Press Conference - 22 April 2026

Melissa McIntosh MP 

Shadow Minister for Families and Social Services

Shadow Minister for the NDIS

Shadow Minister for Women

Federal Member for Lindsay 

22 April 2026

Transcript 

Press Conference

Topics: NDIS –Mark Butler’s National Press Club Speech

E&EO … 

Melissa McIntosh

The Prime Minister in his 2022 Budget in reply speech, promised Australians he would stop the cuts to the NDIS. Today Minister Butler dropped a complete bombshell on every single person with a disability in this country who uses this very important scheme. 160,000 people are now going to have to reassess to use the NDIS. I have my phone's going off the hook in my office right now as the Shadow spokesperson for the NDIS because people are in mass anxiety. They feel like this is a disaster awaiting them. I have a woman who's told me that she had to prove that she did not have legs to be able to access the NDIS. Does this mean she has to re-prove that she no longer has legs so she can get the funding that she desperately needs? Not to have a good time, but to have some form of quality of life? This is the third growth reduction strategy target that the Minister has announced. First, reducing the NDIS by eight per cent, then it was five per cent, now it is two per cent. Yet, the NDIS is still running at over ten per cent growth per annum. The Minister today was full of the message of cuts, cuts, cuts - yet he had no detail on how this is going to be achieved. No detail on how he's going to reduce the mass fraud and criminal activity within the NDIS. We know that the Commission is struggling to deal with this. People with criminal backgrounds are looking after people with disabilities, yet right now they may only be banned for a couple of years. What changes does the Minister promise to ensure there is quality back within the NDIS. So, the Minister has made his big announcement, reducing growth to two per cent with no plan. He's going to be ramming this through parliament in a couple of weeks, and he has had zero consultation with the Coalition, when we have promised the government to work with them. We want to end fraud and corruption with the NDIS, we want to protect our most vulnerable Australians which this scheme was set up for in the first place. This now broken scheme that the Minister himself claimed today was broken, this is Labor's own baby, is now broken. Well, the Government doesn't want to work with us. They'll ram it through the Parliament, they'll cut those plans and they've left every single person with a disability in this country with high anxiety today.

Journalist

Is it fair to reassess the eligibility though as a starting point given that spending has become so significant in the program?

Melissa McIntosh

There is no doubt that spending is out of control, $50 billion a year, and $5 billion of rorting. But when you, as the Minister for the NDIS, tell Australians that every single participant, around 760,000 of them, are going to have to be reassessed that would upset so many people. Like that woman I just said who's gone through assessment after assessment to prove that she's an amputee when she clearly has no legs. And some of these assessments are very costly with high medical costs, so to actually tell every Australian on the NDIS they must go through this again, I imagine will be very damaging to a lot of people and cause a lot of concern.

Journalist

What would be the Coalition's approach then to try and, you know, take out some of that fraud, that excessive spending?

Melissa McIntosh

We would support the government in reducing the fraud. We support the concept of having registrations but even on the registration process the Minister wasn't clear today. He said it sounds like it might be a tiered registration process, when 94% of providers are not registered, this is what has allowed the fraud and the rorting to go on. So yes, we do support that, we do support reducing the cost, but there's questions even around getting 160,000 people off the NDIS - are they going on to another program? It's going to leave a lot of people uncertain. The Minister has admitted today he's got the contract signed with the states, but he still doesn't have them all on board. He almost laughed off the question around how are you going to get the states to do this? And he says that it might be, if you've got psychosocial it's not necessarily going to be the whole cohort of people that require psychosocial support, but it'll be dependent on their needs. So, there's big question marks around what constitutes someone being able to access the NDIS, maybe even if they do have schizophrenia or bipolar, and what will then be left for the states to pick up and how is he going to coerce the states to do that job?

Journalist

On the kids’ side with respect to autism and the concerns around people being on the program with varying degrees of autism for instance, there's been some movement on that front as well, what's your response to that?

Melissa McIntosh

Well, there has been, so the Minister has already announced that he wants children with mild autism off the NDIS onto a state-run program. The thing with that is that some of the states aren't on board with that and there's question marks even around the program. So, I've spoken to providers and they've had no details about how that will work, and I know that there's already families that were using the NDIS now falling through the cracks. So, if people are falling through the cracks on one program being Thriving Kids, what's going to happen when 160,000 people have to move off the NDIS in what the Minister has said in a short period of time?

Journalist

Scrutiny on providers, you touched on providers before, that's obviously something that the government said that they're going to do - assess those providers. Again, what's your response?

Melissa McIntosh

Yeah, there's no doubt that providers, some not all, and we've got to acknowledge that there's some really decent people across the country that do look after vulnerable Australians doing the right thing. But when there's 94% that are unregistered that's what has opened it up to the rorts and criminal activity. I read today an article in the paper that talked about somebody that was an NDIS provider that sexually abused somebody on the scheme and the banning orders, and that there's so much of this horrible, abhorrent behaviour going on. So yes, that absolutely needs to be cleaned up, and it should be a priority of the Government but yet we're left with very little detail on how the government is going to address this particular part. It seems very focused on the participants and those vulnerable Australians that have had anxiety over these last few weeks and very little information on how the government's going to clean up the rorting in the system.

Journalist

So, you mentioned that the Government will likely try and push this through Parliament quickly, I know that they want these changes to come into effect 2028. So, when you head back to Canberra, what will the message then be to the Government from the Opposition?

Melissa McIntosh

We’ve always wanted to work with the government; I've thought it was really important that we do this in a bipartisan way first and foremost, to not leave vulnerable Australians hanging out there thinking that people aren't supporting them, or this is a political game. But when we've had no consultation, now we're being told that this is going to be part of Budget week and the Minister wants this done quickly. The legislation is very complex, and any changes can always have unintended consequences. So, the government’s been working on this for a very long time with experts who know exactly what they're doing, but if history is right, the Government has failed every step of the way since they've been in office. $13 billion the Minister admitted today, that is projected blowout over the next four years, so I have high doubts that their legislative process is going to do anything, to make any changes, but we'll see. The devil is going to be in the detail and we're ready to review the legislation, but who knows when we're going to get that.

Journalist

Just elsewhere on the health insurance rebates, the changes there for over 65’s, ending some of those Howard era measures, what's the Oppositions response to that?

Melissa McIntosh

Well, we're in a cost-of-living crisis, that's another detail we need to look into. It's not only that, the government's making all these cuts to plans and schemes and existing programs to plug their big budget black hole that has been growing and growing. I know through, and on another part of this, on the aged care front, I know through personal experience how bad and messed up that process is for older Australians waiting for some form of care and when they do get it, the exorbitant prices and there's been a bit of a backflip on that by the Minister today in announcing that showering, those types of care for older Australians, will now be free but that's after a lot of pressure. So it has been idea after idea being floated by this Government on approach to the budget but I want to come back to the NDIS one - that has caused a huge amount of grief and upset amongst the disability community in Australia, and their families, and no doubt the announcement that 160,000 people will have to come off the NDIS with no plan on where they'll go, and what the government's planning on doing is going to cause even more anxiety.