The Socialist Equality Party (SEP), in conjunction with the Committee for Public Education (CFPE) and the Health Workers Rank-and-File Committee (HWRFC), will hold an online public meeting on August 16 at 2 p.m. (AEST) to discuss a socialist perspective to fight the Albanese Labor government’s sweeping attacks on the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), the federally funded program on which more than 770,000 people rely for daily necessities including personal care, in-home assistance, therapy, and mobility aids.

Click here to register for the meeting.

Labor’s NDIS Amendment Bill seeks to strip $38 billion from the NDIS over four years, the largest single cut to a government social program in Australian history. Government modelling indicates some 240,000 existing participants will be removed from the scheme by 2031, while a further 110,000 will be denied access altogether.

The main targets are disabled children. Almost two-thirds of those Labor intends to remove are under the age of 18. They are to be forced into so-called foundational supports, programs that do not yet exist, while those remaining on the NDIS will face sweeping reductions to the assistance on which they depend.

It must be emphasised that even before the legislation is passed, cuts to supports and removals are already underway. Australian Neurodivergent Parents Association president Sarah Langston told the Guardian in April that, since the end of 2024, approximately 29,000 participants had either partially or totally lost access to NDIS supports, including nearly 12,000 children with developmental delays removed from individualised support before any replacement system even exists.

The most defenceless and vulnerable sections of the working class are being targeted first, but the attacks are aimed at all. The entire working class must be politically mobilised to halt these measures, which are the spearhead of a broader offensive against the social rights and living standards of workers as a whole.

What is driving this onslaught is the deepening crisis of world capitalism. The same Albanese government that is stripping $38 billion from disability support has raised annual military spending to around $60 billion and committed $368 billion to the AUKUS nuclear submarine program, integrating Australia directly into US-led war preparations against China.

Moreover, it is the same Albanese government which has supported, funded and armed the genocidal slaughter in Gaza by Israel, was the first government to hail Trump’s murderous war against Iran, which is escalating on an hourly basis, and which has transformed vast swathes of Australia into a staging post for war against China.

Across the globe, governments are slashing healthcare, education and welfare to boost the profits of the super-wealthy and divert trillions into militarism and war. War abroad means war against the working class at home.

The meeting will examine why a genuine fight against these cuts cannot mean defending the NDIS as it was designed. From its inception under the Gillard Labor government, the NDIS was constructed as a market-based scheme, a voucher system channelling public money into private, for-profit providers. Labor is not abandoning this model; it is stripping away funding while leaving the privatised structure intact. Any serious fight must break with the logic of privatised, profit-driven care.

The meeting will take up and examine the demands advanced by the SEP in its statement:

• Withdraw the NDIS Amendment Bill. Reinstate every participant removed from the scheme and restore every funding cut.
• Redirect the billions squandered on war and the military to disability care, health, education and other essential social services. Place disability and health services under public ownership and democratic workers control, organised according to social need, not private profit.

These demands cannot be realised through appeals to Labor, the Liberal-National Coalition, the Greens or the trade union apparatus. They require the independent political mobilisation of the working class against the capitalist system itself.

This meeting is being convened by the SEP together with the HWRFC and CFPE because, alongside people with disabilities and their families, health workers, teachers and educators will be on the front line of this assault. As hospitals and schools are inundated with those thrown off the scheme, these workers will be forced to absorb the consequences, while the union bureaucracies collaborate with the government.

The HWRFC has already taken up this fight, unanimously adopting a resolution against the NDIS cuts and beginning to mobilise health workers. The CFPE has just established the Victorian Educators Rank-and-File Committee, bringing together teachers and education workers to fight the austerity agenda of which these cuts are the spearhead.

We will discuss how to deepen and broaden this struggle, how disabled people, their families, and workers across every industry can establish rank-and-file committees, independent of the trade union bureaucracy and every capitalist party. The fight against these cuts must be linked to the broader struggle against austerity and war, and to the building of the Socialist Equality Party as the revolutionary leadership of the working class.

We urge workers, young people, NDIS participants and their families to register for this meeting on August 16 at 2 p.m. and join this critical discussion.