There's a kind of courage that politics almost never produces, and it's the only thing that will fix this.
Moral courage.
Being willing to be right and unpopular. Standing on what's actually true, saying it plainly, and wearing whatever comes back at you.
We want to be fair here. Labor and the agency could see the broad strokes. The unsustainable NDIS growth curve was real. The pressure on the budget was real. Anyone serious about the scheme lasting had to reckon with both, and they were right to say so.
Where it went wrong is in the conclusions they drew and in what they did next. Doing the right thing here was going to be unpopular for a while. That's usually the deal with hard reform: you make the honest case, you wear the criticism, and you wait for people to catch up.
Instead the truth got bent. Australians were sold outsized lies about crooks and rorts rather than truth about reasonable limits, and actual cost.
Labor and the agency's approach 'got the job done'. But it's been a story of manipulation and political expediency, rather than courageously doing the right thing.
Rather than cherish the scheme's reputation, it was sacrificed was spent to buy permission for the cuts.
All of it justified as protecting the NDIS. Some of the people involved probably believed it was worthwhile.
But doing the wrong thing for right reasons, is never the way to go. That's fear, not courage.
Look at what's left:
A country that thinks worse of disabled people than it did five years ago. Participants who cop it at the shops and in the comments under every news story. And a public that was never trusted to consider the hard questions, so it never got the chance to answer it.
Let's look at where this lack of courage and honesty has landed us, and then at what's still possible. Because none of this is finished.
1. The growth was too high
It was. There's no point pretending otherwise.
A scheme cannot grow at 10% a year forever. At some point the arithmetic stops working, and anyone telling participants otherwise is setting them up for a harder fall later.
So something had to change. That much is honest, and the government was right to name it.
But here's what a courageous government would have asked before reaching for the axe:
Is this growth permanent, or is it partly a scheme still filling up?
Because there's a saturation point. There always was. The NDIS launched in 2013 and spent years finding people who had gone without support their entire lives. People who'd never been in any system. People whose families had carried them alone for decades. Every one of them arriving looks like growth on a graph. It isn't growth in need. It's a backlog clearing.
A scheme that reaches most eligible people stops climbing like that, because there's fewer people left to find. Did anyone clearly model where that point sits and when we'd reach it? Did anyone put that to the public before declaring the trajectory unsustainable?
If they did, we've never seen it. It takes more courage to explain why a line goes up than to point at it and call it a crisis.
As a result, the NDIS is now harder than ever to gain access, and easier than ever to get kicked off for no genuine reason. And there's no public will to stand up for what the scheme really needs to cost, in order to fulfil its actual mandate.
2. The autism question
Then there's the harder one, which politicians and executives tiptoe around.
Children with autism and developmental delay now account for a very large share of the scheme, and most of that spending goes to kids who, unless their functional capacity genuinely increases, will need support for the rest of their lives.
That's a real long-term liability and it deserves a serious answer. Being proactively supportive improves people's lives dramatically. Plus it saves lives. But it requires hard conversations and moral courage.
What has the government decided instead? Children aged 8 and under with developmental delay or autism at what it calls low to moderate support needs will stop entering the NDIS from 1 January 2028, and will be handled by a new program instead.
There is a genuinely good idea buried in here. Early, intensive, skilled support for young children, aimed at building capability while the brain is at its most responsive, is one of the few interventions in this field with strong evidence behind it. Get it right and you don't just save money later. You give a kid a different life.
If Thriving Kids were that, we'd be its loudest supporters.
So is it?
Look closely and the picture gets thin.
The money. Commonwealth and state governments have jointly committed $4 billion over five years. The Commonwealth's share is $2 billion, and at least $1.4 billion of that goes straight to the states rather than being spent on services federally. Set that against $38 billion coming out of the NDIS over four years, and a stated goal of reducing participants from 760,000 to around 600,000 by 2030.
The timing. State services were to commence rolling out no later than 1 October 2026, which is now. The program is expected to be at scale from 1 January 2028. In much of the country, particularly regionally, the services it depends on don't exist yet.
The design. Thriving Kids supports come through mainstream channels, GPs and schools among them, rather than individualised funding. No choice, no control, and no way to keep the therapist your kid finally trusts. One parent told the parliamentary inquiry their children would lose people it had taken a long time to get to know. Will this really lead to people who need less support in their adult lives?
The consultation. More than 400 submissions went to that inquiry. Its report, No Child Left Behind, called for genuine co-design, safeguards and a staged rollout so no child loses access. Families asked for one simple thing: a written guarantee that no child would receive less support under Thriving Kids than they get now. It hasn't been legislated. Yellow Ladybugs chief executive Katie Koulas said the program hasn't had autistic input or approval, and called it dangerous.
The cost to families. Whether services will be free, or carry co-payments and caps, still isn't settled.
What would count as success
The test isn't complicated.
If Thriving Kids delivers earlier, better, more skilled support, and those children reach adolescence with more capability than they'd have had, it works. We'll be the first to applaud.
But if it reduces access to the therapeutic support needed to build those independence - yet calls the saving a 'reform', it has failed at the only thing it claimed to be for.
And the bill arrives later anyway, in a teenager with less independence, a parent who left work to care for their kid, and an adult plan down the track costing much more than the therapy ever would have.
A program designed to build capacity and a program designed to remove people from a scheme can look identical on a press release. They are not the same thing, and the difference shows up years later in somebody's actual life.
It's not too late
Here's the part worth holding onto. The law has passed and the cuts have started, but the decisions that matter most are still ahead. How the line gets drawn. What the assessment actually looks like. Whether services exist before children are moved to them. Whether anyone is honest with the public about what's happening and why.
Every one of those is still open. And every one of them is a choice about which way to walk.
We can keep going the way we're headed. Cutting funding that people seriously suffer without, and calling the suffering a saving. Pushing children out of a scheme before there's anywhere solid to land, knowing some will never now get the support that would have built capacity for life. Avoiding every conversation that might lead somewhere humane, because humane costs money and money has to come from somewhere, and usually that pisses people off.
That path is well worn and it's easy going. Nobody has to defend anything.
Or we find some courage.
Stick to the truth, even when it gets used against you. Say out loud that the growth rate will fall on its own as the scheme finishes finding people who were always eligible. That's unpopular in an environment built on alarm, and it'll be twisted into a defence of waste within a day. Say it anyway. A government that can't tell the public an inconvenient fact has already given up on governing.
Invest in people's futures, even when the bill arrives first. Early intensive support costs real money now and pays off in fifteen years, in a portfolio nobody currently holds and a term nobody currently sits in. That's precisely why it doesn't get done. Doing it anyway, and defending the cost publicly, is the whole job.
Stand up for the disability community. Not manage them. Not poll the public on how to sell them a cut. Stand with them, in front of the country, and make the case.
Find the money that's needed. Reform the tax system. That's the big one. Extreme wealth is growing at an unsustainable rate. The economy grows, but the people growing their wealth pay less tax, all while needing more money to the support people who need it. So fix the systems that are broken, rather than demonising systems that save lives and change futures.
That's what moral courage looks like here. It isn't complicated. It's just confronting and expensive, and it means being disliked for a while by people who'll be reading a different headline next month anyway.
Australia has done this before. This scheme exists because people made an unpopular, expensive argument and kept making it until the country agreed. Every disabled person receiving support today is living inside the result of somebody's courage.
So the question isn't whether it's too late. It isn't. The question is whether anyone currently holding the pen is willing.
What would you want them to stand up for?
Tell us. We're listening.
Sources
Thriving Kids, Department of Health, Disability and Ageing
https://www.health.gov.au/our-work/thriving-kids
'Ableist and discriminatory': focus on NDIS autism plan, AAP, October 2025
https://www.inkl.com/news/ableist-and-discriminatory-focus-on-ndis-autism-plan
'Thriving Kids' could help secure the future of the NDIS. But what will the program mean for children and families?, The Conversation
https://theconversation.com/thriving-kids-could-help-secure-the-future-of-the-ndis-but-what-will-the-program-mean-for-children-and-families-263532
If parents designed the new 'Thriving Kids' program, it'd look like this, The Conversation, March 2026
https://theconversation.com/if-parents-designed-the-new-thriving-kids-program-itd-look-like-this-271182