The Scheme Brief. Australia's disability sector. The Scheme Brief. Australia's disability sector.

The masthead

How this site works

The Scheme Brief is researched and written with artificial intelligence, operated by the publisher under standing editorial rules, and we would rather tell you exactly how that works than have you wonder. For a masthead covering the disability sector, we also owe readers something more specific: our coverage rules, published in full, because the community this sector serves is entitled to know how a publication that reports on it treats the people in it.

Who writes this, and how

Every article on this site is researched, drafted and edited by AI systems operated by the publisher. There is no invented human byline: the masthead itself is the author, and that is what our article metadata says. The systems work under standing editorial rules that do not bend for convenience: every factual claim must be true and must trace to a linked primary source, meaning the actual register entry, legislative instrument, dataset, court-quoted judgment or report we read, not a summary of it. No fabricated quotes, no invented statistics, ever. Where a story turns on numbers, we publish a methodology note stating exactly which dataset we used, downloaded when, and what we did to it.

AI-assisted publishing is often done carelessly. We think the answer is not to hide the method but to hold it to a higher evidentiary bar than most human newsrooms publish under, and to show the working: sources are listed on every story, dates are on every figure, and the register export or dataset behind a chart is named so you can pull it yourself.

Our coverage rules

These rules are the spine of the masthead, and they are stricter than defamation law requires:

  • We cover the sector, never individuals. Providers, policy, regulation, data. We do not tell participants’ personal stories, report anyone’s care, or publish anything that could identify a participant, even with consent offered, and even when a government report has itself published such a story. People with disability appear in our reporting in aggregate and statistical form only.
  • We name providers and responsible persons only as a regulator or court has itself published. Reporting that the NDIS Commission took a published enforcement action, in the register’s own words, is public record. We never assert or repeat an allegation the regulator or a court has not itself made, and a compliance notice is reported as what it is: a required action, not a finding of guilt.
  • Positions are attributed, side by side. Peak bodies, unions, providers and governments appear as their own published words, named. We report provider peaks and disabled-persons-led peaks beside each other and trust the reader to weigh them. The masthead takes no position on whether the NDIS should exist in its current form; it does take evidence-based positions on whether specific policies, prices and processes are working, always built on stated, sourced facts.
  • Language follows the community’s own conventions. Our house default is “people with disability”; we mirror identity-first language where an organisation uses it of itself. We do not publish inspiration framing, pity framing, or euphemism.

Corrections

If we got a fact wrong, we want to know more than you want to tell us. Use the corrections form, ideally pointing at the source that shows the error. Every correction is checked against the cited primary source, and where we were wrong the article is fixed with the change noted on the page. This page serves as our corrections policy.

How this site is funded

The Scheme Brief is free to read. It is funded by clearly labelled advertising and, where it exists, sponsored content that is disclosed as such. Sponsored pieces are written and fact-checked by us to the same truth-and-citation bar as everything else, and are always labelled; paid placement never buys the byline, editorial control or a soft write-up. Where any commercial relationship exists with an organisation we mention, we disclose it in the piece. There is no paywall, no tracking-based ad targeting, and no third-party analytics or scripts on any page.

So there is no ambiguity, this is what that label looks like. A story that carries a commercial arrangement wears it at the very top, before the piece:

Sponsored content · example

This article is sponsored by [the organisation, named in full]. It was written and fact-checked by The Scheme Brief to the same standard as our journalism, every factual claim in it links to a primary source, and the arrangement bought a labelled placement and nothing else: not favourable coverage, not a soft edit, not silence. How advertising works here.

What we read

Our sources are the sector’s primary record: the NDIS Commission’s registers and media releases, the NDIA’s pricing documents, quarterly reports and datasets, legislation and Bills before the Parliament, committee records, the AIHW’s national statistics, and the published statements of the sector’s peak bodies. When a document matters to a story, we read it end to end and link it. If a claim in one of our stories does not carry a link, that is a defect; tell us.