NDIS overhaul: The hard part has only just started on NDIS reform

With his speech to the National Press Club, Mark Butler has done the easy part on reforming the NDIS. Now, he has to deliver.

The Health Minister’s keyword was “reset”.

His bid to return the scheme to its original intention, to support people with permanent, significant disabilities, feels much more than that.

The changes effectively pause the scheme at current funding levels for the next four years before allowing it to start growing again.

There will be no more “let it rip” market for either those offering services or those seeking to access the scheme.

Both sides of the equation will be significantly curtailed to contain the costs.

There’s also a highly ambitious timeframe to get it all done that relies, in part, in the Coalition agreeing to rush some of the financial controls through Parliament by the end of June.

Anthony Albanese told the ABC’s 730 on Monday night: “We’re not talking about cuts here.”

But the severe restriction of growth that Mr Butler hopes to achieve – paring back to 2 per cent a year initially, well below inflation – is a cut in real terms to the scheme.

A lot of people are going to be left unhappy, not least the 160,000 people currently receiving NDIS support who are expected to be reassessed as no longer needing it under tighter eligibility criteria.

There are big cuts too to the stream of funding that helps people participate in their communities, through social activities like art classes or sport, but also things such as transport to medical appointments.

Mr Butler acknowledged that there would be a “material impact” on existing participants.

These are real people whose everyday lives could significantly change, for the worse.

But he also basically admitted that what Labor has done over the past few years in a bid to rein in the scheme hadn’t worked.

There were hurdles in getting the annual growth rate down to 8 per cent, and the NDIA hadn’t been able to cut the average reassessed plan increase from 20 per cent to 15 per cent as promised.

Plus the States are dragging their feet – and in Queensland’s case outright refusing – on holding up their end of the grand hospitals-NDIS funding bargain struck a couple of years back.

It’s a big job ahead of the man tagged as a future prime minister.

The risk is that we’ll be back here in another couple of years, told that even more changes are needed – or, worse, that the scheme cannot go on.