The NDIS Money Train: When Good Intentions Meet Market Reality
There’s a conversation happening right now that’s making a lot of people uncomfortable, and it needs to be had. I’ve been watching the NDIS debate unfold over the past few years, and what started as a genuinely progressive piece of social policy is turning into something that’s distorting our entire labour market in ways I don’t think anyone anticipated.
Three mates leaving their trades to become disability support workers. That’s not an isolated incident – it’s a trend. And while I’m all for people having career choices and disabilities being properly supported, something’s fundamentally broken when an auto mechanic or plumber can earn more taking someone to play bingo than they can after years of developing a skilled trade.
The frustrating part? The workers themselves aren’t the problem here. Someone mentioned that support workers are getting paid $25-30 an hour while providers charge $125. That gap right there – that’s where the rot lives. These registered providers have found themselves a government-funded gravy train, and they’re milking it for everything it’s worth. Shower seats marked up from $45 to $275. Support work billed at rates that would make a lawyer blush. It’s profiteering dressed up as care.
I’ve got mixed feelings about this because the NDIS was supposed to be one of those rare examples of government actually getting something right. People with disabilities deserve proper support – that’s not up for debate. But the implementation has been an absolute shambles. We’ve essentially created a market where providers can charge maximum rates with zero competitive pressure, pocket the difference between what they pay workers and what they bill the government, and face minimal oversight.
The real kicker is how this ripples out into everything else. When tradies can earn $40-50 an hour as students doing support work – jobs that are admittedly not always easy, but don’t require years of apprenticeship – why would they stick with their trade? And when they leave, who fixes your car? Who installs your plumbing? The cost of those services goes through the roof because there’s a labour shortage, which feeds into inflation, which makes everything more expensive for everyone.
Someone in the discussion pointed out that it’s affecting retail businesses too, because students who might have worked casual retail jobs are now doing support work instead. They called it “National Debt & Inflation Support” and honestly, that’s not far off the mark. When you pump billions into a poorly regulated market, you don’t just affect that market – you distort the entire economy around it.
What really gets under my skin is how the government’s response to the budget blowout is to tighten restrictions on the people who actually need support, rather than going after the dodgy providers who are systematically defrauding the system. Someone shared a story about a family member whose housing provider emptied their $500k annual plan in six months through overcharging, then threatened eviction when the money ran out. They were back-billed for 15 sessions that never happened. This isn’t an outlier – it’s a feature of how the system operates.
The Quality and Safeguards Commission is apparently drowning in a backlog of over 30,000 complaints, some more than three years old, with people having died while waiting for their complaints to be addressed. Meanwhile, dodgy providers just phoenix their way to a new ABN and keep going. The system is reactive when it desperately needs to be proactive.
Here’s the thing that really bothers me from a policy perspective: this didn’t have to be this way. We could have implemented proper support for people with disabilities through the existing public health system. Instead, we privatised it, created a marketplace with perverse incentives, and then acted surprised when profit-seeking behaviour emerged exactly where you’d expect it.
I’m not saying everyone in the NDIS space is corrupt. There are genuine providers doing difficult work with tight margins, and there are support workers who genuinely care about the people they’re helping. But when a system is designed in a way that makes rorting easier than compliance, you’re going to get rorting. That’s just basic economics.
The uncomfortable truth is that we can’t afford the NDIS as it currently exists. Not because people with disabilities don’t deserve support, but because we’ve built a system that’s more about enriching middlemen than delivering care. When you’ve got providers buying up properties, charging rent to participants, then billing for services in those same properties while driving up housing costs for everyone else – that’s not a disability support scheme, that’s a wealth transfer mechanism.
What we need is fundamental reform. Tighter regulation. Actual enforcement. Maybe even bringing the whole thing back in-house under proper government oversight rather than leaving it to private providers to charge maximum rates. The current approach of punishing participants for “mismanaging funds” when providers rort their plans is victim-blaming at its finest.
The trades workforce drain is just one symptom of a much larger problem. Until we address the underlying incentive structures and actually hold providers accountable, this will only get worse. Good intentions without proper implementation don’t just fail – they create entirely new problems while failing to solve the original one.
We need to be able to have this conversation without people assuming you’re attacking disability support itself. I want people with disabilities to get the care they need. I also want a system that doesn’t create perverse market distortions while enriching profiteers. Those two goals aren’t mutually exclusive – we just need the political will to actually fix the mess we’ve created.