Women and families of disabled Australians are set to bear the heaviest load from the federal government’s sweeping National Disability Insurance Scheme reforms, with advocacy groups warning that cuts to community participation funding will push care responsibilities back onto informal carers, most of whom are women.
The warning comes as a Senate committee this week begins three days of hearings into the NDIS Future Generations Bill, legislation that would deliver $36.2 billion in savings over four years and is expected to remove 160,000 participants from the scheme by 2030.
The Grattan Institute, in its submission to the inquiry, was unambiguous: “These savings won’t be achieved without shifting costs onto families and informal carers.”
The cuts on the table
The most immediately contentious measures in the bill are blunt reductions to two categories of support. Social and Community Participation budgets would be cut by 50 per cent, while Capacity Building Daily Activities budgets would be reduced by 10 per cent. Together, these cuts are projected to deliver $13.2 billion of the four-year savings, roughly one third of the total.
Social and community participation funding is what allows disabled Australians to attend medical appointments, access social activities, maintain employment, and engage with their communities. It is not, advocates stress, a discretionary luxury. For many participants, it is the practical mechanism through which the rest of their NDIS plan becomes usable.
The Grattan Institute noted that for participants with more complex needs, community participation depends on individualised support that cannot simply be replaced by goodwill from a family member. “For many, particularly those with more complex needs, community participation depends on the right individualised support,” its submission stated.
When that funded support disappears, someone still needs to drive the appointment, supervise the activity, or fill the gap. The question the Senate hearings will need to grapple with is who that person is, and what it costs them.
The gendered arithmetic
Women currently make up more than 71 per cent of all primary carers in Australia. That figure alone gives weight to the concerns raised by Women With Disabilities Australia, which warned in its submission that care responsibilities were likely to shift disproportionately onto women, including those who may need to reduce or abandon paid work to meet the increased demand.
“Where funded amounts fall below actual support costs, the gap will be carried by participants, families and unpaid carers, with predictable gendered impacts,” the organisation said.
The Child and Family Disability Alliance went further, recommending that family and household circumstances be taken into account when funding is assessed, so that participants do not lose NDIS support in situations where they have no private means to replace it. Without that safeguard, the alliance warned, mothers in particular would face worsening wellbeing and reduced workforce participation.
“Current government planning and attention to these areas do not appear adequately developed ahead of the scheduled implementation of the legislative reform,” its submission said.
The financial scale of what unpaid carers already contribute to the disability sector is rarely acknowledged in the debate over NDIS costs. A 2020 report estimated it would cost $77.9 billion to replace existing unpaid disability care with paid support, more than twice the NDIS’s annual budget at the time. The government’s projected savings look considerably smaller when set against that figure.
Who loses the most support
The cuts are not evenly distributed. Analysis from the Grattan Institute suggests that about $11 billion of the $16.6 billion in savings forecast for 2029-30 will come from eligibility changes alone, with the total participant population expected to fall to around 598,000 in 2030-31, roughly a third of what was projected under the existing settings.
But in the near term, before eligibility changes fully take hold, the majority of reductions will come from the support category cuts. Research published by the Grattan Institute shows that people in supported independent living or specialist disability accommodation, those with the highest levels of need in the scheme, have average social and community participation budgets more than five times higher than other participants. A 50 per cent cut therefore strips five times as much support from those who need it most.
Sam Bennett, writing in The Australian, described the social and community participation cuts as a “chainsaw” approach that would hold real-terms growth in those supports to just 1.1 per cent annually over four years, well below inflation, while the government’s own structural reforms were projected to bring long-run NDIS growth down to a sustainable 5 to 6 per cent a year without those blunt reductions.
Sweeping new powers
Underpinning the immediate cuts is a proposed expansion of ministerial authority that has drawn its own criticism. The bill would give the minister, and any future minister, the power to reduce funding for categories of supports at any time, provided they declare it necessary for the scheme’s financial sustainability.
Crucially, a minister would not be required to demonstrate that an individual participant’s needs had changed, that their plan was incorrectly calculated, or that the support in question was poor value. The power is broad, and advocates have warned it creates a mechanism for future cuts with no structural safeguard against misuse.
The government’s position
The government has defended the reforms as necessary to ensure the NDIS remains viable for future generations, describing the scheme’s growth rate as unsustainable. A government spokesperson said the bill was compatible with human rights and that governments needed greater oversight over a scheme “growing faster than Medicare, the PBS and aged care”.
The government has also pointed out that the NDIS will remain the largest social programme it runs outside the age pension, and the most comprehensive disability support system in the world.
The Senate committee inquiry is due to report by 16 June. The government is seeking to pass the legislation as quickly as possible, but faces opposition from both the Coalition and the Greens, with both parties raising concerns about the extent to which key details have been left to ministerial rules and individual discretion rather than set out in the legislation itself.
For families represented by the Child and Family Disability Alliance, the timeline matters enormously. The community participation cuts are among the bill’s earliest measures, and the supports that replace what is cut, including state-run programs that do not yet exist, are not expected to be operational before the reductions take effect.
Whether the Senate inquiry will recommend amendments to the most contested provisions remains to be seen. What is already clear, from the submissions before it, is that the cost of these reforms will not be borne equally.
These cuts are outrageous. People with complex medical needs are going to be referred to “community connections” and/or “foundational supports”. These resources never existed in some communities and the idea of people meeting in a local hall somewhere to get support is delusional. The fact is that care is going to be flicked back onto families some of whom are exhausted and overwhelmed. I appreciate that the government wants to redirect money into other areas like Defence but the fact is that this is a political decision not an economic and social decision. Women as always will bear the brunt of this policy. To say that this is unfair is an understatement.
If this Government stopped wasting money on New immigration and giving every other person arriving in the Country a pension and got some of the lazy Unemployed generations off unemployment benefits maybe those with genuine issue would get the real care and help they need financially medically and emotionally…..
The Government should be targeting those who rort and abuse the system, not people who genuinely depend on support services.
These cuts unfairly impact vulnerable Australians, placing additional pressure on families and carers who are already doing their best to fill the gaps.
What makes this approach even more concerning is that many of the proposed state-run replacement programs either do not yet exist or are not expected to be fully operational before these reductions take effect. Removing thousands of people from the NDIS without a clear, functioning alternative in place is not reform—it is poor planning.
The consequences are predictable. Reduced support will lead to increased social isolation, worsening mental health and greater demand on an already overstretched health system. The long-term costs to taxpayers will quickly outweigh any short-term savings.
The fundamental question remains: how can the Government justify removing people from essential supports when there is no credible Plan B ready to take their place? This policy appears fundamentally flawed and risks abandoning vulnerable Australians in the hope that an untested system will eventually fill the gap.
Ultimately, the highest price will be paid by some of the most vulnerable people in our community. Perhaps before making these decisions, politicians, policy advisers and number crunchers should spend time at the coalface alongside support workers, carers and better still, spend a day walking in the shoes of someone navigating daily life with a disability. They may then gain a clearer understanding of the real-world consequences of decisions made from offices and boardrooms far removed from the challenges faced by those who depend on these supports every day.