Mark Butler turns 56 next month. At the moment, the opposition does not look ready to give him a birthday present by passing the NDIS legislation. The big question is if the Greens and Liberals will cooperate to press for an inquiry.

The Greens demand is simple: hold an inquiry and make changes to the NDIS legislation before the bill is passed. The coalition also has a simple price for voting with the Greens: vote with the conservatives for an inquiry into the tax changes.

Delay matters because Labor has already spent the money.

The Budget counts on the NDIS changes delivering $37.8 billion in reduced participant payments by 2030. Butler told ABC Insiders this morning that a 12-month delay would cost $17 billion. That is not a rounding error. It is deficit pressure Labor has hidden inside its Budget repair.

The current Senate inquiry reports tomorrow. That was meant to be the end of scrutiny. It may now be the beginning of delay.

David Speers put to Butler that the coalition was prepared to back a six-month extension of the NDIS inquiry if the Greens backed a similar delay to Labor’s tax inquiry. Butler accused Angus Taylor of using the NDIS as “a pawn in a bigger chess game”.

Both major parties want the bill to pass. Eventually.

But not yet. Not cleanly. And probably not before Labor bleeds.

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This is now a Senate problem.

Labor has the House. It has the Budget. It has the savings booked. What it does not yet have is a clean path through the upper chamber.

The coalition can do three things.

Firstly, it can join the Greens to extend the inquiry. The coalition and Greens have both criticised Labor’s shortened timetable, and both now have reason to slow the bill down. For the Greens, the argument is policy. For the coalition, this is leverage.

Extending the inquiry keeps the evidence running and bring disability groups, providers, families and state governments into public conflict with Labor.

Secondly, the coalition can demand a six-month inquiry. Duniam’s line is simple and effective: take the time to “get this right”. It does not require the coalition to defend every current NDIS setting. It only requires it to say the Government is rushing.

After more than 4,000 submissions, fewer than 10 per cent had been published when hearings began, according to Melissa McIntosh. That gives the opposition an easy procedural argument as well as a moral one.

Thirdly, it can separate supply from reform. This is the crucial distinction. The coalition can pass the Budget and guarantee supply while still leaving the NDIS changes on hold. That gives it maximum pressure with minimum risk. It does not have to trigger a crisis. It only has to delay a saving Labor has already banked.

Butler knows this. That is why he used Insiders to shift the argument from disability policy to Budget politics. A 12-month delay, he said, would cost $17 billion. A six-month delay would cost billions. Taylor, he said, was not really making a case about the inquiry itself but using the NDIS as a “pawn” in a wider Budget fight.

This is true, but it’s how oppositions behave when governments are exposed.

This does not mean Melissa McIntosh is insincere. She has been pressing genuine concerns about anxiety in the disability community, the rushed timetable and consultation after the fact. Her argument is not that the NDIS needs no reform. It is that Labor introduced the legislation first and consulted later.

Thats the danger for Butler.

Every extra week gives the bill’s critics more material. State and territory disability ministers have already warned that people shifted out of the Scheme will not have clearly defined alternative supports. Butler concedes there is “a lot of work to do” before new eligibility rules begin.

The coalition will pass this bill in the end but the politics have changed.

It’s now about the Green’s willingness to expose Labor on other tax reforms it agrees with, in order to get an inquiry into the NDIS changes. .