Why I am cautiously optimistic about women absorbing the entire NDIS care burden

I awoke this morning to a barrage of deeply unhelpful negativity in the press. A new poll has surfaced showing that Jacinta Allan is feeling the heat, with her Labor party trailing the Coalition and One Nation ahead of November’s state election. The entire media apparatus seems to be in a panic, and the source of this electoral anxiety is apparently the recent cuts to the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

Advocacy groups are running around with their hair on fire, telling anyone who will listen that women will be the “biggest losers” from these NDIS cuts. The narrative being aggressively pushed by these so-called experts is that as state-funded care vanishes, the crushing burden of managing complex physical and psychiatric disabilities will inevitably shift onto the shoulders of unpaid female relatives.

I find this phrasing incredibly toxic. “Losers”? Since when is doing tens of thousands of hours of uncompensated medical and domestic labor a “loss”? Where the advocacy groups see a catastrophic failure of the social safety net, I see a remarkable pivot to the passion economy.

I was discussing this very issue over a spectacular wagyu tartare at Society last Thursday with a senior Labor strategist. He looked absolutely drained. Ruling is, quite frankly, an exhausting endeavor, and he confided in me that the state budget simply cannot sustain the NDIS in its current form. “The money has to come from somewhere, mate,” he said, swirling a 2018 Shiraz that cost more than a specialized wheelchair ramp. And he is entirely right. The money has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is the invisible, unquantifiable void of women’s free time.

Let us take a moment to appreciate the macroeconomic brilliance of this strategy. By slashing the NDIS, we are not “cutting care,” as the alarmists claim. We are simply decentralizing it. We are disrupting the bureaucratic monopoly of paid professionals and handing the reigns back to the agile, highly motivated sector of mothers, daughters, and sisters who have absolutely no other choice.

I know a thing or two about the suffocating weight of domestic responsibility. Just last month, my wife was out of town at a wellness retreat in Byron Bay, and our live-in nanny, Maria, came down with a vicious strain of the flu. For an entire Saturday afternoon—from roughly 1:00 PM to 4:15 PM, when I finally swallowed my pride and paid an emergency babysitter triple time to relieve me—I was the sole care provider for my two neurotypical, fully mobile children.

It was a crucible. I was forced to navigate the treacherous interface of our high-end microwave without the instruction manual. I had to locate the organic fruit snacks. I was required to negotiate a screen-time dispute without the presence of a dedicated HR representative. But I emerged from that harrowing three-hour ordeal a much stronger, more resilient man. Why are we denying Australian women the chance to experience this kind of profound character development on a permanent, inescapable basis?

Jacinta Allan is facing pressure in the polls because voters are fundamentally selfish. They look at the Labor party trailing the Coalition and One Nation, and they think the government is failing them. No, you are failing the government. The state is politely asking you to step up, quit your frivolous paying jobs, abandon your career trajectories, and provide round-the-clock occupational therapy to your dependents so that we can balance the budget. Is that really so much to ask?

The fact that One Nation is gaining in the polls is fascinating to me as a student of political sociology. Clearly, the electorate is angry. But they are angry at the wrong people. They should be angry at the advocacy groups spreading this pessimistic narrative. If you constantly tell a woman she is the “biggest loser” of a government policy, she might start to believe it, rather than seeing herself as a volunteer fiscal patriot.

I sat on a panel recently in Davos—or perhaps it was Aspen, the chalets all blend together at a certain altitude—about the future of the welfare state. The consensus among the fourteen male billionaires on the stage was absolute: the era of the government doing things is over. We have entered the bold new era of the government politely asking women to do things while the government focuses on more pressing matters, like subsidizing fossil fuel extraction or building highly controversial, massively over-budget toll roads.

Honestly, I consider myself a staunch feminist. And what is more empowering, more fundamentally feminist, than trusting women to handle the entire collapse of the state’s social safety net? We are empowering them to become amateur speech pathologists, crisis counselors, and physical therapists, all without the tedious burden of acquiring a medical degree or receiving a biweekly salary. We are cutting through the red tape and allowing women to interface directly with the raw, unfiltered reality of systemic institutional abandonment.

Yet, the complaints persist. I open my inbox and it is full of messages from exhausted mothers detailing their lack of sleep, their evaporating savings, and their complete isolation from society. To these women, I offer a gentle piece of advice: mindset is everything. Have you tried reframing your crushing, twenty-four-hour caregiving obligations as a disruptive startup? Have you considered that by losing your career to care for a disabled relative, you are actually reducing your carbon footprint?

The political reality is that Jacinta Allan needs to hold her nerve. If she caves to the pressure of these advocacy groups and reinstates the NDIS funding, she will be sending a dangerous message to the market: that the government can be bullied into providing basic human dignity. We cannot afford to set that precedent.

If Labor wants to win back the voters currently flirting with the Coalition and One Nation, they need to lean into the cuts. They need to sell the romance of unpaid labor. They need to remind the public that before the NDIS, we had a perfectly functional system where women simply suffered in silence behind closed doors, and the budget looked fantastic.

So, to Jacinta Allan, I say: hold the line. Do not let the polls or the desperate pleas of exhausted, financially ruined mothers sway your commitment to fiscal discipline. And to the women of Victoria, who are about to absorb the entire weight of the state’s abdicated responsibilities, I say: you are welcome. You are about to embark on the most rewarding, mandatory, entirely uncompensated journey of your lives. I will be cheering you on from the Qantas Chairman's Lounge.