6 minute read
It’s April 2026, and a lot of disabled people and their families are carrying a level of uncertainty that is hard to explain unless you are living it.
Not ordinary uncertainty. Not the everyday kind.
The kind that sits in your chest when you do not know whether the support keeping you showered, fed, safe at home, or able to get out the front door will still be there after the next review. The kind that pressures people to be afraid to spend, ask, or hope, because the ground keeps shifting under their feet.
The long-term sustainability of the NDIS matters. Of course it does. Disabled people need this scheme to exist not just next year, but in ten, twenty and thirty years’ time.
But the broadside attacks happening against all things NDIS are not about sustainability. It is propaganda, and it needs to be called out.
This did not happen by accident. It has been engineered. For years.
By governments looking for political cover. By uninformed fringe politicians chasing attention. By big media that knows fear and resentment sell. And by the agency itself, which keeps pointing at costs, fraud and “sustainability” in ways that prime the public to see disabled people as the problem.
It has been a coordinated pattern of blame, denigration and sabotage. Point the finger often enough. Repeat that the scheme is out of control. Treat ordinary disability-related needs as suspect. Keep tightening, keep cutting, keep casting doubt. Over time, a terrible momentum builds.
What has happened in public is that “the NDIS” has increasingly been turned into a dirty phrase. It is talked about as if it is a blowout, a rort, a cultural embarrassment, a looming disaster. Disabled people and providers are too often bundled together in one ugly public story, where receiving help to live an ordinary life is cast as some kind of luxury at the taxpayer’s expense.
That should alarm everyone.
Because once public sympathy is poisoned, governments can do things that would once have been politically impossible.
They can tighten rules in ways ordinary people struggle to understand. They can talk about “clarity” while people lose flexibility. They can talk about “stabilisation” while families experience cuts and confusion. And the public, primed to believe the scheme is out of control, often nods along without ever seeing what life actually looks like for the people on the receiving end.
And what does life look like on the receiving end?
It does not look like luxury.
It looks like a mother trying to work out how to cover the hours that disappeared from her child’s plan. It looks like an adult with degenerative disability wondering how long they can safely stay at home if the therapy that keeps them moving is no longer treated as secure. It looks like families spending months trying to understand changes that arrived faster than they could process them.
That is before you even get to the people still outside the scheme altogether.
There are about 739,000 active NDIS participants in Australia. There are also about 5.5 million Australians with disability under the ABS definition. Those are not like-for-like categories, but the contrast still matters. Huge numbers of disabled Australians are living outside the scheme, including people with severe, permanent impairments who are still not getting the help they need.
Those people are rarely the ones writing opinion pieces or getting quoted in national debates.
They are the quiet ones.
The person who cannot afford the reports. The person in a rural town who cannot get to the specialist. The person whose world has shrunk so much that staying on top of agency requests is laughable.
Disabled people are not to blame for this atmosphere.
They did not create the politics around cost growth. They did not build the media cycle that rewards outrage. They did not invent a system where fraud headlines travel faster than the truth about ordinary care. And they are certainly not responsible for the way governments and agencies choose to talk about reform.
Yet they are too often the ones carrying the shame, the fear, the scrutiny and the consequences. They stand to lose the most. And be sure, they're already losing out.
This is ugly. And it is unjust.
There is a world of difference between saying, “This scheme must be sustainable,” and saying, by tone and implication, “Disabled people are taking too much.” One is responsible public policy. The other teaches people to resent support itself.
And support itself is not the problem.
Support is getting enough meals into someone whose body is failing them.
Support is a worker who helps a person out into community life so they do not disappear into four walls and silence.
Support is making sure someone can stay alive at home with a bit of safety, hygiene, nutrition and dignity.
Support is often the bare minimum between a difficult life and a dangerous one.
Right now, disabled people are being made to carry the burden of “sustainability” in a way that is politically convenient and morally rotten. A support list here. A funding period there. A plan review that quietly strips out what kept someone functioning. Those things do not happen in a vacuum. They shape how safe people feel in their homes, communities, and futures.
What is happening now is the downstream effect of a deliberate public narrative that has made disabled people easier to cut, easier to doubt and easier to treat as if they are somehow the threat.
And still, disabled people have agency.
Disabled people still have their own politics, values, goals, humour, intelligence, desires and plans for the life they want to live. They are not passive recipients of policy. They are not just “scheme participants.” They are people trying to build homes, relationships, careers, interests and futures in a system that increasingly makes them feel like a cost centre.
They are also speaking up.
They are educating. Correcting. Explaining. Telling the truth about what daily life with disability actually looks like, what support does, and what happens when it disappears.
Helping inform and strengthen that agency is something we care deeply about at Meliora.
That is one of the reasons we run free information sessions for disabled people, families and supporters. Disabled people now more than ever need support to navigate a hostile environment. They deserve real answers to complex questions, and somewhere to bring the letters, confusion and practical mess to people who are in the trenches with this every day.
They deserve support to navigate. Support to communicate. Support to educate. Support to keep pursuing positive change instead of being worn down.
Because disabled people are not the enemy.
They are not living high on the public purse. They are not the reason public debate has become so ugly. They are not the ones who should be made to feel ashamed for needing support to live an ordinary life.
They are people. People whose lives have value. People whose safety matters. People whose futures matter. People who deserve systems that work, language that tells the truth, and communities that do not turn on them the moment money enters the conversation.
The NDIS must be sustainable. Yes.
But it must also remain recognisably human.
If sustainability is pursued through fear, distortion and public hostility, we will not have saved the scheme. We will have hollowed out the moral idea that justified it in the first place.
And that would be a disgrace.