The NDIS needs reform, but tightening eligibility before alternative supports are ready risks abandoning people with disability and retreating from the citizenship principles on which the scheme was built.

When the National Disability Insurance Scheme was launched in 2013, it represented the most significant advance in Australian social policy since Medicare. For the first time, Australians with significant and permanent disability had an individual, enforceable entitlement to support, not rationed by state budget cycles, not dependent on where they lived, and not determined by what services happened to be available locally. For many participants and their families, the scheme was genuinely transformative.

It is worth saying that clearly before saying anything else. The current reform debate, dominated by cost figures and sustainability concerns, risks obscuring how much the NDIS has meant to the people it serves. Understanding why reform is now necessary requires holding both truths at once.

The NDIS has grown well beyond its original projections. The Productivity Commission estimated in 2011 that the scheme would serve around 411,000 people at approximately $22 billion annually. By 2023–24 it was supporting more than 600,000 participants at a cost of nearly $44 billion. It is on a trajectory toward $92 billion by 2032.

The politically convenient explanation is that the scheme became too generous. The accurate explanation is more troubling. A substantial part of the growth in........

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