When the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) was launched in 2013, it was sold as proof that the state could be compassionate toward the working class. It promised “choice and control.” Then Prime Minister, Julia Gillard called it “a fundamental social reform that will change our nation,” ensuring that “people with disabilities have the same opportunities as everyone else to participate in work and in the community.”
A decade later, the illusion has collapsed. The NDIS has been a feeding trough for capitalists; a bureaucratic assault course that leaves the vulnerable isolated and without essential care. It now stands as another lesson in the limits of reformism.
Pressure for reform
Before the NDIS, the disability rights movement had fought to end the patchwork, state-based welfare system that left millions without consistent support. Groups such as People with Disability Australia (PWDA) and the Disability Advocacy Network organised rallies and media campaigns calling for a national, rights-based approach.
By the late 2000s this movement had merged with broader campaigns for social inclusion, anti-discrimination, and was reflected in the Gillard Labor government’s “nation-building” rhetoric. Services were underfunded and fragmented, a system of state neglect that left people reliant on charity. The Productivity Commission’s 2011 report described the situation as “underfunded, unfair, fragmented and inefficient.” Tens of thousands were on waiting lists, and many received no support at all. The 2009 Shut Out report revealed the human cost of neglect and forced the issue into national prominence.
The state could offer substantive reform only because it coincided with the tail-end of the mining boom and China’s massive stimulus program following the 2008 crisis, which poured billions into export revenues and construction. Public debt was low, borrowing cheap, and the illusion of limitless growth allowed Labor to posture as progressive.
Reform built on capitalist terms
Facing a crisis of legitimacy marked by the 2010 leadership turmoil, and the instability of a minority government, the Gillard administration seized on the NDIS as proof that Labor could deliver social reform without threatening the rule of capital.
The capitalist class saw reform as an opportunity to draw both carers and people with disabilities into the labour market. An economic structure was designed to expand the workforce in order to create new avenues of profit and exploitation.
The NDIS served a clear social function for capitalist interests. It undermined public anger and thus helped stabilise the system at a time of political discontent when faith in the major parties was eroding after the 2008 global financial crisis and the disability rights movement was demanding an end to decades of neglect. By channeling this pressure into controlled, institutional forms, the state sought to renew faith in the idea that capitalism could still deliver social progress. At the same time, reforms helped reproduce the conditions for the accumulation of profits by the bosses: expanding the labour market, professionalising unpaid care, and disciplining welfare around ‘productivity’ and ‘efficiency.’
When the ruling class give concessions, they do so only to maintain social control, reinforcing the order of capitalism while momentarily relieving the contradiction between social need and private profit.
The Productivity Commission declared that the scheme would make the economy more ‘efficient,’ lift workforce participation, and ‘pursue goals of economic and social inclusion.’ The plan was clear: an investment in labour productivity and the commodification of care. People became “participants,” services became “products,” and care was transformed into a contract. Providers competed for funding, and disabled people were forced to navigate a system designed to measure worth by cost efficiency and economic output.
By 2025, more than $45 billion flowed through the NDIS each year, much of it captured by large corporate providers. Health insurers like NIB and a long list of private equity firms have already extracted billions. NIB’s chief executive declared to shareholders that the NDIS was now “a significant economic sector.”
Despite its gentler language, the NDIS structure represents the same class interests that have always underpinned capitalist welfare. It echoes the historical form of the Poor Laws of 1834. State welfare was used to regulate the ‘unfit.’ Capitalism continually divides workers into the ‘fit’ and ‘unfit,’ the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving,’ judging all by their ability to serve the capitalist ideal of the productive worker. The NDIS merely updated this framework, dressing it in the language of ‘choice’ and ‘participation’ while preserving the underlying hierarchy of social worth.
As Engels observed in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845):
“The English bourgeoisie is charitable out of self-interest; it gives nothing outright, but regards its gifts as a business matter, makes a bargain with the poor, saying: ‘If I spend this much upon benevolent institutions, I thereby purchase the right not to be troubled any further, and you are bound thereby to stay in your dusky holes and not to irritate my tender nerves by exposing your misery.’”
Here the true nature of capitalist ‘charity’ is laid bare. What the capitalist class called compassion was never that at all – it was self-preservation dressed up as virtue. Their donations to charitable institutions were not about improving the lives of the poor, but about maintaining order and easing their own guilt. By funding ‘relief,’ they bought themselves moral comfort and the illusion of decency, while ensuring that the structural roots of poverty remained untouched.
Engels shows that this ‘charity’ was not benevolence – it was management. The poor were to be pitied, not empowered; helped just enough to remain quiet and invisible. In this way, reform became another tool of class rule – a means to stabilise an unequal society while preserving the image of moral righteousness.
The State as Defender of Capital
That window for cheap and easy reforms has closed. The mining boom has ended, China’s growth has slowed, and Australian capitalism is now defined by deficits and imperialist militarisation. Surplus once available for social programs is now used for debt repayments and weapons.
The International Monetary Fund reported in November 2024 that Australia faces “an unforgiving combination of low growth and high debt” and must “cut spending and raise revenue to prepare for future shocks.”
When the Treasurer Jim Chalmers and Health Minister Mark Butler speak of “restoring confidence,” they mean the confidence of capital, not of the working class. As Marx and Engels declared in the Communist Manifesto:
“The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”
The function of the capitalist state is not to care but to manage. It is an instrument of class rule, enforcing austerity and maintaining social order.
At the 2025 Economic Reform Roundtable convened by the Albanese government, measures were announced to “slow the growth” of the scheme. One measure is to exclude thousands of children with autism or developmental conditions. Billions will be slashed in the next decade and redirected to AUKUS submarines and corporate subsidies.
As the crisis of capitalism deepens, the state defends profit by attacking workers and youth. Treasurer Jim Chalmers made this plain when he declared, “We have made very good progress on the NDIS… Spending is growing more sustainably now… at around 8 per cent instead of 19.” In another address he boasted that Labor had “restrained real spending growth to 1.4 per cent, less than half the 30-year average.”
The Parliamentary Budget Office projects a decline in public service spending of around $17 billion by 2028–29. Legal aid and community services face a funding shortfall, while regional programs such as Stronger Communities and Local Roads have been left unfunded. Cuts have also hit social services and housing programs.
The welfare state after 1945 existed only while profits allowed concessions. Once economic crisis returned in the 1970s, the attacks began. In Australia these cuts have been visible in multiple areas. We have seen a shift in welfare towards onerous conditions and obligations; means-tests have tightened and asset-tests expanded; and the language of social justice has been replaced by the capitalist language of ‘productivity,’ ‘efficiency,’ and ‘responsibility.’ The NDIS has followed the same path.
Social Murder
Friedrich Engels described this reality in The Condition of the Working Class in England:
“When society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death… society knows how injurious such conditions are to health and yet does nothing to improve them. Such a situation is nothing less than social murder.”
The NDIS crisis is social murder. Not through neglect alone, but deliberate policy as dictated by the inherent contradictions of capitalism. A 2022 Summer Foundation study found that many people with disabilities remained in hospital for months or even a year after they were medically ready to go home because of inadequate support. In 2024, there were 2,689 NDIS participants stuck in hospitals, 1,125 of them medically cleared but still waiting.
Take the case of Emily Livingstone, a former arborist with multiple sclerosis. After her support hours were slashed from 20 a day to two, she was forced to remain in hospital for more than a month despite being medically cleared. “I feel like I’m in prison,” she said. “I’m being punished for being disabled.”
Her experience exposes the human face of austerity. People are trapped not because care cannot be provided but because the profit system decides they are not ‘worth’ supporting. The resources exist but are diverted to the needs of capital. We are told cuts are necessary because the NDIS is “unsustainable.” What is truly unsustainable is a system that hands billions to bosses, landlords, and bankers while people lay in hospital beds.
The Lesson of Reformism
No reform can escape the laws of capitalism. When profit is threatened, concessions are withdrawn. Capital cannot be planned for need. It must accumulate or collapse. When reform collides with profit, reform gives way. As Karl Marx explained in Capital, Volume III (1894):
“The real barrier of capitalist production is capital itself. It is that capital and its self-valorisation appear as the starting and the closing point, the motive and the purpose of production; production is only production for capital and not the reverse.”
Welfare and social spending exist only so long as they contribute to the reproduction of capital, or can be maintained by the active struggles of the working class. The state provides a basic level of education and health, for example, to maintain and reproduce a skilled and disciplined workforce. Fundamentally, concessions to the working class are not acts of compassion but only an effort to maintain the social conditions for capital accumulation. Welfare under capitalism can never be secure because it is financed from the surplus created by exploitation itself. Capital’s only purpose is to expand that surplus without limit.
Reformists believe goodwill can humanise capitalism. But as Rosa Luxemburg warned in Reform or Revolution (1900):
“People who pronounce themselves in favour of the method of legislative reform in place and in contradistinction to the conquest of political power and social revolution, do not really choose a more tranquil, calmer and slower road to the same goal, but a different goal. … Our programme becomes not the realisation of Socialism, but the reform of capitalism; not the suppression of the system of wage labour, but the diminution of exploitation.”
The struggle for care is inseparable from the class struggle. Only when production is democratically planned by the working class can we end the commodification of human life.
The fight for disability rights must be part of a broader revolutionary movement: a class-struggle for a society where care is collective, work dignified, and life itself is no longer commodified.
A state that abandons its most vulnerable while spending billions on war has forfeited the right to exist!