In the second of a two-part review, Peter Strong, former CEO of COSBOA, looks back at a disability system that was once more locally embedded, relational and connected to work, training and community services. He argues that with the introduction of the NDIS market model, something vital has been lost.

Thin markets and fragmentation is now the problem. The system measures transactions and placements more easily than participation, continuity and citizenship.

Peter Strong’s answer is deliberately provocative. Bring back the CES. Not literally, perhaps. But bring back what it represented at its best: local knowledge, public coordination and relationships that lasted longer than a contract cycle.

A key institutional milestone came with the Disability Services Act 1986, marking a shift toward funding services that supported integration and community participation. It also formalised expectations around quality, accountability, and the role of governments in shaping services, rather than merely funding passive care.

From the 1990s into the early 2000s, policy continued to evolve around inclusion - particularly in education and employment.

But as a whole, the system remained fragmented across states and programs, with funding complexity often falling on families to navigate. Support was still largely supply-driven. Services that existed determined what participation was possible, rather than individual need driving flexible support.

The parallel growth of contracted employment services reinforced fragmentation, separating employment assistance from broader community and social supports.

The most significant structural shift in recent history arrived with the introduction of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), legislated in 2013 and progressively rolled out.

The NDIS represented a seismic change. Instead of block-funded services, it introduced individualised funding packages intended to give people choice and control over supports. In principle, it reframed disability support from a welfare entitlement to a participation investment.

That was the promise.

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The NDIS era has exposed tensions that were long embedded in the system. The result was not just an administrative change. It changed incentives.

Outcomes became measured through placements, compliance and throughput. Sustained participation was harder to capture. Informal collaboration between local services became harder to justify. Longer-term counselling and support sat uneasily inside tight contracts.

People with disability, especially those needing more time and more coordination, were left navigating fragments.

In some respects, the same market-based assumptions that underpinned the outsourcing of employment services reappeared - can markets alone can deliver coordinated, person-centred outcomes? Particularly where needs are complex or thin markets exist?

Australia now operates a hybrid system: part insurance model, part welfare safety net, part
institutional legacy and part quasi-market. The question for the coming decades is whether that hybrid can be made genuinely navigable for individuals, or whether fragmentation will continue to define the experience of support.

The question is not only who should receive support, or how much the scheme should cost. Those are real questions. They are also political questions.

But there is another one.

Can Australia build a disability system that works across employment, training, housing, health, transport and community life? Or will people keep being pushed between programs that each see only part of their lives?

And also, there is the cost to the budget and just who should benefit - always a
difficult and emotional question.

What is clear from 1920 onward is that disability policy has always been a mirror of broader social values. When society prioritised productivity, systems were restrictive. When it prioritised protection, systems were institutional. When it began to prioritise participation, we moved toward choice.

The unfinished task is ensuring that participation is not just an aspiration embedded in policy language, but a consistent lived reality regardless of geography, income, or level of need - and that the systems designed to support it are capable of working together, rather than operating in parallel silos shaped by funding models rather than human need.

Bring back the CES!

The National Disability Insurance Scheme changed Australian disability policy more than any reform in recent memory.

It shifted power, at least in principle, from services to individuals. Instead of governments funding organisations to provide set programs, participants received individualised plans. The ambition was choice, control and participation.

For many people, that mattered deeply.

But the NDIS also carried a contradiction.

It promised person-centred support while relying heavily on market delivery. It assumed that individualised funding, consumer choice and provider competition could generate better outcomes.

Sometimes they did.

Sometimes they did not.

Peter Strong’s contribution is useful because it places this problem inside a longer history. He argues that the marketisation of disability support did not begin with the NDIS. One of the earlier turning points was the closure of the Commonwealth Employment Service and the outsourcing of employment services.

That change altered the nature of support.

The old CES model had been locally embedded. Officers knew employers, training providers and community organisations. They could work across the practical barriers that stand between a person and employment.

The outsourced model was different.

It introduced contractual incentives. It measured performance through defined outcomes. It pushed services towards compliance and placement targets. It did not easily reward the slower work of building confidence, coordinating support, understanding a local labour market or helping someone stay in work over time.

This distinction matters.

A placement is not the same as participation.

A service episode is not the same as support.

A market transaction is not the same as a relationship.

For people with disability, especially those with complex needs, thin markets or limited family support, fragmentation is not an abstract policy problem. It is the daily experience of having to explain the same life repeatedly to different systems.

Employment support sits in one place. NDIS supports in another. Health somewhere else. Housing somewhere else again. Transport may be the missing link no one owns. Education may be involved, then disappear. Families are left to coordinate what institutions do not.

The NDIS was meant to make support more responsive to individual need. Yet in practice, it often operates alongside other systems that have not changed enough.

That is why the current reform debate cannot only be about scheme sustainability, although cost is unavoidable. It cannot only be about eligibility, although eligibility is now at the centre of the political fight. It cannot only be about fraud, rorts or plan inflation, although all of those issues exist.

The deeper question is structural.

What kind of system is Australia trying to build?

If the answer is a market, then government will keep trying to regulate transactions. If the answer is a safety net, government will keep narrowing the gate. If the answer is participation, then the system has to be built around coordination.

This is where Strong’s argument lands.

Australia now has a hybrid disability system. It is part insurance model, part welfare system, part market, part legacy structure. It contains the language of rights and participation, but often leaves people dealing with silos shaped by funding rules rather than human need.

The next stage of reform needs to confront that.

It is not enough to ask whether the NDIS is too expensive. It is not enough to ask whether too many people are entering the scheme. It is not enough to promise foundational supports if those supports are not real, funded and locally available.

The test is whether people can actually live, learn, work and participate.

That requires more than individual packages. It requires public responsibility for joining the pieces together.

Strong’s final line is blunt: “Bring back the CES!”

The literal Commonwealth Employment Service is not coming back. Nor should Australia pretend the old system was ideal. But the challenge behind the slogan is real.

Bring back local knowledge.

Bring back coordination.

Bring back the idea that employment and participation are not commodities to be purchased one service at a time, but public goals that require sustained relationships.

That may be the lesson Australia forgot.