CANBERRA – The Albanese Government has identified $37.8 billion in savings from the National Disability Insurance Scheme over four years, while simultaneously describing the doubling of remote First Nations jobs from 3,000 to 6,000 across the same period as one of the Budget’s most ambitious targets.
The Budget papers released Tuesday confirmed approximately 160,000 participants will exit the NDIS following new standardised functional capacity assessments. The Remote Jobs and Economic Development Program received $299 million.
“Both reforms represent significant fiscal commitments,” a senior departmental spokesperson said. “But realistically, identifying 160,000 Australians to remove from a payment system is a much more straightforward administrative exercise than identifying 3,000 actual jobs in actual remote communities.”
The spokesperson said the NDIS reforms had been “ready to go for some time” whereas the remote employment target would require “extensive co-design”, “place-based modelling” and “ongoing yarn”.
Asked whether the assessment tools used to remove participants from the NDIS could also be used to assess where remote jobs might be created, a Treasury official paused for a long time before saying that was “not how the tool was scoped”.
The Disability Advocacy Network described the changes as “drastic”. The Secretariat of National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care described the same Budget as “the budget of missed opportunity”.
A senior Indigenous Affairs official confirmed the Government remains committed to its Closing the Gap targets, which it expects to begin showing measurable progress on “any year now”.
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