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NDIS Cuts: Labor Built the Scheme. Now It's Gutting It and Gaslighting You.

Loving Life Support Services
Oct 26
9 min read

Updated: 3 days ago

I get phone calls I can't stop thinking about. Calls from people we support who live alone, with no family nearby, who rely on our team for their day-to-day care. They've read the news. They've heard the word "cuts". And they're crying down the phone, asking me what's going to happen to them.


This isn't one person. Disabled people right across Australia are terrified, and they have every reason to be. The Albanese Labor Government is cutting the scheme they depend on, and it has spent two years gaslighting the rest of the country into cheering it on.


I should say up front that I co-direct Loving Life Support Services, a small, unregistered NDIS provider on the Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast. These changes hit our business. But they hit the people we support far harder, and I'm done being polite about it.


Labor Built This. Now Look at It.

Labor created the NDIS. It was sold to the country on a simple promise from the Productivity Commission: "The scheme would spend dollars to save more dollars." Support people properly, and you save money everywhere else: in hospitals, in crisis services, in families who can finally go back to work.


The same party is now tearing that promise apart, and it can't even be honest about what it's doing. I warned them. I made a submission to the Senate inquiry and wrote about it publicly in NDIS Bill 2026: I Read It. I Have Questions. I told them cutting the NDIS doesn't save money, it just shifts the cost onto hospitals, Centrelink, mental health services, housing, the justice system and families. They passed it anyway. The cuts started on 1 October.


The "$12 Billion on Coffee" Con

Mark Butler has been on every program he can find telling Australians that social and community participation now costs "$12 billion, the same as the PBS." Why would a Health Minister put it that way? Disability support versus your medicines. He wanted you angry, and it worked. The headlines followed: "NDIS paying carers $12B to join participants on walks and café visits".


What they didn't tell you is that the money mostly pays for a support worker's time, not the coffee.


From where I sit, community participation is often the budget that pays for a support worker to help someone do their grocery shopping, get to the GP or a specialist, pick up medication from the pharmacy, or sort something out at the bank. The NDIS's own description of what support workers do includes "daily chores, including shopping or transport" and "going for an outing or attending a medical appointment". Cut that, and you aren't cutting coffee. You're cutting someone's way to the doctor and the food in their fridge.


And sure, sometimes it is a coffee. But that coffee is doing a lot more than people think.


Take a young man with level 3 autism and an intellectual disability. The public sees a support worker being paid to sit in a café. They don't see the scaffolding that happens before the outing. They don't see him learning to order for himself, or counting out his money to make sure he has enough. They don't see him coping in a busy, noisy public place that can be completely overwhelming for someone with those diagnoses. That's skill building. That's independence.


Or take someone with a serious mental health condition. That coffee might be the first time they've managed to leave the house in three weeks. Fresh air, sunlight, another human being. For that person, it could be life-saving.


So I'll ask the question the government won't answer: why shouldn't disabled people enjoy the things the rest of us take for granted? What's the alternative? Lock them up at home and call it a saving? As People with Disability Australia's president Jeramy Hope said: "It's not a luxury to be able to have a coffee; that is ordinary."


Butler's own favourite example gives the game away. He keeps talking about support workers "scrolling on their phone" at food courts. That's a complaint about bad workers. The fix for bad workers is enforcing quality. Instead, his government is cutting social and community participation budgets by 50 per cent for almost everyone, as plans are reassessed or renewed, and the NDIA says flatly that "This change isn't a reviewable decision."


In April Butler said "We're not taking it away." The same month he admitted "this will have a material impact on participant plans." Which is it? And his own government's modelling showed who gets hit hardest: people with Down syndrome and people with vision impairment. People who need someone beside them just to leave the house.


Isolation kills. The World Health Organization links loneliness to more than 871,000 deaths a year and names people with disability as facing extra barriers to connection. Loneliness already costs Australia's health system up to $2.7 billion a year. And that cost lands on all of us.


They Wrote Down the Harm, Then Refused to Count the Cost

When Labor built the NDIS, the Productivity Commission weighed the cost against savings across government and gains to the economy. It found "The benefits of the scheme would significantly outweigh the costs." The bar to pass was an annual gain of just $3,800 per participant.


Now look at how this government assessed its cuts. Its own Impact Analysis chose a "more qualitative approach" and refused to put a dollar figure on the net benefit at all. On the people losing support, it shrugs that they "may continue to receive supports from other services systems as appropriate". Which systems? At what cost? It doesn't say.


And here's the part that should make every Australian furious. The same document admits the cuts could "elevate the risks of injury, neglect and social isolation". It admits workers may leave the NDIS. It admits "Smaller providers might be more vulnerable." They wrote the harm down themselves and went ahead anyway. That document was then quietly revised twice while keeping its original May date.


The bill for that harm is already landing on the states. In November 2025, the Queensland Government said 290 younger NDIS patients waiting to leave hospital were adding $660,000 a day to its costs. That's the cost shift. It didn't disappear. It just moved off Canberra's books.


As for the 8 per cent growth target that started all of this? No economic modelling behind it has ever been published. The government claimed public interest immunity to keep the framework documents secret. If the numbers were good, they'd show us.


Registration Is Theatre

I don't want this turning into a big-provider versus small-provider fight, so I'll be upfront. Fraud happens at every size. Some small providers do it. Some independent workers do it. Some participants do it. So do big, registered organisations.


Registration doesn't stop it. I couldn't find a single piece of official evidence that registration on its own reduces fraud or harm. The largest penalties ever handed out in this sector went to substantial registered providers, after participants died or were seriously harmed. And no regulator even publishes enforcement data by provider size. So when the government implies this is a small-provider problem, it's doing it without evidence.


It's coming anyway. Registration became mandatory for Supported Independent Living and digital platforms from 1 July 2026, and the government plans to expand it to more supports it calls higher risk from 1 July 2027, with every provider in scope registered by the end of 2030. It's also considering paying unregistered providers less. About 94 per cent of NDIS providers are unregistered, almost 260,000 of them.


Registration audits cost thousands to tens of thousands of dollars, with no subsidy. That's pocket change to a large organisation and a serious hit to a small, local one. So the pool shrinks, the big players get bigger, and participants lose the workers they chose and trust. That's choice and control, killed off by paperwork.


Aged Care Already Showed Us the Ending

If you want to see where Labor's road leads, look at aged care. Under Support at Home, an older person can only self-manage and choose their own workers if their provider agrees, and 10 per cent of their budget is taken for care management whether they self-manage or not. Whatever you want to call that, it isn't choice and control.


The national aged care advocacy body, OPAN, is now begging the Senate for a "practical multi-provider model" and says self-management needs to be more than "a nominal choice". Aged care advocates are fighting to win back exactly what the NDIS is now taking away.


Providers are being swallowed up. Anglicare Sydney is selling its community home care business, its CEO saying Support at Home needs a scale it "cannot naturally reach in the community". More than 90 per cent of providers surveyed say clients are reducing or refusing services because of cost.


And in 2024-25, 4,812 older Australians died while waiting for the home care they had been assessed as needing. Approved, and never received. Those numbers count people who died while waiting, not necessarily because of it. But this government has now missed two Senate deadlines to release the next year's figure. What are they hiding?


The part that really gets me is that when Labor was in opposition, Mark Butler, now the senior minister responsible for the NDIS, used this exact argument about people dying on the home care waitlist to attack the Coalition. It was a fair argument then. It's a fair argument now.


NDIS Cuts Before the Rescue Boat Exists

The NDIS Review called the scheme "the only lifeboat in the ocean" and said other "foundational supports" had to be built around it. So what did the government do? It started cutting the lifeboat first.


The National Agreement on Foundational Supports promises up to $10 billion over five years, but sets no date by which a single support has to actually exist. As at 1 October, Queensland hadn't signed the Thriving Kids deal, and our own Disability Services Minister called it a "cost-shifting deal".


States told the Senate inquiry the alternatives wouldn't be ready in time. The Minister said she was "not contemplating" a delay. Meanwhile $2.83 billion has already been cut from reassessed packages since July 2024. Cut first, build later, maybe. I don't know what you'd call that, but it isn't reform.


"Nothing About Us Without Us"? Really?

Thousands of people made submissions to the Senate inquiry into this Bill. Disabled people, families, workers and providers explained exactly what it would do to their lives. The government-majority committee's final report made one recommendation: pass the Bill.


People with Disability Australia's CEO called it what it was: "To have that evidence heard and then disregarded through one recommendation is irresponsible and disrespectful." Twelve disability representative organisations said the timeframe was "extraordinarily short" and didn't meet the expectations of genuine co-design.


This is a pattern, not an accident. In 2024, Labor's "Getting the NDIS Back on Track" Bill passed the Senate on 22 August, two days before public consultation on the lists of NDIS supports had even closed. More than 7,000 people responded to a consultation on a law that had already passed.


Yes, the 2026 Bill was amended before it passed. Those changes came from deals with the Greens and the Coalition, not from listening to the people who'll live with the consequences. They were heard, then overruled.


Before They Say It

Yes, the scheme grew fast. Yes, some support workers are lousy and sit on their phones. I manage a team of support workers, and I'd sack anyone who did that to one of our participants. So fix it. Enforce quality. Chase the fraud, wherever it is. None of that requires halving the support of almost every disabled person in the country.


What Labor Needs to Do

  • Stop the cuts until foundational supports actually exist on the ground, not just on paper.

  • Learn what you're cutting. Come and spend a day with a participant and their support worker before you call it "coffee" on national radio.

  • Listen to disabled people. They told you, in their thousands.

  • Do the whole sum: hospitals, mental health, housing, justice, and the carers who can't work. Your own party did it in 2011. Do it again, and publish it.


If You're Scared Right Now

If you or someone you love is frightened about these changes, you're not alone and you're not overreacting. Talk to your support coordinator or your providers. Read our plain-English guide to the 1 October NDIS changes. And if you're one of the people we support, pick up the phone. We'll work through it with you.


Disabled people deserve a life, not just to survive. The government that built this scheme should be the last one to forget that.


You can see the everyday connection we're standing up for on our NDIS group programs page, with groups running across the Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast.


📍 Based on the Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast



Written October 2026. Information current as at 6 November 2026. NDIS rules are changing, so check with your plan manager or the NDIS before acting.


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