ABC Radio Adelaide with Nikolai Beilharz - 22 April 2026

Melissa McIntosh MP

Federal Member for Lindsay 

Shadow Minister for Families and Social Services

Shadow Minister for the NDIS

Shadow Minister for Women

22 April 2026

Transcript 

ABC Radio Adelaide with Nikolai Beilharz

Topics: NDIS

E&EO … 

Nikolai Beilharz

Nikolai Beilharz with you, also joining for this conversation Melissa McIntosh, who's the Federal NDIS Shadow Minister. Melissa McIntosh, thank you for your time.

Melissa McIntosh

Thank you.

Nikolai Beilharz

Did the federal government need to make this move? Do 160,000 people need to be removed from the NDIS?

Melissa McIntosh

The government today, and the Minister himself, didn't need to scare 760,000 Australians the way he did today without consultation, that's for sure. The Coalition has always supported the fact that we do need to reduce the spending in the NDIS. I think the Australian sentiment has changed in that regard as well, $50 billion a year is too much and it's growing. But it sort of blows my mind, and I know because I'm getting phone calls through my office since the announcement, that he decided to target participants, first and foremost, in his ambition to reduce the growth in the scheme to two per cent, but he hasn't achieved his previous growth targets of eight per cent, and five per cent yet. So, how he's going to get to two per cent - it's going to be in the detail, but I am highly sceptical that he is going to be able to achieve that.

Nikolai Beilharz

Is the reality though that hard calls had to be made?

Melissa McIntosh

Certainly, but not by targeting our most vulnerable. Every single participant on the NDIS now, according to Mark Butler today, has to go through a reassessment. This is a big deal for people with severe disability who have gone through so many assessments. It is very costly, the medical costs are high, plus the trauma of doing it. I've used an example today because she's recently contacted me, a woman who has had to go through multiple assessments to prove that she doesn't have legs and she needs a prosthetic leg. So, her legs are never going to grow back, why does she have to go through another assessment as part of Mark Butler's cutting over the NDIS? We know that there's a huge amount of criminal activity going on, and there's $5 billion dollars worth of rorting and waste every single year, yet Mark Butler didn't really talk about that at all today. The Government's wasting $60 million a year fighting participants in the Administrative Review Tribunal, another way they can save money.

Nikolai Beilharz

If you were the Minister, what would you do? How would you rein in that spending?

Melissa McIntosh

Well, I'm not the Minister, but I would have liked to worked with the Minister. We opened the door to say we’ll work in collaboration, but we had zero consultation and now we're going to have legislation thrust upon us in the next couple of weeks when we go to Parliament for budget sitting. This is very complex, very important legislation. We do want to work with the Minister, but our target would be around reducing the rorting in the scheme. It is too high, there’s too much of it - that needs to be tightened, returning quality, and there's no assessment, there's no quality control within this scheme, and this extends to the registration. This is one area that I do agree with the Minister on. It's around registering providers, but there's no level of detail, what that means? How many providers are going to be registered at what level? They could have gone further on the registration of providers front, 94% of providers are not registered. This means there's no safeguards in place, they don't even have to get a first aid certificate or Working With Vulnerable People check. That clearly needs to be sorted out, and that will get rid of some of the rorting that's going on. It is also very evident that there is a whole lot of overcharging going on in the scheme, where I think you had an example of that just in the call earlier. So, there's one reduction of costs. Don't charge people four times the amount for a cleaning service than they should be charged just because they're using their NDIS plan. There are plenty of things that we could be looking at. I think the whole scheme needs to be unravelled and almost started again back to its core basic foundation of where it should be, but don't, don’ do this without consultation, telling people that they could be off the scheme, and they're not going to know where they're going to go, who’s going to pick them up. Because it was clear by your caller prior to me, the Minister for Health there, that they're concerned about people falling through the cracks to stay time, particularly keen to pick up those people from the NDIS.

Nikolai Beilharz

Melissa McIntosh, appreciate your time. Thankyou.

Melissa McIntosh

Thankyou.