What Would Tocqueville Say About the NDIS? 

A curious query was put to me recently: What would Alexis de Tocqueville say about the NDIS?  It’s an odd question to ask about a 21st-century Australian policy and a 19th-century French aristocrat. 

It came from someone who knew my interest in intellectual history, particularly as it tries to explain politics and how we live. But in considering the question, some pertinent aspects come to mind. 

The establishment of the NDIS occurred around the same time as two other grand national projects — the NBN earlier and the Gonski school funding reforms. All were high-water marks of the belief that governments could solve most problems by administrative rule and taxpayer-funded spending. In this worldview, every problem has a political solution. This is precisely the sort of thinking that worried Tocqueville. 

It is no surprise that Olivier Zunz titled his biography of the French traveller The Man Who Understood Democracy. Tocqueville anticipated many of the pathologies we now see of democratic politics: cost blowouts, creeping bureaucracy, and a tendency to crowd out private initiative. That the NDIS has seen costs spiral and, in some cases, succumbed to corruption would not have surprised him  — nor would it have surprised another great thinker about democracy, Nobel laureate James M. Buchanan. 

Though Tocqueville wrote in the early to mid-19th century and Buchanan mostly in the mid to late 20th, they shared a core concern: the balance between democratic ‘generosity’ and democratic self-discipline. 

The spirit behind the NDIS is considered admirable. Yet Tocqueville would have been cautious. In democracies, he warned, benevolent programmes can quietly replace the spirit of voluntary association with a reliance on distant authorities. When the state assumes what neighbours, communities, and families once did, it risks dulling the civic energies that sustain liberty.  

Civil society —  those countless acts of generosity, mutual aid, and shared responsibility —  withers when the habit of helping is replaced by the habit of applying. If the NDIS becomes solely an apparatus of bureaucracy, it weakens the very bonds of mutual responsibility it seeks to somehow strengthen. Compassion must not give way to dependency; administration must not stifle initiative. 

This was my worry when the NDIS took shape. Publications by my colleague Andrew Baker reinforced my concern that the hallmark of a healthy society is one which first seeks to solve its problems within the community before turning to the state. If there is some sort of index on this, the state part should be the smaller one. It is a matter of degree of course, but in recent years the balance has tilted heavily toward the administrative state —  and we are now living with the consequences. 

Buchanan’s lens is different. His focus is the arithmetic of politics. The NDIS is a textbook case of a programme whose benefits are concentrated and costs diffused. Political incentives will always favour expansion – broader eligibility, more generous packages, greater administrative reach – because those who gain are organised and vocal, while those who pay are uncoordinated and silent. Without constitutional-level constraints – firm rules on spending growth, transparent governance, and clear eligibility boundaries – such programmes drift toward fiscal unsustainability. Bureaucracies have their own interests, and once created, seldom shrink.  

Moreover, what we see too often now is the lack of skills in administering the administrative state. Waving a wand and wishing up a good idea does indeed present challenges. What begins as a measured guarantee can become a Leviathan, consuming more than the people ever intended. 

Both Tocqueville and Buchanan were committed to the democratic ideal and sought to improve it, albeit from different angles. Buchanan gives us the tools to understand political inefficiency; Tocqueville gives us the insight to see how democratic culture and civil society can be eroded. Together, they offer a warning and a challenge: taxpayer generosity without prudence can weaken the very democracy it seeks to serve. 

If, as I believe, initiatives like the NDIS risk undermining both fiscal discipline and the habits of a free people, the question is no longer what would Tocqueville say? but rather: what will we do about it? That’s a very good question.