Labor is finally doing what it should have done years ago – what both sides of politics should have done years ago.
The NDIS has blown out, drifted off course and become a budgetary monster. Originally forecast to cost $8billion a year, the Productivity Commission revised that figure to $15billion, yet it now costs $50billion annually and left alone, it’s projected to hit $70billion before the end of the decade.
Pulling it back isn’t the scandal, as the Greens would predictably like you to think. The real scandal is that it got this bad in the first place, and that the political party now pretending to be the responsible saviour is, in fact, the very party that built it, designed it and sanctified it, spending years refusing to admit how badly it had all gone wrong.
In fact, whenever the Coalition even hinted that cuts might be necessary, they were cast as villains willing to step all over the disabled. When commentators like myself floated concerns early on that an NDIS risked growing unsustainably, we were condemned as heartless neo-liberals.
That is the real story here. Not the courage of the clean-up finally going to happen, but the cowardice and the sanctimony of the denial from the left before now.
The NDIS was one of Labor’s proudest creations, or so it kept telling us. Billed as this generation’s social policy equivalent of Medicare. It was sold as compassionate, necessary and nation-shaping. And in principle, of course it was. Australians with profound disabilities deserved far better than the patchwork system they were stuck dealing with. Few disputed that.
But good intentions don’t excuse bad design, and sentiment is no substitute for fiscal discipline when embarking on serious social reform.
Jim Chalmers has become a specialist in the half-truth dressed up as frankness, says PVO
‘Labor created a scheme with loose edges, weak boundaries and enormous political sanctity attached to it. And it happened on Julia Gillard’s watch: a desperate rushed effort to leave a legacy before her inevitable removal,’ writes Daily Mail political editor Peter van Onselen
Labor created a scheme with loose edges, weak boundaries and enormous political sanctity attached to it. And it happened on Julia Gillard’s watch: a desperate, rushed effort to leave a legacy before her inevitable removal.
Once all of that happened, any attempt to question where the NDIS was heading could be shouted down as cold-hearted or worse. So it kept expanding. More people, more services, more things folded into it that were never meant to be there. And all the while, the politics behind it rewarded such indulgence, rather than prudent restraint.
Now Labor wants credit for discovering the obvious. Ministers suddenly speak the language of sustainability, discipline and original intent, as though this grim revelation arrived out of nowhere?
It was abandoned in practice because governments lacked the guts to enforce it, and the party most responsible for that culture of evasion was Labor, because it always wanted the halo of having created the NDIS without ever paying the price of admitting what it was growing into.
Yes, the Coalition were weak, petrified of Labor’s scare campaigns and too quick to buckle when fiscal restraint was suggested internally. That shouldn’t surprise anyone. The modern Coalition has been limp on serious industrial relations reforms ever since the Work Choices fiasco, and such timidity has only been reinforced by Labor’s regular deployment of Medicare campaigns, including at the last election.
Recent generations of conservative politicians haven’t had the stomach to risk defeat standing by sound ideological policies. They believe in little and struggle to mount persuasive arguments to convince voters even if they did.
Which brings us to Albo. He sold himself as a corrective of the grubby habits of modern politics. More integrity and more honesty. More respect and less spin. Certainly less excuse-making and less of the old tricks, where politicians tell stories that are technically defensible but deliberately incomplete.
Yet that is exactly the culture Albo now presides over. It’s not new, he didn’t invent it, but he did promise to rise above it. The moralising over the need to look into the trajectory of the NDIS was one example, but there are many more.
Pulling back the NDIS is not the scandal. The fact that it got so bad in the first place is
Peter van Onselen says Australians have been gaslit for years by the government when it comes to the NDIS
Treasurer Jim Chalmers has been the clearest example of a minister sailing under the bar Albo set for his team before winning the 2022 election. Chalmers has become a specialist in the half-truth dressed up as frankness. On the economy, on inflation, on budget repair, and by extension on a problem like the NDIS, the formula is always the same.
Take a slice of reality that flatters the government, repeat it endlessly. Leave out the part that points back to Labor’s own responsibility, and hope that the media either doesn’t notice or can’t be bothered pressing the point.
On deficits, Chalmers regularly claims credit for savings measured against pandemic-era budget projections that were built on worst-case assumptions that never came to pass, turning the gap between a false baseline and a better reality into evidence of Labor discipline.
On surpluses, he points to the $22.1 billion underlying cash surplus in 2023 and the $15.8billion surplus in 2024 as proof of superior economic management, while skating past the fact that much of the improvement came from stronger-than-expected tax receipts, high commodity prices, and a tight labour market rather than structural spending restraint.
On inflation, he talks up energy rebates for lowering the headline number, even though that flatters the published figure without doing enough to reduce underlying price pressure.
And when inflation remains stubborn, he reaches for global events (most recently, conflict in the Middle East) despite underlying inflation already sitting well above the RBA’s target before those excuses arrived, which is why interest rates went up before the Middle East crisis too.
That’s all gaslighting in a political form. Not because every word is false, but because the presentation is designed to make the public doubt what is plainly in front of them.
On the NDIS, Chalmers and his colleagues now want to sound like sober custodians cleaning up a runaway scheme. But where is the equal candour about how it became a fiscal sinkhole in the first place? Where is the blunt admission that one of Labor’s most celebrated reforms was structurally flawed from the beginning, politically protected and allowed to drift because no one wanted to take on the moral vanity attached to it?
Where is the honesty that the repair bill exists precisely because the political class, led in large part by Labor, preferred applause to fiscal discipline?
They want credit for creating it and credit for fixing it, classic Albo-era politicking despite his promise to be different. And with the opposition in disarray and scrutiny weaker than it should be, Albo will probably get away it, because there isn’t a viable opposition capable of exposing growing dissatisfaction with the PM’s performance and make it count electorally.
To not get eaten alive by the voters, you only need to be good, just better than the alternative, and that’s not hard at the moment.
