Today’s bloated NDIS would never have been greenlit, its former head says. How did we get here?

The Albanese government this week launched the most significant intervention in the disability support scheme’s history

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The national disability insurance scheme was a Labor vision brought to life with the Coalition’s blessing, an act of political bi-partisanship that would change the lives of millions of Australians and their families.

But David Bowen, the first chief executive of the agency in charge of the NDIS, doubts it might ever have happened had either side known what it would become 15 years later.