In a poignant opinion piece for The Sydney Morning Herald, 95-year-old Melbourne writer Ros Collins has issued a searing critique of the National Disability Insurance Scheme’s (NDIS) strict age cut-off rules, which have left her son, Dan, without vital support.
Her story exposes the human cost of a system that deems 65 the dividing line between disability and “aged” care, regardless of individual circumstances.
The crux of Collins’ frustration lies in the NDIS’s inflexible eligibility threshold. Dan, who turned 65 in 2023, collapsed from a meningitis infection just seven days before his birthday, having been dismissed from hospital twice with advice to take paracetamol.
He spent his milestone unconscious in The Alfred hospital’s intensive care unit, emerging with a permanent brain injury that obliterated his short-term memory. Despite his physical fitness and eagerness to volunteer—reading to schoolchildren and working at a library—he was denied NDIS support.
The reason? He wasn’t already receiving it before turning 65, a cut-off that Collins brands as arbitrary and cruel.
This age limit has forced Dan into the aged care system, a categorisation Collins rejects outright. “Dan is not aged,” she insists, painting a picture of a man with ambitions and a zest for life, not someone ready for “God’s waiting room.”
Yet, the NDIS rules are unbending: if disability strikes too close to that 65th birthday, support is off the table.
For Dan, this meant his application was rejected despite his collapse occurring mere days before the cut-off, leaving him reliant on an aged care package that could take a year to materialise—and even then, won’t match the NDIS’s scope. Collins, at 95, is left as his primary carer, dipping into Dan’s savings to bridge the gap.
Her attempts to challenge this age barrier have been met with bureaucratic stonewalling. Appeals to local MPs, ministers, the NDIS, and even the prime minister have yielded sympathy but no solutions, with responses leaning on the mantra: “the law is the law.”
Collins describes the NDIS legislation as “cunningly worded” to block appeals, a design that traps families like hers in a cycle of rejection. She fears that without reform, Dan’s future will fade into an aged-care home once she can no longer fight.
Collins widens her lens, citing research showing older Australians over 55 are far less likely to gain NDIS approval, a disparity that questions the scheme’s fairness.
She invokes Julia Gillard’s 2012 vision for the NDIS, contrasting it with today’s reality where age, not need, dictates access. Her plea is clear: the 65 cut-off is a blunt instrument, slicing through lives like Dan’s with no regard for timing or circumstance.
Published in The Sydney Morning Herald, her words are a desperate call to scrap this rigid limit and inject compassion into a system that, for now, seems deaf to her cries.
Yet on the flip side there are many under the age of 65 receiving aged care support because at the time they had been rejected when they applied for NDIS.
At present, there is no view of how many of the current 240k participants under the age of 65 who are receiving aged care packages. A figure not reported on anywhere.
The package is given when there are no other programs the individual qualifies for. Many of them should be on and do qualify for NDIS yet not given the support required during application. This is a system failure that also penalizes those over 65 who are waitlisted. This needs exposure and attention!