The first failure of the NDIS wasn’t fraud. It wasn’t autism. It wasn’t participants asking for too much. It was politics.

Popular politics. Necessary politics, in many ways. But politics all the same.

At the scheme’s birth, politicians and advocates promised to end a shameful old system of rationed support and replace it with something bigger, fairer, demand-driven. The moral case was overwhelming. The design work was not.

Rick Morton, probably the journalist who has covered the NDIS more closely than anyone in Australia, has now written the bluntest version of this story. Gillard’s promise, he says, was political. It was also one she “couldn’t keep”. His central warning is colder: “disabled people will be the ones who are punished when poor planning meets political mongrel.”

This is what’s happening now.

In another take, Daniel Reeders goes to the design flaw eating away at the scheme’s foundations. The NDIS was never just a support system; it was a market experiment. Participants were given budgets and told to buy services from providers. But nobody properly specified what services or how muvh they should cost. Reeders calls this “the original sin of the NDIS scheme design - magical thinking about markets”.

The result was predictable. The old service ecosystem withered. Governments watched as costs rose, then rediscovered fiscal restraint once the political mood shifted and the bills mounted.

Now Mark Butler talks about restoring the scheme’s social licence. Chris Coombes’ LinkedIn video shows why that language has landed so badly in the sector. Coombes asks whether the NDIS really has lost its social licence.

He points to the political failure at the centre. The scheme was born from goodwill. It’s being repaired through fear.

People with Disability were promised support, but now they are paying the bill.

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The hard truth is that the NDIS was never allowed to develop before it was pushed into the world.

The political urgency was understandable. The old disability system was brutal. Families were exhausted. Support was rationed. And PM Julia Gillard (and Bill Shorten) needed a win.

The moral case for change was unanswerable, but that alone was not enough to create a workable scheme.

This point is now being made from different directions by two of the sharpest observers of the NDIS: Rick Morton and Daniel Reeders.

Morton’s authority matters. He has followed the scheme with unusual persistence, across governments, scandals, reviews and reforms. He is not arriving late to the issue. He has covered the NDIS more than any other subject in his career and has written more than 1,000 articles on it. That makes him one of the country’s most reliable analysts of the scheme’s political and practical failures.

His diagnosis is devastating because it does not blame participants. It blames those who buile the system.

The scheme, he writes, was rushed forward with commitments that could not be kept. It became a political monument before it became a durable service system. “Gross politicisation of the scheme was never rare,” he writes.

This is why the origin story matters.

The NDIS did not fail because too many disabled people needed support. It failed because governments promised a demand-driven scheme while failing to preserve, build or properly fund the surrounding systems that would make that promise possible. States were allowed to withdraw. The scheme extended as community services evaporated. Mainstream systems kept pushing people back towards the NDIS. The scheme became not a safety net but the only net left.

Then the Commonwealth seemed surprised as people used it.

Reeders adds the missing structural explanation. The NDIS was designed as a quasi-market. Participants would receive budgets. Providers would compete. Choice and control would discipline price and quality.

That was the theory.

But disability services do not operate like ordinary markets. Participants are not buying luxury goods. They need help to shower, communicate, leave the house, regulate behaviour, manage distress, access therapy, attend school, work, or stay safe. They can’t simply walk away from one provider and find another. In thin markets there may be no real choice at all.

Reeders puts it plainly. In many local markets, participants may have only “two or three providers (if that!)” to choose from. The market forces meant to control the scheme were immobilised by the very conditions they were supposed to fix.

That is why the current reform argument feels so hollow.

Government now says the NDIS must be made sustainable. But it helped create the unsustainability. It designed a scheme around individualised purchasing without first building the pricing, quality, workforce and service architecture needed to support it. It allowed the old system to disappear before the new one was mature. It accepted goodwill as a substitute for discipline.

Now discipline has arrived.

Not for the architects. For participants.

This is the sting in Morton’s piece. Disabled people “deserve what they were promised”. Instead, they are being told the promise has become too expensive.

Chris Coombes’ video report shows the depth of anger in the sector. He challenges the claim that the NDIS has lost its social licence, arguing the survey evidence used in the political debate is murky and that similar public doubts about defence spending do not produce the same call for cuts. His closing point is the one the government should hear: seven in ten people still believe the NDIS plays a vital role in improving the lives of people with disability.

That is not a scheme without social licence.

It is a scheme whose purpose is still understood more clearly by the community than by the political class now trying to shrink it.

The NDIS began as a promise that disability support would no longer depend on scarcity, geography and luck. The danger now is that reform drags it back to exactly that place.

The original failure was ambition without enough architecture.

Failure today will be worse: knowing the system is broken; making disabled people carry the cost of repair.