Grattan’s NDIS podcast lands at exactly the wrong moment for the Albanese government.

Which is the point, because this is not another attack on reform.

Grattan’s disability team accepts the NDIS is too large, growing too fast, and needs structural repair. The Scheme is now expected to cost almost $54 billion in 2025–26 and now supports more than 770,000 people, far beyond the 490,000 originally envisaged by the Productivity Commission.

Grattan’s warning, however, is sharper than the usual response. It says government may have found some of the right levers, but it’s pulled too hard, too fast, and in the wrong place.

Start with the politics.

The Senate inquiry has now been extended by another eight weeks. It recieved 4,000 submissions before just three days of hearings; after which it produced two delays and an interim report. This bill will not even be voted on until at least 14 August and yet Labor is already banking on the savings.

This suggests the political approach was not carefully thought through.

Of the $63.8 billion in budget savings and reprioritisations claimed by Treasurer Jim Chalmers, $37.8 billion — about 60 per cent — comes from the NDIS reform package. The NDIS is not just a social policy problem. It is one of the central fiscal bets of the budget.

Grattan’s Sam Bennett says some version of the bill should pass because the Scheme does need repair. Stronger eligibility tests, clearer functional assessments, better budget-setting and greater government market stewardship all address real weaknesses.

But the danger is sequence.

Grattan points out no assessment tool currently exists that can fairly assess function across the NDIS’s incredibly diverse population. More importantly, people who leave the Scheme will still need support — and foundational supports are still largely promises, not services.

This is where Grattan’s critique becomes most damaging. The government appears to have treated participation as less critical than washing, toileting, meals and cleaning. Grattan says that misunderstands the NDIS itself. The Scheme was not built merely to keep people alive at home. It was built to support independence, social and economic participation.

Grattan says a safety-only NDIS was not the NDIS promise.

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Now come the blunt cuts. Grattan is especially critical of the proposed 50 per cent reduction to social, civic and community participation budgets, and the 10 per cent reduction to capacity-building daily activities such as therapies, training and assessments.

The think-tank points out that tese are not marginal extras.

Social and community participation supports can be found in roughly half of participant plans. They’re used heavily by people with higher needs. For people in both supported independent living and specialist disability accommodation, the average social and community participation budget was about $79,000, compared with about $15,000 for others. A 50 per cent cut falls hardest on those requiring the most support.

The government says about 240,000 current participants would not meet the proposed new eligibility threshold. Add those who would otherwise have entered the Scheme, and the NDIS could be more than 300,000 people smaller.

Grattan doesn’t accept the fraud narrative either. Fraud control matters, but the Treasury modelling cited in the podcast puts fraud and pricing-related savings at about $900 million over four years — or 2 per cent of the total savings package.

That’s about half a per cent of total Scheme costs. The politics may be about rorts but it's not where the money’s going.

The central problem is that the package overshoots its own stated target. This is probably intentional, to give the government enough flexibility to ‘offer compromises’.

Minister Mark Butler has argued for sustainable growth of about 5 to 6 per cent. Grattan says the package would push average growth over the forward estimates down to 1.1 per cent, including a 1.9 per cent contraction in 2027–28.

That leaves the real question. Is this reform designed to fix the NDIS? Or to fix the Budget?

Grattan’s answer is careful but unmistakable: repair the Scheme, pass the good machinery, add mandatory parliamentary review, remove the support-determination cuts, and do not reassess people out of the NDIS before foundational supports exist.

Prior planning would have allowed this to happen.