The Albanese government will lift total spending on disability to $98 billion this year as it moves to slow the runaway growth of the National Disability Insurance Scheme. The increase lands in the middle of a budget push that depends heavily on reining in the scheme’s growth over the next four years.
Disability spending is not limited to the NDIS. It also includes payments that support pensions for people who cannot work and help for carers, and those outlays continue to rise. Other forms of disability aid will make up a significant share of government spending, but Labor has put its biggest focus on the scheme that has driven the fastest growth.
The spending figure matters today because Labor is trying to turn the NDIS into one of the main sources of federal budget savings. Over the next four years, the government wants cuts to NDIS growth to deliver more than half of the projected savings it is chasing. That makes the scheme central not only to disability policy, but to the wider budget arithmetic.
The tension for the government is plain. It is promising to slow a program that is still expanding quickly while other disability costs keep climbing. That leaves ministers trying to protect support for people with disability, carers and pension recipients at the same time as they push for restraint in the fastest-growing part of the system. The $98 billion figure shows how large the bill has become, and how much of the budget now depends on whether Labor can keep that growth from running away again.
