What the DRC scorecard says

The Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability delivered its final report on 29 September 2023: 12 volumes, 222 recommendations, addressed to all levels of government. The Joint Government Response followed on 31 July 2024, a National Interim Update on 23 December 2024, and then the Progress Report 2025, the first full implementation report.

The report’s own arithmetic: 50 recommendations are solely for the states and territories, and 172 are the Commonwealth’s solely (84), jointly with the states (85), or shared with non-government owners (3). Of those 172, the government classifies:

Status of the 172 Disability Royal Commission recommendations the Commonwealth is solely or jointly responsible for, per the 2025 Progress Report 0 20 40 60 80 Completed Completed: 8 of 172 recommendations8 In progress In progress: 71 of 172 recommendations71 Require further work Require further work: 51 of 172 recommendations51 Subject to further consideration Subject to further consideration: 36 of 172 recommendations36 Noted Noted: 6 of 172 recommendations6
Status of the 172 Disability Royal Commission recommendations for which the Commonwealth is solely or jointly responsible, as classified by the government’s own Disability Royal Commission Progress Report 2025.

Eight completed is 4.7 per cent, more than two years after the final report and 16 months after the Joint Government Response. The biggest single bucket is “in progress” at 71, but the report’s own taxonomy distinguishes that from “require further work” (51) and “subject to further consideration” (36), and those two together outnumber it. For the 50 state-and-territory recommendations, the report gives percentages rather than counts, because the eight jurisdictions filed 400 separate updates: 39 per cent in progress, 25.3 per cent subject to further consideration, 17.3 per cent requiring further work, and 7.5 per cent completed. We quote those as percentages exactly as published, since converting them to implied counts would manufacture precision the report itself declines to claim.

The Review that has no scorecard

The NDIS Review’s final report, Working together to deliver the NDIS, was published on 7 December 2023, with its 26 recommendations and 139 supporting actions enumerated on the review’s own site. The government’s NDIS reforms hub states, on a page whose own stamp is 15 October 2025: “The Australian Government is carefully considering the recommendations in the final reports of both the NDIS Review and the Disability Royal Commission before providing its responses.” That is the live public position, more than two years after the report.

We searched for an equivalent recommendation-by-recommendation status page for the Review and could not find one on any government domain. A DSS tracker page that once promised this now returns a 404 after disability policy moved from DSS to the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, and no replacement appears on the new department’s site. Absence is hard to prove, and we state it as our observation after looking, not as a government admission.

What exists instead is implementation without a ledger. The Securing the NDIS page says the changes in the 2026 Amendment Bill “build on work underway to implement critical recommendations made by the Independent Review into the NDIS and the Royal Commission”, and carries a dated implementation sequence running to 2030, which we track in the reform countdown. Foundational Supports, one of the Review’s central ideas, has a $10 billion intergovernmental commitment and a start date. Pieces of the Review are plainly moving. What a reader cannot do, for the Review as they can for the DRC, is open a government document and see which of the 26 recommendations and 139 actions are accepted, rejected, under way or done.

Why the difference matters

This is a story about process, not about the merits of either report’s recommendations, on which this masthead takes no position. A published scorecard does two things: it makes slippage visible, as the DRC report’s own five categories do, and it makes claims checkable, which is why we can write “8 of 172” with a citation instead of an estimate. The Review’s implementation may be further along than the DRC’s or further behind; without a ledger, neither the sector nor the people the scheme serves can tell. The next DRC progress report is annual; whether the Review ever gets its first is one of the accountability questions this masthead will keep asking.

One conflation to avoid when checking our numbers: the government’s response to the 2019 Tune review of the NDIS Act (29 recommendations, response published August 2020) predates and is unrelated to the 2023 NDIS Review. It appears in searches for “NDIS Review government response” and is not one.

Primary sources

  1. Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, Disability Royal Commission Progress Report 2025
  2. Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, Disability Royal Commission response hub
  3. Disability Royal Commission, final report (29 September 2023)
  4. NDIS Review, Working together to deliver the NDIS: recommendations and actions
  5. Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, NDIS reforms hub (position statement, page stamped 15 October 2025)
  6. Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, Securing the NDIS
  7. Australian Government response to the 2019 review of the NDIS Act (the Tune review), cited to distinguish it from the 2023 NDIS Review