I do not believe that this bill should be passed.

I again call on the government to honour its promises that legislative changes would only occur with co-design, which has not yet been started.

The serious issues in this bill include:

1. There are no appeal rights if the NDIA do not add an impairment to your list of qualifying impairments.

2. There is no process to request the addition of a new impairment to your list of qualifying impairments.

3. There are no appeal rights if the NDIA decides that an expense was “not in line with the plan”, and no requirement for the NDIA to even allow the participant to provide evidence for why they believed that the expense was valid. The participant is simply judged guilty with absolutely no opportunity to provide evidence/prove innocence, by someone who knows nothing about their disability support needs, has never met them, in some cases won’t even have heard of their impairment previously, with no rights to a review of that decision or to defend themselves from an unfair/unreasonable decision.

4. There are no rights to replacement of an inaccurate assessment. While you can request a review of the plan, you will only be permitted a replacement assessment if the NDIA feels that one is justified - and it is in the NDIA’s interest to simply blanket refuse all requests for replacement assessments the same way that they are currently blankly refusing to conduct internal S100 reviews (they simply rubber-stamp the original decision without reading documentation in the majority of cases now).

5. There are no rights for removal of an inaccurate assessment from your records even when proven inaccurate (e.g. at AAT/ART), and the NDIA have the right to provide that inaccurate assessment to future assessors to prejudice future assessments despite knowing it to be inaccurate.

6. There are zero penalties against the NDIA for failing to comply with the legislation. For example, not involving the participant when creating a new plan is becoming common practice despite the fact that this violates the existing legislation and will still violate the proposed legislation. When this happens, there is no pathway for the participant to get any form of redress whether that be an actual planning meeting with the creation of a legal plan made with them as they had been entitled to in the first place, or whatever else is the most appropriate means to correct the issues caused by the NDIA operating illegally.

7. People with less common disabilities are likely to find that they are unable to receive the disability supports that they need, simply because it does not occur to the minister of the NDIS that these could be genuine disability supports, and hence are either left off the list of “NDIS Supports” or are explicitly banned due to that ignorance.

8. The list of “NDIS Supports” does not exist, and will not exist when this bill becomes law. This means that when this bill becomes law, it will become immediately illegal to use NDIS funding for any purpose. We have been promised that these rules will only be created after extensive co-design, which is not going to have time to happen because without these rules to go with the legislation people will die when this bill becomes law and they lose ALL disability supports. This means that the promise of co-design of these rules is provably false.

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9. This bill does not take, and never has taken, a “whole of person” approach as recommended by the NDIS Review. It still carves the participant into “supported” and “unsupported” impairments, with the participant having no review rights whatsoever on the decision as to whether an impairment is supported or not. As a participant who has had to use review rights regarding whether their impairment meets access due to decisions made by the NDIA, this lack of review rights is absolutely terrifying and WILL result in people who have serious permanent disability who do in fact qualify for NDIS support being refused support for their impairments based on reasons such as:

e) the NDIA trying to force them to undergo experimental treatments that are not evidence based for their condition due to not properly reading the information already provided for that experimental treatment, and b) refusing to recognise the impairment because the participant self-funded their urgently needed disability equipment, both of which happened to me during my access request and was then repeated for the same impairment for the 2 years following gaining access. The existing review rights for access are only for the global yes/no whether access is met - it doesn’t cover being able to review which individual impairments are judged to meet access requirements because carving people into “supported” and “unsupported” impairments was not the original intent of the NDIS. Given that this bill makes the decision that an individual impairment meets access requirements absolutely central to the entire NDIS funding system and raising of debts, there must be pathways for review of the decision to exclude an impairment and for the addition of new impairments to the participant’s NDIS records.

This bill actively denies participants the right to procedural fairness, and should not be passed until these serious flaws have been resolved.

It is easier for the NDIA to raise a debt against a participant for spending funds on a support need that they judge not to meet the disability requirements for the NDIS, than it is for the participant to request that the impairment be assessed for whether it meets those disability requirements.

The lack of any ability to provide evidence for why the item was a valid Support, and the lack of any right to review of the decision that the support was “unapproved” terrifies me.

This is RoboDebt all over again - only this time they are changing the law to make issuing unreasonable debts legal first, so there will be no redress available for an unreasonable debt.

So far, the government has shown no intention of addressing any of these flaws, and has in fact doubled-down on increasing the unfairness and inequality in this bill, following it up with a fierce media campaign stigmatising, denigrating and ridiculing participants instead which has caused participants to be actively attacked and abused by strangers in the community.

The government has actively lied in the media and in parliament when stating the reasons for this bill.

1. The bill does not address fraud in any way.
2. There is no such thing as an “automatic top-up” for overspending.
3. The NDIA already have and use the right to refuse a change of circumstances review if the only reason for the review is running out of funds.
4. That the bill takes a whole of person approach, when it instead carves the participant into arbitrary “supported” and “unsupported” slices.
5. That “primary and secondary” disability would be going away, when the recent changes are in fact cementing those concepts into the NDIS Act (this bill actively removes the “whole of person” approach that is in the original legislation).

The expected savings that the government will be coming from:

1. Cutting supports.
2. Denying people who HAVE had a change of function from being able to have their plans reassessed.

• Denying people the right to have the decision to refuse of a change of circumstances review reviewed despite a significant change of function/situation.

• The NDIA currently have plans to cancel all Change of Circumstances reviews regardless of reason they were requested the moment this bill is passed and becomes law. Many of these people have waited more than 6 months to have anyone from the NDIA even look at the evidence for why a change of circumstances review has been requested, and the NDIA are poised to deny the review without bothering to look at the evidence provided to support it.

We keep being asked to trust that co-design will come later, despite the government having done nothing whatsoever to earn that trust, and having taken multiple actions that have directly eroded any trust we had, including the ambushing of the disability community with this bill in violation of their promise that no legislative changes would be made without extensive co-design, and their extensive mis-information campaign in the media demonising NDIS participants with persistent lies like that of “automatic top-ups”.

I do not trust this government to honour its promises regarding co-design.

I do not support the changes in this bill.

I do not believe that the government has any intention of doing genuine co-design, which would require participants, their families, and their supports, to actively be involved in the design of what changes are on the table to potentially be made. Instead, the government has shown a marked preference for simply saying “we’re doing X, we’ll let you choose if slogan A or slogan B markets X better” and calling that “consultation”.

Thank you for your time.

Regards,