National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 1060
Inquiry into the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026
Dear Committee Secretary,
I am a close friend of an NDIS participant. I am a proud Wiradjuri woman. I am non-disabled and an ally to the disabled community, and because of that, I cannot be silent about the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 and the harm it will cause NDIS participants and the supporters and networks around them.
I have known my friend for almost a decade. I knew her before she became disabled and an NDIS participant, and I have been around for a lot of what has happened since.
I was there when she was being diagnosed, spending thousands of dollars out of pocket just to access care. I was there when she was hospitalised time and time again. I was there when she was rejected for their first NDIS application. I was there when she spent more money on therapies and services and specialists for their next application. I was there when strangers were so moved by her story they worked in-kind to help. I was there when someone in her family took nearly three months off work to support her while we waited for it to be approved. I was there when she found out her first NDIS plan was approved, and I remember her telling me “I don’t care how long it takes, but I am not going to be a sad story anymore. I am going to survive this.”
She may be a number to you, but she is the most passionate and committed person I know. She contributes more to the people in her life just by being around than most would in a lifetime. She never lets her disability define her or limit her, even when it is to her detriment. She helps others before she helps herself, the first to offer an ear or support, even when her struggles may be bigger. She is rare. I have no doubt that her continued support through the NDIS will give them the life they deserve as they navigate being permanently disabled.
The struggle I have watched her face frustrates me to tears. I am not talking about the pain her disability causes them, or its impact on her ability to do things independently anymore, or to feel confident in who she is. I am talking about how hard she has had to fight to be heard and supported by the NDIS.
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 1060
As someone who had no experience with disability or with the Scheme before this, I was shocked. This should be a no-brainer. She is exactly who these systems are for.
I have watched what NDIS funding has done for her. I have watched what happens when that funding isn’t there. The amendments in this bill threaten more than just whether she can leave the house anymore, they threaten whether she will be alive to see her thirties.
The cost these changes remove from the NDIS does not disappear. It lands on me. It lands on her family. It lands on their community. It lands on the emergency department. The government is calling this a saving and sustainable? From where I sit, it is moving the cost and burden onto people who are already drowning in everything the public system stopped doing, in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis, with already so much uncertainty about the future.
The entire system needs an overhaul. Not just the NDIS, but the public health system, Medicare, the barriers disabled people face in the community, the barriers to working and studying. I have seen all of this over the past couple of years, and it has destroyed what little was left of my faith in Australia. We have made too many advances to still be torturing people for what they cannot control and what they did not choose. We know better. We have the means to do better.
Why have you (the Labor Government, the Health Minister, the NDIA, and the experts who prepared this bill) decided that these amendments are the solution? Why are people like me and my friend the ones who have to point out how much you are failing Australians, when you are the people elected to represent us? The people I voted in. The people she voted in and believed in.
The language in this bill is violent. It is intentionally vague, so people cannot understand what you are planning to do until after you have done it. A bill that promises to “secure the NDIS for future generations” reads, to me, as a bill that punches down at the most vulnerable people in our community and calls it sustainable.
The changes that are most horrifying to me are these:
● Schedule 1, Part 3 - Strengthen link between an impairment and need for support
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 1060
○ Does this not lock funding to the impairments named when NDIS funding was approved? What about co-conditions diagnosed after that fact, or the progression of this condition, or the impacts of the disability that was not listed at first and is now unsupported? Regardless of how real the need is. My friend, like most disabled people, didn’t get approved for NDIS funding with a complete and final list of every condition she would ever have. She has a condition that will get worse with time. This disgusts me that this would ever be considered as integrity. ● Schedule 1, Part 8 - Tightening meaning of permanence to reduce access where an impairment can be treated ○ I don’t need to be an expert to know that treatable and curable are two very different things. Permanent conditions are permanent with or without treatment. Now we are using treatment as a grounds to argue a permanent condition isn’t permanent enough to qualify for the NDIS, not because someone isn’t disabled? My friend is on treatment, some of it isn’t covered by the PBS, and none of it will stop her disability from continuing to ruin her life. There’s also a thing called ‘coercive control’, and this change has that written all over it. ● Schedule 3, Part 2 - Automation of administrative action ○ What happened last time we automated decisions affecting people? Robodebt. The scope and safeguards to be written later? Robotdebt. Where is human accountability? The logic behind a decision? Review pathways because there will be mistakes? NDIS funding is not just administrative. Lack of access to services or care will have an impact on a participant. Disabled people shouldn’t have to fight technology and the NDIS just for the bare minimum of supports. I have no faith that anyone involved in writing this bill has the brains or the humanity to design a tool that will do this fairly. The Royal Commission described Robodebt as “a catastrophe and entirely avoidable disaster.” This is a catastrophe and entirely avoidable disaster.
What I am asking the Committee to do
I am not asking the Committee to ignore the problems with the NDIS, or to pretend it does not need reform. I am asking the Committee to consider the damage that will be done by this bill, as drafted. To consider that it won’t be achieving what you have promised it will do, like save the Scheme or protect participants.
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 1060
Specifically, I ask the Committee to recommend:
● That the bill be withdrawn and substantially redrafted with co-design with disabled people and their representative organisations. ● That the clauses identified above be removed or amended. To be frank, the entire bill could do with another look at. ● That foundational supports outside the NDIS, as recommended by the Bonyhady and Robertson Independent Review of the NDIS, be built and funded before any restrictions on NDIS access are passed into law. Cutting off a lifeline to disabled people without a safety net will cause mass death. It has happened before, and it will happen again. ● That the recommendations of the Disability Royal Commission be implemented in any reform of the Scheme, because when did we start treating Royal Commissions as boxes to tick?
Ask yourselves: what is the Australia you want to see? And are you doing enough to make it happen?
These amendments are not well thought through. They are not the reflection of a co-designed scheme that protects disabled people. You can do better. The people who depend on this scheme — and the people who love them — deserve better.
Yours sincerely,
Name withheld