Labor’s scheme was out of control. Lopping off a third of participants is the nuclear option

April 24, 2026 — 3:00am

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“Nothing less than a complete all-out assault to undermine the NDIS”. That’s how Bill Shorten, then shadow NDIS minister, described the Morrison government’s proposed NDIS reforms in 2021. The charge was, in part, that the Coalition was planning to kick people off the scheme by making them submit to independent assessments of their needs. The Morrison government denied that was the intention, but the campaign was devastatingly effective. Within a few months, it had abandoned those reforms. Less than a year later, the Morrison government ceased to exist.

We’ll never know what the consequences of the Morrison plan would have been. We can be fairly confident, however, it would have been dwarfed by what the Labor government did this week. Forget kicking people off the scheme by stealth: Labor just announced it will make a virtue of it. The headline figure says Labor will cut 160,000 people from the scheme by decade’s end. But that actually understates it, because many more will have applied and been added in the meantime. A better measure is that a scheme forecast to serve 900,000 people by then would instead serve 600,000. That’s lopping off a third of participants.

You could, if you wish, mount the argument that this is true to Labor’s fundamental vision for the scheme. Indeed, that’s more or less what Shorten, who pioneered the scheme and is now outside parliament, did this week, foreshadowing “new eligibility rules aimed........

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