See no Evil, Hear no Evil, Speak no Evil: The grey literature and Australia's failure to address change in the National Disability Insurance Scheme

Abstract

The National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) represents a social reform of a magnitude unseen in Australia. The Scheme's significant scope for impact warrants that proper performance evaluation is undertaken, that stakeholder interactions are collaborative and that the scheme is outcome driven. This article reviews a selection of grey literature to gain insights into the persistence of challenges facing the Scheme, as well as how the policy discourse has developed between 2011 and 2020. Our review finds that key issues related to the Scheme's effectiveness and sustainability have been persistent and repeatedly documented by stakeholders. Furthermore, we find that, had the grey literature been heeded, the current and predictable challenges facing the NDIS could have been mitigated at least to some extent. Our contribution here is to renew scholarly vigour toward the Scheme by canvassing its challenges as identified by commentators, policymakers and the industry itself and to focus attention on the capacity for this literature to predict and describe potential and extant problems as well as providing mitigations. By extension, we provide a catalogue of these challenges while showcasing the value of grey literature as one source of triangulating evidence in informing policy evaluation.