A few weeks before she was brought down by Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard choked back tears as she addressed parliament.
"This is a united embrace of national responsibility and a great act of mutual care and solidarity," the former prime minister said during an emotional speech.
Gillard was talking about the national disability insurance scheme, possibly the greatest legacy of her minority government.
Few then doubted Gillard's heartfelt commitment to a scheme that would replace what the Productivity Commission told the government was an underfunded, unfair, fragmented and inefficient system to support Australians with a disability.
Its recommendation: a national scheme, like Medicare, that would provide long-term care and support - but not income - for those with a significant and ongoing disability.
The enormity of implementing such a scheme was not lost on the commission.
To cover the 410,000 people it estimated needed support, a timetable was set out in its report.
The commission wanted the government to wait until July 2014 before beginning a rollout, and to limit it to a few regions.
It wanted a year of experience to fine-tune the scheme before extending it nationally from July 2015.
Gradual implementation had several major advantages, the commission told the government, including getting a high-quality management team in place and allowing sufficient time to build up resources, especially labour.
The Gillard government was not so patient.
It pushed the timetable forward by one year to July 2013, arguing people with disabilities had waited too long for a better system.
Launch - not trial - sites were rolled out in Tasmania for young people aged 15-24, in South Australia for children up to 14 and in the Barwon (Victoria) and Hunter (NSW) regions for people up to 65.
The advanced start date also was politically convenient, coming in an election year. Some in Labor saw the scheme as an opportunity to wedge the coalition on an especially sensitive social issue.
They were to be disappointed. Tony Abbott embraced the concept, saying "its time had come".
And even when the government suggested an increase in the Medicare levy - from 1.5 to two per cent - to partially cover the scheme's cost the coalition gave wholesome bipartisan support.
Abbott even forced Labor's hand by calling on Gillard to introduce the levy legislation before the election.
"I don't see why we can't get this dealt with so that this parliament does have a substantial monument," he said.
But like many in the coalition, Abbott would have preferred to implement the Productivity Commission's recommended timetable.
Now we know why.
The government late last week received the report of an expert panel that conducted a capability review of the National Disability Insurance Agency.
Its members were loath to be overly critical of the landmark scheme, but bringing forward the start date by one year had created significant challenges.
"The agency is like a plane that took off before it had been fully built and is being completed while it is in the air," the review said.
The review highlighted a number of deficiencies, nearly all a consequence of the rushed start and the political decision to site the agency's headquarters in Geelong.
Top of the list was an IT system not fit for purpose, something the Productivity Commission warned about two years earlier.
The agency's board was not established until the start date and its chief executive, appointed by the government, did not select his temporary senior executive staff.
If that wasn't bad enough, most staff in the agency's temporary HQ didn't want to move to Geelong.
"As a result there will be a drop in capability over the next six months," the review found, noting that from July 2014 the scheme will launch more trial sites in WA, the Northern Territory and ACT.
As well, client data, the quality collection of which was another commission recommendation before the scheme's start date, has been poorer than anticipated.
The upshot is that all the agency's efforts were spent on getting to the trial phase of the scheme and insufficient effort is being devoted to the next phases.
The current plan is to "activate" almost 300,000 participants over a three-year period from 2017-18.
That challenging role, the review's panel says, comes with a "very, very difficult" timetable.
It recommends a realistic reassessment be done sooner rather than later, leading to fears within the disability sector that the rollout is about to be pushed back.
Assistant Social Services Minister Mitch Fifield insists the timetable is subject to inter-government agreements between the commonwealth and states and territories.
In any event, he says, it's up to the NDIS agency board to decide whether it has the capability to deliver the rollout on time.
John Della Bosca, director of the Every Australian Counts campaign, concedes the rollout is a big job.
"But it's hardly sending someone to the moon and it should not take a decade to deliver," he says.
The peak body for non-government services in the sector, National Disability Services, reminds everyone we're just eight months into a six-year marathon.
"We've exerted a lot of effort and ingenuity to get this far so quickly - it's too early to decide that the road ahead is too steep," chief executive Ken Baker says.
Jenny Macklin, the Labor minister behind the scheme, was there the day Gillard made her speech to parliament.
She acknowledges the review has identified some teething problems for the NDIS agency.
"But the last thing that people with a disability want is a government that uses this to delay and save money."
