The Hon. Scott Morrison MP
Prime Minister
Parliament House
Canberra ACT 2600

Dear Prime Minister Morrison,

There are numerous reports in the media that the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) has seen the average cost of individual support packages increase by at least 12% per year since 2017. These include:

• your reported description of “a 12.5 per cent growth in payment per participant each year since 2017 …” from https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/morrison-warns-ndis-faces-billion-dollar-cost-blowouts-without-changes-20210506-p57plv.html;
• “National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA) spokesperson Shannon Rees said NDIS packages had increased by 12.5 per cent each year for the past three years on average”in https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-27/queensland-mother-slams-traumatic-ndis-process/100170168; and
• Minister Reynolds said “Participant packages were growing by 12.5% per annum”, see https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/may/03/linda-reynolds-says-coalition-will-keep-some-form-of-independent-ndis-assessments.

The NDIA provides various data sets (CSV files) that include the average annual committed cost for NDIS plans. These data include the following values:

Autism Aspergers Advocacy Australia (A4) calculated the annual growth in average NDIS plan cost at 31/3 from the above data and got 9.84% and 4.48% for 2020 and 2021, respectively. These values are well short of 12.5% that the Government described in the media (see above).

So far, I have not found a figure for the average plan commitment for the 2017-18 year (ending either 3^rd or 4^th quarter) so I cannot calculate the increase from 2018 to 2019.

However, A4’s primary concern is that recent increases expressed as per centages based on the data the NDIA provided publicly (see https://data.ndis.gov.au/data-downloads) are different from those you and other Government representatives are reported to have told the media.

A4 is surprised that your government is concerned by any of these increases while the average NDIS plan utilisation is 68% (if NDIA data is to be believed). Surely, the bigger problem is that people with disability are unable to have many of their support needs met.

A4 has one question: How come the figures we calculate are different from those you describe? It seems to us that the difference is due to one or more of the following reasons …

1. A4’s per centage calculations are incorrect.
2. The NDIA published incorrect data.
3. The laws of arithmetic changed without our noticing.

Please note, A4 has a firm policy on unanswered questions: see https://a4.org.au/node/1419

Yours sincerely

Bob Buckley
Convenor

29 June 2021

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Submitted on Tuesday, 29 June, 2021 - 12:14

Title: Mr
First name: Bob
Family name: Buckley
Email address: convenor@a4.org.au
Phone: XXXX XXX XXX
Your address: XXX
Subject: NDIS sustainability
Comment: Please find attached a letter about NDIS sustainability.