The Prime Minister has acknowledged that the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) is out of control.

During its election campaign, Labor committed to higher social spending on health, aged care and child care, and the backbench pressured them to increase the dole. 

The NDIS was politicised, with Labor accusing the Coalition of “hurting people with disabilities” and forcing them to scrap plans for independent assessments of NDIS participant eligibility.

The NDIS was intended to guarantee adequate support for the most severely disabled and pay for itself by getting more disabled people into work. However, scope creep and expanded eligibility have turned it into an open-ended public entitlement that is now politically poisonous to manage.

The cost spiral beyond all official forecasts makes the NDIS Australia’s most expensive ever policy.

Some believe that the NDIS explosion is crowding out other socially worthy spending areas that also tackle disadvantage, and call for hard caps on individual disability budgets and the overall spend. 

At a meeting last Friday, state and federal ministers agreed to a timeline for tackling NDIS costs.

They also announced there will be a target for the scheme’s annual cost growth to be no more than 8 per cent by July 1 2026, “with further moderation of growth as the scheme matures”. The cost of the scheme is presently growing by 14 per cent a year.

“Governments share the goal of reaching long term sustainability for the scheme and have elevated this objective to national cabinet,” the post national cabinet statement said.

“We know that the trajectory of NDIS expenditure is just not sustainable into the future,” Albanese said.

NDIS minister Bill Shorten has already announced reform areas to curb costs.