National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 1269
Committee, Blind Spot In The NDIS Cost Debate So let’s have this very unpopular conversation. It’s about money, and the NDIS. And institutions. I am talking about Supported Independent Living and Specialist Disability Accommodation. So, before we talk about it, you need to know what this is. SDA (Specialist Disability Accommodation): This is the physical brick-and-mortar house. It pays for modified buildings, smart-home tech, or reinforced walls. SIL (Supported Independent Living): This is the roster of staff inside the house who help with cooking, cleaning, and personal care. The system was designed to give people choice. But it hasn’t, really. It has turned into a massive property market and care monopoly. If you do care about rorts, you should take a mother’s look at those big ‘charities’ and the many corporate entities they run. And how much they charge. Riddle me this - if we are worried about money in the NDIS, why are we not looking at the biggest spend IN the NDIS? Glad you asked. But the answer is not pretty. Out of more than 760,000 people on the NDIS, only about 41,000 have SIL or SDA in their plans. That is just 5.4 per cent of all participants. And no, they are not the people with the highest support needs - most of those people live in the community, just like everyone else. Here is the thing. This tiny group burns through roughly 34 to 40 per cent of the entire NDIS budget. It sucks up nearly $14 billion a year out of a total $40+ billion pool. Why haven’t you heard about this before? That’s because they do not want you to hear about this. It’s not just those little ‘shonks and grifters’ who are sucking up money. It’s a huge, legal bucket of money that is draining almost half the NDIS budget. Why? The market is dominated by a group of massive legacy charities that operate like corporate conglomerates. The biggest players have formed a powerful lobbying coalition called Alliance20. Who are they? Well, the main providers making the most money from this setup include: Aruma Life Without Barriers Endeavour Foundation Scope Australia Northcott I would add The Disability Trust to that list, but only because I dislike them at present for allegedly running a trial in the Dandenongs co-housing disabled people with aged care residents. I am not keen on the Cerebral Palsy Alliance either. But more about that later. These entities are not small community groups. They have multi-million-dollar turnovers, large executive payrolls, and sprawling real estate portfolios. They are also in line for what most expect will be block funding arrangements of some kind, despite a long history for most of the worst of institutional practices. The government pays these providers based on a complex “roster of care.” Because the prices are set so high, providers make massive margins by grouping people together under one roof. The average cost for a single person in a standard SIL group home is over $300,000 a year. For participants with very complex needs, that bill can easily climb past $500,000 a year. Remember my mate Sean? He lives alone. He’s a C2/C3 quad on insulin, and his care in one of those places would be easily $890,000. Just for his care. By living in his own place, he’s saving the taxpayer a whopping $390,000. Here’s the tricky bit. If a provider places three people in one house, they pull in up to $900,000 a year for that single property. They only need to pay one or two workers to sleep overnight or cover a shift, but they collect the full funding rate for all three participants simultaneously. For investors and developers building SDA homes, the government guarantees rental returns of 12 to 15 per cent. This is four times higher than a regular rental property on the normal housing market. Absolutely wild. And do not get me started on the actual rorts, like the ones that go on every day in the housing market. Use our provider for more than 20 hours a week, they say, and we will pay a bit of your rent under the table. Who wouldn’t do that in a housing crisis? And you
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 1269
only need to look at what goes on in parallel (and often dual) systems like in out of home care - let me give you an example. There are places that are famous in not a good way in every jurisdiction, because of ‘care’. In South Australia, there’s a famous old institutional place called Minda - the kids on the special school bus got called ‘Mindas’, as a pejorative, like the r word. In the Hunter, and especially in out of home care, there is Allambi Care. They call them Allambi kids, around here. The kids who came from out of home care. They are often disabled kids. Disclaimer that I do not have any interest or any contact with the agency itself
- I just know a bunch of former workers and have met a few of the people who experienced the dark side of Allambi. Including some Allambi kids. There was a massive housing scandal, not too long ago. Public out-of-home-care money was used to prop up staff property investments, with 12 staff-linked houses leased back to Allambi at 20% above market rent, plus public money covering related costs. Kate Washington commissioned a forensic audit, which you can read about here. The end result seemed rather redacted for a forensic audit, but I don’t make the rules. Allambi Care is one of NSW’s largest out-of-home-care providers by funding. In a Budget Estimates transcript, Kate said it was receiving about $76 million in NSW Government funding that year, largely because it is a residential care provider. A lot like those other bad old block funded programs that have been going on forever. DCJ became concerned after earlier work, then ordered a forensic audit because the government had “very little visibility†over what was happening inside outsourced provider contracts. And gosh, what an interesting audit that was. The alleged problem was not just the rent mark-up. Kate Washington said public funds were also used for costs connected with the staff-owned properties, including council rates, water rates, set-up costs, and $20,000 spent painting a property before it was even used for the intended purpose. It sounded dodgy as shit and was probably quite embarrassing for DCJ at the time. In fairness, here is Allambi’s response about beanbags really being sensory therapeutic pods owned by children and I do not know what else, perhaps a response about propping up executive’s personal financial portfolios, I read it too long ago to care. Sorry, Allambi, but I am FAIR. But - back to the point. Why are we not seriously talking about a massive transfer of wealth from public taxpayers into corporate charity bank accounts, instead of stopping kids with Down syndrome from leaving the house, booting hundreds and thousands off the NDIS and putting 204,000 people out of work? If a participant stays in a group home for three years, the provider collects roughly $1 million from their NDIS plan. The government could literally buy every single one of those 41,000 people a brand-new house outright, hand them the front door keys, and save billions of dollars by breaking the corporate rent cycle. Instead, the money is swallowed up year after year by a closed loop of panel providers and property developers who use high-paid lobbying firms to protect their business models. What they do not talk about is this. That SDA and SIL are highly variable in terms of what they look like, how they operate and what your life looks like on the inside of one. Ask the community visitors in NSW and Victoria for their horror stories - I promise they have many. They have finally agreed to divorce care from landlording, for which we are all grateful - you should never have to move out if you are, say, raped by an employee of your landlord - but if there is one thing that Volume 7 of the Disability Royal Commission taught us, it is that segregation is just another word for shit. You don’t have to take my word for it. We wrote a position paper on this, way back in 2020. Segregation-of-People-with-Disability_Position-Paper.pdf It is why Bill Shorten paid Redbridge $400,000 to find out that most people had ‘qualified tolerance’ for the idea of ramming people back into shared, 1:3 support arrangements but only in certain conditions - for example, to offset a huge fraud emergency. Even if it wasn’t real. There is more. Many of these organisations, like Life Without Barriers, don’t just run group homes or ‘disability day programs’. They also run services for aged care, out of home care, and veterans
- seemingly ahead of a trend that the government is about to get into, harmonising ‘care’ under one, big, algorithmic driven system. Remember this story? I think it was when I first met Linton Besser, now at Media Watch.
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 1269
In 2014, when Jessica was moved in, she was 12 years old. By then, misfortune had been her frequent companion. She’d been diagnosed with ADHD and ODD (Oppositional Defiant Disorder), and was taking Ritalin. She was so scared, so often, that she “imagines things that aren’t there, talks incessantly, has tantrums, bites people”. But Jessica wasn’t beyond help. She was still very young, she was going to school. Her file at that point said she had “hope for the future” and “keeps trying”. Resi would change all of that. The house, run by Life Without Barriers, a not-for-profit residential care provider, is in a suburb of regional NSW. Some things change, but institutions mostly don’t. The Disability Royal Commission did not find that institutions disappeared. It found that institutional violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation continued inside group homes. And some of the biggest names in ‘care’ have already had their own ugly headlines. I, for one, do not want my only choice of ‘registered provider’ - under these new rules by Minister Mark Butler - to be an unknown person, male or female, from one of those agencies who is to change my tampon today. Jessica will be 23 now. I wonder where she is. If she was ever diagnosed with anything more substantial, whether she eventually stopped biting people. If she ever became an NDIS participant. If she is now being booted off, back into a state-run system that no longer exists. And this is where the money matters. Because the biggest scandal is not just that these models are expensive. Nor that their fat cat executives drive around in fancy cars and own three houses, a yacht and a summer house on the coast. Nor even that they sometimes pay people working in their sheltered workshops two bucks an hour, or that they have fourteen corporate identities, a research arm and for all I know a bank account in the Caymans. The scandal is that the most expensive part of the NDIS is also the part that looks most like the old system. We are paying too much for segregated, provider-controlled, institution-like care, while cutting the supports that let people live freely in the community. And if we kill off the NDIS, if we do not prioritise disabled people’s rights rather than political donors and lobby groups, then that is not just a scandal. It’s a goddamn tragedy.
Paul Johnson