NDIS could carry day for Labor

AMID all the noise of the election campaign, there is one sleeper issue that could almost single-handedly determine the result – so much so it’s been dubbed “the new WorkChoices”.

And yet it has barely graced the radar of much political commentary or even the messaging of the leaders themselves until Anthony Albanese accidentally and spectacularly brought it to the fore.

This is, of course, the National Disability Insurance Scheme, Labor’s policy for which Albanese was infamously unable to articulate last week – struggling to outline his own six-point plan.

Labor strategists held their heads in their hands while Liberal strategists rubbed the latter with glee, and yet when Newspoll came out on Monday, Albanese’s approval was up, Labor’s primary was up and its two-party-preferred vote had risen to a landslide-level 54 per cent.

Likewise, none of Albo’s stumbles have put a dent in Labor’s 2PP. Why? The issues that have dominated the campaign – the economy, cost of living, health and national security – have

Labor and the Coalition fairly evenly matched. In many cases, their policies are exactly the same. But Labor-aligned researchers are picking up massive community concern over one area where the two parties are very different – the NDIS.

“I haven’t seen anything like it since WorkChoices,” one pollster told News Corp.

The issue came from nowhere to dominate the first Sky News People’s Forum when a woman revealed her four-year-old autistic son had his funding slashed by 30 per cent.

Albanese’s response was probably the strongest of the night, while the PM quibbled about costs.

Albanese later won that debate on the basis that he was warmer and more empathetic – but the NDIS retreated from public view as a first order issue.

Last week, however, thanks to Albanese’s gaffe, it has shot back to the fore. Labor is once more reaping the benefits.

It is an immovable fact of politics that people will almost always vote with their hip pocket.

And the NDIS goes straight to the hip pocket of those who desperately need it. Any moves to take that funding away – or even fear that a party might – and that party can kiss goodbye to almost 100 per cent of those voters. That’s 500,000 Australians – not to mention their families.

But what is less well known is that the NDIS is also a massive job-creation scheme, employing more than 250,000 Australians. That’s an awful lot of voters whose livelihoods are on the line.

To put those numbers into sharp relief, the number of people either on or working for the NDIS in six key marginal Coalition seats is greater than the margin those seats are held by.

Much of the credit for this goes to Albanese’s predecessor Bill Shorten. No doubt wanting to keep his erstwhile arch rival busy, Albanese gave Shorten the herculean task of making the

NDIS both fair and sustainable.

Against all odds, Shorten produced a policy that will do just that. Wrangling such a massively complex, expensive, sensitive and historic scheme takes brains and balls. Shorten showed he had plenty of both.

Despite the anxiety of advocates in the sector, he acknowledged there was waste, but he also worked hard to ensure that Labor could be trusted to only target the genuine waste without cutting support that was needed.

As it happens, my best mate is on the NDIS. He is not only quadriplegic, but also a business intelligence analyst who has worked in the disability services sector. I doubt there is anyone in the country who better understands how it needs to be reformed.

He nominated three key areas – making sure NDIS assessors have much better knowledge of disability requirements; eliminating the Kafkaesque bureaucratic process recipients need to go through; and making sure funding is not reduced if a recipient fails to spend all the funding they receive over a given period.

I spoke to Shorten last week and he named these exact areas as his priority. The funny thing was I hadn’t yet told him what my mate had said.

And so Anthony Albanese appears set for a thumping election win, thanks to Bill Shorten. What a long strange trip it’s been.