It hit with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

Anthony Albanese hadn’t been long elected when the number crunchers came knocking with unwelcome news: National Disability Insurance Scheme costs were blowing out so fast that every Australian who paid personal tax would be on the hook for an average $2800 each in the coming year.

Worse still, they also forecast the annual cost would balloon to $8000 a taxpayer within a decade.

The NDIS program is one of the fastest growing areas of government spending.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

The message was simple: the NDIS, born just a decade earlier, was on course to blow up the budget.

I was in the budget lock-up in Canberra when the government revealed these updated forecasts. It was a year-and-a-half ago, but I vividly remember the moment it dawned on Australia’s most senior journalists that there was a big problem.

How big? The dollars involved are daunting, but it’s the politics that are the most challenging. That’s because doing something about runaway NDIS costs means pitting the reasonable rights of Australia’s disabled against the reasonable rights of the nation’s other taxpayers – with both groups having good reason to be grumpy about what’s happening.

That’s wake-in-the-night stuff for any government to manage.

So what did they do? It took a further six months, but then the government........

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