The NDIS: Bureaucracy, Big Business, and Moneypots

Evidence check — 10 September 2026

This article was published in December 2024 and has not been rewritten. The dated notes below score it against the evidence now available — where later evidence supports the argument, where policy changed the ground underneath it, and where a claim does not hold up. Part 4 of five.

Update — 10 September 2026

Subsequent reporting has put names and figures to this structure

This article was published in December 2024. In September 2026, Michael West Media published an investigation by Claudia Weisenberger, Inside Job. How former insiders and corporateers are cashing in on the NDIS, reporting on corporate and private-equity activity in and around the scheme.

Michael West Media reports that the scheme has since grown to a $53.8 billion annual market; that Quadrant Private Equity, owner of the mobility equipment retailer Aidacare, borrowed $540 million against that business in February 2026 and paid it to itself as a dividend; and that one month later Aidacare gave the ACCC a court-enforceable undertaking, admitting it had likely misled NDIS participants about their consumer rights for more than three years, with no financial penalty imposed. It also reports that two former chief executives of the NDIA have since taken senior commercial roles connected to the scheme — Martin Hoffman, who oversaw assistive technology pricing, at Aidacare from July 2023, and Rob De Luca at McMillan Shakespeare, which owns the plan manager Plan Tracker. On those appointments, Aidacare told Michael West Media that Mr Hoffman’s transition was consistent with applicable post-separation obligations, and Mr De Luca said he had complied with his legal, governance and confidentiality obligations; the investigation’s argument is not that a rule was broken, but that no cooling-off rule exists to govern such a move.

Those are Michael West Media’s findings, not ours, and the chronology runs one way only: we set out the structure in December 2024, and that reporting was published in September 2026. What it adds is named companies, named individuals and specific figures set against the funding chain described above — government funding to providers to corporate owners to shareholders — beyond the single case of Freedom Care Group.

It also bears on the second argument in this piece: that policy aimed at the small end of the market leaves the structural incentives at the centre untouched. Michael West Media reports that the government’s proposed plan management tender would favour operators at the scale of My Plan Manager, which supports close to 50,000 participants, and that the more than 1,400 smaller plan managers are unlikely to qualify. On our reading that is the same shape as the Music and Art therapy decision: a visible cut at the periphery, with the economics at the centre unchanged.

The reporting concerns a different set of companies to the case study that follows, and it speaks to one part of the argument made here: where the money goes, and which end of the market policy leaves untouched. On that part the fair claim is the narrow one: subsequent investigative reporting has added specific, documented examples consistent with the structural risks Culture of One identified in 2024.

Evidence check — 10 September 2026

Where the capital went — and the part of this argument that does not hold

The clearest evidence for the argument above is in an investor’s own words. IFM Investors’ portfolio page records that it invested in My Plan Manager in July 2019 “with a thesis to drive growth and productivity to create a platform asset in the National Disability Insurance Scheme (‘NDIS’) plan management sector”; that its value-creation plan “enabled the business to acquire and integrate acquisitions efficiently, a key capability in the fragmented plan management market”; that MPM was supporting more than 60,000 participants and processing several billion dollars of payments annually at exit; and that IFM sold the business in December 2023 to Gallagher Bassett, a subsidiary of the NYSE-listed Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. IFM Investors, private equity portfolio. None of that describes wrongdoing. It describes something plainer than the language used above: government-funded participant expenditure had become an investable asset class with an explicit consolidation and value-creation thesis attached to it.

On conduct, the ACCC published a report on consumer issues in NDIS markets in February 2026 covering false or misleading advertising, misrepresentation of consumer guarantee rights, overcharging and unfair contract terms, and recording six infringement notices totalling $118,800, Federal Court proceedings against one provider, and a court-enforceable undertaking over unfair contract terms. ACCC, observations on consumer issues in the NDIS, February 2026. Separately, Aidacare gave the ACCC a court-enforceable undertaking admitting it likely made false or misleading representations to some customers about their consumer guarantee rights between January 2022 and May 2025, and likely used unfair standard-form contract terms limiting remedies on faulty products; it agreed to remediate affected consumers. ACCC media release.

One thing here needs correcting. The funding chain set out above is a claim about where the money ends up, and it holds. It is not a claim that the market is steadily concentrating into fewer, larger hands, and this article should not be read as predicting one, because the later data does not show it. On the NDIA’s June 2026 figures the largest providers’ share of payments has fallen in most categories: the top ten providers’ share of disability support worker payments fell from 8.9% in early 2023 to 6.9% in the six months to December 2025; therapy was effectively flat at about 10.6%; support coordination fell from 7.9% to 7.2%. Most NDIS provider markets are more fragmented than they were, not less. NDIA Annual Pricing Review 2026–27.

The sharper claim, and the one that data does support, is this: the scheme can stay fragmented by provider count while a small corporate cohort takes a disproportionate share of the money. In the same report, companies are 17% of active disability support worker providers and receive 78% of payments in that category ($13.3 billion), against sole traders at 78% of providers and 15% of payments; in therapy, companies are about a third of providers and take more than 70% of payments. And in one vertical the concentration is explicit — plan management, where the NDIA notes that “the fixed monthly fee favours providers that operate at scale, and the market is consolidated in that direction”, and where the same five largest plan managers have processed a significant and stable share of payments since the first half of 2023. That is the vertical institutional capital bought into, and the stated thesis for buying it — quoted above, from the investor itself — was consolidation in a fragmented market.

Evidence check — 10 September 2026

The macro claim has held up

That sentence is the broadest claim in this series, and it is the one with the most contemporaneous evidence sitting behind it. In July 2024 MacroBusiness asked the question directly — “Has the NDIS saved the economy?” — noting that public demand had reached a record 27.2% of GDP in the March 2024 quarter, that total employment grew 2.2% in the year to May 2024 while market-sector employment grew 0.3%, and that almost all of Australia’s jobs growth was coming from government spending, much of it NDIS-related. MacroBusiness, July 2024.

In December 2024, the same month this article was published, CBA’s head of Australian economics observed that the usual relationship between non-farm GDP and employment growth “is simply not there”, and that “the disparity is largely explained by strong growth in non-market employment, which doesn’t make a commensurate contribution to measured GDP”. CBA note, December 2024.

That supports the sentence above. Care spending was holding up employment while the market economy weakened, which is the same fragility this article is about seen from the macro side: an economy leaning on a transfer payment is exposed to any correction in it. That is an argument for reforming the scheme carefully rather than abruptly, not for leaving it alone.

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