Mark Butler used his National Press Club address in Canberra today to spell out just what getting the National Disability Insurance Scheme under control means in practice. 

The broad direction was very much as foreshadowed in leaks: slow the scheme's rate of growth, tighten scrutiny around its biggest and fastest growing packages, push more people with lower levels of support or less permanent needs into systems outside the NDIS, and make the states carry more of that burden.

In other words, this was not a defence of the scheme in its current form by one of Anthony Albanese's closest parliamentary allies. It was an overdue acknowledgement that the NDIS has drifted a long way from what voters thought they were signing up to. The Prime Minister had all but said as much in a recent media interview, and Butler has now put that reality more plainly on the public record.

For years, the political system talked about the NDIS as though its only appropriate setting was ongoing expansion. Any attempt to draw firmer boundaries for financial reasons was treated as suspect, if not outright cruel. 

Butler's speech amounted to an admission that the scheme can't go on absorbing every service gap, developmental issue and support failure that other parts of government have neglected. It was a tacit recognition that sustainability is not some neoliberal talking point invented by critics, but the central policy question now hanging over the future of the NDIS.

And it's about time.

What makes today’s speech more significant still is that Butler made clear the tightening won’t just apply to future entrants. Existing participants will be reassessed against new eligibility rules as their plans come up for renewal, once a new assessment tool is developed and put in place (don’t hold your breath). 

Butler says he wants that tool operating from 1 January 2028. Once operational it means people already on the scheme now could be removed from it later on, if they no longer meet the tighter criteria.

That’s a substantive narrowing of the scheme’s coverage, which most Australians would agree with. Butler is now openly talking about participant numbers falling from around 760,000 to 600,000, but it will take years to happen. And it’s arguably still far larger than voters initially anticipated. 

Meanwhile, average plan costs are expected to be pushed down from roughly $31,000 to $26,000, back to what they in 2023. It’s uncertain whether the lower costs per participant, coupled with fewer participants, will guarantee the NDIS’s sustainability, but it should at least buy some time before the inevitable upwards pressures on costs and eligibility resume.

What the speech didn't fully resolve, however, was the hardest question of all: where those pushed out of the NDIS are meant to go. 

That tension was brought into sharper focus during the question and answer session, when a reporter with cerebral palsy who is on the NDIS asked Butler how the changes would affect disabled Australians already struggling with cost of living pressures. 

Butler answered professionally enough, but it was clearly an awkward moment for the minister. You could see it in his eyes, because the exchange went to the heart of the political and moral problem Labor is still trying to navigate: restraining Commonwealth spending without leaving vulnerable people to fall between systems. 

Labor wants to curb federal outlays while expecting states to build or rebuild the support systems that were allowed to weaken as the NDIS expanded. That may well be necessary, but it is also politically convenient. 

If all that changes is a new carve-up of spending between tiers of government, without reducing the overall outlay, that's little more than an accounting trick. It's certainly not a shift that puts the scheme on a more sustainable fiscal footing.

Unless governments are prepared to say clearly who the NDIS is for, who it is not for, and what sits outside it, the country will remain stuck in the same cowardly debate: pretending everyone can be promised everything, while the bills keep climbing.

The NDIS was sold to the public as a simple moral proposition: Australians with severe, permanent disability should not be left to chance, charity or the uneven mercy of underwhelming state systems. 

That idea remains popular, but pretending the scheme still operates within anything like those original boundaries has been blown to pieces.

The NDIS has become one of the Commonwealth's biggest spending programs, one of its fastest growing, and one of the clearest examples of what happens when political sentiment outruns administrative discipline. 

Which is why the debate has to change. Not in a shrill way, where any attempt to tighten the scheme is denounced as cruelty, and any criticism of it is treated as an attack on disabled Australians. 

The real problem is not the existence of the NDIS, it's what it has become: too big, too vulnerable to gaming, and too politically protected for too long.

In the current financial year the NDIS has been projected to cost $52.3b, making it the third largest program expense in the Commonwealth budget. It is larger than aged care or the Commonwealth's medical benefits bill, and it is on track to reach $63.6b by 2028-29 unless major changes come into effect.

Such out of control costs are extraordinary for what began as a specialised disability scheme. There is a big 'I told you so' here. I and many others quickly raised concerns that such a scheme might not be sufficiently narrowed or capped, making it costly and unsustainable into the future. 

This was entirely foreseeable, yet both sides of politics let the NDIS continue to spiral. Back in 2012 I wrote: 'the idea, while a good one, risks becoming a failure'.

The scheme was initially predicted to cost $8b a year. Think about that in the context of the fiscal sinkhole it has become. Also remind yourself, as the budget gets closer, just how inaccurate costing predictions often are.

The other number worth staring at is interest on government debt right now. Budget papers show interest expenses continuing to rise across the forward estimates, with the debt management program (code for the cost of the interest bills) climbing from $28.4b this financial year to $41.7b in 2028-29.

Two of the biggest fiscal pressures helping to squeeze future governments are now staring each other in the face: a vast disability program growing at a rate of knots, and the mounting cost of servicing the debt accumulated in an era of structurally high spending. 

The irony is brutal: governments spend freely, fail to control the spending they create, then act surprised when debt interest payments start elbowing their way into the same fiscal territory.

The NDIS now services hundreds of thousands of people, far beyond what many voters likely imagined when the public case for it rested heavily on helping those with profound and permanent disabilities. The official figure was 739,000 participants at 30 June last year.

The original public compact was broad because the premise felt well bounded. Most people thought of the NDIS as a guarantee for those with the most serious and enduring needs. What the scheme increasingly became instead was the default answer to a much larger range of disability-related problems, developmental issues, family support failures and service gaps that should never all have been funnelled into one national, individualised funding model.

The 2023 review into the NDIS effectively said as much, arguing that the scheme should sit inside a broader disability support system rather than act as the catch-all for every need the rest of government has failed to meet. Mark Butler's National Press Club speech suggests that three years later Labor may finally be taking appropriate action to curtail the length and breadth of the NDIS.

However, pulling it back does not mean abandoning everyone else. That is the trap in this debate. There are many Australians with disabilities or developmental challenges who need support of some kind. But they do not need, and were never meant to receive, a large lifetime individual package from the Commonwealth. The answer is to rebuild the non-NDIS support architecture that state governments let wither while the Commonwealth scheme became the path of least resistance.

But we do also need a national conversation about what the role of government is, how far that role should pervade into people's lives, and at what cost to taxpayers. I'm just not sure politicians, the media and frankly the broader public are capable of such a serious debate without it degenerating.

Then there is the criminal side of the NDIS story, which can no longer be dismissed as anecdotal or exaggerated. Official agencies now openly acknowledge that serious organised crime has infiltrated the disability system. The Fraud Fusion Taskforce exists specifically to target fraud and organised criminal exploitation in the scheme, and it now involves no less than 23 agencies. That of itself is a serious impost on the budget.

However, it's important, because we are not just talking about minor overbilling or a few dodgy invoices. Where there is a huge river of public money, weak controls and fragmented oversight, organised criminals turn up with a bucket.

In late 2025 the National Disability Insurance Agency, which runs the NDIS, announced action against criminal gangs allegedly involved in claims worth up to $50m. In January this year a Sydney man was charged over an alleged $3.5m NDIS fraud, with authorities explicitly warning about organised crime syndicates targeting the scheme. These are not opposition talking points or media beat-ups. They tell us something damning about how porous the scheme has become.

Fraud, however, certainly is not the driver of the scheme's blowouts. Even if every criminal involvement was removed immediately, the NDIS would still face a structural sustainability problem. Annual growth remains well above the target Labor says it needs to hit. A rights-based entitlement with fuzzy boundaries will always keep expanding, because every pressure in the system pushes towards more participants, more services, more claims, more categories of support, and more moral blackmail against restraint. Governments built a scheme in which saying no is politically toxic, and election scare campaigns have been built around precisely that premise.

Butler says Labor wants annual NDIS growth cut from 10 per cent to 2 per cent over the budget forward estimates, before returning to 5 per cent growth at the end of the decade. He claims this would bring projected spending in 2030 down from more than $70b to around $55b. Those are large savings targets, but a $55b outlay come 2030 is still huge.

Labor is also moving to claw back control from the provider market. Butler’s language about a let it rip system and a ‘chaotic free for all market’ was deliberate. More providers in higher risk categories will face mandatory registration, and a digital payments system is supposed to provide for better oversight on claims that currently pass through with little or no supporting evidence. Which underscores the extent to which the scheme has been allowed to become too loose and too difficult to police.

For too long, the NDIS has been wrapped in sanctimony, such that serious reform became almost impossible. Does anyone seriously think a Coalition government could have made cuts to the system without a Labor opposition suggesting they were heartless conservatives?

The scheme's defenders often talk as though any tightening of eligibility or support categories is somehow a betrayal of disabled people. In reality, the opposite is closer to the truth.

If the scheme is not brought back under control, public confidence in it will erode even further. And once the public starts to see the NDIS less as a solemn social guarantee and more as a bloated, rorted spending machine, the people who will ultimately suffer are the ones who genuinely depend on it.

So yes, the NDIS should be reset closer to what most Australians thought they were backing in the first place: a robust national guarantee for people with severe, permanent disability, not an endlessly elastic program expected to absorb every service failure around it.

That means tighter eligibility, clearer boundaries, stronger policing of misuse, less tolerance for provider rorts, and the construction of genuine support systems outside the scheme itself for those who still need help but do not belong in its most expensive tier.

The choice now is not between compassion and austerity. Policy decisions are rarely so binary. It is about making the NDIS sustainably affordable, so that it survives as a quality piece of social policy the country can be proud of.