A critical examination of data for market stewardship: The case of the Australian National Disability Insurance Scheme

Market mechanisms have emerged as a dominant approach in the provision of public welfare services, most notably in sectors such as disability care, aged care, and health care. While this shift promises potential benefits such as improved efficiency, enhanced service quality, and increased consumer support, it also presents significant challenges around equity, access, and the potential for market failure in the absence of effective regulation and governance. Stewardship of quasi-markets from the national to the local level is essential for the success of such programs, and the effectiveness of that stewardship relies in part on good-quality data for decision-making. This research note provides a critical examination of the National Disability Insurance Scheme's (NDIS) data management in Australia and its implications for local market stewardship. This analysis highlights the considerable barriers local market stewards encounter in using NDIS market data for stewardship activities due to the pervasive issues of incomplete datasets and a lack of granular, comprehensive data. These obstacles constrain effective local decision-making, obscure market predictability, and may hinder service improvement initiatives at the grassroots level. The study acknowledges ongoing improvements in NDIS data management while emphasising the need for rapid progress to ensure meaningful choice and control for all NDIS participants.

Points for practitioners

• Public sector markets can provide efficiencies for government, but they also require management to ensure they are functioning effectively and protecting equity.
• ‘Stewardship’ actions, to address market issues, require good-quality data.
• At present, data on the NDIS—both collected and distributed—have serious limitations that are hindering efforts to address market issues.