Crackdown on unregistered NDIS providers coming in bid to save $6b a year
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04-19/ndis-unregistered-providers-6b-savings-price-reform/106571188
Crackdown on unregistered NDIS providers coming in bid to save $6b a year
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04-19/ndis-unregistered-providers-6b-savings-price-reform/106571188
25 Comments
They could also crack down on legal tax evasion perpetrated by cancerous multinational companies and introduce a gas exports tax and also a MRRT on other mined products to increase tax revenue.
When these support workers with toilet paper qualifications and skills are being paid more than a junior doc in NSW health, there is a serious problem.
They visit their clients in public hospitals to provide “support” but all they do is sit on their phones for a few hours. What a useless waste of money.
Unregistered providers need to be abolished IMO.
I know a guy getting $90/hour doing NDIS stuff. He’s dealing with the males that aren’t allowed to have female carers and he takes in car rides to get them out of their house, takes them for meals, or just hangs out with them at their place. He says it’s easy work, but the people he cares for have no filter when it comes to talking about women.
Just crackdown won’t do it. Reverse charge those MFS and garnishee all their assets if they can’t pay back.
It’s about time. Conceptually the NDIS is amazing but they just didn’t build enough checks and controls into the system so it was rorted.
I’m concerned about letting the aged care department set pricing etc.
With the November 1 changes to aged care, support at home, they stripped out travel payments completely. I can’t send My allied health providers, OTs, physio, etc to clients at home if they are more than 30 mins away from the office.
There is also no funds to prepare resources or research interventions etc.
They also removed many services from the approved service list. I had 55 clients midway through technology, orthoptic and orientation & mobility goals when they were completely cut off from funds. Vision Australia and Guide Dogs had to stop seeing support at home clients on Nov 1 for these services.
Sure, Aged Care saved money, but they have severely disadvantaged blind or low vision clients.
It’s about time. Registered providers invest so much time and money in audits, systems, security and compliance that unregistered providers aren’t obligated to do the same making it a joke.
I know a gym franchise advertising disability fitness and they bill for support work cause it’s easier than billing for personal training. They then have personal trainers who have just applied for a yellow card, and have no qualifications or any idea how to train someone with disabilities working with them – you need a 4 year degree in exercise physiology to be trained to work with chronic conditions.
The owner is making so much money out of it and its not right for the clients who have no idea that the people training them aren’t properly trained.
The symptoms of a rushed policy and legislation! the NDIS was never costed properly from the inception with the appropriate checks and balances in place and don’t me wrong it was something that is definitely needed, just how it’s administered has been screwed up from the start but it’s just like the green loans policy that was crashed through parliament, people die with poor and ill conceived policy and legislation.
I clean for a sweet older couple once a week, I’m not registered I just use my ABN and go through the clients fund manager. It’s only 2hrs a week. Do I need to register to do this properly? I don’t do any other NDIS work.
I don’t hear the voice of disabled people in the comments here at all. There is an issue, but it is a very complex one, not the binary presented by mainstream media trying to give you someone to hate (it’s usually us disabled people being pilloried, but we started fighting back and the hate seems to be turning to the providers).
Providers that aren’t sole traders are usually for-profit, and they are going to try and make as much profit as possible. They will screw the disabled people they service and the government, because that’s Capitalism for you. Being registered will NOT change a thing, it will just be another box-ticking exercise that will be claimed as a business expense that has to be recouped from someone – the customer or the government.
All providers should be not-for-profit entities that have designated maximum wage rates for executives. Preferably they would also have a board with at least a couple of customer members on it so their voices are heard and incorporated in policy. There’s already legislation that not-for-profit organisations need to run under in each state, and there’s federal taxation legislation that covers the rest.
The NDIS has slipped away from the entity it was designed to be because of greed built into Capitalism. Disabled people are dying right now because the support they were getting has been withdrawn. There’s very little savings going to be made by pushing us all through a sausage mince machine because every disabled person has unique requirements.
I hope people here start thinking about the entire financial system as the issue and remember that we made it this way, not “the baddies” over there…whoever the media is pointing at
Australia is an alcoholic father who doesn’t care who has picked his pockets as long as its beer money is still there
Its the same as Centrelink rot. There is nothing wrong with cutting NDIS and putting it into more hospitals and government owned clinics for disabled people. It would actually cost less then this.
The need to go absolutely hard on this. Billions of tax payer money wasted every year on fraud and scams.
The ballooning costs of the NDIS are really the result of inadequate funding for mainstream and community supports, in particular for healthcare. The majority of misuse of NDIS funding comes from disabled people being unable to access more appropriate services which are not in fact available.
So much wastage. Money better spent in healthcare, education and childcare
I hope that NDIS looks towards immigration incentivising “buying a business” as a pathway to PR because let me tell you, there are hundreds of these “companies”.
I’m increasingly of the view the whole thing needs to be scrapped and started again.
NDIS should be reserved for people with profound, lifelong disabilities that need significant levels of care.
For people with lower level disabilities, or even significant disabilities that are more “standard”, there should be a separate program. They should get defined support packages, or defined support items. Not a budget where they can choose.
For example, if someone needs a wheelchair, then provide a suitable wheelchair. If someone needs a carer for 4 hours a day, give them a carer for 4 hours a day. The government would source these items.
Don’t give participants a budget they must manage. Give them the actual support they need.
Also, the goal of these programs should be to give people a dignified life.
You know what would save billions of dollars in NDIS costs?
Public disability housing. If you made that part of foundational supports, all the funding going to private landlords for SDA & SIL wouldn’t be an NDIS cost anymore. And what is paid would just go back to the government rather than private landlords.
There’s also basically no disability housing available if you don’t have NDIS, which means disabled people are either on endless general public housing waitlists or in unsuitable private housing.
The fact that this isn’t being considered is because investors and landlords are being prioritised over disabled people’s wellbeing AND taxpayer’s dollars.
Imagine how much we’d “save” if they also taxed gas exports appropriately
How are unregistered providers getting paid? Like wouldn’t that be the easy part?
The best news here:
> The government will not kick off a new round of lengthy reviews for its second pass at NDIS reforms intended to rein in costs growing from their untenable peak of 22 per cent a year a few years ago to 5 or 6 per cent a year by 2030.
> Instead, it will lean on the substantial body of work already completed through previous reviews, particularly the NDIS Review led by Professor Bruce Bonyhady and Lisa Paul that was the foundation for reforms introduced by former minister Bill Shorten last term.
At last, actually implementing recommendations instead of just announcing another review!
Private market are more efficient at providing services than the Government, there’s no debate about that. The issue is all industries m charge 3-50 times more for Government contracts than private.
Granddaughter had her claim reduced and the nutritional supplements she needs to live rejected by some genius at NDIS. Apparently, Google told them that ARFID (Autism related food intake disorder) is a mental condition like anorexia or Bulimia and therefore curable. We have spent over 10 years trying to get her to eat a sustainable diet in conjunction with a dietitian, paediatricians, OT school programmes etc. This is not enough. She is 100% incapeable of independent daily activities and requires support 24/7. Without these, she will slowly starve and die, not this year, not next, but eventually. The price will outstrip her pension. Who is the NDIS actually for? How much gets past the bureaucrats and report writers and reaches the participant? We have countless reports and statements from qualified doctors and specialists, but no one actually reads them. They are box tickers, and it is easier to say NO.
There’s a way we could save $50 billion a year, but you won’t like it