Australia’s National Disability Insurance

Abstract

Abstract The National Disability Insurance Scheme is one of the most significant welfare reforms Australia has seen in a century. The reform incorporates several themes that have been gaining traction in other countries, including individual budgets and actuarial (or social investment) approaches. This chapter provides an overview of NDIS’s emergence and first phase of development from 2013-2017 and an analysis of the program’s more unusual attributes within the broader personalization agenda. In particular, we assess the use of actuarial approaches and their implications for the administration of the scheme. At the heart of the scheme sits a tension between the unusually prominent role given to actuarial methods (which are typically used for monitoring and forecasting costs) and the fundamental objective of achieving the best possible outcomes for people with a disability (taking account of value-for-money constraints).