The NDIS bill is about to pass. Nobody agrees on how much of it is fraud

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The NDIS bill is about to pass. Nobody agrees on how much of it is fraud

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Two credible sources, two very different numbers, and a Senate debate running out of time to reconcile them.Debate on the NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 opened in the Senate on Monday, 17 August, with the government confident it will pass this sitting week with Coalition support. The bill would cut at least 160,000 people from the scheme and bank $37.8 billion in savings over four years, the single largest saving measure in May’s federal budget.Greens Senator Jordon Steele-John used the floor to make the moral case against it directly. “The eyes of five point five million disabled people fall at this moment on this Parliament,” he told the chamber, accusing the government of “backing billionaires and gas companies instead of disabled people.” He did not soften the closing line: “Shame on you. You will be condemned by history.”Appreciate the newsletter but aren’t ready to pay for a subscription? Grab us a beer or snag the exclusive ad spot at the top of next week's newsletter.Shadow Health Minister Anne Ruston made the Coalition’s case for supporting the bill anyway, in the same debate. The scheme was designed to support around 410,000 people. It now supports 782,000, nearly double the original estimate. Costed at $13.6 billion, it now runs above $50 billion a year.This is, by Ruston’s count, the government’s third attempt at slowing that growth: an 8 per cent target set in 2023, missed; a 5 to 6 per cent target set in January, also missed, with growth still near 11 per cent; a new target of 2 per cent set in this year’s budget.Both of those accounts are true at once. The scheme has grown at the rate Ruston describes, and cutting 160,000 people from it will do the harm Steele-John is warning about. The debate isn’t really about whether those two facts exist. It’s about which one should carry more weight in the vote.What actually changed this weekWhat moved this week wasn’t the underlying fight, which Inside Auspol has covered since the bill’s Senate committee report was tabled on 14 August. It was the amendments negotiated inside it.The government and the Greens agreed to limit the disability minister’s power to cut funding across entire categories of NDIS support. Any decision made using an automated system must now be reviewable by a human, and the decision-making framework behind it has to be published before it’s switched on.And a new clause bars restrictive practices, including forced medication, from being used as a condition of NDIS eligibility, with any genuinely required treatment funded instead through the public health system.That last change addresses a gap that predates this bill rather than one it created. Somewhere in the scheme’s operation, a person could reportedly be pressured into a restrictive practice to keep their support. The amendment closes that specific door.The fraud number that depends on who’s askingThe most contested figure in the debate isn’t about who gets cut. It’s about why.The Grattan Institute, an independent think tank, told the Senate inquiry in its submission that fraud accounts for just 2 per cent of the bill’s projected savings — $900 million of the $37.8 billion package.Ruston, on the same day, cited a different figure on the Senate floor: an Australian National Audit Office estimate that up to 10 per cent of NDIS payments are “non-compliant, incorrect, or fraudulent,” worth roughly $5 billion a year at today’s spending.The two numbers aren’t measuring the same thing. Grattan’s 2 per cent is specifically fraud, calculated against this bill’s projected savings. The audit-derived figure Ruston cites is a broader compliance estimate — built from an earlier and smaller year of NDIS spending, and folding genuine fraud together with incorrect claims and administrative non-compliance. Different measure, different baseline, different year.Neither figure appears to be fabricated. But the gap between “2 per cent, and specifically fraud” and “up to 10 per cent, loosely defined” is wide enough to support two entirely different political arguments from the same evidence base, and so far, nobody in the debate has been required to reconcile them.The gap advocates are pointing at insteadPeople with Disability Australia’s acting chief executive, Megan Spindler-Smith, isn’t disputing the fraud figures at all. Her concern is what replaces the NDIS supports being cut.“We are feeling pretty devastated,” she said, adding that the disability community’s warnings during the Senate inquiry have not been “adequately heard.” Her specific example is Thriving Kids, a $2 billion program meant to catch people leaving the scheme. It currently only covers children up to age eight, leaving older children, teenagers and adults with disability without a confirmed alternative.Health Minister Mark Butler says that gap will close. He points to a technical advisory group developing ...

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