By Andrew Klein  December 2025

From a café window in suburban Australia , the view tells a damning story. Opposite, a small office operating under the banners of NDIS support, aged care, and dementia services shares a building with a new sports car parked behind a locked metal gate. This incongruous image—modest services alongside apparent luxury—is not merely odd. It is a perfect, stark symbol of a national scheme being drained dry, where poor governance has crafted a multi-billion dollar trough for the exploitative, while failing the very people it was designed to empower.

This is the reality of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). Conceived as a visionary, participant-centred program, it has metastasised into Australia’s second-largest social program, now costing taxpayers over $35 billion annually. Beneath this staggering price tag lies an ecosystem in crisis: one where sophisticated criminal networks feast, legitimate providers struggle to survive, and people with disability are caught in the middle, facing unreliable support and a system buckling under the weight of its own poor design.

The Open Gate: Systemic Vulnerabilities Inviting Fraud

The NDIS has become a prime target for financial crime, not through petty opportunism, but via large-scale, organised exploitation. Law enforcement agencies are engaged in a relentless battle against fraudsters who see the scheme not as a lifeline, but a loophole.

The methods are brazen. Investigations like Operation Banksia have uncovered fraud networks billing for services never rendered, sometimes for participants who were incarcerated at the time. Fake providers are registered using stolen business identities, and sham medical reports are fabricated to enrol non-disabled individuals. A major multi-agency taskforce has disrupted over $50 million in alleged fraud, revealing the deep penetration of organised criminal gangs into the system.

The government’s response, a 24-agency Fraud Fusion Taskforce, has identified over $2.3 billion in questionable payments. While this demonstrates action, it first highlights a catastrophic failure of oversight. The system’s complexity and the sheer volume of funds have created a landscape where such exploitation can flourish in the shadows of poor transparency and accountability.

The Squeezed Middle: Legitimate Providers on the Brink

While criminals prosper, the backbone of the scheme—genuine service providers—is breaking. This is the other side of the governance failure: a system that is simultaneously too lax on fraudsters and too punishing for honest operators.

A 2024 survey by the sector’s peak body paints a dire picture: 80% of providers question their long-term viability, and half operated at a loss last financial year. They are strangled by government-set prices frozen for five years while inflation drives costs up, and buried under Byzantine administrative burdens. A mere 3% feel the NDIS systems work well for them.

The human cost of this financial distress is severe. 21% of providers are considering exiting the sector entirely. For a person with complex disability relying on consistent, specialised support, the collapse of their provider isn’t an inconvenience; it is a catastrophe that threatens their health, independence, and place in the community. This exodus creates “service deserts,” leaving participants stranded—a direct failure of the scheme’s core promise.

The Human Toll: Complaints, Neglect, and Lost Trust

For participants, these systemic failures translate into daily anxiety and compromised care. The official complaints process, managed by the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission, reveals a stream of grievances where 68% concern support workers, including issues of poor practice, neglect, and in severe cases, abuse.

A significant portion of complaints relates to “scheme integrity”—financial exploitation where participants are overcharged for substandard or non-existent services. The proposed NDIS Amendment (Integrity and Safeguarding) Bill 2025, which seeks to introduce fines up to $16 million and mandated electronic claims, is a necessary but belated attempt to close the door after the horse has bolted. It underscores how accountability has been an afterthought.

The Suburban Paradigm: A Symptom of the Disease

This brings us back to the view from the café. The small provider offering a suite of government-funded services—NDIS, aged care, dementia support—operating from a modest office, yet affording a conspicuous sports car, embodies the entire crisis.

It represents the troubling opacity of the system. Where does the money flow? What are the owner’s credentials? Is this a diligent operator or a savvy exploiter of multiple government funding streams? The current lack of transparency makes these questions difficult for participants and the public to answer. It represents the perverse incentives. When provider profits can be inflated by cutting corners on service delivery or engaging in creative billing, the participant’s well-being becomes secondary to financial extraction. It represents the governance vacuum. How can a scheme losing billions to fraud simultaneously crush honest providers? The answer lies in a bureaucratic design focused on disbursing funds rapidly, without building the robust, transparent accountability frameworks required to safeguard them.

Conclusion: Draining the Trough, Rebuilding the Foundation

The NDIS is at a precipice. It is being plundered by criminals and is starving its legitimate heart. This is the definition of poor governance: a system that fails to protect its resources from theft while failing to nourish its essential service ecosystem.

The “crafted trough” is not an accident; it is the outcome of prioritising rollout speed over integrity, and financial flows over human outcomes. The sports car in the suburbs is a miniature monument to this failure.

Reform must be twofold: first, a relentless, well-resourced pursuit of fraudsters, with sunlight as the ultimate disinfectant through full transparency in provider operations and fund tracing. Second, and just as critical, is fixing the broken economics for genuine providers. Sustainable pricing, streamlined processes, and a supportive regulatory environment are essential to ensure participants can access quality, stable support.

The alternative is the continued betrayal of a historic social compact. The NDIS was promised as a scheme of empowerment and dignity. Without urgent, courageous governance to reclaim it from exploiters and stabilise it for providers, it risks becoming a byword for national failure—a lavish trough in a barren field, where the most vulnerable go wanting.

Additional Observations

Of course, it is probably worth also stating that there are fraudsters and fraudsters.

The government tends to take the line of least resistance – regulating disabled people to a fare-thee-well but having relatively few mechanisms even now to go after dodgy providers. 

It took the death of Ann Marie Smith https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-08-01/ann-marie-smith-what-changes-have-been-made/100335540 to highlight exactly how little safety the supposed regulations on suppliers worked … and the trend of regulating the relatively low-hanging fruit of disabled people rather than suppliers who might actually have financial means to defend themselves has continued.

Certainly the changes in the (bipartisan) legislation passed last year – https://www.legislation.gov.au/C2024A00081/asmade/text – were all about saving money by, inter alia, giving the CEO the power to make unilateral changes to disabled peoples’ plans and by making specific provision for computerised clawbacks of benefits  (Robodebt 2.0 – https://www.innovationaus.com/the-dangerous-culture-that-created-robodebt-and-robondis/).

This two-tier system of justice seems intrinsic to the system – and both major parties seem quite happy with that.