Here's the question underneath everything, and almost nobody in a position to answer it will say it out loud:
Disabled people need support to live an ordinary life, similar to the one everyone else gets. Every disability is different. Every person's goals and priorities are different too. So what level of ordinary should the scheme actually guarantee, and for whom?
That's it. That's the whole argument, and it's never been settled in public.
Work through it honestly and you get a ladder.
Basic survival. Food, medication, getting out of bed.
Physical safety. Not falling. Not being injured. Managing behaviours of concern without someone getting hurt.
Then the things that quietly consume a disabled person's entire day. The tasks that take four hours instead of twenty minutes, that cost enormous energy, that come with pain attached. Is that worth funding, or is a person expected to spend their life on it?
Then social connection and community access. Are those protected, or are they extras to be cut when the budget gets tight?
Then therapeutic supports. The things that hold functional capacity in place and stop it sliding away. Fund those and you spend less later. Cut them and you pay more, just further down the track and in someone else's portfolio.
And support at work, for anyone who wants to work. Reasonable to fund, or not?
Where does the line sit? Nobody will say. Because saying it would mean defending it.
The bait and switch
What we've watched instead is a slow retreat that's never been announced.
What the government and the agency considered fair enough four years ago is simply unavailable to almost anyone on the scheme today. Same disability. Same functional impact. Same evidence. Different answer.
That shift was never properly communicated to the public. It was never put as a proposition anyone could vote on. It just happened, plan by plan, while the national conversation was about rorts, scams and crooks.
That's the trick. Point at fraud with one hand, and quietly lower the floor with the other.
So which is it?
There are only two explanations for what's happening, and the government can't have both.
One. People were seriously overfunded, well past what's reasonable and necessary, and past what the public would accept. The cuts are a correction.
Two. Funding is being cut regardless of what people actually need to live an ordinary life, because there's a number to hit.
Which is true? Honestly, it depends whose plan you're looking at. We won't pretend option one has never happened anywhere in this scheme.
But in our experience, it's almost always option two. People are losing funding without genuine consideration of what they need to have a life comparable to someone without disability. The need didn't change. The answer did.
Why nobody will draw the line
There's a reason the question never gets answered.
Answer it honestly and you have to name a number. And the moment you name a number, you own it.
Say the scheme guarantees basic survival and physical safety and nothing beyond it, and you have to look at the country and say out loud that disabled people get to be alive and uninjured, and that's the deal. Nobody in politics will say that, because it's indefensible.
Say the scheme guarantees an ordinary life, including getting out of the house, seeing people, holding onto the functional capacity you've got, working if you want to work, and you have to fund it. Properly. Which means a conversation about tax and priorities that nobody wants to have either.
So the line never gets drawn in daylight. It gets drawn in individual planning meetings, by frightened staff, one person at a time, with no announcement and no debate. Hundreds of thousands of small decisions add up to a national policy position that was never stated and can't be challenged, because officially it doesn't exist.
Ask the agency where the line is and you'll be told the legislation, reasonable and necessary, every decision made on its merits. But every participant, coordinator and support worker in this country can tell you the answer has moved, and that it moved without anyone changing the words.
Reasonable compared to what
The phrase "reasonable and necessary" only means something if you finish the sentence. Reasonable compared to what?
Compared to the life someone without disability takes for granted, or compared to what's left in the budget?
That's the entire question, and the scheme has quietly changed its answer.
Most people reading this don't want anything extravagant. They want to get up, get clean, get out of the house, see somebody, do something that matters to them, and not lose more function than they have to. That's not a wish list. It's Tuesday, for everybody else.
And the further the line drops below that, the more the cost simply moves somewhere else. To a family member who gives up work. To a hospital bed. To a mental health service. To an emergency department at 2am. Nothing is saved. It's shifted onto people with less capacity to carry it, and out of a budget line where somebody would have to account for it.
What we're asking for
If the government genuinely doesn't have enough money to run this scheme while properly supporting the disability community, then there are two honest paths. Cut spending somewhere else, or raise the revenue.
We'd like to see both explored openly, rather than the current approach of quietly lowering what people get and hoping nobody notices.
We'd like real transparency about what these decisions are doing to people.
And we'd like some serious soul searching about where the ethical floor actually sits. What is the minimum level of support this country is prepared to guarantee a disabled person? Say the number. Defend it. Then find the money to do the right thing.
Because right now the line is being drawn in the dark, by people who never have to explain it.
Where do you think the line should be?
Tell us. We're listening.