What the report is, and where it sits

Australia’s Disability Strategy 2021–2031 is the national plan all governments signed up to. It is structured around seven Outcome Areas, it is reported on publicly, and it is now a little past its midpoint. The second implementation report, covering 1 July 2023 to 30 June 2025, was produced by the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing and published on the Disability Gateway. The file properties date it 30 March 2026.

Implementation reports come every two years. This one carries a genuinely eventful period: the Disability Royal Commission’s final report in September 2023, the independent NDIS Review in December 2023, the commencement of the Disability Services and Inclusion Act 2023 on 1 January 2024, and an updated Strategy released in early 2025 that added a new policy priority on homelessness.

One administrative change in it is worth knowing because it explains a lot of broken links. In June 2025 the Australian Government moved responsibility for the Strategy out of the Social Services portfolio and into Health, Disability and Ageing. If you have been looking for Strategy material on a departmental site and not finding it, that is why.

The lines that do not read like a progress report

Most of the 167 pages is achievement listing, jurisdiction by jurisdiction. That is what an implementation report is for. But the document also records what the Strategy’s own governance bodies have said about it, and those passages are much sharper than the surrounding text.

On the Outcomes Framework, the report states that the Australian Human Rights Commission regards it as a notable improvement on the former National Disability Strategy and an important accountability tool, and then adds this:

the Strategy’s Advisory Council has expressed scepticism about the Outcomes Framework reporting positive achievements where measures have only improved marginally, as it is unclear if the change represents an incidental shift or actual improvement because of the Strategy.

That is the accountability problem stated plainly, in the government’s own report, by the body appointed to advise on it. A measure that ticks up slightly gets written up as progress, and nobody can say whether the Strategy moved it.

The report records a second Advisory Council criticism, this time about what the reporting is pointed at. It says the Council has told governments that reporting, including on the Targeted Action Plans, needs to focus on the positive impact of the Strategy on the day-to-day lives of people with disability, rather than its impact on government policy, and that reporting should say whether actions are resulting in positive outcomes or harm.

And on the action plans themselves, the report summarises the view of disability representative organisations: that while the plans show positive intent and some isolated achievements, overall implementation has been hindered by fragmented efforts and low completion rates.

The new action plans drop targets on purpose

Three new Targeted Action Plans were designed and released in January 2025, running to the end of 2027: Inclusive Homes and Communities, Safety Rights and Justice, and Community Attitudes. The report lists what changed from the previous set. Alongside fewer actions and the addition of national actions, there is this:

Indicators focused on demonstrating improvement rather than arbitrary targets. This will improve reporting to reflect that states and territories may be starting at different baselines and have different levels of resources.

The stated reason is a real one and deserves to be taken seriously. A national target applied identically to eight jurisdictions with different starting points and different budgets can be unfair and can distort effort. Federalism makes uniform targets genuinely hard.

The difficulty is what it leaves behind. Put the two passages together and the reporting has no targets to miss, and an Advisory Council already sceptical that small movements mean anything. It is worth being precise about scope here: this change is described as applying to the Targeted Action Plans’ indicators, not to the whole Outcomes Framework. But the report also records the Council asking for something that does not yet exist. It says the Council has advised that governments should agree nationally consistent approaches to the Strategy’s implementation, reporting and measurement, for example, by developing baseline levels for progress for states and territories.

Baselines are the thing that would make demonstrating improvement a testable claim. The report has the Council asking for them in one section and the design decision that assumes them in another.

What is actually measured

It would be wrong to leave the impression that nothing is tracked. The Outcomes Framework covers the seven Outcome Areas, and the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare reports it independently: a public dashboard with a page per measure, data updated quarterly in January, April, July and October, and an annual progress report, the third of which was published on 30 January 2025. Community attitudes are measured separately through the Australia’s Disability Strategy Survey, whose second wave drew about 19,000 respondents in the second half of 2024.

That is more machinery than the previous decade’s strategy had, which is the AHRC’s point. The criticism recorded in the report is not that measurement is absent. It is that the measurement, as reported, cannot presently distinguish a real effect from drift.

Why late 2026 is the date to watch

The Strategy is to be evaluated independently twice: once at the midpoint and once by the end of 2030. The first evaluation runs across 2025–26, and the report says its final report will be presented in late 2026.

Two things make that more than a routine milestone. The first is scope. The report says the evaluation will look at how well the Targeted Action Plans are working, and, separately, that it will look at how well the Strategy’s Outcomes Framework measures are working. The doubt the Advisory Council raised about the scoreboard is on the evaluation’s own list.

The second is that work is queued behind it. The 2024 review of the Strategy deliberately limited itself to improvements that could be made immediately, and the report says some potential reforms were deferred for consideration until after the Strategy’s first Independent Evaluation in 2025–2026. The report frames that as giving people with disability more time to be involved, which is a fair reading. It also means a set of unnamed reforms has been waiting since 2024 on a document due within months.

Our view, and what we will check

Our take is that the interesting part of this report is its candour rather than its achievements list, and that the candour is doing the reader a favour. A government report that publishes its own advisory council calling the scoreboard into question is more useful than one that does not. The weakness is that the report records the criticism without resolving it: the Council asks for baselines, the newest plans are built without targets, and the question of whether the Strategy is causing the changes it reports is handed to an evaluation that has not landed yet.

That is a defensible way to run a ten-year strategy at its midpoint. It is not a defensible place to still be at year eight. So the test is the evaluation, and it is close enough to hold to a date.

We will be checking three things when it lands: whether it answers the causation question the Advisory Council raised, whether baselines for states and territories are recommended or adopted, and which of the reforms deferred in 2024 are named and picked up. If the final report slips past late 2026, we will note that too.

Primary sources

  1. Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, Australia’s Disability Strategy 2021-2031: 2nd Implementation Report 1 July 2023 to 30 June 2025 (DOCX, 167 pages, document properties dated 30 March 2026; downloaded and read in full 29 August 2026): the reporting period and structure; the September 2023 Disability Royal Commission final report, the December 2023 NDIS Review and the commencement of the Disability Services and Inclusion Act 2023 on 1 January 2024; the early 2025 updated Strategy and its new policy priority on homelessness; the June 2025 move of responsibility from the Social Services portfolio to Health, Disability and Ageing; the quoted Advisory Council scepticism about the Outcomes Framework reporting marginal improvements and the AHRC’s assessment of the Framework as a notable improvement on the former National Disability Strategy; the quoted Advisory Council advice on reporting focusing on day-to-day lives rather than government policy and on outcomes or harm; the quoted summary of disability representative organisations on fragmented efforts and low completion rates; the three Targeted Action Plans released January 2025 and the quoted indicator change from targets to demonstrating improvement; the quoted Advisory Council advice on nationally consistent measurement and baseline levels for states and territories; the Outcomes Framework reporting arrangements including AIHW reporting, the quarterly January, April, July and October updates and the third annual report of 30 January 2025; the Australia’s Disability Strategy Survey wave two of about 19,000 respondents in the second half of 2024; the twice-only evaluation design with a midpoint evaluation and one by end of 2030, the quoted late 2026 final report, the quoted scope covering the Outcomes Framework measures, and the quoted deferral of some potential reforms until after the 2025-2026 Independent Evaluation.
  2. Disability Gateway, Reporting progress (read 29 August 2026): the reporting structure for the Strategy, including that implementation reports are produced every two years, and the link to the report above.

The report is published by the Commonwealth under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 licence. It is quoted here briefly and with attribution for the purpose of reporting news, and is not reproduced. Quotations are taken from the DOCX text as published. Where the report summarises what the Advisory Council or disability representative organisations have said, we have attributed it that way rather than as a direct statement by those bodies, because the report is our source for their views and not the bodies themselves.

Involved in the Strategy’s evaluation, or reporting against a Targeted Action Plan? Tell us and we will check it against the sources above and log the outcome.