28/04/2026
Our society is renegotiating our social contract. And at the moment the NDIS is the most visible part of it.
Has anyone else been reading the many many articles over the years about cost blow outs in the NDIS thinking, ah yes, this is what happens when an economy built on invisible labour is asked to produce a receipt?
Because once you take seriously the idea that societies develop around who bears costs and who captures benefitsâit becomes very hard to ignore that, for a long time, the âcare sectorâ in countries like Australia wasnât really a sector at all. It was a person. Usually a woman. In a house. Doing everything. For free. With no superannuation and only vague promises of appreciation on Motherâs Day. With help from other women (her mother, her sister, her mother in law) if she was lucky. And with the constant feeling that as someone that wasnât financially contributing, what she was doing was less valuable.
This wasnât written into legislation in quite those words, but it might as well have been. Childcare, disability support, aged careâthese were treated less as collective responsibilities and more as private arrangements to be handled within families. The state hovered politely at the edges, funding a bit here and there, but the core assumption was stable: someone at home would absorb the work. The entire system rested on that quiet, continuous extraction of labour that didnât appear in GDP and didnât generate invoices, but without which nothing else functioned. If a woman in this scenario asked for a man who could economically support her well while she did all of this, she was called a gold-digger. The man was never called a labour-digger.
Then, somewhat inconveniently for the model, women stopped agreeing to this as a full-time economic role. They entered the workforce, quite reasonably expecting to be paid actual money for their time, and the invisible scaffolding holding up the care economy began to creak. The labour didnât disappearâit just became visible, scarce, and, worst of all, expensive.
Enter the National Disability Insurance Scheme, Australiaâs ambitious attempt to modernise this arrangement without entirely rethinking it. Instead of the government directly providing care, it hands individuals funding and says, in effect, âHere is your budget, please go and assemble a functional support system in the marketplace.â It is a very elegant idea, if you assume that care behaves like a normal economic good and that a sufficient workforce will simply appear when money is offered.
Care, however, is not a toaster. It cannot be mass-produced, it resists automation, and its âproductivity gainsâ are limited by the stubborn requirement that a human being be physically present, paying attention, and exercising patience. Good language skills are also often necessary, more so than in many other physically demanding jobs. So the system develops a curious personality. It is quite comfortable funding things that look like modern, professional servicesâtherapy sessions, assessments, reportsâbecause these fit neatly into our idea of legitimate expenditure. They are measurable, credentialed, and reassuringly finite.
It is much less comfortable funding the thing families actually need most, which is ongoing, day-to-day help. The kind of help that used to be quietly supplied by women and is therefore, at some deep institutional level, still assumed to be available in the background. The result is a system that will fund a beautifully written report explaining your childâs needs, while you personally continue to function as operations manager, support worker, and emergency response team, often without pay and occasionally without sleep.
At this point, someone inevitably appearsâoften in the comments section of a newspaperâand says, âWell, people should pay for their own children.â It is a clean, satisfying argument, and like many clean, satisfying arguments, it becomes less convincing the longer you look at it.
Because children, inconveniently, are not just a private good. They are also the future workforce, the future taxpayers, and the future people who will keep systems like healthcare, aged care, and, indeed, disability support running at all. When parents raise children, they bear most of the costsâfinancial, emotional, logisticalâbut a significant portion of the benefits flows outward to society. The child you painstakingly teach to eat vegetables and eventually hold down a job will, in due course, help fund services for everyone else.
In economic terms, parenting produces large public spillovers. In practical terms, it means society quietly relies on work it does not fully pay for, and then occasionally expresses surprise when that arrangement starts to strain.
This becomes particularly stark in disability. Here, the âhave children at your own expenseâ argument turns into something closer to a high-stakes lottery. Most families will be fine, statistically speaking. Some will not. And for those families, the costs are not marginal; they are life-defining. If you insist that this risk be borne entirely privately, you are effectively saying that a small group of people should absorb an enormous burden for what is, from a societal perspective, a shared human reality.
Modern systems like Medicare exist precisely because we have decided, in other domains, that catastrophic risk should be pooled. Illness is not treated as a personal financial failure; it is something we collectively insure against. Disability sits in that same conceptual space, which is why the NDIS exists at all, even as everyone nervously watches the cost.
And the cost is, undeniably, large. This is the moment where policymakers experience a kind of institutional vertigo, because what the NDIS is gradually revealing is the true price of care once it is no longer invisibly supplied. For decades, the system appeared affordable because a significant portion of the work was being done off the books, inside households, by people who were not paid for it. Now that the bill is arriving, it looks alarmingânot because the need has suddenly appeared, but because it is finally being counted.
This is where the demographic reality quietly enters the conversation. If you push too hard on the idea that families should bear all the costs and risks themselves, people adjust. They have fewer children, or none at all. This is not theoretical; it is already happening across much of the developed world. And while this may solve a short-term budget problem, it creates a longer-term one, because the systems we are trying to sustain depend on a steady flow of future contributors.
So we end up in a deeply uncomfortable middle ground. We recognise that care has public value and that risks like disability should be shared, at least to some extent. We build systems like the National Disability Insurance Scheme to reflect that. But we remain reluctant to fully accept the financial and structural implications of replacing what was once provided for free.
The result is a system that is at once generous and insufficient, rational and slightly delusional. It funds what it can easily justify, hesitates over what it cannot, and quietly assumes that families will absorb the difference. Which they do, because there is no alternative, and because the alternativeâsimply not providing careâis not one we are willing to contemplate.
We are living through the slow transition from a set of institutions that relied on hidden extraction within households to ones that attempt, imperfectly, to make that labour visible and shared. The difficulty is that we have not yet decided how much we are actually willing to pay for that transition. Until we do, the system will continue to feel exactly as it does now: indispensable, expensive, and faintly surreal, like an economy that has just discovered that the most important work was never really accounted for in the first place.
