Sydney’s worst areas for National Disability Insurance Scheme fraud are Labor heartland seats home to the city’s largest Muslim and immigrant populations, a data analysis has found.
Of the top 10 electorates for NDIS provider compliance issues, seven are in Sydney’s west or southwest, and three are in Melbourne, according to the Kismet Care Index, which has identified trouble postcodes using enforcement actions published by NDIS Quality Safeguards Commission.
The worst affected Sydney electorates are Fowler, McMahon, Watson, Blaxland, Werriwa, Parramatta and Banks, which are all held by Labor except for Fowler, which was held by Labor until being won by Independent MP Dai Le in 2022.
At the time of the 2027 Census they were 7.5%, 13.8%, 25.1%, 31.7%, 16%, 10.5% and 6.3% Muslim respectively, were all minority Australian-born except for Banks on 55.9%, and all had majority non-English speaking populations.
The only NSW seats with large Muslim populations missing from the list are Chifley, also in western Sydney, which was 9.6% Islamic in 2021, and Barton in the city’s south which was 8.2% Muslim.
Chifley was 49.2% foreign-born and 54% non-English speaking, while Barton was 54.2% foreign-born with 62.9% of residents speaking a language other than English at home.
Kismet CEO Mark Woodland told the AFR the care index used enforcement actions, including banning orders, compliance notices and revocations of registration, in order to try to help improve NDIS outcomes and eliminate fraud, which is estimated to cost taxpayers at least $8 billion a year.
The NDIS now costs taxpayers $50 billion a year – more than Medicare – and is projected to double by the mid-2030s.
NDIS expert Mona Nikidehaghani from the University of Wollongong said issues in outer-metropolitan suburbs could be caused by a denser market causing “more competition leading to more opportunistic behaviours and aggressive recruitment of customers”, and due to the prevalence of unregistered providers.
Monash University Professor Dennis Petrie said lower-quality services in the trouble spots were the result of providers operating “at the margin of sustainability”, while Cherry Baylosis from the Disability Advocacy Network Australia blamed a “lack of governance and oversight” due to the NDIS rollout outpacing regulations.
The data comes after a series of high profile enforcement actions by the NDIS’s Fraud Fusion Taskforce in western Sydney, including raids linked to Middle Eastern man Billal Chami, who allegedly stole $3.5 million from the scheme.
Header image: Left, Billal Chami being arrested. Right, Indian Muslim fraudster Rehana Memon being arrested (FFT).
