Has the scheme sort of grown? Have other things got sucked into it?

Yeah, including very late inclusions that you'll recall, Peter, I'm sure.

So, um, the Productivity Commission didn't model the number of people with a psychosocial disability that might come onto the NDIS, but in the end, it was included within the scope.

So there was always a, a real risk.

The NDIS was not supposed to replace the role of other service systems, whether that's the health or the mental health system, and yet we have this new program that came into being that's demand-driven, intentionally uncapped, and essentially open-ended in what it can provide as well, I should add, rubbing up against these other systems that are absolutely not governed by those principles and face real challenges, in fact, as a result of budgetary constraints.

So you create this gilt-edged opportunity for cost shifting, particularly when state contributions to the NDIS were capped with the federal government holding all of the upside growth risk.

So you, you had this situation where the states, to a greater or lesser extent, because it was different from one to another, rolled all of their disability funding into the NDIS and withdrew lots of their services as well in a way that wasn't fully expected.

Much as they might seem reasonable to someone not with a disability, they, they seem somewhat frightening if you're someone already on the scheme, and there's, uh, more than a quarter of a million people are, uh, scheduled to leave the scheme under these reforms.

Sam, if the ADEs aren't quite getting people out into that open employment setting, what services do exist to help disabled people into open employment?

Well, one of the things we found in our research was that the employment supports that do exist for people in Australia, they're pretty fragmented.

They sit across two main programs.

One is IEA, that Inclusive Employment Australia program, and that's government's flagship disability employment program, if you like.

Recently relaunched, as I referred to earlier.

And then you've got the NDIS on the other hand, and people may know that's always been one of the objectives of the NDIS from the outset, has been to im-improve economic participation for disabled Australians.

But those two services, they're not well joined up at all at the moment.

What are the recommendations that you're making in this report that could improve the system?

So Sam, what's good in the bill?

Well, the things I'm broadly pleased to see in there, as you've just alluded to, are the ones where you can see the government's grappling with a major design flaw that's been quite long-standing.

And cumulatively, it's those design flaws that are responsible for the unsustainability of the program to date.

We called in our Saving the NDIS report last year for government to grapple with those issues, and they are doing so in this bill, or at least attempting to do so, including in ways that are pretty close to what Grattan recommended.

We also warned in that report that we wanted to ensure that government wasn't hitting the target but missing the point, so successfully slowing growth, um, but doing that in ways that make the scheme worse for the people that rely on it.

So it's with that in mind that we've, uh, looked at the reform package and we wrote that submission.

Are these the right things to be doing or are they regressive measures? Do they fix real problems or are they causing unnecessary damage? And the good news is that there are things in the bill that are doing a lot of the right things, or at least attempting to fix real issues.

Sam, what does government mean by a sustainable NDIS, and will this package get us there?

Can you explain what you were saying there?

Absolutely.

So, look, I should start by saying I think there's also a lot of good stuff in the package here that is attempting to fix real and longstanding structural problems with the NDIS.

And I would include eligibility, the way the market operates and building up supports outside the scheme itself.

But you're right that there are some other shorter term measures in the package that I have much more concerns about.

And particularly, as you said, some pretty blunt cuts that are planned to social and community participation and capacity building budgets.

And that cut will be of 50 percent and 10 percent respectively of those budgets applied to all participants.

Are there any other components that you'd point to as being particularly significant and worth having a chat about?

Dr Sam Bennett is the Disability Programme Director at the Grattan Institute.

Well, it's going to have a very significant impact.

As you said, I think, you know, whilst there's been a lot of focus on other aspects of the most recent federal budget, the tax reform elements in particular, there's a strong argument that the NDIS savings in that budget are the single biggest component of it.

As you said, more than 37 billion, I think it is.

It's more than a third of the overall savings.

in the budget and obviously if those savings don't materialize over the forward estimates as is expected, then that will have a significant knock-on impact

He says most of the savings proposed within the next two years, around $13.2 billion, will come from cuts to social and community participation.

And that's because some of those other measures, those ones that are really fixing big structural problems with the NDIS are going to take longer to design and to implement.

What did we learn last night?

Erin, we learnt quite a few new things.

NDIS savings are really the centerpiece of the budget repair aspect of this federal budget, and given the scale of them, there's an argument they're the single biggest measure within it.

And what we see builds out from those announcements that you referred to in April, and I think you saw government lining up many of the right issues in that reform package to tackle, including in ways that Grattan's previously recommended, tightening the eligibility criteria to clarify who the scheme's really for, more direct government intervention in the market, including to secure better value where that's warranted, and a rebalancing of the NDIS as we described it, so that there are more disability services outside of that scheme, and I'll come back to that.

It wasn't so much new substance we saw in the budget announcements.

It was more about the cumulative impact of those measures and how they washed through those forward estimates.

There's a total saving attached to these measures of 36.6 billion through to 2030.

Aruna, what does it mean in everyday terms, and did this budget do much to improve it?