An NDIS participant discovers that the Australian Government keeps a file on him. The trouble begins when he asks to read it.


Seventy-one thousand, eight hundred and eighty-six dollars.
That's what the Australian government has allocated to keep me functioning as a reasonably respectable member of society.
Seventy-one fucking thousand dollars.
And where am I sleeping?
In a Toyota Camry.
Welcome to Australia, ladies and gentlemen. The lucky country. Where you can have seventy-one grand in disability funding and still wake up in a car park in Merino wondering whether you've got enough petrol to run the heater, while the clipboard-wielding priesthood of the NDIS siphon off the proceeds for "Capacity Building."

I should explain something.
I'm mentally ill.
There. I've said it.
Whoops. Asperger's syndrome.
Apparently, I don't always understand the delicate social conventions governing human interaction.
Such as knowing when to shut the fuck up.
Whoops. ADHD.
Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. My brain has approximately seventeen investigations running simultaneously, three overdue invoices, two parliamentary complaints, and a burning desire to find out which bureaucrat authorised what.
Concentration problems, they tell me.
Funny. I can concentrate on a disputed Wattle Lane statement reconciliation for six bloody hours, cross-referencing CSV exports against PDF remittance advices until my eyes bleed.
Whoops. Schizotypal personality disorder.
Now there's a beauty.
Sounds like something the Department of Social Services developed in a laboratory and accidentally released into the community to drive auditors insane.
Apparently, my thinking can be unconventional.
Well, thank Christ for that.
Because conventional thinking appears to have produced a seventy-one-thousand-dollar disability support plan and a middle-aged journalist sleeping behind a steering wheel.

And then there's the really interesting bit.
I have difficulty correcting myself.
I interrupt. I get carried away. I lose the thread. Sometimes I say something outrageous and realise three minutes later that I've just insulted the very bastard I'm trying to get an invoice out of.
Whoops.
But here's the thing.
Being mentally ill doesn't mean I can't count.
And it certainly doesn't mean the government gets to stop counting when I start demanding the receipts.

I’ve worked as a journalist. I’ve written for the Sydney Morning Herald, the International Herald Tribune, Ralph magazine. I’ve interviewed people who'd make your average plan manager shit himself before morning tea.
I've seen poverty. I've seen institutional stupidity. I've seen enough human misery to know the difference between someone who needs help and someone who's been buried under an avalanche of administrative bullshit.
And now I'm the poor bastard underneath it.

So I stopped trusting the portal and started auditing the ledger. Not particularly sophisticated questions, mind you. Just basic forensic sanity: Where’s the money? Why does Wattle Lane’s September statement record Israel Adesoye’s invoice INV-2026860 at $420.00, but the actual PDF source document sitting in my inbox says $796.00? That’s a neat little $376 discrepancy right out of the gate. What happened to the $1,679 for Israel's revised invoice INV-2026860-v2—spanning Saturday support, Sunday support, and 63 bloody kilometres of transport—which matches three separate portal claims marked Paid - Cancelled (1441141895, 1441141896, 1441141897)? Did the money land in his account? Did he bounce it back via Commonwealth Bank receipt N283069151901? And why is everyone acting like basic bookkeeping is a state secret?

Enter Freedom of Information.
FOI.
Three beautiful letters.
The legal right to ask the government what it's been writing about you behind your back.
This, it turns out, is a spectacularly inconvenient hobby.
Services Australia has extended restrictions on my contact with its offices until April 2027.
April 2027!
Jesus Christ. By then I could have converted the Camry into a three-bedroom investment property and applied for negative gearing.
I want the records explaining that decision. I want to know whether my FOI requests were actually processed. And if they weren't, splendid. Show me the documents and we'll all go home.
Well, they can go home.
I'll go back to the Toyota.

Meanwhile, the NDIS continues its magnificent administrative circus.
Support coordinators. Plan managers. Allied health providers. Referral agencies. Assessors. Consultants. People like Cath Porter billing the plan for 1.3-hour meetings and SMS messages while I'm left doing the heavy lifting of chasing phantom repayments because the plan managers abruptly chopped the wires.
Everybody has a title.
Everybody has an email signature.
Everybody has a bloody invoice.
And somehow I'm still sleeping in the car while trying to drag the NDIS Scheme Debt Management Team and the Safeguards Commission into an email chain just to get someone to do their actual jobs.

I've documented eleven separate service delivery problems. Eleven.
That's not proof of a conspiracy. That's eleven matters requiring eleven proper explanations, backed by exact claim IDs, exact BSB numbers (734-063), and exact bank receipts.
But watch what happens when a participant with a psychiatric history starts demanding those explanations.
Suddenly the conversation isn't about the invoice anymore.
It's about the participant.
His behaviour.
His tone.
His persistence.
His mental health.
Whoops. Asperger's.
Whoops. ADHD.
Whoops. Schizotypal personality disorder.
Whoops. The bastard can read a spreadsheet.

And worse.
The bastard can write.
He can preserve correspondence, compare dates, calculate discrepancies, match claim IDs, and send the whole filthy administrative laundry basket to parliamentary offices, regulators, debt teams, and anyone else unlucky enough to be on cc.
A terrible affliction.
No known cure.

I have no interest in pretending I'm some flawless, saintly victim. I'm not. I can be abrasive, impatient, impulsive, and occasionally a first-class pain in the arse.
Ask Mick. Ask the characters floating around Firma Heights with their sticky fingers and wandering Fifty-Dollar notes.
Ask Israel.
Ask Cath.
But that's the bloody point.
You don't have to be charming to have rights.
You don't have to be psychiatrically uncomplicated to question public expenditure.
And you certainly don't have to pass a departmental personality test before someone explains where seventy-one grand of taxpayer money went while you're sleeping in a Toyota Camry.

So here's my proposal.
Open the files.
Show the invoices.
Reconcile the $1,817 statement against the $1,679 cancellations.
Explain the restrictions.
Identify the decision-makers.
Let the journalists inspect the evidence.
If I've got something wrong, show me where.
I'll correct it.
Whoops.
There's that mental illness again.

The government has a file on me.
I'm building a forensic master ledger on them.
And unlike the Toyota Camry, this particular investigation is just warming up.

Stay hungry. Stay foolish.
Amen.

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