The Australian government named it a “sustainability taskforce.” I want you to sit with that word. Sustainability. As if disabled people’s support needs are an environmental crisis, a depleting resource, something the earth cannot replenish. In April 2026, Australia’s Labor Party appointed Anthea Long — a former Treasury official with no personal experience of disability, support work, or having to request funding to access basic daily care — to lead a team whose job is to find ways to spend less on the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), Australia’s government insurance program for people with disabilities. Fifty-two billion dollars. That is the number they keep printing. They print it the way you’d print the cost of a flood.

I design information systems. I spend my life looking at how numbers are arranged on screens, which columns sit next to which, what gets a label and what gets buried in a footnote. The NDIS figure is presented as spending. A cost. A line item trending in the wrong direction. Nowhere in the reporting, nowhere in the government’s own framing, does anyone show the number that sits in the column next to it: the unpaid labour that fills the gap when the state steps back.

In July 2022, I sat in a council office in Rotterdam while a planning official walked me through a digital dashboard. The screen showed building permits, zoning compliance, renovation costs. Every structure in the district had a data point. I asked where the accessibility modifications were tracked. He pointed to a sub-menu three clicks deep, nested under “non-standard alterations.” The same category as garden sheds and satellite dishes.

The dashboard was beautiful. Clean typography, consistent colour system, readable at a glance. It did exactly what it was designed to do: make certain things visible and let other things dissolve into the architecture.

This is what a ledger does. Not lie. Categorise.

The NDIS was built as a scheme. The word matters. A scheme is a plan, a structure, an arrangement. It is not a right. Rights do not have sustainability taskforces. Rights do not get “razor gangs” — cost-cutting committees appointed to reduce government spending. The language tells you where you stand before anyone makes a cut.

Here is what I keep thinking about. Otto Neurath — an Austrian philosopher who spent the 1920s and 1930s developing a universal visual language for statistics — discovered something that matters to how we understand disability funding today. He wanted to show social facts in pictures so that anyone could read them: housing, health, mortality, labour. His team at the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum (the Museum of Society and Economics in Vienna) designed rows of tiny human figures, each one representing a thousand people. The method was radical: it forced you to see populations as bodies, not as numbers.

But Neurath discovered something he never fully solved. The moment you put a figure in a row, you have to decide what the row measures. And the thing you measure becomes the thing that matters. His colleague Marie Reidemeister, a designer and statistician who did much of the actual design work and shaped how the figures looked and what stories they told, wrote in her notebooks about the arguments over which data to visualise. Every chart was a political decision disguised as a design decision. What you count is what you see. What you see is what you fund.

The NDIS dashboard — and I am guessing here, but I have sat in enough of these rooms to bet correctly — tracks cost per participant, plan use rates, provider billing patterns. It does not track hours of unpaid care performed by family members when a plan is reduced. It does not track the women who leave jobs. The Australian Bureau of Statistics’ own 2022 survey found that primary carers were overwhelmingly female, overwhelmingly not in full-time work. That number exists. It just lives in a different spreadsheet, managed by a different department, tagged under a different category. Garden sheds and satellite dishes.

A razor gang does not need to cut anything directly. It only needs to redesign the dashboard. Move the threshold for “reasonable and necessary.” Adjust the algorithm that predicts plan costs. Change the font size, if you want to be poetic about it, though I am not being poetic. I have watched a municipal office make a category disappear by changing a dropdown menu. February 2020, a district office in The Hague. The category was “communication support.” It became “supplementary services — other.” Referrals dropped within two months. Nobody cut a budget. They just moved a label.

Bruce Young, a disability advocate who gave evidence to the Australian Parliament’s Joint Standing Committee on the NDIS in 2023, said something that has stayed with me: “Every time they say ‘sustainability,’ I hear ‘how little can we get away with.’” He said it plainly, the way you say something you have tested against your own life and found true.

The concession I owe: fifty-two billion dollars is a real number. Managing public money is a real obligation. Fraud exists. Waste exists. No system that large runs clean. I know this. The question is not whether you audit the program. The question is who designs the audit, what they count, and what they have decided — before they start — is not worth counting.

Neurath died in 1945, still working on the problem. He never found a way to make a chart that showed what it had left out. Reidemeister kept the work going for decades after. She redesigned the figures, refined the method, expanded the system. The gap in the data stayed exactly where it was.

Anthea Long’s taskforce will produce a report. The report will contain tables. The tables will have columns. Somewhere, in a category nobody opens, a woman will stop going to work and start lifting her adult child into a bath, and the ledger will show a saving.