This week, Parliament passed the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026, with the government arguing the reforms are necessary to make the scheme stronger, fairer and more financially sustainable.
The public debate that followed was entirely predictable.
Can we afford it?
How much is it costing?
How fast is it growing?
How do we stop fraud?
All reasonable questions. After all, public money is not infinite, and no public program should be exempt from scrutiny. But listening to the debate, I couldn't shake the feeling that we were discussing the NDIS as though it were a spreadsheet rather than a social contract.
The entire conversation seemed preoccupied with sustaining the scheme financially.
Very little attention was paid to what the scheme exists to sustain in the first place.
People.
Not abstract participants. Not cost centres. Not line items.
People.
I work with people living with a diverse range of disabilities every day. I support people into employment, to stay employed, to build self-employment and sustain small businesses. I see, up close, the difference that effective support can make to a person's independence.
And that brings me to a word politicians love to invoke whenever disability policy is discussed.
Independence.
The problem is that our definition of independence has become remarkably small.
When governments assess disability, they often focus on (very) basic activities of daily living. Can you shower? Can you dress yourself? Can you prepare a meal? Can you get yourself into bed at night?
These things matter enormously, but they are not the entirety of a life.
True independence is not merely about surviving. It is about participating. It is about having access to the things many Australians take for granted: work, education, friendships, volunteering, community groups, social activities, sporting clubs and professional opportunities.
The NDIS was designed with this in mind, but over time its importance is becoming eroded under cost-cutting measures because many of the supports that facilitate that participation are often viewed as expenses rather than investments.
A support that enables someone with disability to maintain employment is treated as a cost. Rarely do we examine the economic and social benefits generated by that support; the taxes paid by that employee; the business they help sustain; the reduction in dependence on other government services; the improvements to physical and mental health that meaningful participation often creates.
This is where I think the NDIS debate reveals a much larger problem in the way Australia approaches public policy. While the legislation passed this week suggests it's about "future generations," it fails to acknowledge that such considerations are not just an exercise in managing expenditure when Australian politics is increasingly struggling to think beyond the next budget cycle.
Our government seems obsessed with managing individual portfolios while losing sight of the outcomes they collectively produce. Education, health, employment, disability, social services all have their own budgets, and each department is expected to account for its own expenditure and defend its own corner. They are neatly siloed and individually managed.
Yet human beings do not live in departmental silos.
The student supported through education may become the employee who contributes to the economy. The employee may experience improved wellbeing and require fewer health interventions. The person with a disability who receives adequate support may establish a business, employ staff and create opportunities for themselves and others.
Benefits flow across portfolios. Costs do too.
Yet our siloed political structures often seem incapable of recognising this reality. Instead, we lurch from election cycle to election cycle, evaluating success according to fiscal outcomes rather than long-term national benefit.
The result is a political culture that has become extraordinarily good at measuring what something costs today and remarkably poor at measuring what it saves tomorrow.
We speak endlessly about sustainability, but almost always in financial terms: can we afford the NDIS? Healthcare? Education? Welfare? ... Should we?
What we ask far less often is whether we can afford the consequences of underinvesting in them.
Let me ask you: What happens when people lose opportunities for participation?
What happens when support is withdrawn before independence is secure? What happens when we treat expenditure as a problem to be minimised rather than an investment to be assessed over decades?
These are not questions confined to disability policy. They speak to a broader challenge facing Australian democracy. Somewhere along the way, our political horizons have shrunk to the length of an election cycle.
Every policy is evaluated through the lens of its immediate political impact. Every investment is expected to demonstrate rapid returns. Every difficult decision is filtered through polling, messaging and electoral risk.
Yet nation-building has never operated on a three-year timetable. The benefits of good policy for education, healthcare, welfare may take decades to emerge. The benefits of supporting people with disability into employment, self-employment and community participation are often measured in lifetimes, not budget papers.
Politicians will never make everyone happy. Nor should they try. The question voters should ask is much simpler: At the end of a political career, can an elected representative look back and say they made decisions that were for the long-term, sustainable benefit of the country?
Or did they simply make decisions that were best for their next election?
Because it is a travesty of democracy that we must continually remind governments that the numbers they balance on a spreadsheet are people.
And if our definition of sustainability fails to account for that, then the problem is not the NDIS.
It is our politics.