22/04/2026
Published today, Wednesday 22nd April 2026, in the print edition of the Daily Telegraph, Sydney. Sharing here so our families can read it too 🧡
FIX NDIS AND DON'T TORCH IT
Nicole Rogerson
It is time to rebuild the NDIS, before it buckles under its own weight.
Most parents of children with disability carry a quiet, terrible thought: we cannot afford to die.
I have carried that thought for 30 years. As a mother, and as someone who has spent two decades working alongside
families in this space. Not because we think we are superhuman. Not because we believe nobody else is capable of caring. But because we know, in the most primal part of ourselves, that no one will ever love and fight for our children in the same way we do.
Which is exactly why the NDIS is not just another political problem or budget drain. For hundreds of thousands of Australians, it is the difference between a life with some dignity and a life that depends entirely on who happens to love you and how much they earn.
This is why it has been so painful to watch the NDIS become Australia's political and financial punching bag.
Successive governments let the scheme drift. The original design was sound. But instead of protecting its core purpose, governments kept tinkering, expanding, patching and deferring hard decisions.
Too many people were admitted under rules that nobody was willing to enforce.
The concept of choice and control was stretched well beyond what it was ever meant to cover. Fraud was not just possible, it was predictable and so poorly cracked down upon that the risk was worth taking.
And when the warnings came, too many ministers looked the other way because fixing it was harder than ignoring it.
The result is a scheme that costs far more than it should, delivers less than it could, and is now being paraded around as the very exemplification that social policy investment always ends in waste.
That conclusion is wrong. But it is not hard to see why people are drawing it. The government is right to pursue reform because the scheme cannot continue as it is. But we need a scalpel not a machete.
Nicole Rogerson is the CEO of the national peak body Autism Association Australia
