The NDIS didn’t need to remove case management to save money. It just stopped checking its own work.

Mr River Night has spent 30 years in disability, aged care, youth justice and mental health. His diagnosis of the NDIS budget problem is simple: the scheme stopped watching what it was doing, and called that efficiency.

Mr Night is the founder of Developing Australian Communities and a public officer at the National Disability Leadership Organisation. In a statement titled “Australia’s most vulnerable treated as the vegemite between a slice of State and Federal Government,” he argues the NDIS used to run quarterly, in-person check-ins that caught overfunding, underfunding and incorrect plans early. Somewhere along the way, those check-ins gave way to automated decisions and plan rollovers.

“I know people on almost half a million dollars a year of NDIS funding that haven’t seen or talked to a NDIS planner in years and just keep getting their plans ‘rolled over’,” he said.

That specific example is his own account. Nobody has independently verified it, and it shouldn’t be read as confirmed fact. But the broader claim, that oversight has weakened while decisions get made faster and further from view, holds up better than the anecdote does.

Start with the NDIA’s own numbers. The Administrative Review Tribunal changed 73% of the 7,132 NDIA decisions appealed in the 12 months to June 2025. Three in every 4 challenges succeeded. That’s not a rounding error. That’s a system whose first answer is wrong most of the time someone bothers to push back, and the vast majority of participants never push back at all.

The NDIA is currently rolling out New Framework Planning, a model that replaces some planning conversations with a “support needs assessment” run by a trained assessor, starting mid-2026. The NDIA says a person, not a computer, will still approve every plan. Twelve disability representative organisations weren’t satisfied with that assurance. In December 2025, they publicly raised concerns that automated decision-making could shape the new budget allocation process, and that the Tribunal can no longer vary a plan directly. It can only send a case back to the same decision-maker who got it wrong the first time.

Put those two facts next to each other and Mr Night’s argument writes itself: the review pathway got narrower right as the evidence says the original decisions need reviewing more, not less.

His argument about the Federal Government’s NDIS Amendment Bill lands somewhere similar. He says the legislation pushes the cost of unresolved gaps in disability support onto the states, and that better planning now would be cheaper than a decade of state-level patch-ups later.

“While the Federal Government pushes forward legislation to force states into fixing gaps in supports for people living with disability, advocates ask why not plan so it doesn’t end up costing 10 times more?” he said.

On the Disability Royal Commission, Mr Night says more than 80% of its recommendations haven’t been actioned. He’s actually being generous. The government’s own 2025 Progress Report shows only 8 of the 172 recommendations the Commonwealth is responsible for, alone or jointly, are marked complete. That’s about 5%, not 20%. For the 50 recommendations that sit solely with the states, only 7.5% are done. If 80% not actioned sounded damning, the real completion rate is worse.

None of this makes Mr Night’s fix official policy. It’s one advocate’s proposal, not an NDIA plan. But his proposed fix doesn’t ask for new legislation, just independent, face-to-face case management every 3 months, with someone actually asking whether the funding and the supports are working. Given how often the Tribunal finds the NDIA’s own decisions wrong, that’s a cheap thing to test before assuming automation and rollovers are the more efficient choice.

If you or someone you support has a plan review coming up, or moves onto New Framework Planning, ask how the budget was worked out and who signed off on it. The data suggests that’s a reasonable thing to ask.