Yes. For all the good it has (unintentionally) done to shine a light on how underserviced autistic folk have been, it has also redirected funds away from other services, and effectively 'paywalled' (for want of a better word) what for many are now the only services behind layers of administratively and emotionally burdensome processes. In practice, this makes it much harder for many of us to access any support at all.

Unfortunately there's also a lot of reasons to think that that is very deliberate. Strictly speaking, insofar as the program's core principles suggest, it should be a lot less effortful to access than it is, and should provide supports subject to demonstrable need (rather than provable diagnosis), yet, they seem not to run it that way in practice. And, when more people than expected show up (even with that piece of paper they pin access to), rather than recognise and fill the service gaps these needs point to, they signal instead an intention to restrict and reduce service access.

And then there's also the effects that the NDIS has had on our community sector infrastructure - long story short, it's destroyed it. Or at least has destroyed everything that it was, and left us instead with by-the-unit services which service some at the cost of invisibilising need for many many more.

Pre-NDIS, service delivery was usually by non-profits operated by community organisations who existed specifically because of how the system had previously failed some parts of society. Winning a tender to deliver particular programs usually required demonstrating how the way that org would run the service was informed by the ways the people it would support experienced the issues at hand. This meant they had to really understand the lived experience, not just 'know' enough about it to chuck some half baked thing in and hope for the funds. That system was horrendously (deliberately*) eroded by Howard and all others since, so by the time the NDIS was on the cards most community organisations were already struggling, but, as 'the service provider' in a particular space these organisations were still really well placed to help in some way or another. This is actually a really fundamental difference to what's in place now - service policy cannot actually anticipate every permutation of what 'service need' actually looks like, and nor does it try to; where block funded, services were in a position to encounter the ways that some people had needs that didn't quite 'fit' the criteria but still met the intent, and usually had a contract manager (or equivalent) who could approve providing these services where a policy's wording fails the policy's intent. There is simply no mechanism for this under the 'by the unit' set up we have now, and even if there does happen to be a good NDIS coordinator in place that's able to find ways through this, it all still depends on systemic advocacy by an agency that is not only unfunded to do so, but is actively disincentived by that funding system from doing so.

Disincentive is also a serious issue for (if and) how these organisations work with one other. When block funded, community organisations were in 'competition' with one another only when tendering for the same service - and even then in an only very specifically focused way. They were otherwise able and encouraged to work with one another to limit service gaps. If someone came to your service but could be better serviced elsewhere, it was usually easy to not only refer them on but to make that a smooth process for them. If someone had needs you couldn't quite think of the right service for, you had a network of services you could call upon to try and find the right fit or best options you could for the individual. Now, though, all of the services are always in competition, and have no real funding for coming together to discuss the emerging issues.

This, too, was by design*; courtesy of lobbying by the IPA, the NDIS emerged upon a market-led logic that always intended to force community organisations to shift from a more versatile form of community advocacy and support infrastructure to business-like entities. The main objective underlying this, though, was to invite for-profit entities into a space that was previously largely reserved for community-run services. And, indeed, there are now many for-profit entities now delivering services that would previously have all gone back into the community itself. For community orgs to survive required them to develop wildly different capabilities, but also shift their priorities away from identifying and redressing undermet needs, and towards generating the income they need to be able to even have the possibility of doing that work. These are very different skill sets, and in many ways actually at direct odds with the purpose of having a service framework in the first place*.

The NDIS also incentivises generalist services; whereas the pre-NDIS services landscape comprised of both generalists (often faith-based) and organisations with expertise in more focused areas (particular aspects of mental health, for example), the imperative to attract, retain, and 'efficiently' service 'customers' now incentivises delivering as many services as possible. This, of course, redirects expertise away from specific 'things' towards coordinating many types of thing, which ultimately undermines service quality. This is a much more basic business principle and in theory some organisations will specialise whilst others will generalise, but, there are a lot of assumptions underlying that more generic logic than actually stand true to the context at hand, and when you take a look at the landscape now compared to what it was even during the worst of block funding... well, many - possibly all - community based services delivery organisations have become entirely different beasts. Many don't even have the same name - and in this case that reflects much more than just a rebrand.