Submission to:

Investigation into the Integrity of the National Disability Insurance Scheme

Joint Standing Committee on the National Disability Insurance Scheme

Parliament of Australia

Submitted by:

Mental Health Legal Centre Inc

Contact Person: Charlotte Jones

Email: redacted

Phone: redacted

Date: April 2026

Submission on the Integrity of the NDIS Purpose: To provide the Committee with evidence, analysis and recommendations drawn from MHLC’s direct work with people living with psychosocial disability, including the findings from the Centre’s multiple internal investigations, to inform reforms that strengthen the integrity of the NDIS while ensuring that integrity measures protect, rather than penalise, people with disability.

Table of Contents

1. Executive Summary
2. About MHLC and the evidence base for this submission
3. Framing: what we mean by integrity
4. Response to the Terms of Reference
5. Recommendations
6. Implementation Considerations
7. References

Executive Summary

This submission responds to the Joint Standing Committee’s inquiry into the integrity of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (referenced variously as the ‘Scheme’, and ‘NDIS’). It is informed by MHLC’s direct casework, our six-month investigation documented in the People need People report, our sector consultations with more than 35 professionals and 52 residents of supported residential services (SRSs), and the views we expressed in our December 2025 submission to the Federal Disability Safeguards Consultation.

MHLC supports robust integrity measures. We have seen up close and repeatedly what poor scheme integrity looks like in practice: participants stripped of their NDIS funds by predatory providers, invoices submitted for services that were never delivered, and plans drained at accelerated rates by people who hold every form of power over the participant’s daily life. We have also reported these practices to the relevant authorities, only to receive responses that are slow, fragmented and largely ineffective.

However, integrity reform that focuses narrowly on compliance, eligibility tightening and enforcement against participants will not fix the problem. The participants we work with are not driving the integrity gap. The integrity gap is being driven by predatory providers and proprietors who exploit isolated participants, regulatory fragmentation, and the structural absence of independent advocacy and safeguarding.

If the Inquiry’s recommendations result in tighter compliance for participants while leaving the predatory provider ecosystem intact, the Scheme’s integrity will not improve but its participants will be harmed twice: once by exploitation, and again by suspicion.

Our central message is this: integrity is a safeguarding question. The Scheme leaks money in the same places it leaks safety. The participants most at risk of having funds fraudulently drained are the participants most at risk of coercion, neglect and abuse. Fixing one requires fixing the other.

Key recommendations at a glance

• Separate the quality and safeguarding functions of the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission from its provider-registration and complaints-handling functions, to remove structural conflicts of interest.
• Introduce participant-driven package safeguards, including automatic, opt-out independent advocacy for vulnerable adults; salaried (not commissioned) plan managers and support coordinators for participants at highest risk; and face-to-face NDIA outreach for participants who cannot safely engage by phone or portal.
• Require transparent, itemised billing with separation of accommodation and personal care charges, and conduct cross-regulator desktop audits (NDIA, NDIS Q&SC, ASIC, ATO, ACNC, DFFH and Medicare) of all entities using taxpayer funds to support vulnerable adults.

• Establish localised, multi-agency regulatory teams with statutory powers to enter accommodation settings and investigate without prior notice, including unregistered SILs and SRSs operating as NDIS hubs.
• Strengthen sanctions, penalties and criminal prosecution pathways for institutional abuse and fraudulent billing and ensure mandatory disclosure of beneficial ownership for all NDIS providers and providers of accommodation to vulnerable adults.

About MHLC and the evidence base for this submission

The Mental Health Legal Centre (MHLC) is a community legal centre based in Melbourne that provides free legal assistance to people living with mental ill-health and psychosocial disability across Victoria. We represent people across all groups, including those facing compulsory treatment, those in supported residential services, those navigating Guardianship and Administration, and those whose NDIS plans have led to vulnerability of financial exploitation.

This submission draws on four bodies of evidence.

• People need People (2024). A multidisciplinary project in which our team listened to 52 people with psychosocial disability about their experiences living in supported residential services and accessing the NDIS, held consultations with more than 35 sector professionals, visited more than 10 different SRSs, and identified serious concerns related to more than 50 companies operating in the space. All specific concerns were reported to the relevant authorities. The report contains 47 recommendations, many of which speak directly to NDIS integrity.
• MHLC submission to the Federal Disability Safeguards Consultation (December 2025). This submission set out our analysis of safeguarding fragmentation across federal and state systems, the lack of a single point of reporting, and the failure of existing complaints pathways to deliver protection or redress for people with limited natural safeguards.
• MHLC casework. Through the People need People project alone we provided legal assistance to 26 individuals on issues ranging from tenancy and Guardianship to Centrelink debt, complaints, and recovery of money lost through inappropriate billing. We continue to act for participants whose plans have been exploited by registered and unregistered providers.
• Coronial findings. The findings of Victoria’s State Coroner, John Cain, including renewed calls for better protections for vulnerable adults, which provides an important reference point for the legal and policy gaps the Committee is being asked to address.

We have made every effort in this submission to follow the Committee’s guidance and comment on the conduct of providers and regulators in general terms, without naming individuals or specific organisations. The companies, providers and proprietors referenced in our underlying evidence have been the subject of detailed reports to the relevant authorities.

Framing: what we mean by integrity

The Committee has been asked to inquire into the integrity of the NDIS, including fraud and sharp practices. We support this focus. We also urge the Committee to keep two framings clearly in view as it works through the evidence.

Integrity is not the same as compliance

Much of the public discussion about NDIS integrity has been framed in terms of waste, fraud and overpayment. These are real problems. But integrity in the deeper sense (which we argue is the integrity of the NDIS as a vehicle for upholding the rights of people with disability) is also about whether the money that is spent is delivering what participants are entitled to.

A plan that is fully drawn down but where the participant received no genuine support has not been administered with integrity, even if every invoice on its face complies with the price guide. The NDIS can be entirely compliant and still be failing the people it was built for. This is a clear and repeated finding of our work, that continues today.

Integrity reform must distinguish participants from perpetrators

The participants we work with are people living with psychosocial disability, often with limited natural safeguards of their own. They are not the drivers of the integrity gap, but overwhelmingly the targets of it. They are the people, for example, whose ATM cards are held by proprietors, whose email accounts are set up by providers in their provider’s names, whose packages are drained through invoicing for one-to-one supports that were actually delivered (if at all) to groups of three or more at a time.

From the People need People report

The unintended consequences of [the introduction of NDIS packages] are that people living with psychosocial disability and limited natural safeguards are valuable commodities. This means that they are specifically targeted and become highly vulnerable to predatory practices motivated by greed.

If integrity reforms harden eligibility and compliance settings in ways that make it more difficult for people with psychosocial disability to access and stay in the NDIS, the result will not be a more honest scheme. It will simply be a scheme that has shifted the cost of the integrity gap onto the very people who already bear most of it.

Response to the Terms of Reference

4.1 The nature and extent of non-compliance, fraud and sharp practices

Our work has identified a consistent pattern of fraud, sharp practices (as defined by the investigation’s terms of reference) and exploitative conduct within the NDIS, concentrated in the segment of the market that services people with psychosocial disability as well as

others with limited natural safeguards. This particularly includes residents of supported residential services, supported independent living arrangements and other forms of congregate accommodation.

The sharp practices we and our sector partners have documented include the following:

Fraudulent and inappropriate billing

• Invoicing services that were not provided at all.
• Invoicing for one-to-one supports where the participant was actually taken out in groups of three or more and conversely invoicing across multiple participants for one-to-one support while delivering a group activity.
• Double-dipping between accommodation services (charged through the Disability Support Pension) and personal care (charged through the NDIS), with vaguely worded invoices for items already included in SRS fees such as basic personal care and domestic services.
• Triple-billing across SRS fees, NDIS supports and Aged Care packages for the same hours of nominal care, with invoices using generic language such as ‘personal care’ and total hours claimed.
• Accelerated drainage of participants’ plans by providers who control the participant’s day-to-day life and can secure ‘approval’ for hours through fear, dependence or substituted consent.

Sharp practices and coercive sales

• Targeting of participants with larger plans for unsolicited approaches, including collecting people on discharge from hospital and taking them to private unregistered dwellings.
• Inducements and bribes to switch provider or accommodation - including ‘free’ fast food, cigarettes, reduced rent, new furniture, televisions and cash.
• Use of ‘I heart NDIS’ style branding by entities that are not in fact registered providers, alongside cleverly worded implications of registration and claims of NDIS specialist expertise.
• SRS proprietors registering as NDIS providers and then operating as the de facto sole or ‘preferred’ provider for all their residents, producing wide-spread conflicts of interest and double billing.
• Threats of eviction used to coerce residents into agreeing to switch providers or remain with a preferred provider.

Conflicts of interest and ownership opacity

• Single NDIS providers operating as plan manager, support coordinator, core supports provider and capacity-building provider for the same participant, in effect concentrating every decision-point in one commercially interested entity.
• Family Trusts and related-party arrangements obscuring beneficial ownership of multiple NDIS provider entities and multiple SRSs.
• Different company names with no apparent relationship being held in the same Family Trusts; shareholding loops where Company X is the sole shareholder of Company Y, and Company Y is the sole shareholder of Company X.
• Registered NDIS providers showing hundreds of ‘outlets’ actively invoicing, with limited transparency about where, by whom and to whom services are being delivered.
• Proprietors of facilities deemed unsuitable to operate accommodation services moving directly into NDIS provider entities (often registered in a spouse’s name) and continuing to control the same vulnerable cohort.

Restrictive practices used as a quiet form of cost management

• Widespread observed use of PRN (‘as needed’) sedative medications that meet the definition of chemical restraint, with operational under-recording and under-reporting to the relevant authorities.
• In-house GP arrangements where a single GP attends a facility, briefly sees all residents in a public area, issues prescriptions including PRNs and bills Medicare, thus benefitting both the GP and the proprietor while degrading the participant’s health outcomes.
• Mishandling of medications by non-clinical staff, including dispensing by other residents, or by being ‘left (unsupervised) at the breakfast table at the place (the participants) usually sit’. These practices are not only matters of safety, but also points at which Medicare and NDIS funds are being claimed for clinical-grade supports that are not being delivered.

Financial abuse facilitated by the design of the NDIS

• Proprietors and providers holding participants’ ATM cards and operating accounts in participants’ names, including email accounts established by the provider in the participant’s name to receive and ‘approve’ invoices and NDIS correspondence.
• Overcharging of rent above agreed amounts, including charging participants for single rooms that are in fact shared, sometimes by multiple occupants, with beds being separated by thin curtains or material.

• Charges that quietly exceed the participant’s total Disability Support Pension by more than $170 per fortnight, in one case persisting for at least five years without detection by the State Trustees who administered the participant’s money.

It is the consistent pattern of these practices, across more than 50 companies identified in just six months of work in one segment of one State’s market, that should worry the Committee, not because of any single example, but because of what it tells us about how exposed the scheme is to the kind of provider that has structured itself precisely to exploit it.

4.2 The impacts of non-compliance on NDIS participants and their families

The impacts of these practices on the participants we work with are severe, cumulative, and, in many cases, irreversible.

Direct harm to participants

Participants are left without the support they are entitled to. Their plans are exhausted at an accelerated rate, leaving them without funded support for the remainder of the plan period, and forcing the participant or their advocates to seek emergency plan reviews, a process which is itself slow, opaque and difficult to navigate. Health needs are not addressed because the worker did not actually engage with the participant. Capacity-building goals are not met because the supports delivered bore no relationship to the goals in the plan.

Beyond financial harm, the conditions in which these practices flourish are harmful. Participants in the settings we visited in the People Need People report reported feeling scared to live where they live, but without realistic alternatives. They reported being bullied by proprietors and by other residents. They reported being unable to refuse a worker, to leave the facility freely, or to raise a complaint without fear of being ‘asked to leave’. They reported being given days-old bread and being charged extra for soy milk.

Erosion of choice and control

The integrity gap erodes the foundational promise of the NDIS, which is that participants exercise genuine choice and control over the supports they receive. In the settings we have documented and continue to interact with, choice and control has effectively been transferred from the participant to the provider or proprietor. Decisions about which workers attend, which providers are used, which days supports are delivered, which rooms participants sleep in, and what they eat, are routinely not being made by the participant.

Substituted decision-making is being overused. The use of Guardianship Orders have, in some cases, been the only available protective tool, only applied for by community health nurses and support workers as a last resort when no other system would act. The waitlist

for Guardianship Orders has been observed to extend to about 18 months before final decision. During that time, the participant remains exposed.

Impact on families and natural supports

Families who do exist often report being shut out of the participant’s NDIS communications, including by providers who have established email accounts in the participant’s name and replaced the family’s contact details on the participant’s record. Where families try to raise concerns, they encounter the same fragmented complaints landscape that defeats sector professionals.

Many of the participants we work with do not have a family circle of support. This is not incidental to the integrity question; rather it is central to it. Participants without natural safeguards are precisely the cohort that the predatory end of the market identifies and targets.

People need other people. In case things go wrong, you can help each other. People with disability are less likely to have these supports and are more likely to need them. As we know the evidence proves that they are more likely to be abused.

• People Need People (2024)

Impact on workers and on trust in the Scheme

The impact is not limited to participants. Sector workers, including community health nurses, independent advocates, support coordinators, local area coordinators and frontline staff at not-for-profit providers, have told us repeatedly that they have raised concerns, lodged complaints, and reported risks, and that nothing they could see came of it. On one occasion, after lodging concerns with the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission about manipulation, coercion and inappropriate invoicing, MHLC’s project team waited 18 months for a response. The response, when it came, was that the specific concerns reported did not constitute a breach of the current codes of practice.

This kind of dismissive experience corrodes trust in the scheme among workers, families and participants alike. It also produces the kind of public narrative the Committee is now navigating, in which the integrity problem is everyone’s - and no one’s.

4.3 The effectiveness and adequacy of successive government policies

Successive policy responses, including the establishment of the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission, the introduction of the Code of Conduct, the Fraud Fusion Taskforce, the NDIS Review, and most recently the NDIS Amendment (Integrity and Safeguarding) Bill 2025, have made important contributions. However, they have not, in our experience, been adequate to the scale or shape of the problem.

Fragmentation across regulators

During the People Need People project, our team identified at least 14 different regulatory agencies with some level of jurisdiction over the practices we were reporting. None of them

was clearly responsible for ensuring the safety and rights of vulnerable adults in supported accommodation. Working out who to report a particular breach to required research; receiving a response required patience; receiving an effective response was rare.

Gaps in jurisdiction were a recurring feature. Supported residential services are regulated under Victoria’s SRS Act, but approximately 30% are also registered NDIS providers, and many of the practices of concern sit outside the SRS regulator’s remit. Only around 40% of SRS residents are NDIS participants, which means many practices of concern sit outside the NDIS Q&SC’s jurisdiction. SRSs are not technically disability services because they are open to anyone, which means complaints about their staff sit outside the Disability Services Commission. Supported independent living arrangements that are increasingly used as accommodation for participants with psychosocial disability, currently fall outside any specific regulatory framework or registration requirements and are therefore unregulated environments. WE welcome reform to the SIL provisions and use of core supports.

The result is that risk concentrates exactly in the gaps; predatory operators have learned to operate in the gaps; decent providers have learned that their reports about the gaps will not be acted on; and the integrity of mechanisms set up to our assist our community’s most vulnerable, is corroded exponentially.

Complaints pathways that do not deliver

Complaints processes are slow, opaque and ineffective for the people who most need them to work. Sector professionals report routinely lodging complaints with Victoria’s Social Services Regulator and/or the NDIS Q&SC, and routinely being unable to point to a satisfactory outcome. This lack of response or action means participants face additional barriers, including complex pathways, communication needs that are not met, fear of retaliation and loss of housing, fear of being prosecuted, digital access barriers, and a compliance culture in which they feel dismissed.

Structural conflict in the regulator’s own design

The NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission combines two functions within a single body: quality assurance (a relationship with providers) and safeguarding (a duty to participants). Our consistent observation is that the quality function dominates, meaning the regulator is seen by participants and frontline workers as safeguarding businesses, not safeguarding people. This is consistent with what we said in our December 2025 submission to the Disability Safeguards Consultation, and it is one of the structural problems the Committee’s reform recommendations need to address.

Enforcement that does not deter

Weak sanctions allow risks to persist and recur. Prosecutions are rare, mainly because people with psychosocial disability are not, in practice, considered credible witnesses, which is a major impediment to building enforcement actions against perpetrators. Whilst many of the victims we encountered in any of our reports had experiences of incarceration, none of the perpetrators did. Operators of businesses deemed unsuitable have, in multiple

cases, simply re-entered the sector through a related entity. As we noted in our Disability Safeguards submission, ’often when looking to make accountable, companies simply vanish’, further flying in the face of the integrity of the scheme.

Concerns about the direction of the Amendment Bill

MHLC shares the concerns expressed by People with Disability Australia and other peak bodies that the NDIS Amendment (Integrity and Safeguarding) Bill 2025 has weighted its design towards compliance and enforcement, without an equivalent investment in participant rights, supported decision-making, dignity and independent advocacy. Integrity reform that does not also strengthen participant protections will close some doors to fraud while leaving open the doors through which most of the harm in our casework has actually walked.

4.4 Legislative and other reforms required to strengthen scheme integrity

The reforms set out in detail in section 5 below are grouped around five interlocking changes. We summarise them here to make clear how they respond to the Terms of Reference.

(a) Disentangle the Scheme’s design from the practices that exploit it

The Scheme has design features that predatory operators have learned to exploit. Plan management, support coordination, and direct service delivery can all be provided by the same entity to the same participant. Accommodation services and personal care services are billed in ways that allow double- and triple-dipping. Participants without natural safeguards have no automatic access to independent advocacy. These design features need to be addressed at the legislative and policy level, not only at the compliance level.

(b) Strengthen the safeguarding side of the Q&SC, and separate it from quality

The quality and safeguarding functions of the Commission should be structurally separated, and the safeguarding function aligned with and connected to a national adult safeguarding architecture, as MHLC has previously recommended. This connects directly to our December 2025 submission to the Disability Safeguards Consultation.

(c) Make ownership and money flows visible

Cross-regulator desktop audits, mandatory disclosure of beneficial ownership, and transparent itemised billing are technically straightforward measures that would significantly reduce the cover under which predatory operators currently work. The data already exists across NDIA, NDIS Q&SC, ASIC, ATO, ACNC, Medicare, DFFH and the State SRS regulators in Victoria, however, it is not being cross-referenced.

(d) Put people back into the safeguarding picture

Desktop audits and data-matching are necessary, but not sufficient. In addition to these, local, place-based, multi-agency teams with the power and resourcing to enter accommodation settings, including unregistered SILs and other settings, are needed to do what data cannot do so that they (and the participants, families, and regulating bodies) can

see what is actually happening. Their authority needs to extend beyond announced visits to unannounced and any other observational mechanism available and useful for accountability.

(e) Strengthen sanctions and prosecute

Sanctions should be reviewed across every relevant jurisdiction and regulator to ensure they are fit-for-purpose to address deliberate institutional abuse and fraudulent billing. Criminal sanctions for indictable offences should be initiated and prosecuted. Banning orders need to follow the person and the beneficial owner, not merely the entity.

Recommendations

The following recommendations are drawn from the work of the People Need People report and from MHLC’s continuing casework and policy work. They have been refined and selected for their direct relevance to the integrity of the Scheme. Numbering is consecutive and does not correspond to the original numbering in People need People.

A. Structural reforms to the NDIS Q&SC and the integrity architecture

1. Separate the quality and safeguarding functions of the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission, and of any other regulatory body with combined functions, so that the safeguarding function is structurally and operationally independent of the provider- facing quality function.

2. Establish public accountability for integrity outcomes through mandatory, regular public reporting of complaints received, complaints responded to within target timeframes, breaches substantiated, sanctions imposed, and money recovered. Reporting should be at sufficient granularity to allow trend analysis at provider, region and service-type level.

3. Establish a single, no-wrong-door reporting channel for reports of integrity concerns, with anonymous reporting available, supported triage to the relevant regulator, and a feedback loop to the reporter on the actions taken.

4. Establish a whistleblower line for workers in workplaces that deliver NDIS-funded support, with enforceable anti-retaliation protections that follow the worker if they move to a related entity.

B. Participant-driven safeguards

5. Provide automatic, opt-out independent advocacy for vulnerable adult participants, fully funded so that geographic and resource constraints do not ration access in practice.

6. Embed intake processes that connect vulnerable adults to independent advocacy at the point of access to the Scheme, including at the point of plan review where risk factors are present.

7. Improve NDIA and NDIS risk assessments to appropriately identify vulnerable adults, including but not limited to people living with psychosocial disability, people in congregate accommodation, people without natural supports, and people whose primary contact details are controlled by their provider or proprietor.

8. Establish NDIA outreach teams to enable face-to-face contact with vulnerable adults, recognising that for many participants the phone and the participant portal are not safe or accessible channels.

9. Directly employ salaried plan managers, support coordinators and recovery coaches for vulnerable adult participants, removing the commercial incentive structures that currently distort these roles.

10. Establish participant-driven package use safeguards that allow vulnerable adults to protect themselves from financial exploitation, including the ability to require dual authorisation for large invoices, real-time notifications of plan utilisation, and automated flags for unusual billing patterns.

11. Establish nationally consistent laws requiring the use of supported decision- making, and limiting the use of substituted decision-making and Guardianship Orders to a proven last resort. Establish mandatory training on psychosocial disability and supported decision-making for all Public Guardians.

12. Increase access to legal advocacy for vulnerable adults, including through Health Justice Partnership models that have been shown to reach and provide necessary support to vulnerable participants in accommodation settings.

C. Ownership, billing and money flows

13. Require mandatory disclosure of beneficial ownership for all NDIS-registered providers, unregistered providers receiving plan-managed payments, and accommodation providers serving NDIS participants, including disclosure of related- party arrangements, Family Trust structures, and persons with significant control.

14. Require transparent, itemised billing with separation of accommodation and personal care charges, so that supports already paid for under DSP, Aged Care or SRS fees cannot be re-billed to the NDIS.

15. Conduct cross-regulator desktop audits and cross-reference all information given to NDIA, NDIS Q&SC, ASIC, ATO, ACNC, DFFH, Medicare and State SRS regulators by businesses using taxpayer funds to support vulnerable adults. The data already exists so cross-referencing is both possible, and achievable.

16. Require all services providing accommodation to vulnerable adults, including private properties operating as SIL providers, to register all accommodation addresses and occupants. Ensure the locations of groups of vulnerable adults are known to relevant emergency planning authorities.

17. Require every person employed to work with vulnerable adults to undergo a screening process, with a national screening tool and risk register designed to prevent people who should not be in the sector from re-entering it through a related entity, a spouse’s company, or an interstate move.

D. Place-based, multi-agency regulation

18. Establish a localised approach to national safeguarding responsibilities for vulnerable adults, ensuring regulators and authorised officers familiar to the local sector and to the participants they protect.

19. Establish local multi-agency regulatory teams with the statutory powers, resourcing and skills to identify and reduce risks of abuse, including the authority to enter accommodation settings, including unregistered SILs, without prior notice.

20. Urgently bring SILs within an appropriate regulatory framework. SILs are currently unregulated environments and represent one of the largest single gaps in the Scheme’s integrity architecture.

21. Investigate the use of restrictive practices, particularly chemical restraint, across SRSs and other accommodation settings supporting NDIS participants, and require authentic and transparent reporting against any combined NDIS, Medicare and pharmaceutical data the Commonwealth holds.

E. Sanctions, prosecutions and workforce accountability

22. Conduct an urgent review of sanctions and legal instruments across each jurisdiction and regulator to ensure they are fit-for-purpose to address breaches, violations and deliberate abuse. This must include fraudulent billing, package drainage, and institutional abuse.

23. Ensure significant penalties for institutional abuse and fraudulent billing, and that criminal sanctions for indictable offences are initiated and prosecuted in a responsive and timely manner. Banning orders should also be extended to follow the beneficial owner, not merely the entity.

24. Develop mandatory reporting requirements for relevant professionals, including allied health professionals, GPs and first responders, to report concerns related to the abuse and exploitation of people with disability.

25. Establish mandatory training for anyone working with vulnerable adults to recognise and report signs of abuse, neglect, violence and financial exploitation, and to recognise coercive control in residential settings as a form of institutional domestic abuse.

26. Conduct independent evaluations of services to vulnerable adults to continuously improve standards and outcomes, ideally through partnerships with universities, building a public evidence base of what is and is not a good service from the perspectives of participants, workers and outcomes data.

Implementation Considerations

Sequencing and proportionality

Several of these recommendations can be implemented quickly, including cross-regulator desktop audits, mandatory beneficial ownership disclosure, public reporting on complaints outcomes, and the establishment of automatic opt-out advocacy for vulnerable adults. Others, particularly the structural separation of quality and safeguarding functions and the regulation of SILs, will require more substantial legislative work. We urge the Committee not to defer the rapid measures while the structural work proceeds.

Co-design with people with disability

Every reform that touches participants directly, be it complaints processes, advocacy intake, package safeguards, or outreach, should be co-designed with people with disability, including people with psychosocial disability and people currently or formerly living in congregate accommodation. This is consistent with the position MHLC took in its Disability Safeguards Consultation submission and forms a fundamental point of difference between the NDIS and the inadequate systems that went before it.

Federal-state coordination

Several of the gaps that predatory operators exploit sit at the federal-state interface. Implementation will require formalised intergovernmental agreements that clarify roles, embed consistent definitions, powers and reporting obligations, and avoid duplication. Phased implementation will allow state systems to align with federal standards.

Resourcing the safeguarding side

Integrity reform is sometimes presented as cost-saving, and, at the level of the NDIS it may well be. But the safeguarding architecture that delivers integrity (independent advocacy, place-based regulatory teams, prosecutorial capacity, public reporting) requires dedicated and sustained resourcing. Under-resourcing and poorly planned off-the-shelf approaches to adult safeguarding have been features of the current arrangements and is a major reason they have not been effective.

Monitoring and transparency

The implementation of any reform package should itself be subject to public reporting and independent oversight, with measurable outcomes and timeframes. Without this, the Committee’s recommendations will join the long list of recommendations that have, in the words of one of the people we listened to, ’resulted in inactions’.

References

MHLC documents

Mental Health Legal Centre Inc, People need People (2024). Mental Health Legal Centre Inc, Submission to the Federal Disability Safeguards Consultation (December 2025). Mental Health Legal Centre Inc, Choice and Control (October 2023). Mental Health Legal Centre Inc, Safeguarder State – Roadmap (2025).

Inquiry materials

Joint Standing Committee on the National Disability Insurance Scheme, Terms of Reference: Inquiry into the Integrity of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (25 March 2026). NDIS Quality and Safeguarding Commission, NDIS Code of Conduct Worker Guidance: definition of ’sharp practices’.

Other relevant materials

Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability: Final Report. Independent Review of the National Disability Insurance Scheme: Final Report (NDIS Review, 2023). NDIS Amendment (Integrity and Safeguarding) Bill 2025. Australian National Audit Office, audit of NDIA management of claimant compliance (2025). Coroners Court of Victoria: findings of State Coroner John Cain on safeguards for vulnerable adults. United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD), particularly Articles 12, 16, 19, 25 and 28. Care Act 2014 (UK): definition of adult safeguarding.