Annual Report No 2 of the 48th Parliament

Joint Standing Committee on the National Disability Insurance Scheme

Submitter: Michael Sanderson

Introduction

I welcome the opportunity to make this submission to the Joint Standing Committee on the National Disability Insurance Scheme in relation to Annual Report No 2 of the 48th Parliament.

This submission asks the Committee to treat this annual report process as a serious accountability inquiry, not as a routine reporting exercise. The National Disability Insurance Scheme is one of the most important public commitments Australia has made to people with disability, families, carers and communities. It spends public money, exercises coercive administrative power, shapes private markets, affects legal rights and directly influences whether people live with dignity, safety, participation and support. It should therefore be examined with the same seriousness as any other major national institution whose decisions affect basic human security.

The central concern of this submission is that the NDIS is too often discussed as though its main problem is participant cost. That frame is too narrow, misleading and politically dangerous. The deeper problem is not simply that the scheme costs money. The deeper problem is that Australia has built an essential human service around fragmented private delivery, weak public capacity, complex administration, thin markets, poor accountability, excessive reliance on informal care, insufficient workforce formation and an increasingly defensive cost control culture. If Parliament accepts the wrong diagnosis, it will keep prescribing the wrong cure.

Sustainability must not be used as a polite word for rationing. Properly understood, NDIS sustainability means real resource sustainability. It means whether Australia has, or can build, the trained workers, allied health capacity, housing, transport, assistive technology, supervision, public administration, local service structures and safeguards needed to support people with disability safely and effectively over time. The Commonwealth is the issuer of the Australian dollar. Money is not a scarce resource to

The Currency Issuing Commonwealth

the currency issuing Commonwealth in the same way it is to a household, business, charity, council or state government. Money is an organising tool. The real question is whether public money is organising care, dignity, safety and inclusion, or whether it is organising private extraction, rent seeking, provider churn, legal contest and administrative waste.

Fraud, overcharging, provider misconduct and sharp practice must be attacked. Public money intended for disability support should not be captured by weak providers, conflicted intermediaries, inflated pricing, organised misconduct, poor records, coercive control, plan manipulation, rent seeking or market extraction. But the answer is not to turn participants into the shock absorbers for the failure of the market architecture that government designed, funded and allowed to grow. The answer is to build public capacity, restore accountability, protect review rights, improve administration, create a serious workforce strategy, support safe and chosen family care properly, and examine whether direct public provision is now required in core parts of the scheme.

This annual report inquiry gives the Committee an opportunity to step back from narrow legislative disputes and ask the harder institutional question. Is the NDIS being administered, governed and reported in a way that shows whether the scheme is safe, accessible, fair, locally available, reviewable, communication accessible, resistant to exploitation and capable of building the real service capacity that people with disability need. Does annual reporting reveal lived experience before harm becomes scandal, litigation or collapse. Does the scheme respond proactively and face to face where needed, or does it rely on faceless systems that assume failure, suspicion or non- compliance and then require participants to prove need inside processes they may not understand or control. If the answer is no, the annual report should say so plainly.

The annual report must not become a performance shield

The annual reports of the National Disability Insurance Agency and the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission should not be treated as proof of performance merely because they contain activity, expenditure and compliance data. Administrative activity is not the same as justice. Expenditure is not the same as support. Compliance action is not the same as safety. Provider registration is not the same as service quality. Participant numbers are not the same as participant dignity.

The Committee should test the annual reports against lived reality. It should ask whether participants can actually obtain supports, whether plans reflect real functional need, whether assessments are fair, whether communication is accessible, whether review processes are usable, whether families are being pushed beyond endurance, whether thin markets are being solved, whether providers are being controlled, whether

Integrity must mean more than fraud control

Integrity in the NDIS must not be reduced to fraud control. Fraud matters, but a scheme can be free of fraud in a narrow accounting sense and still fail the people it exists to support. Integrity must include safety, fairness, transparency, continuity, accessibility, accountability and fidelity to public purpose.

The Committee should therefore reject any annual report framework that treats integrity as mainly a matter of claims control, provider registration and payment compliance. Those matters are important, but they are not enough. A scheme lacks integrity if participants cannot understand decisions. It lacks integrity if people are forced into internal review or the ART because of poor first instance decision making. It lacks integrity if plan managers, support coordinators, nominees or providers control the participant in practice while the paperwork pretends that the participant has choice and control. It lacks integrity if supports are withdrawn because another system is theoretically responsible when that system is not practically available. It lacks integrity if people are pushed into isolation, carer collapse, hospitalisation, institutionalisation or family breakdown in the name of sustainability.

The Committee should ask the NDIA and the Commission to distinguish clearly between fraud by providers, misconduct by intermediaries, coercion by third parties, administrative error, poor plan design, participant vulnerability, and deliberate participant misuse. A system that does not make those distinctions will punish the

• wrong people. It will pursue the person easiest to identify rather than the party with control, knowledge, benefit and fault.

This distinction is critical because many participants are not in a position to police the system around them. Some rely on nominees, family members, guardians, plan managers, support coordinators or providers to understand invoices, claims, service agreements and plan use. Some have cognitive, psychosocial, communication, literacy, sensory or executive function barriers. Some are isolated or dependent on the very provider who may be exploiting them. In that environment, the annual report should disclose how the system detects and responds to provider capture, nominee abuse, coercive control, financial exploitation and plan manipulation.

The private provider architecture is itself an integrity issue

The Committee should be willing to examine whether the privatised provider market has failed the integrity test. It is not enough to say that there are bad actors inside an otherwise sound market. The pattern is deeper than that. Where a publicly funded essential service is delivered through a fragmented field of private providers, plan managers, support coordinators and intermediaries, public money becomes a revenue stream around which commercial behaviour organises itself. Vulnerable participants are then expected to navigate a market that they did not build, often cannot discipline, and may not realistically be able to leave.

The language of choice and control is powerful, but it must not be used as a shield for market failure. Choice without real alternatives is not meaningful choice. Choice in a thin market is often just acceptance of what is available. Choice where the participant is exhausted, isolated, communication impaired, dependent on a provider, or controlled by a nominee may be largely fictional. Choice where no public option exists can become a polite way of leaving participants alone with private power.

The annual report should therefore ask whether the provider market is delivering real capacity or whether it is producing extraction, churn, inflated billing, poor continuity, weak records, conflicts of interest, aggressive service selling, selective servicing and administrative complexity. It should ask whether the NDIA and the Commission have enough local knowledge to identify patterns before harm occurs. It should ask whether a remote administrative model can adequately supervise local provider conduct. It should ask whether public money is building durable disability support capacity, or merely funding a shifting market of billable transactions.

The Committee should not accept the idea that the answer is simply more rules imposed on the same architecture. Stronger regulation may be necessary, but repeated patching is evidence of design stress. If the system constantly needs more registration, more claim controls, more pricing controls, more penalties, more audits, more

restrictions and more warnings, the issue is not merely misconduct at the edges.

The delivery model itself is generating risk.

Public provision should be examined seriously

The NDIS is already national in legal and funding terms. What is not nationalised is the delivery architecture. That is the gap Parliament must confront.

This submission does not suggest that every non-government provider can or should disappear overnight. It does say that essential disability support should no longer be organised primarily around market dependence. Core supports, high risk supports, thin market services, supports involving high participant vulnerability and areas of repeated provider failure should move progressively toward direct public provision or a dominant public framework.

Public provision would not remove every failure. No institution is perfect. But direct public provision would align accountability more closely with care, continuity, training, records, supervision and public purpose. It would also give participants a visible public pathway instead of forcing them to rely on fragmented providers and conflicted intermediaries. It would allow the Commonwealth to benchmark service quality, worker standards, pricing, local availability and continuity of care against a public standard rather than a private market standard.

A modern CES style public NDIS service structure should be developed. Local public NDIS offices should not merely process plans or police claims. They should help organise local disability support capacity. They should provide public support coordination, service navigation, local service mapping, workforce development, thin market intervention, provider oversight and direct public delivery options. Participants should have somewhere public, local and accountable to go when the market fails.

Such a structure would also strengthen integrity. Fraud control is easier where public officers understand local services, know where capacity is missing, can identify provider patterns, and have a direct public alternative to offer. It is much harder where the Commonwealth relies on remote administration, private plan managers, automated systems and after the event enforcement.

Sustainability must mean real resource sustainability

The Committee should be cautious about the word sustainability. It is now often used as though it means reducing Commonwealth expenditure, but that is too crude and too dangerous. The NDIS cannot be made sustainable by hollowing out the supports that give it purpose. It is not sustainable if participants lose essential support, families collapse under unpaid care, states inherit unmet need, or the private provider market continues extracting public money while plans are cut.

Properly understood, sustainability means real resource sustainability.

It means whether Australia has, or can build, the trained workers, allied health capacity, housing, t transport, assistive technology, supervision, administration, public service capability, community infrastructure and local service capacity needed to support people with disability safely and effectively over time. It does not mean reducing supports merely because aggregate spending has increased. A rising expenditure line may reflect unmet disability need finally being recognised. It may also reflect fraud, inflated pricing, provider extraction, rent seeking, unnecessary intermediation, poor market design, legal contest or administrative waste. Those are very different things, and they should not be collapsed into one claim that the scheme costs too much.

The Commonwealth is the issuer of the Australian dollar. It is not financially constrained in the same way as a household, business, charity, local council or state government. For the currency issuing Commonwealth, money is not a scarce resource that must first be found from taxation or borrowing before people with disability can be supported. Money is an organising tool. It is the public instrument used to mobilise labour, skills, services, housing, transport, assistive technology, supervision, administration, clinical capacity and public institutions for public purpose.

The real constraints are the availability of those real resources, the time and organisation needed to build them, and the need to avoid inflationary pressure if spending runs ahead of actual capacity. Those constraints are serious and should be addressed directly. But Australia is not starting from a position where every available person is already fully used. There are well over 1.5 million unemployed or underemployed Australians, and the number moves closer to 2 million when broader labour underutilisation and marginal attachment are considered. These people are not currently being fully used by the private market or by existing public employment. They are treated as surplus by the present labour market, but they are not surplus to public purpose.

That matters for the NDIS. The Commonwealth has the monetary capacity to train and employ some of this unused and underused labour without bidding workers away from existing private employment. Properly designed, this would not be inflationary in the ordinary sense of competing for already scarce labour. It would convert unused labour into real public capacity. It would move people from unemployment, underemployment, insecure work or enforced idleness into paid training, supervised entry roles, administration, local service coordination, community access support, t transport assistance, disability support pathways and other socially useful work connected to the NDIS. The inflation risk would not come from the act of employing people who are currently unused or underused. It would arise only if the program were poorly designed, poorly supervised, or tried to purchase real resources that were already fully stretched.

This is why false monetary scarcity produces bad policy

If Parliament accepts that the NDIS must be reduced because the Commonwealth is short of money, it will look first to plans, eligibility, supports and participants. If Parliament understands that the real constraints are labour, skills, services, housing, transport, administration, safeguards and public capacity, it will ask whether public money is organising care, dignity, safety and inclusion, or whether it is organising private extraction, rent seeking, provider c churn, inflated prices, legal disputes and administrative waste.

The annual report should therefore separate participant support from provider extraction and rent seeking. It should identify how much spending goes to direct support, how much is absorbed by administration and intermediation, how much is affected by price inflation, how much reflects service gaps, and how much is lost through poor provider behaviour, conflicted service models, unnecessary intermediaries, inflated billing, market positioning and other forms of rent seeking. Without that separation, public debate will keep blaming participants for costs generated by the market.

If spending is rising because participants are finally receiving essential supports that reflect real disability need, the answer is not to cut support. The answer is to build the real service capacity required. If spending is rising because public money is being captured by inflated prices, conflicted intermediaries, weak providers, duplicated services, poor market design or organised misconduct, the answer is not to punish participants. The answer is to remove extraction from the system.

Political rhetoric about NDIS cost must be tested

The Committee should also test the political rhetoric now being used around NDIS cost and sustainability. This should not be done as a partisan exercise. The problem crosses party lines. Labor ministers have used sustainability, growth and budget language. The Coalition figures have used taxpayer money and fraud language. State ministers have warned about cost shifting. Some opposition voices have rightly warned about human consequences. Taken together, the debate shows why Parliament needs a more disciplined frame.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has acknowledged that the NDIS has “made an enormous difference to people’s lives,” but has also said the Government wants to ensure it is “fit for purpose” and “sustainable.” The first part recognises the scheme’s public purpose. The second part requires scrutiny, because sustainability can either mean building the real service capacity required to support people with disability over time, or it can become a budget phrase used to justify narrowing access, reducing supports and shifting unmet need onto families, states and participants.

Minister Mark Butler has been reported as saying that “right now, the NDIS costs too much and is growing too fast.” That frame is misleading unless Parliament first asks

• what is causing the cost.

A participant who needs care, therapy, transport, communication support or community access is not the same as a provider who clips the ticket, inflates an invoice, captures a plan or uses public funding as a rent seeking opportunity. Political rhetoric that treats aggregate expenditure as the problem before separating support from extraction blames people with disability for costs generated by the system around them.

Senator Jenny McAllister’s reported statement that the scheme “just costs too much” sharpens the concern. That phrase turns disability support into a budget complaint. It does not ask whether the Commonwealth is paying too much for too little because the provider market has been allowed to organise itself around public money. It does not ask whether support reductions will create costs elsewhere through carer collapse, hospitalisation, school exclusion, homelessness, family breakdown, crisis policing or institutionalisation. It tells the public there is too much spending before proving that the spending is excessive participant support rather than market extraction.

Opposition Leader Angus Taylor has framed the issue through taxpayer money and fraud language. His statement that the NDIS must be run so that “there isn’t fraud,” and that where fraud exists “we need to see it gone,” identifies a real problem. Fraud, organised crime, provider manipulation and inflated claims must be removed from the scheme. But when applied to the currency issuing Commonwealth, the taxpayer money frame is not merely incomplete. It is false and wrong. It implies that the federal government must first obtain money from taxpayers before it can support people with disability. That is not how a currency issuing Commonwealth operates.

The Committee should therefore reject two misleading frames at once. It should reject the Labor frame where sustainability becomes a polite word for budget savings. It should also reject the Coalition frame where taxpayer money language obscures the monetary capacity of the Commonwealth and turns public disability support into a contest over scarcity. Both frames can identify real problems, but both mislead if they fail to distinguish monetary capacity from real resource capacity, and if they fail to distinguish participant support from fraud, extraction and rent seeking.

The state and territory warning that they cannot provide “like for like services” for people shifted off the NDIS is important because states are different. States and territories do not issue the Australian dollar. They also run health, education, housing, justice and community systems that are already under strain. If the Commonwealth reduces its visible NDIS expenditure by pushing people into those systems, the saving is not a real public saving. It is cost shifting. It moves pressure from one public ledger to another, and often from government altogether onto families, carers and participants.

Melissa McIntosh’s warning that there are “human lives at the other end” should be treated as a necessary corrective to both sides of the cost debate. Every support

determination, assessment tool, plan reduction, access rule, debt action, suspension

notice and budget saving affects a person. A political claim about cost is not complete unless it identifies who bears the risk when support is reduced.

The honest frame is this. The NDIS does not suffer from a shortage of Commonwealth dollars. That claim is false. A currency issuing Commonwealth can always issue Australian dollars. What the NDIS suffers from is a failure of public purpose. Public money is being channelled through a fragmented private delivery architecture that too often produces market dependence, weak public capacity, inadequate workforce formation, fragmented accountability, poor administration, provider rent seeking and political language that makes participants appear unaffordable while leaving the system’s deeper design failures intact.

The NDIS was not created to satisfy a budget narrative. It was created to provide necessary disability support. Annual reporting should therefore test whether public money is being used to organise care, dignity, safety, inclusion and real capacity, or whether political rhetoric about sustainability is being used to justify rationing, withdrawal and cost shifting.

Assessment reform must not become administrative exclusion

The Committee should examine New Framework Planning, Support Needs Assessment tools and related instruments such as I CAN and PECQ with great care. The key issue is not only whether a human assessor asks questions, but whether the answers are converted into coded, scored or machine-readable inputs that affect planning outcomes, support access or budget generation. Standardised assessment may sound fair, but consistency is not the same as justice, especially where participants cannot see, test or meaningfully challenge the assumptions, formulas, weightings or thresholds being applied to them. I CAN appears to operate as a computer-based assessment tool. PECQ should be examined to determine whether it is merely used to collect contextual information, or whether its responses are coded and used directly or indirectly in funding decisions, plan design or automated or semi-automated processes. A tool can produce consistent exclusion as easily as consistent inclusion, and it can look objective while embedding assumptions that ignore environment, communication barriers, fluctuating disability, informal support failure, family stress, regional service gaps and the actual availability of supports.

The Committee should also be careful not to confuse a structured assessment with a proper face to face assessment of real life. Disability support needs are not always visible in a form, a digital prompt, a scored answer or a remote administrative interview. They are often revealed through conversation, observation, context, hesitation, fatigue, distress, family interaction, communication difficulty, environmental barriers and the practical reality of how a person lives. A face-to-face process allows an assessor to see

what a digital tool may flatten. It can show whether a person can move safely through their home, communicate under pressure, manage daily tasks, cope with sensory load, rely safely on informal care, access transport, participate in the community, or function when supports are absent. It also allows participants, families and carers to explain complexity in their own setting rather than being forced into categories designed for administrative convenience.

The annual report should require clear disclosure of how assessment tools are selected, validated, reviewed and applied. It should disclose whether participants can understand the tool, challenge the evidence, correct errors and obtain meaningful review. It should disclose how assessors are trained, whether assessments are conducted face to face wherever needed or requested, and whether assessors are required to observe real world function rather than simply translate answers into administrative categories. It should also disclose whether digital or coded tools have different impacts on children, people with psychosocial disability, people with communication disability, autistic people, people with invisible disability, people in remote communities, First Nations participants, culturally and linguistically diverse participants and people reliant on informal care.

The Committee should not allow the NDIA to replace individualised planning with a technical assessment culture that appears neutral but narrows support in practice. People do not live as neat statutory categories. Their support needs arise from the interaction between impairment, environment, family capacity, communication, housing, transport, health, behaviour, safety, community access and service availability. A system that removes or weakens face to face assessment risks losing the very evidence that shows whether a person is coping, deteriorating, being supported, being controlled, being isolated or being left unsafe. Nor should the NDIS become a faceless system that begins from suspicion, treats participants as though they must disprove misuse or exaggeration, and then requires them to prove their need inside a technical process they may not understand, control or be able to challenge. A disability support scheme should not assume guilt and make people prove innocence. It should begin from support need, human dignity and practical evidence, with proper safeguards against fraud directed at the party with control, knowledge, benefit and fault. An annual report that does not test assessment tools against that real life complexity is not giving Parliament a real account of the scheme.

Review rights and administrative burden must be reported honestly

The NDIS cannot be described as fair if participants must fight too hard to obtain what they are entitled to receive. Internal review and ART proceedings should not become the ordinary pathway for correcting poor initial decisions.

Communication Access Is a Core Administration Issue

The annual report should disclose the volume of internal reviews, the time taken to resolve them, the issues most commonly disputed, the number of decisions changed before hearing, the number of matters settled, the number of matters conceded, the number of matters where the participant succeeded, the legal costs incurred, and the practical consequences of delay.

It should also disclose whether participants have access to advocacy, accessible communication, evidence support and procedural adjustments.

Review delay is not a minor administrative inconvenience. It can mean lost therapy, carer collapse, school exclusion, loss of work, mental health deterioration, family crisis, hospitalisation, isolation and loss of function. A decision that is eventually corrected after months of contest may still have caused real harm. The annual report should measure that harm rather than hiding behind final outcomes.

The Committee should also examine whether the NDIA is using its institutional power fairly in disputes. A national agency with legal teams, internal expertise and procedural knowledge is not in an equal contest with a participant or family under stress. If the scheme forces vulnerable people into adversarial processes, Parliament should ask whether the administration itself is failing.

Communication access is a core administration issue

A scheme for people with disability must be accessible to people with disability. That should be obvious, but many participants continue to experience the NDIA as complex, inaccessible and difficult to communicate with. Communication should not be reactive, passive or limited to sending notices and waiting for a participant to fail. It should be proactive, adaptive and disability aware from the outset.

The annual report should include specific reporting on communication disability, deaf and hard of hearing participants, Auslan access, augmentative and alternative communication, cognitive accessibility, plain language, digital exclusion, interpreter use, accessible notices, supported decision making, psychosocial barriers, literacy barriers and the ability of participants to communicate with the NDIA in a way that reflects their disability.

Failure to communicate accessibly can produce false non-compliance. A participant may miss a deadline, fail to provide information, misunderstand a request, lose support or appear disengaged because the administrative system is not accessible to them. That should not be treated as participant failure. It should be treated as administrative failure. Where there is doubt, confusion, repeated non response, distress, cognitive difficulty, communication difficulty, unstable housing, psychosocial disability, suspected coercion or risk of support loss, the NDIA should move toward direct human contact and, where necessary, in person engagement rather than escalating automatically to suspension, adverse action or debt recovery.

The health and NDS boundary must not become a gap people fall through

Communication with participants

The Committee should ask whether plan suspension, information requests, reassessment processes, review notices and debt actions are being communicated in forms that participants can understand and act upon. It should also ask whether the NDIA is adapting communication to the participant, or forcing the participant to adapt to the bureaucracy. A disability scheme should not wait for communication failure and then punish the participant for it. It should identify communication risk early, contact the person proactively, check understanding, involve chosen supports where appropriate and safe, and use face to face engagement where written, digital or remote communication is likely to fail.

Interface between NDIA and Health Systems

Annual report examination

The annual report should examine the interface between the NDIS and health systems as a major risk area. Participants should not be left unsupported because the NDIA says health is responsible while health is unavailable, delayed, under resourced or unwilling to act. Responsibility on paper is not support in practice.

This is particularly important for participants with complex nursing needs, hospital discharge needs, psychosocial disability, degenerative conditions, rehabilitation needs, behavioural support needs, disability related clinical risk or overlapping health and functional support needs. The Commonwealth should not withdraw or refuse NDIS support on the theory that another system should act unless that system is practically available, accessible and ready to provide the support.

Disclosure requirements

The annual report should disclose how often supports are refused or reduced because another system is said to be responsible. It should disclose what happens next. It should show whether the participant actually receives the alternative support, how long the transfer takes, whether interim support is maintained, and whether harm occurs during the gap. The Committee should recommend a no wrong door safeguard. Essential support should continue until responsibility is practically transferred.

Families and informal carers must not be treated as invisible infrastructure

Annual Report Examination of Unpaid Care Reliance

The annual report must examine the extent to which the NDIS relies on unpaid care. Families and carers are essential, but they are not an unlimited substitute for funded support. Informal care may be loving, skilled, stable and preferred by the participant, but it can also be exhausted, unsafe, coercive, unavailable, financially destructive or physically unsustainable. The scheme should not treat family care as free infrastructure simply because it occurs inside a household.

Where a participant wants suitable care to be provided by a family member, and where that arrangement is safe, voluntary, non-exploitative and non-coercive, the NDIS should be able to fund that care properly. A family member who provides real disability support should not be pushed into poverty, lost employment, injury or exhaustion merely

because the work is performed by someone who loves the participant.

If the same work would be paid when performed by an external provider, there is no principled reason to assume it has no economic value when performed by a suitable family carer. At a minimum, such care should be paid at no less than the National Minimum Wage or the relevant award rate, whichever is higher, with proper safeguards, consent, review and oversight.

Those safeguards should include appropriate training where the nature of the disability, the level of support or the risk involved requires it. Training should be funded, practical, accessible and proportionate. It should not become another gatekeeping device that blocks safe family care or leaves a participant unsupported while paperwork is processed. In some cases, training may be simple and directed to communication, manual handling, medication awareness, behaviour support, emergency response, infection control, personal care, rights and boundaries, or recognising signs of distress, neglect or coercion. In more complex cases, training should be linked to clinical, behavioural or allied health advice. The point is to make family care safer and more sustainable, not to use training requirements as an excuse to deny payment for real support.

This would not mean forcing participants into family care or replacing specialist services with unpaid household labour. It would mean recognising that, in some cases, a trusted and properly supported family member may provide safer, more continuous and more cost-effective support than an exploitative or unstable external provider. Depending on the disability and the intensity of support required, funded family care may need to operate alongside external providers, respite, clinical support, behavioural support or public disability services so that the family member is not overloaded and the participant is not isolated or controlled.

A scheme that relies on family exhaustion to reduce expenditure is not sustainable. It is merely shifting cost from the Commonwealth to households. It is also shifting risk to women, older carers, parents, partners, siblings and extended family members who may already be carrying the consequences of service failure. The annual report should therefore include indicators of carer collapse, family stress, lost work, reduced income, injury, mental health deterioration, housing stress, school exclusion, crisis presentations and support withdrawal. If the NDIA assumes that family support can absorb what funded supports no longer provide, that assumption should be tested in the real world. Parliament should not accept invisible unpaid labour as proof that the scheme is working.

Provider regulation must pursue the party with control, benefit and fault

The Committee should support stronger provider regulation where it protects participants from exploitation, neglect, abuse, poor records, overcharging, conflicted

Service Delivery Integrity in NDIS

service delivery, plan manipulation and unsafe practice. Mandatory registration, better oversight of plan managers, stronger record keeping, better complaints handling and more serious enforcement may all be necessary.

But the integrity system must pursue the correct target. It should pursue the party with control, knowledge, benefit and fault. It should not default to the participant simply because the participant is the legal holder of the plan or the visible recipient of funds. Many participants rely on others to arrange services, understand invoices, approve claims and communicate with the NDIA. If a provider, plan manager, support coordinator, nominee, family member or other third party caused or benefited from misuse, the system should not recover from or punish the participant unless the evidence shows real participant fault.

The annual report should disclose enforcement action by category. It should show action against registered providers, unregistered providers, plan managers, support coordinators, nominees, workers and participants separately. It should disclose how often participant vulnerability, coercion, dependence, communication barriers and third-party control were considered before adverse action was taken.

Coercive control and provider capture must be treated as safeguarding failures

The Committee should examine coercive control in the NDIS as a safeguarding issue. Participants may be controlled by providers, workers, family members, nominees, landlords, plan managers or support coordinators. They may be isolated from alternative services. They may fear losing support. They may depend on a person or organisation that also controls information, transport, housing, communication or access to the community.

In those circumstances, the appearance of choice and control can be dangerously misleading. A participant may formally agree while practically having no safe alternative. A participant may not complain because complaint would threaten support. A participant may not understand financial arrangements or may be pressured to accept services that mainly benefit the provider.

The annual report should disclose how the Commission and the NDIA identify coercive control, provider capture, financial exploitation, isolation, intimidation, restrictive practice misuse and conflicts of interest. It should disclose response times, enforcement outcomes and whether participants were provided with safe alternative supports after raising concerns. A safeguarding system that identifies abuse but cannot arrange safe replacement support is incomplete.

SDA and housing show why market signals are not enough

Specialist Disability Accommodation should be examined as an example of market complexity. A market can contain vacant dwellings while participants still cannot

access suitable housing.

Capital can be invested while matching fails. Providers can hold assets while people remain in unsuitable homes, hospitals, family stress or institutional settings. That is not a simple supply problem. It is a governance, information, matching, planning and accountability problem.

The annual report should disclose SDA vacancies, participant demand, mismatch by location and design category, time to placement, barriers to occupancy, appeals, pricing effects, provider behaviour and whether participants are being supported into suitable housing. It should also examine whether the SDA market is producing real housing security or merely a financial asset class adjacent to disability need.

Housing is too important to be left to abstract market confidence. A participant does not need a theoretical dwelling. They need a secure, accessible, safe and suitable home in the real world. If the NDIS cannot connect need to available housing, Parliament should ask whether stronger public coordination or public provision is required.

Transport funding must be treated as participation infrastructure

Transport is not a fringe issue. For many participants it is the condition of social participation, employment, education, medical access, therapy, family connection and ordinary life. If transport funding is poorly designed, poorly monitored, exhausted too early or treated mainly as a fraud risk, participants lose mobility and independence.

The annual report should examine whether transport funding is adequate, accountable and practically usable. It should distinguish between genuine need, poor plan design, provider overuse, plan management failure, lack of public transport, regional isolation, participant vulnerability and misuse. It should also examine whether transport costs are being shifted onto families or forcing participants into isolation.

A scheme that funds a plan but does not provide practical mobility may be funding support on paper only. Participation requires movement. The annual report should treat transport as core participation infrastructure, not merely an expense line.

Workforce is the real sustainability test

The NDIS cannot be sustainable without a workforce. The annual report should therefore treat workforce formation as a central performance and expenditure issue.

A serious workforce strategy should include paid training, supervised entry, proper accreditation, secure employment, regional workforce development, allied health pipeline support, career progression, decent wages, safe workloads, supervision and retention. A system that treats labour mainly as a cost to be suppressed will produce churn, thin markets, poor continuity and unsafe care. It will also drive workers out of the sector and make supports unavailable even where plans contain funding.

Expenditure reporting must separate public value from private extraction

The NDIS spends substantial public money. That money should be accounted for rigorously, but the accounting should ask the right question. The right question is not simply whether expenditure increased. The right question is whether expenditure produced public value.

The annual report should distinguish between money spent on direct participant support, money absorbed by administration, money captured by intermediaries, money lost through poor provider behaviour, money inflated by pricing failures, money wasted through poor decision making, money spent on disputes that should have been avoided, and money used to build enduring public capacity. Without that distinction, Parliament cannot know whether the scheme is expensive because people are receiving necessary support, or expensive because the architecture leaks value.

Expenditure control that cuts essential supports while leaving provider extraction and rent seeking intact is not discipline. It is misdirected austerity. It reduces the visible plan while leaving the deeper system failure untouched. The Committee should insist that savings come first from fraud, overcharging, rent seeking, conflicts of interest,

Lived Experience Must Be Treated As Evidence

The Annual Report Process Should Treat Lived Experience As Evidence

Participants, families, carers and workers often see system failures before annual reports show them. They know when assessment tools miss reality, when providers manipulate plans, when communication fails, when support withdrawal causes harm, when families are at breaking point, when services exist only on paper, and when the scheme becomes too exhausting to use.

The fact that the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 inquiry received 1,574 submissions, and the Integrity of the National Disability Insurance Scheme inquiry received 97 submissions, should be treated as a warning sign. Those figures are high for parliamentary inquiries of this kind. They are the canary in the coal mine. They show that the disability community, families, carers, workers, providers and advocates are not merely offering policy preferences. They are signalling that serious pressure is building inside the scheme.

Recommendations For A Formal Framework

The Committee should recommend a formal lived experience evidence framework for annual reporting. That framework should include participant safety, fear of complaint, administrative distress, communication barriers, carer collapse, isolation, loss of function, service withdrawal, provider dependence, review burden and whether participants feel safe contesting decisions. It should also require the NDIA and the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission to identify recurring themes from submissions, complaints, reviews and public evidence before those themes become crises.

It should not be enough for agencies to report satisfaction scores, consultation activity or selected case studies. Parliament needs to know whether people are being heard before damage occurs, because a system that waits until lived experience becomes scandal, litigation or collapse is not listening early enough.

Conclusion

The NDIS should be protected, but it should be protected as a human service, not as a budget line. Fraud should be attacked. Provider misconduct should be attacked. Overcharging should be attacked. Coercive control, conflicted plan management, weak records, sharp practice, rent seeking and organised exploitation should be attacked. But participants should not be made to carry the cost of a private market failure that government designed, funded and allowed to grow.

This annual report inquiry should therefore ask whether the NDIS is being governed in a way that builds real capacity, or whether it is mainly controlling expenditure inside a failing architecture. It should ask whether annual reporting reveals the lived reality of

• participants, families, carers and workers, or whether it hides behind aggregate activity.

It should ask whether sustainability is being defined as real resource capacity over time, or whether it has become a polite word for rationing. It should ask whether public money is organising care, dignity, safety and inclusion, or whether it is organising private extraction, rent seeking, provider churn, legal contest and administrative waste.

The Committee should also say plainly that political rhetoric about cost must be tested. The NDIS does not suffer from a shortage of Commonwealth dollars. The Commonwealth is the issuer of the Australian dollar. Money is not a scarce resource to to the federal government in the way it is to a household, business, charity, council or state government. For the currency issuing Commonwealth, money is an organising tool. The true constraint is whether Australia has, or can build, the workers, services, housing, transport, allied health capacity, assistive technology, supervision, public administration, local service structures and safeguards required to support people with disability safely and effectively.

Australia is not starting from a position where every person is already fully used. There are well over 1.5 million unemployed or underemployed Australians, and the number moves closer to 2 million when broader labour underutilisation and marginal attachment are considered. Many of those people are treated as surplus by the private market and by existing public employment, but they are not surplus to public purpose. A currency issuing Commonwealth has the monetary capability to train and employ some of that unused and underused labour, without bidding workers away from existing jobs, and convert it into real public capacity through paid training, supervised entry roles, local coordination, community access support, transport assistance, disability support pathways and other socially useful work connected to the NDIS.

The hard truth is that the NDIS has a structural problem, not merely a compliance problem. A scheme that constantly needs more policing, more pricing control, more restrictions, more registration, more plan controls, more automation, more review limits and more administrative machinery is showing design stress. Parliament should not keep pretending that another patch will cure a system organised around the wrong incentives.

The proper direction is public capacity. Australia needs direct public disability support capability, local public NDIS service structures, strong provider regulation, accessible and proactive administration, enforceable review rights, face to face assessment where needed or requested, practical health interface safeguards, serious communication access, public housing and SDA coordination, transport as participation infrastructure, workforce formation, properly funded family care where safe and chosen, and a Job Guarantee linked to social need. That is how the scheme can move from market dependence to public purpose.

Annual Report No 2

The Committee should use Annual Report No 2 to say plainly that the NDS cannot be secured by narrowing support, hiding behind fiscal myths, assuming guilt, forcing participants to prove innocence inside faceless systems, or asking families and carers to absorb the failure of private delivery without recognition, training or payment. It can only be secured by building the real workers, services, institutions, safeguards and public accountability needed to deliver the support Australia promised.

Recommendations

• The Committee should recommend that future annual reports of the NDIA and the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission include a deeper public accountability framework that reports not only expenditure, activity and compliance, but participant safety, service availability, review burden, communication access, provider misconduct, coercive control, market failure, workforce capacity, health interface failure, SDA mismatch, transport adequacy, carer sustainability and lived experience evidence.

• The Committee should recommend that NDIS sustainability be reported in real resource terms. This means that the relevant test should be whether Australia has, or can build, the workers, services, housing, transport, allied health capacity, assistive technology, supervision, administration, public institutions and community infrastructure required to support participants safely over time. Sustainability should not be reported as a mere expenditure control target.

• The Committee should recommend that annual reporting expressly distinguish between Commonwealth monetary capacity and real resource capacity. It should reject the false and wrong claim that the Commonwealth must first collect taxes or borrow dollars before it can support people with disability, while still requiring serious reporting on labour, skills, training, infrastructure, inflation risk, provider capacity and public administration.

• The Committee should recommend that the annual reports identify whether public money is organising care, dignity, safety and inclusion, or whether it is being captured by fraud, overcharging, rent seeking, conflicted intermediaries, inflated billing, poor provider governance, unnecessary legal contest, administrative churn and defective market design.

• The Committee should recommend that NDIS expenditure reporting separate direct participant support from provider extraction, rent seeking, intermediation, administrative cost, legal contest, pricing failure, poor market design and waste, so that

Recommendations

6. The Committee should recommend that the NDIA and the Commission distinguish clearly between provider fraud, intermediary misconduct, nominee abuse, coercion, administrative error, participant vulnerability and deliberate participant misuse, so that enforcement pursues the party with control, knowledge, benefit and fault.

7. The Committee should recommend that New Framework Planning, Support Needs Assessment tools and related instruments not be treated as legitimate unless they are transparent, independently validated, accessible, disability appropriate, reviewable and capable of capturing real world functional need. The annual report should disclose whether tools such as I CAN and PECQ involve coded, scored, machine readable, automated or semi-automated inputs that affect funding, support access or plan design.

8. The Committee should recommend that face to face assessment remain available wherever needed or requested. A structured tool should not replace observation, conversation, context, family evidence, environmental evidence and the practical reality of how a person lives. The NDIS should not become a faceless system that begins from suspicion, assumes misuse or exaggeration, and then requires participants to prove need inside a technical process they may not understand, control or be able to challenge.

9. The Committee should recommend that annual reporting include detailed disclosure of internal review and ART matters, including causes of dispute, delay, outcomes, settlements, overturned decisions, legal costs and participant harm caused by poor initial decision making.

10. The Committee should recommend that accessible communication be treated as a core administration obligation, with specific reporting on Auslan, communication disability, cognitive accessibility, plain language, digital exclusion, interpreter access, supported decision making and reasonable adjustments. Communication should be proactive, adaptive and disability aware, with in person engagement where written, digital or remote communication is likely to fail.

11. The Committee should recommend a no wrong door safeguard so that participants do not lose essential support merely because another system is theoretically responsible, unless that system is practically available, accessible and

Recommendation

Section Heading (if applicable)

ready to provide the support. Essential support should continue until responsibility is practically transferred.

Recommendations from the Committee:

• The Committee should recommend that the NDIA and the Commission report specifically on coercive control, provider capture, financial exploitation, nominee abuse, conflicts of interest, restrictive practice misuse and the availability of safe alternative supports after a participant raises concern.
• The Committee should recommend that suitable family care be recognised as real support where it is chosen by the participant, safe, voluntary, non-exploitative and non-coercive. Where a family member provides support that would otherwise be paid if delivered by an external provider, the NDIS should be able to fund that care at no less than the National Minimum Wage or the relevant award rate, whichever is higher, with appropriate consent, safeguards, review and oversight.
• The Committee should recommend that funded family care include appropriate training where the nature of the disability, the level of support or the risk involved requires it. Training should be funded, practical, accessible and proportionate, and should operate as a safety and sustainability measure rather than as a gatekeeping device that blocks safe family care or leaves participants unsupported.
• The Committee should recommend that the Commonwealth develop a national public NDIS service capacity plan, including a modern CES style public NDIS service structure with local public offices, public support coordination, service navigation, workforce development, thin market intervention, provider oversight and direct public delivery options.
• The Committee should recommend that core supports, high risk supports, thin market services and areas of persistent provider failure move progressively toward direct public provision or a dominant public framework, because essential disability support should be treated as public service infrastructure rather than a field for private extraction.
• The Committee should recommend a national disability workforce strategy built around paid training, supervised entry, accreditation, secure employment, regional workforce development, allied health pipeline support, proper supervision, career progression and workforce retention.
• The Committee should recommend that the Commonwealth examine a federally funded, locally administered Job Guarantee as part of NDIS workforce formation and

• participant inclusion. It should be voluntary for participants, properly paid, socially useful, designed around capacity, and never used as a substitute for necessary disability support. Properly designed, it could convert unused and underused labour into real public capacity while also creating dignified, supported work pathways for participants who want them.

• The Committee should recommend that transport be treated as participation infrastructure, not merely as an expense line, with reporting on adequacy, accountability, plan exhaustion, regional access, public transport gaps and whether transport costs are being shifted onto families or forcing participants into isolation.

• The Committee should recommend that SDA and disability housing be reported as a real housing security issue, not merely as a market investment issue, with disclosure of vacancies, participant demand, mismatch by location and design category, time to placement, barriers to occupancy and whether stronger public coordination or public provision is required.

• The Committee should recommend a formal lived experience evidence framework for annual reporting. That framework should include participant safety, fear of complaint, administrative distress, communication barriers, carer collapse, isolation, loss of function, service withdrawal, provider dependence, review burden and whether participants feel safe contesting decisions. The large number of submissions to recent NDIS inquiries should be treated as the canary in the coal mine, not as ordinary consultation noise.