Joint Standing Committee on the National Disability Insurance Scheme
PO Box 6100 Parliament House Canberra ACT 2600
24th April 2026
I am taking the opportunity to make this submission in respect of the above inquiry. I do note that it was not my intention to make a submission, but the developments and announcements of the Australian Government this week have compelled me to write a submission.
I would also note that the significant time pressure of the closure date for submission means writing a shorter submission, and thus less detailed, than I would have preferred.
I am writing in a personal capacity, but informed by significant professional identity as a social worker, with 15+ years experience in child protection and education. I also identify as neurodivergent, living with autism and ADHD. I ask that the Committee respect my desire for this information to be unedited for the purposes of publication, not least because I am already public about conditions.
My primary concern is that the general approach of the Government to the challenges of managing the NDIS is to proceed from a perspective of financial burden, rather than humanistic obligation. The realities of disability and lived experience of neurodivergent conditions becomes clearer every day. The scale of challenges, and numbers, is also becoming clearer.
It is easy to understand that successive governments have failed to understand or comprehend this scale of challenge, assuming that disability exists on the periphery of human experience. What we now see is that it exists on a level to be an observable phenomenon in everyday life, and furthermore existing as an invisible self-managed burden.
An invisible, self-managed burden relates to those with conditions who knowingly withhold the full scale of their impact, do not divulge their condition at all, or manage through life being unaware of having the condition. There are many factors for this, but the impacts of stigma, costs of diagnosis, and limitations on protections and services all combine to put enormous pressure on people that have a disability or live with neurodivergent condition.
Stigma can present a significant challenge to those with disabilities, and for many it can be the source of any traumatising, and debilitating consequences. In this way
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to disability is not the primary source of difficulties, but people’s and institution’s poor responses generate more problems than they resolve.
This highlights a major limitation of the way the NDIS is perceived by the government, in that the NDIS does not necessarily support a safe integration of the person with opportunities for employment, social life, or any other aspect that their disability might have an impact on.
This is especially true of children, where public institutions (such as education) see NDIS support as mitigating effects in isolation of their own operation. That is, if a child has diagnosed disability the intervention of the NDIS support should resolve any complicating factors for that institution, but without reflecting any changes themselves.
In practice, this leads to situations where schools expect change arising from NDIS input, but do not themselves operate to reflect changes to help those students. This is especially the case in instances of behavioural impacts (such as those arising from autism, for example). This has the tendency to isolate the child from integration of service support, which would be at its most helpful.
This type of behaviour is also mirrored with child protection and youth justice, in my experience, amongst other service inputs.
This lack of integration serves to undermine the ability of acquiring adequate insight into performance. Services through the NDIS are not subject to wider scrutiny about how their services aid or assist, raising the risk of faulty input. It can also mean that NDIS service providers are ‘flying blind’, because they are not being informed about various complications elsewhere.
The point I am making here is that it is easy to paint a label of malpractice against a range of service providers. This unfortunately can and does happen, but the risk increases where free-market capitalist approaches are promoted in favour of more integrated public service approaches.
However, many aspects of flawed service delivery occur because of a failure to properly integrate service input and communication. A great deal of time, effort and money could be saved by improving those linkages. So rather than cutting off services wholesale, and indiscriminately, on the basis of a raw dollar figure saving, it would be better to approach the integrity of the NDIS from a point of view of integrated service supports and ask the question of why so many people operating in the same figurative room for a person living with disabilities, all seem to be working as though in the dark when everyone knows where the light switch is.
I would have preferred more opportunity to give greater detail of my perceptions of the service in practice, but the aforementioned conditions constrain what I am providing you. I would reinforce the idea though that lack of integrity is not generally driven by malignant practice, but by a failure of service integration.
Yours faithfully
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Jack Davenport
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