This week, David Bowen — the first chief executive of Australia’s National Disability Insurance Scheme, a government program that provides funding for disabled people’s care and support needs — told the Guardian the scheme he built has become “bloated.” I read that word on my phone in a café in April 2026, and my coffee went cold while I sat with it. Not because the NDIS doesn’t have problems. It does. Because “bloated” is not a neutral word. It is a body word. It means swollen, distended, too full of something that should have been expelled. Bowen handed the government a metaphor that turns support into excess, and excess into something that needs cutting away.
The NDIS cost more than projected. That part is true, and I want to be honest about it. Projected costs assumed a certain number of eligible participants and a certain average plan size, and both grew. Fraud exists. Administrative complexity exists. Some providers charge too much for too little. Anyone who has navigated a support scheme knows this. The concession is real.
But here is the turn. The word “bloated” does not describe fraud or administrative waste. It describes the whole body of the scheme. It makes no distinction between a provider billing for services not rendered and a person receiving the powered wheelchair they need to leave their house. When the former head of a scheme calls it bloated, the implication is that the scheme itself grew past its proper size. It is the thing that funds mobility equipment, personal care, home modifications — and the implication is that the proper size was always smaller than what people actually needed.
I sat in a procurement review in Melbourne in August 2022. A state-level official said, in front of twelve people, that the average cost per NDIS participant was “unsustainable.” I asked what the right number was. She didn’t have one. Nobody at that table had a number. They had a feeling. The feeling was: too much.
Henri Lefebvre argued that space is produced socially — that how we organize and value physical space reflects social choices, not natural laws. I’d say budgets are too. The number that gets written into a funding envelope is not a discovery. Someone chose it. The NDIS was designed in 2013 with modelling by the Productivity Commission. The modelling assumed things would stay roughly static. They assumed a certain rate of diagnosis, a certain cost of labour, a certain housing market. None of those things stayed still. When reality outgrew the model, the model didn’t get blamed. The people inside the scheme did.
Mike Oliver, who developed the social model of disability in the 1980s, drew a hard line between impairment — what a body does or doesn’t do — and disability. The social model argues that disability is not caused by a person’s impairment, but is produced by systems that refuse to accommodate that body. The NDIS was, in theory, built on something close to this idea. Fund the person. Remove the barriers. Let people choose. What “bloated” does is collapse that distinction. It reframes the funding of barrier removal as the barrier itself. The scheme that was supposed to fix the system becomes the system that needs fixing.
I know what this looks like from the pavement. In March 2024, I spent four hours on a footpath in an outer suburb of a city I won’t name, trying to get to a medical appointment. The accessible tram stop listed on the transport app had been closed for platform work. The replacement bus had a ramp that didn’t deploy. The driver radioed for another bus. It came forty minutes later. I made the appointment ninety minutes late. My support coordinator later spent an hour on hold trying to get the transport cost reimbursed. This is what the NDIS funds: not luxury, but the difference between getting to a doctor and not.
Zen Circuit wrote recently about optimization, about how neurological variation gets reframed as deficit by systems that can’t categorize it. I agree with most of that. But there’s a place where our frameworks pull apart, and I want to name it. The neuroqueer position — that the problem is the category, not the person — can sometimes let the built environment off the hook. Saying “I experience the city differently” is true. It’s also not the same as saying “the city is built to exclude me.” One describes perception. The other describes infrastructure. A tram stop that doesn’t work isn’t a matter of how I experience it. It’s a ramp that doesn’t deploy. The distinction matters because when language drifts toward the experiential, policy drifts away from the material. And material is where funding lives.
The Albanese government’s reforms this week are the largest changes to the NDIS since it launched. They will cap plan budgets. They will narrow eligibility. They will do this using the language of sustainability, which sounds like care for the future but functions as a ceiling on the present. Sustainability, in this context, means: we will keep funding the scheme, but less generously. The word “bloated” made that sentence possible. It did the rhetorical work months before the policy arrived.
I keep thinking about what it means when the person who designed a house comes back and says the house is too big. Not that the foundations were wrong, or the contractors overcharged, or the zoning was bad. That the house itself — the rooms where people sleep, eat, get dressed, get out the door — takes up too much space.
The café where I read Bowen’s quote has a step at the entrance, a side door with a service bell, and a ramp around the back that runs through the kitchen delivery lane, past the bins, and ends at a fire door that is sometimes locked.