About

Who's behind this

Just me: one person. Not a service provider, not a lobby group, not a political party, and nobody is paying for it. The only thing I want to do is build something that stops all of this from continuing.

Why I started this

I started this because I'm angry. I'm tired of watching people get hurt by a system that's supposed to support them, and I don't want the NDIA to be able to keep doing this to people. People are lied to, kept in the dark, and hurt, including me. What happened to me is small compared to others, but it has opened my eyes to the true scope of harm which is happening.

I trust things that are written down more than I trust my read on people. So when the NDIS had rules, I believed them. I read the legislation. I found the Agency's own internal procedures, studied them, understood how they worked. With my treating team, I gave the Agency exactly the kind of evidence those procedures expected. Then the decision came back, and it didn't match anything I'd read. Not just slightly off, it was as if it had been decided under a different set of rules altogether. Nobody said the documents were wrong. Nobody said what was right instead. So I went through it all again, but more carefully this time. And it happened again.

After enough of that, you stop knowing what to trust, including yourself. You can't plan, because nothing you do seems connected to what happens next. When I tried to find out why, follow-ups disappeared, enquiries never got to the person I was trying to contact, and complaints were closed without any resolution. Every single issue I try to resolve with the Agency turns into a major fight, even the simplest, smallest, most straightforward of things.

I don't think most of the people making these decisions mean harm. Most staff are doing the best they can in a difficult place. But pressure from the top — budgets, targets, timelines — gets pushed down through every layer until the rules become optional. This results in a system seemingly designed to make people frightened and wear them down until they have no fight left. Participants living on plans which are not enough often won't request a review, because they've seen what happens: a review can shred the whole plan.

The rules that are supposed to protect us do exist. They're in internal guidance that's only released when someone asks for it under FOI, in PDFs almost nobody outside the Agency ever reads. If you can't see the rule, you can't point to it when it's broken. Even asking for my own records, through the legal process meant to guarantee that, has meant being told information doesn't exist when I know it does. The people this lands on hardest are often the least able to fight back, as they are struggling to live day-to-day even when they have the right supports in place. Having to fight for what you need, when you don't have it, is an insurmountable task for many. Nobody should be allowed to make it this hard for them.

So this project does two things. It puts the Agency's own procedures, guidelines and rules — and what's actually happened to people — where anyone can find them. And it's building a Service Code: those rules, written down in one place, by the people they affect, so that one day an independent body can hold the Agency accountable to them.

What's here

Everything here comes from public sources: legislation, FOI releases, the Disability Royal Commission's findings, and other people's own accounts of what's happened to them, anonymised. The Service Code is being written collaboratively, by disabled people, our families, and the people who support us - not by me alone, and not by politicians. If something here is wrong, please email me - I want to know, and fix it.

The Document Library: thousands of pages of NDIA documents, released through Freedom of Information requests, plus public submissions to Senate inquiries into the NDIS. All of it is searchable by keyword and filterable by topic, so you can find what's actually relevant instead of downloading and reading through PDFs one at a time.

The Service Code: the enforceable standard this project is building, for how NDIA staff should communicate with participants and make decisions about their lives. It's being drafted in the open, grounded in the Agency's own guidelines, the legislation, and the Disability Royal Commission's findings — and it's not finished. If you want to help shape it, this is where to start.

Lived Experiences: anonymised accounts from people who've been affected by the NDIS, in their own words. They're part of the evidence base for the Service Code, and a record, in itself, of what's actually happening to people using the scheme.

For what this project can't do (in some cases not yet, and in others not ever) see the homepage.

Get involved

Read the Service Code as it stands. If something is missing, wrong, or needs to be said differently — you can contribute to it at the bottom of each section page. It's being written in the open, and it's not finished.

If you've been affected by the NDIS and are willing to share what happened, your story can be added to the Lived Experiences archive, anonymised.