is either in unstable housing, sharehousing, or housing stress. The state public housing systems fell apart decades ago. In Victoria, they stopped saying the waitlist was 10 years long because it was no longer clear that new applicants would ever receive a lease.

Supported Independent Living (SIL) was designed to be a response to the proliferation of people with severe and complex disabilities in wildly inappropriate aged care settings. It was supposed to be deinstitutionalisation-lite, with the emphasis being on lite. These are the million-dollar plans that you hear about.

Despite the significantly restricted freedom of these environments, they are desired (for straight up survival reasons) by a large number of people with disabilities who are in unstable housing. For all the good that its intended use case has done, it has too often turned into a wildly inappropriate Federal public housing scheme at many times the cost.

When those million dollar plans could have been a one-off $300k purchase which becomes an asset which generates revenue, this is fiscally the worst possible approach, but the political power of the landowning class is so huge that it's basically impossible to dedicate resources to giving people a bye on paying them rent (keeping rents high through the exact same mechanism that attacking Centrelink pulls wages down by giving workers a less viable plan B). So we end up shoehorning a much more expensive and much less appropriate solution that has a different narrative.

🔗 "That" AAT Case

The NDIS does not fund sex work. It never has and it never will. The famous AAT case which everyone heard about in the news was for a sex therapist, which is a psychologist or physician who provides counselling or treatment, not prostitution. Anyone who saw the headlines and raced out to access sex workers with self managed funds was in for a very rude awakening when review time rolled around.

The right-aligned media gleefully pounced on that one case and loudly shouted that your taxpayer dollars are being used to fund prostitution for welfare recipients. They very deliberately got it wrong over and over again in an attempt to sell that narrative.

Some advocacy groups basically ran with it and started saying people with disabilities should get sex workers. I think this is a very important reason that a culture of responsible advocacy matters, rather than "I got them what they wanted" being the central metric for success. Conscious resistance to a packaged narrative which will cause catastrophic damage to the people they're advocating for is part of that.

The reality of disability and sexuality is intersectional, complex and nuanced, and understanding it certainly shouldn't be entrusted to the Herald Sun. This is a perfect example of how the incentives align towards motivated distortion by the media, and shows us how a single headline can threaten the entire Scheme. This incident is a perfect microcosm of why delegates and policymakers behave the way they do.

🔗 What This Does Not Mean

People who have internalised the "welfare cheats" nonsense will be scanning the above looking for a reason to believe that they're right and that this is proof that participants are blatantly stealing and misusing your money.

There is funding misuse. It exists. That is a fact which will never change. It was the case before the NDIS too. There is clearly a lot less than there was. We can acknowledge these facts and still be supportive of the NDIS and its mission.

The incentive structure acting on someone who is inordinately concerned with those facts is likely to be the product of political engineering, created at that person's own expense (and ultimately at the expense of the efficient operation of the NDIS itself). Ironically this situation increases fund misuse.

🔗 In Short

Ethical or not, a lot of the seemingly bizarre actions of the NDIA and policymakers are politically completely rational, and often necessary for the Scheme to survive. In a country long trained to hate "welfare" via a hostile political and media environment, the actual design choices must tend towards choosing narrative containment over compassion or procedural efficiency.

The legacy of obsessing around misuse of public funds has ironically rendered the scheme inefficient and excessively lenient about extreme misuse as a survival mechanism, forcing politicians and public servants to carefully navigate these tensions to keep it alive. Its confusing behaviours are not irrational: they're the predictable consequence of its environment.

It is not possible to reform or abolish the NDIS without understanding this, lest you incur humanitarian disasters of a scale as yet unimagined. The environment and its incentives will not change simply because the program does.

The NDIS cannot be effectively understood, reformed, or protected without understanding the political ecosystem that created it.

🔗 Checkin

Version: 1

Written: 2026-01-14 to 2026-01-19

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

Mental health was: poor - estimate 25% brain