Navigating the Australian National Disability Insurance Scheme: A Scheme of Big Ideas and Big Challenges.

One of Australia's biggest reforms - the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) - is intended to provide people with choice and certainty of access to disability supports. It replaced an underfunded, unfair, fragmented and inefficient "system". However, recently, the NDIS has received criticism in regard to access and the provision of supports. These issues, addressed elsewhere, have arguably arisen due to concerns about cost. This article pre-empts these concerns by bridging a gap between the extra-legal academic literature concerning the NDIS and the sparse literature concerning NDIS law. It does so by providing a detailed exposition of the NDIS legal framework embedded in the relevant interdisciplinary extra-legal literature. It concludes that if the NDIS is to succeed it cannot be dominated by concern with the financial sustainability of the system.

Mandatory Welfare Drug Treatment in Australia.

In 2017 and 2018 Australia almost implemented laws to require unemployed people to undertake mandatory drug testing and treatment. Debate about linking welfare with mandatory drug treatment suffers from the complexity and paucity of research specifically about the efficacy of mandatory welfare drug treatment. This allows the possibility for mandatory welfare drug treatment to remain on the political horizon. This article situates the Australian proposal to introduce mandatory drug treatment for the unemployed within the relevant research literature. It concludes that the literature shows there is little chance of efficacy if welfare is linked with mandatory drug treatment. Instead, cost ineffectiveness and perverse outcomes are more probable than treatment efficacy.