Eligibility for services funded by the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) is set to be tightened in a bid to save more than $15 billion over the next four years alone.
Tuesday's budget reveals a plan to significantly reduce growth of the NDIS between now and July 2026, when the government wants to impose an annual funding target of no more than 8 per cent increase.
A review of the NDIS, co-chaired by Bruce Bonyhady and Lisa Paul, is not scheduled to be handed down until October.
But the government is already banking $74.3 billion in savings from the NDIS through trimmed growth forecasts, including $15.3 billion in the four years from 2023-24.
NDIS Minister Bill Shorten said the scheme had become the "only lifeboat in the ocean" for people with a disability — comments that suggest he will use a renegotiation of the scheme's funding with states and territories to demand they step up their own services.
"This scheme was never designed for every Australian with a disability but for the most severely and profoundly impaired," he said on Wednesday morning.
Last October, the budget was forecasting the NDIS would grow at 13.8 per cent each year, second only to interest repayments as the fastest-growing government payment over the next decade.
Tuesday's budget forecasted the NDIS to grow at 10.4 per cent each year for the next decade, making it the highest-growing government payment. Interest repayments are forecast to grow 8.8 per cent each year over the next decade.
The NDIS, which has 580,000 participants, is a demand-driven scheme.
The government, while wanting to lower its growth, insists there will be no hard funding caps on the program.
Mr Shorten said participants experienced inconsistent and unpredictable decision-making from the National Disability Insurance Agency, which oversees the scheme.
"We also intend to clamp down on unethical behaviour," he said.
"That covers everything from the crims to people overservicing, to people over charging."
Mr Shorten said he wanted to overhaul "traumatising" and "demoralising" aspects of the scheme that required people to prove they have a disability each year.
He reinforced that the cost of the scheme would go up each year and that the government's focus was on slowing its annual rate of growth.
The minister said since the NDIS started, states had vacated offering services they once did, leaving the federal government to pick up the bill.
He said the success of the NDIS had led to growth of the scheme beyond what it was intended to deliver.
"In the early intervention of kids, what's happened is the NDIS is such an influential system that what we're getting is diagnosis following the money," Mr Shorten told Sky News.
"I don't blame any mumma bear parent whose child has got a developmental delay. If this is the only place that you can get help, that is where you will go.
"Part of the solution to the NDIS and moderating cost growth is asking what's in the best interest of that little child? Is it to be on the NDIS? Or is it to have other interventions, which means they can go onto school and get other support."
Greens Senator Jordan Steele-John said the government was "stabbing the disability community in the back".
"The community have been blindsided by this decision. People expected cuts in a Liberal budget but expected more from the Australian Labor Party, which promised to co-design decisions with the disability community."
People with Disability Australia president Nicole Lee said she was pleased the treasurer said that the NDIS was here to stay and would remain a demand-driving service.
She said she wanted the NDIS to be sustainable for people with a disability and that rorting needed to be stamped out.
But she said there were concerns within the community about what the changes might mean.
"Whenever they mention NDIS and reigning in spending, there is a lot of fear for the community and the government needs to be really careful around the language they use," she said.
"The reality of the people on the disability support pension, and people who are also on JobSeeker payments, who couldn’t access the Disability Support pension, that reality of poverty is very, very real and only getting worse."
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