04/06/2026
https://www.facebook.com/share/1BbxFFTPgP/?mibextid=wwXIfr
Due to my mounting horror that we may one day accidentally wake up and discover Pauline Hanson is Prime Minister, I have decided the safest course of action is for me to become Australia’s benevolent dictator instead.
Not forever obviously. Just until everyone calms down and stops trying to protest their way out of having grown up tax policies.
If I was benevolent dictator of Australia for one year, I would not abolish the NDIS. I would simply make everyone in the system sit down quietly and explain what exactly they think is happening right now.
At present the system appears to operate on the assumption that parents of profoundly disabled children are powered entirely by love, vibes and perhaps the occasional Woolworths mud cake.
Currently the government is paying $70 an hour for support workers, $10194 for someone to write a report explaining your child still has autism, and approximately seventeen different admin fees so someone can send you a PDF attachment called FINAL_v6_REAL_FINAL.pdf
But the mother awake at 3am preventing her teenager from absconding into traffic? Apparently that is just “parenting.”
So under my dictatorship, the first thing I would do is create a category within the NDIS called Family Delivered Supports.
Not for ordinary parenting. Nobody is getting paid because little Johnny refuses broccoli.
This would only apply where families are already performing disability support work that would otherwise cost the state enormous amounts of money.
And yes, they would actually be paid properly for it.
Not agency-owner-buying-a-third-investment-property money. But real wages.
If the state is currently willing to pay support providers $70–$100 an hour for equivalent work, then families performing approved high-intensity support should receive something in the vicinity of $35–$60 an hour depending on complexity, qualifications and intensity of care.
Overnight active support, complex medical care, specialist behaviour support and long-distance transport would all count as paid work, because they are paid work when performed by someone unrelated to the participant. And because an ordinary parent of a 12 year old has never had to follow them to the toilet to make sure they don’t try to drink from it.
At the moment the government accepts this labour has economic value when done by a stranger with a lanyard, but magically becomes priceless maternal instinct the second a family member does it.
There would still be limits. Capped hours, mandatory respite and superannuation would all exist because otherwise Australia would accidentally reinvent feudalism through disability policy.
In practice this could mean a parent providing overnight supervision, a sibling implementing behaviour support strategies, or a family member acting as transport, therapy assistant and emergency response system all at once. It could apply to families managing PEG feeds, seizure monitoring, violent meltdowns, school exclusion or constant supervision needs in rural areas where the “workforce solution” is currently one exhausted woman and a Facebook group. It would go to whoever is providing the support - a parent, a grandparent, a priceless aunt or uncle, or some mixture of the above.
Right now the system calls all of this “informal supports,” which is a very elegant bureaucratic phrase meaning “labour we desperately rely on but prefer not to financially acknowledge.”
Families would still need training, safeguarding checks and regular reassessments because this is Australia and we cannot emotionally regulate unless there is a portal involved.
There would also need to be protections against coercion and underpayment, and clear recognition that family care is not infinitely sustainable simply because guilt currently subsidises the disability system.
And importantly: the disabled person controls the funding as soon as they are cognitively able. The goal is not “trap women inside forever while calling them heroes.” The goal is to recognise actual care labour while preserving autonomy and choice.
The funniest part is this might not even cost dramatically more than the current system. At this moment we already have burnt out families, workforce shortages, emergency respite shortages, children excluded from school, parents leaving the workforce and enough duplicated reports to reforest Tasmania.
At some point governments are going to realise there are not actually enough workers in Australia to replace families entirely. And then suddenly my “radical socialist dictatorship” starts sounding suspiciously like basic arithmetic.
Thank you for your support during this difficult transition to authoritarianism.
