Last night Four Corners carried a strong report on how some would-be investors were dudded of close to $100 million. It capitalized on other controversies surrounding the NDIS to gain viewers.

To make sense of Monday’s program, you need to understand television.

To make a visual story, you need pictures. The ABC had lots of vision of emotional interviews with people who’d apparently been swindled. It also had some far more reasoned commentary about broader issues to do with disability housing. It didn’t really have anything about the many problems bedeviling disability housing.

So what it did do was juxtapose the pictures it had and pretend it had a story about the failure of the disability housing sector. In reality, it just had a tale of some people who believed they could make big money from property.

There is a story about the failure of disability housing. Unfortunately, it’s still waiting to be written.

No viewer can doubt the raw power of the story Four Corners did put to air. It exposed the underside of how easily property promoters can make money. And yes, promoters happily used the veneer of respectability that came from people assuming, naively, that because the NDIS was a government scheme, ‘investments’ were guaranteed by the government.

Unfortunately, like most schemes promising extraordinary returns, this was equally unbelievable.

The reality of disability housing is far more complex.

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To understand the issues raised by Four Corners we need to break down the report into stories. What the program was about was simple, and powerful. It was the way people had been defrauded by property investors promising a scheme that was, quite literally, too good to be true.

But the NDIS was only a backdrop to that story.

What was more significant was the implicit government guarantee coming from the “I heart NDIS” logo that appears to have been used by the promotors of the scheme. This has now - and not before time - been scrapped by the NDIA.

It was a stupid advertising logo that is absolutely meaningless. Of course it was always going to be used by shonky promoters.

The third story, one which the program barely touched on, was about disability housing being built in the wrong places. This, however, is a failure of government and finding a villain to pin the blame on is difficult. The problem here is systemic failure, and a story about this would be really useful. Unfortunately this is almost impossible to film.

And, finally, there’s a story about the NDIS.

But apart from a few cut-away shots of NDIA offices, the big story was left untouched. The ABC didn’t have any interviews with the Authority, simply reducing its response to a few words from an email.

Too many issues are swirling around in this pond to distill an easy story from the weeds. It’s hardly surprising no journalist has yet been able to compress them into a single piece that picks apart the failures of the scheme.

But if you’d like to try, abilityNEWS would love to hear from you.