When the Budget Shrinks, Who Gets Kept?

The NDIS funding reset started on 1 October. Funding for social, economic and community participation supports, and for improved daily living skills supports, is being reset, and it rolls out over the next 12 months as each participant's plan is created, reassessed or renewed. For a lot of participants and families it's a cut. The people closest to it are angry and worried, with good reason, and I'm not going to dress it up as anything else.

What I want to write about is narrower than the policy. I work with NDIS providers on how people choose them, and the reset changes the decision those providers are on the receiving end of. That's worth thinking through carefully, because handled badly it makes a hard year harder for participants as well as providers.

The decision doesn't happen on 1 October

For most people, not much changed on the day itself. The reset lands plan by plan. A family finds out what their new plan looks like at the review, and that's when the real decisions get made about which supports stay and which providers they keep working with.

So there won't be one moment of change this year. There'll be thousands of small ones, at kitchen tables and in review meetings, spread across every month between now and next October.

Choosing and keeping are different decisions

The question providers usually bring to me is some version of "why would someone choose us?" That's a question about appeal: what makes a family look at a list of options and pick you.

When a budget shrinks, the question flips. A family with less funding isn't deciding who to bring in. They're deciding who to keep, and that decision runs on loss far more than appeal. Kahneman and Tversky's work on loss aversion is the well-known version of this: people feel what they'd lose more sharply than an equal gain. At a plan review it sounds like a quiet question. What would we actually miss if this stopped?

The providers who get kept are the ones where that answer is obvious to the person deciding. That's often a different list from the best providers. It's the providers whose value is easiest to see.

Who's actually deciding

Plenty of good providers come unstuck here. The person weighing up your service often isn't only the participant. It might be a parent who sees the invoices but not the sessions, or a support coordinator working through dozens of plans in the same month. Each of them is looking at you from a different angle, usually with less information than you'd assume.

A therapist might know a participant has made real progress on travelling independently. The parent reading the plan sees "capacity building, 2 hours per week" and a dollar figure. If the progress only lives in the session notes, it isn't part of the decision.

What helps, before the review rather than after

Most of this comes down to making real value visible to the people who'll decide, early enough for it to count.

Talk to families before their review comes up. A short, plain conversation about what the support has done and what it's for gives them something to bring into the review meeting. Once the new plan is set, you're explaining a decision that's already been made.

Write outcomes in the family's language. "Improved community participation" means very little at a kitchen table. "She catches the bus to TAFE on her own now" means a lot. Keep those specifics written down and easy to share, with the participant's consent.

Give support coordinators what they need without making them ask. They're heading into a very full year. A provider who sends a clear one-page summary of supports and progress ahead of a review is making their job easier, and coordinators remember who did that.

Make sure people know about the safeguard pathway. Some participants with high support needs can apply for a plan variation within 90 days of the reset reaching their plan. The criteria are narrow and the participant or their nominee has to apply, so if you support anyone who might qualify, tell them and their family it exists. The details are on health.gov.au under Securing the NDIS.

And resist the urge to panic. Discounting, chasing families or filling their inboxes over the next few months will read exactly as it is: a provider worried about its own revenue while families are worried about their support.

The honest move

Sometimes the most trustworthy thing a provider can do this year is tell a family that, with less funding, their money might be better spent somewhere else. A different support, a different priority, or fewer hours of yours.

It feels like giving up revenue, and in the short term it is. It's also the clearest signal you can send that you're on the participant's side, and families talk to each other. The provider who said "this is what I'd prioritise if I were you" is the one they come back to when things change, and the one they recommend to the family down the road.