Navigating the Australian National Disability Insurance Scheme: A Scheme of Big Ideas and Big Challenges

Abstract

One of Australia's biggest reforms - the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) - is intended to provide people with choice and certainty of access to disability supports. It replaced an underfunded, unfair, fragmented and inefficient "system". However, recently, the NDIS has received criticism in regard to access and the provision of supports. These issues, addressed elsewhere, have arguably arisen due to concerns about cost. This article preempts these concerns by bridging a gap between the extra-legal academic literature concerning the NDIS and the sparse literature concerning NDIS law. It does so by providing a detailed exposition of the NDIS legal framework embedded in the relevant interdisciplinary extra-legal literature. It concludes that if the NDIS is to succeed it cannot be dominated by concern with the financial sustainability of the system.