Picture walking into a planning meeting where the person across the table is on your side.
They've read your file. They want to know what your life is really like. They ask because they can't help you until they understand it, not because they're looking for a hole in your story. If your answer is complicated, they sit with the complication. If you can't explain something well, they help you explain it. They tell you plainly what they can and can't do and why. When they get something wrong, they fix it without you having to fight.
And the person in the next town, with the same needs as you, walks out with the same plan.
That's what a public service demonstrating love for people looks like. Everybody upheld as equal, with equal access to the possibility of an ordinary life. Assessment built around finding out what's true. Decisions you can rely on being the same tomorrow as they were today. An organisation that carries its share of the weight instead of quietly handing it back to your mum.
It goes higher than the meeting, too. A loving system starts by working out the real number. What does it actually cost for disabled people in this country to live an ordinary life? Do the sums honestly, then build the budget and the tax system to pay for it. Work out what people need, then fund it. At the moment it runs the other way round. Pick a figure the government is comfortable with, then trim lives until they fit inside it.
Most of you reading this have never had that meeting. And nobody has ever done those sums.
Here's why.
The NDIA Is Being Run on Fear
The NDIS was built on a loving intention. Give disabled people the supports they actually need, and while you're at it, hand them choice, control and a fair go at an ordinary life. That was the promise. It was a good one, and this country voted for it.
Something has taken hold since then, at every level, and it has quietly wrecked the thing.
Fear.
Not malice. Fear. Once you see it, most of the behaviour that seems baffling from the outside starts making sense.
And fear has a hierarchy. It starts at the top and it runs all the way down to your kitchen table.
Politicians
At the top, the fear is about staying in the job.
Fear of being voted out. Fear of not having the money to pay for this in ten years. Fear of touching the tax system to find it, because that means a fight with mining, with corporate Australia, with wealth, with the parts of the media that speak for them, and with a lobbying industry that never sleeps.
And underneath all that, fear of you. Of ordinary Australians. Fear that if the facts were put plainly, people couldn't be trusted to make a decent decision about what kind of country this is.
So the facts don't get put plainly.
NDIA executives
One level down, the fear changes shape.
Executives are frightened the scheme will be destroyed altogether. That fear is genuine, and it's the one that gets used to justify everything else. Better to give up an arm now than risk the lot. Better to trim it yourself than let someone else swing the axe.
So they compromise. And the compromising has gone far enough that the agency has participated in tearing down the scheme's own public reputation.
In 2023 the NDIA commissioned polling research through Redbridge Group on how to build public support for an overhaul. People pushed back hard against cost alone as a reason for reform. But they became more amenable when rorts, fraud and unreasonable pricing were framed as a threat to the scheme's survival. The research sits on the NDIA's own website.
The executive read that and used it. Fraud, rorts, shonks. That's what the country has heard ever since, and disabled people have worn it at the shops, at the doctor, in the comments under every news story about the scheme.
They're also frightened of their political masters, Labor or Liberal, whoever holds the keys this term. And here's the part worth sitting with: they appear to be more frightened of that than of leaving people without support. More frightened of a bad meeting in Canberra than being responsible for disabled people dying in large numbers.
Middle management
Further down, it gets simpler and uglier.
Middle managers are frightened of their bosses. They know what the expectation is. They know what the numbers are supposed to look like by the end of the month, how much plans need to be cut, and they know what happens to people who don't deliver them.
So they pressure people relentlessly to achieve it.
Assessors and delegates
At the coalface, the fear is about keeping a job.
It's strong enough that staff start applying new policy before it's official. Not because anyone instructed them to, but because getting ahead of it feels safer than being caught behind it. That's how plans get halved on the basis of a rule that hasn't commenced.
Put a frightened person in charge of someone else's funding and you get exactly what participants describe. Decisions that feel arbitrary. Evidence waved away. Bullying in meetings. Supports cut with no explanation. An assessor with no medical training making a call about a body they've never been trained to understand. Seven days to defend yourself in writing, which quietly removes everybody who struggles to read and write.
We want to be straight about something here. It isn't all fear. There are assessors and delegates doing genuinely incredible work, who fight their own employer to get participants what they deserve, and who win. We've spoken with people in those roles who describe sleepless nights worrying about the ones the system is failing.
But in our experience those people are now the exception rather than the rule. That wasn't always true. It is now.
Participants
And then it arrives at the bottom, where it does the most damage, because the people at the bottom have nowhere to pass it on to.
Scared of making waves. Scared of speaking up, in case it's remembered. That fear isn't imagined either. When one advocate got loud enough to be inconvenient, the then chief executive told her deputies to revoke his access to the scheme, after a talkback segment, with no investigation.
Scared of running out of funding before the year is out. Scared of picking up a private number, in case it's a sudden review meeting with no warning and no chance to gather evidence, and you come off the phone with less than half of what you had. People talk about participants getting haircuts. It's the plans getting the haircut.
Scared of what comes after that. More time alone. More pain. Functional capacity dropping away faster than it should, and not coming back.
And scared of dying early, from something that didn't have to happen. That one isn't paranoia. The agency's own figure, given to Senate estimates, was 1,279 people who had been assessed as eligible and died before they ever received a first plan. The Commonwealth Ombudsman reported the agency acknowledging reviews taking up to nine months. Every support coordinator in the country can tell you what happens to someone in a nine month gap.
What fear builds
Fear builds spin, blame-shifting, cost-cutting and survival. It cannot build anything else. It's incapable of it.
An organisation run on love does close to the opposite. It works out what people actually need and says the number out loud, even when the number is uncomfortable. It tells the truth about its own failures and fixes them. It treats Australians as adults capable of deciding what kind of country this is. It gives its own staff enough safety to make an honest call. It hands people real choice and control rather than the words. It takes the long way, because the long way is the only one that holds.
A scheme that hundreds of thousands of people depend on to get out of bed in the morning cannot be run on survival instinct. Every compromise made out of fear gets paid for by somebody who had no say in it.
So over the coming weeks we want to work on the other side of this properly, because complaining on its own has never fixed anything. We'll be going through the Disability Royal Commission's recommendations as well, since a great deal of the answer is already written and sitting on a shelf. Four and a half years, thousands of people, and a long list of things that quietly went nowhere.
What are the positive changes needed in the NDIS?
Tell us what you'd change. We're listening.
Sources
Canberra Times, More than 1200 died waiting for NDIS plans, March 2020
https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/6664715/more-than-1200-died-waiting-for-ndis-plans/
Crikey, Inquest cancelled into death of man with disabilities as family drip-fed crucial information on NDIS failures, October 2022
https://www.crikey.com.au/2022/10/28/ndis-failure-david-harris-leanne-longfellow/
ABC News, NDIS Senate inquiry hears concerns of carer burnout, slashing of social supports and 'dangerous' ministerial powers, 7 August 2026
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-07/ndis-senate-inquiry-main-takeaways/107002938
Meliora, Should I rock the boat with the NDIA, or keep my head down?
https://www.meliora.org.au/blogs/helpful-reads/should-i-rock-the-boat-with-the-ndia-or-keep-my-head-down