This article was prompted by The Shovel’s sharp satire about a women’s shelter accidentally receiving $2.5 billion because government misread it as a “smelter”. For allied health service providers to the NDIS, the underlying comparison is uncomfortably plausible.
When a smelter or steelworks becomes unviable, governments understand exactly what is at risk.
There is a large regional workforce. There are supply chains and dependent businesses. There is productive capacity of national importance. There is expensive infrastructure that deteriorates when it sits idle and may never be restored once it closes.
So governments intervene.
At Whyalla, the steelworks entered administration as part of Arrium in 2016 and was subsequently sold. Its successor was forced into administration again in 2025. The Australian and South Australian governments responded with a $2.4 billion rescue and transition package—not to protect the failed owner, they emphasised, but to preserve steelmaking capability, support workers and suppliers, and secure infrastructure considered important to the nation.
Governments have also recently committed $135 million to support the Nyrstar smelters in Port Pirie and Hobart, with a further $105 million announced in mid-2026 to fund feasibility work aimed at keeping both smelters viable for the long term.
And in the Hunter Valley, the federal and NSW governments have committed $2.5 billion to secure Tomago Aluminium’s electricity supply for the next decade—not because the smelter has failed, but because its existing energy contract expires in 2028 and government moved years ahead of that deadline to protect 1,000 jobs and a third of the nation’s aluminium capacity.
There are reasonable arguments for doing this. Once industrial capacity disappears, rebuilding it can be enormously difficult. The loss of a large employer can devastate a regional community. Governments therefore accept some responsibility for managing the transition rather than leaving the market, workers and local businesses to absorb it alone.
Now consider what is happening in the NDIS.
The NDIS did not simply discover an existing allied health market. Government policy actively created and expanded it.
Demand-side funding encouraged participants to purchase allied health services. Administered prices made new services viable. Universities expanded training, and practitioners developed careers and businesses around the demand created by the scheme. Clinicians established practices, signed leases, employed staff and developed specialised expertise. Governments relied on thousands of private providers to build the service capacity required to make individualised choice and control possible.
Many of those providers are now woven into local health, disability and early-childhood systems, particularly in regional communities where one small practice may work across the NDIS, aged care, primary care, schools and private services.
The NDIS is growing faster than governments are prepared to fund, and government is redesigning the market it created.
Thriving Kids will shift many children away from individual NDIS packages and towards a different service model. That may be the right policy direction. But changing the funding architecture also changes the economic foundations on which thousands of small allied health businesses were encouraged to build.
Where is the transition plan for that productive capacity?
This week, COSBOA and Allied Health Professions Australia drew attention to ASIC data showing that first-time external administration appointments among allied health providers increased from 17 in 2022–23 to 68 in 2024–25—a 300 per cent increase.
Those insolvencies predate Thriving Kids. They do not prove that any single funding decision caused those businesses to fail. But they show that another major government-created transition is about to land on a provider market that is already vulnerable.
If these were large industrial employers concentrated in several regional towns, we would undertake a workforce impact assessment. We would map the supply chain. We would identify stranded assets and capabilities. Governments would negotiate directly with employers and unions. Transition funding, concessional finance, retraining and regional adjustment packages would all be on the table.
Allied health providers have none of the structural features that trigger that response.
They are thousands of small, dispersed businesses. They are largely female-owned and staffed. Many practitioners are self-employed. Unionisation is limited, representation is fragmented across numerous professions, and there is no single organisation with the authority to negotiate for the workforce as a whole.
Most importantly, they have no chokepoint.
When a smelter stops, production stops visibly and immediately. When an allied health practice closes, the system continues to appear functional. A waiting list becomes longer. A child loses a therapist. A regional town loses one more service. A clinician takes a different job. A business owner absorbs the debt.
No single closure creates a national crisis. The capacity simply disappears in increments too small for government to see.
Music therapy gave us an early demonstration of this vulnerability. An administrative decision proposed moving creative arts therapies out of the NDIS therapy-support category. With the stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen, the economic basis of an overwhelmingly feminised profession was threatened.
Music therapists then had to organise, produce evidence, defend their qualifications and demonstrate the effectiveness of work that participants had already been purchasing through the scheme. The decision was deferred, an independent review was conducted and music therapy survived as a recognised therapeutic support—although it was subsequently subjected to a separate pricing reduction.
But the larger warning was clear: an entire small profession’s position in a publicly constructed market could be destabilised through an administrative decision, with no formal mechanism for protecting the workforce capacity that government policy had helped create.
What happened first to music therapy is now a risk across the wider NDIS allied health market.
This is not an argument that every provider should be rescued or that an existing funding model should never change. Industrial assistance does not guarantee that every industrial business survives either.
It is an argument about who carries the cost of policy-induced transition.
For strategically important industrial work, the risk is socialised. Governments recognise productive capacity, map the consequences of its loss and invest in preserving or transforming it.
For small, feminised care businesses, the risk is privatised. Governments change the purchasing architecture and expect individual practitioners, business owners, workers, participants and communities to absorb the consequences.
The difference is not the social value of the work. It is its structural visibility and political power.
A smelter has a large regional workforce, nationally legible infrastructure and the capacity to create an immediate economic and political crisis.
Allied health has no furnace that suddenly goes cold.
Its infrastructure is human. Its capacity is dispersed. Its losses are experienced privately. And at the federal level, much of the workforce is still barely counted, planned or represented.
This vulnerability has an industrial counterpart. In 2025, the Fair Work Commission found that minimum rates for health professionals under the principal federal award had been affected by gender-based undervaluation. It has now finalised a new classification and wage structure, with the phased correction beginning in October 2026. The Commission’s analysis traced the problem partly to an award system historically anchored to the C10 rate for a Certificate III-qualified manufacturing tradesperson—a system that never adequately translated the qualifications and work value of feminised health professions into corresponding wages. That is a separate argument, but not an unrelated one.
That is precisely why protection cannot depend on market power alone.
If government creates a care market and then substantially redesigns it, it also carries responsibility for understanding what capacity may be lost, involving the workforce in the transition, and ensuring that communities are not left without services once the restructuring is complete.
Otherwise, we will keep spending billions to preserve the productive capacity we can see—while allowing the capacity that sustains people’s lives to disappear almost unnoticed.
Which raises a much bigger question:
Who is this market actually for?
This is one part of a larger question about how health workforce markets distribute money, authority and protection.
Industrial context: The C10 minimum under the Manufacturing Award for 2026–27 is $29.45 per hour. The initial minimum applying to an AQF Level 7 graduate health professional under the new Health Professionals and Support Services Award structure is $32.88 per hour—approximately 12 per cent higher—when the phased changes commence from the first full pay period beginning on or after 1 October 2026. The new health-professional rates continue to be phased in until 2030, so this is a comparison at commencement, not the final corrected relativity. See Gender-based undervaluation—priority awards, [2025] FWCFB 74; [2025] FWCFB 297; and [2026] FWCFB 123.
