NDIS architect admits he wouldn't have built it knowing what it'd become

Guardian Australia · Dan Jervis-Bardy, Sarah Basford Canales · Saturday 25 April 2026

NDIS architect admits he wouldn't have built it knowing what it'd become

The first head of the NDIS agency says neither side of politics would have signed off on the scheme had they known its eventual size, as Labor launches its biggest intervention yet.

Bowen reckons they wouldn't have built it if they'd seen what it became. Mate, that's every government program ever written — Medicare, the GST, the bloody Snowy Scheme. The honest admission isn't that the NDIS got too big. It's that nobody in Canberra knows how to build something and then run it. They cut the ribbon and walk off whistling.

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