Andrew Miller: NDIS burn-off misses the mark

Winters suit me better than 40 degree summers. I can take my sad Celtic pallor outdoors without my internal organs getting sunburnt.

It’s also the season when we usually remain in charge of fire, rather than vice versa.

On Saturday evening I sat watching a few logs burn with the same primal fascination I felt when my dad first taught us how to toast marshmallows on a campfire, with supplementary guidance on the treatment of minor burns.

The connection goes back hundreds of thousands of years to our ancestors mastering their first technology for cooking, warmth and social gatherings around the safe light of a fire at night.

Accessing more nutrients from cooked food and beginning the ancient curation of lands with strategic seasonal burns, they made advances in cooperation, a precursor for our specie’s messy dominance of the planet.

Dad and I were camping with a large group on the Gunbarrel Highway, sitting by a reluctant bonfire of damp and smoky wood.

Our backs were frozen in the chilly desert night, but our faces were toasted by crackling orange, red and blue flames that leapt up toward the scarf of the glowing Milky Way.

Playful shadows and crimson light danced on the up-lit faces of people sitting around, turning the whole scene into a strange carnival.

Generosity was projected onto the faces of kindly, smiling mothers, while the darker impulses of some, becoming scarier in their cups, were betrayed.

The crucible of firelight seemingly burnt away the chaff, unmasking true desires and motives.

Abraham Lincoln probably never said “you can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time,” but it’s a useful truism to recall when politicians come a-selling.

The Senate inquiry into the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill will soon conclude, and it has been interesting to watch the way the government has framed this around cost blow-outs and fraud, rather than cuts to services.

Doctors are instinctively suspicious of these themes, having watched the determination of governments to deeply erode patients’ Medicare rebates in real terms for decades, while wage, property and everything else spirals forever upwards.

Why not stamp out NDIS fraud if that’s the problem?

Because the figures suggest that the savings being targeted — around $10 billion per annum — are at least triple even the most pessimistic estimates of so-called provider “integrity leakage”, a term George Orwell might admire.

The documented fraud is in the millions, not billions, and says more about dodgy operators than anyone who relies on the scheme.

Thus, the vast majority of savings can only be realised if about 160,000 people with disabilities have their supports reduced, withdrawn or gated behind processes beyond their bandwidth to access.

Those cuts go far beyond stamping out malfeasance.

Patchy State support systems are being touted by the feds as potential cost-shifting destinations for NDIS packages, but the failure of States to deliver was one of the drivers for a national scheme in the first place.

That safety net lays on hard ground.

State hospital systems do not offer outpatient medical or allied health services in many places now, and when they do the wait times often involve years.

Meanwhile the Prime Minister likes to brandish his Medicare Card at press conferences, while the government’s credit card is apparently maxed out on used submarines.

The uncertainty causes significant distress among some of the most vulnerable in our community, who deal with ignorant health supremacy and eugenic arguments in their lifelong struggle for equity.

Like immigration, disability supports are an easy target for anyone not currently impacted. We forget that could change in a heartbeat.

Prime Minister Albanese’s government started a controlled burn of the NDIS in the name of sustainability.

Let’s hope they can keep their negative rhetoric and collateral damage under control.