You Can't Cut Your Way Out of a Broken System

Today NDIS Minister Mark Butler confirmed it. 160,000 people will be moved off the NDIS.

Autistic people and those with developmental delays were named directly. The language was “lower support needs” and “higher functional capacity.”

This will change the shape of this sector. There is no point pretending otherwise.

I run a national conference by and for autistic Australians. I am autistic and ADHD. I have spent years building the organisations, the rooms, and the arguments that hold ground for autistic people in this country. So let me be direct about what was announced today.

This is a political decision wearing technical language.

“Lower support needs” is not a clinical category. It is a sorting mechanism. The functional assessment tool that will decide who stays and who is moved has not been finalised, published, or opened to independent scrutiny. 160,000 is a budget decision that is now looking for a methodology to fit it. Everything that follows, including who falls out of the scheme, will be reverse engineered from a savings target.

I am one of the people this language will likely sort into “lower support needs.” I have been told, more times than I can count, that I do not look autistic. That there is nothing wrong with me. That I am articulate, employed, capable. All of which is true, and none of which is the whole picture. What is not visible is the cost. The hours of masking that make a public life possible. The collapse that follows. The work that goes into looking like someone who does not need support, precisely so that I can keep doing the work.

I went through most of my life without the language to name any of this. I think, sometimes, about what that life would have been if the support had come early. That is not a personal regret. It is a policy failure with a name on it. The assessment being built now will produce the next generation of the same absence.

An assessment that measures what a professional sees in a room will miss all of that. It is not a flaw in the tool. It is the design. The scheme will shrink from around 760,000 participants to 600,000. Legislation is expected in May. The access rule changes land from July 2027.

“Diagnosis gateway” is the other piece of language worth contesting. Butler’s framing implies that people got onto the NDIS who should not have. The truth is that the NDIS was, for most autistic Australians and their families, the only door. There was no functioning system of mainstream supports to walk through instead. The government is now blaming people for using the scheme because the alternatives it should have built do not exist.

That language works because people are angry and need somewhere to put it. Cost of living. Housing. Wages. Stagnant services. The public is looking for someone to blame, and the language answers them.

You cannot openly direct that anger at disabled people in this country. It is not socially acceptable. So it gets coded.

“Diagnosis gateway” does the work without naming the accusation. It invites the public to believe that some people gamed a system. That the reason things are hard for you is that someone else took more than they were owed.

This is how it has always worked. Austerity needs a subgroup. The unemployed. Migrants. Renters. Now autistic people and those with lower support needs, because we are the fastest growing cohort and the most visible target.

The quiet part is that the cost is not leaving. It is moving to the households of the people being removed. The budget line drops. The household line rises. The government saves what the family absorbs. And the public, who were angry, are told something has been done.

Thriving Kids, the new early intervention program for children under nine with mild or moderate developmental delay and autism, is the replacement architecture. It has a $2 billion investment, a codesign process, and a 2026 commencement date. It also has two years between announcement and the 2027 access cut to stand up services, train a workforce, fund states, and hold families through the transition. Anyone who has built a program inside government knows two years is not a delivery timeline. It is an announcement cycle.

So let me say this plainly. You cannot cut your way out of a system that was never designed properly in the first place.

This is being talked about as a cost problem. It is not. It is a design problem. The NDIS is growing because the mainstream systems around it are not doing their share. Schools, health, housing, workforce, primary care. Every one of those systems has been allowed to offload its obligations to disabled Australians onto a single insurance scheme, and then the scheme is blamed for being expensive.

The system is not expensive because it is failing. It is expensive because it is compensating for failures elsewhere.

The reforms do not fix that. They reduce access without building participation. That is not a saving. It is a transfer. When people lose support, they do not disappear. They lose work. They lose study. They lose the scaffolding that was holding their life together. The cost does not vanish. It shifts.

It shifts onto families, who absorb more care, more advocacy, more crisis. It shifts onto women, who leave the workforce to hold the gap. It shifts onto mental health services, which are already at capacity. It shifts onto schools, which have no funding model to hold children who are no longer in early intervention. It shifts onto workforce participation, which is the variable the Commonwealth says it cares about. And eventually it lands back on the Commonwealth budget through income support, homelessness services, and acute care.

The people who designed this understand that. The actuarial modelling knows that. The decision has been made anyway, because the savings are booked against one line item and the costs are absorbed across twelve.

Excluding autistic people from workplaces and economic participation is not a side issue for better times. It sits at the centre of the crisis the government says it is solving. A system that does not enable participation will always become more expensive, not less.

That is the part of the conversation that is missing.

I am not in a position to rewrite fiscal policy, and neither are most of us. But we are in a position to decide how we respond to each other, and to this. When systems tighten, communities either fragment or they organise. They compete for shrinking resources, or they build new ways of holding each other up.

I am choosing to organise, not to mourn.

I will keep building the rooms, the networks, and the shared knowledge that autistic people, families, professionals, and allies can draw on. That means conferences run by autistic people, centring autistic voices in the policy conversation, not just around it. It means treating autistic expertise as expertise, not as lived experience to be cited and then set aside.

Not as a substitute for what should exist, but as something real, immediate, and within our control.

The gap between policy intent and lived experience has always been filled by community. That does not change today. It becomes more important.

I have written before, those of us with any privilege, any platform, any capacity to keep going carry an obligation to keep the work moving. The people who cannot afford to stop and advocate for themselves need someone who will not stop either.

If you have access, use it. If you have influence, share it. If you have resources, direct them where they matter. And if you are in a position to contribute, do it in a way that brings someone else with you.

First published on Substack, 21 April 2026.