National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 1070
Submission on: Securing the NDIS for Future Generations Bill 2026
May 25, 2026
Proposed changes to the NDIS that involve cutting funding support for people with disabilities reflect an unconscionable abandonment of those most in need. That the NDIS has faced greater demand than originally anticipated reflects greater need in the community for disability care than the original policymakers modelled. In the following I address specific issues with proposed ministerial powers and funding structures that will devastate the lives of those affected. I am not on the NDIS, however I know people who have received lifesaving support from it for either themselves or their families. I have seen a person with a missing limb able to engage in his community after the NDIS covered a replacement prosthetic that was causing him harm, and another family with two severely autistic children that has only been able to speak to one child through NDIS-funded equipment, and whose respite care access is already threatened. The cost-cutting attitude to disability care speaks to a deep disregard for the lives and well-being of people with disability and their families. Our aim should be to provide all people with the care and support they need to live dignified lives.
Ministerial powers
The proposed legislation gives the minister broad power to change the funding for specific types of support without regard for the specific needs of different participants, and with the power to discriminate changes in funding to particular participant cohorts. The minister will also be able to set maximum funding or support levels, which will mean that people may miss out on needed support entirely if the maximum funding is insufficient. Participants have no option for appeal. The lack of oversight or limits opens the door to future ministers leveraging that power to cause immense harm against people with disabilities for any and all political ends. This is already happening in the United States of America with the decisions made under the Secretary of Health and Human Services. The current minister has proposed to use these powers to halve funding for social, civic, and community participation budgets which are essential to the dignity and civic engagement of people with disability. Removing people with disability from public life will not help them, and in fact making people reliant on that funding more isolated. People with disabilities
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National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 1070
already experience known barriers to engagement in social life (Macdonald et al., 2018), which NDIS funding is intended to relieve allowing people with disabilities access to benefits of socialising including increased physiological and mental health. Access to a social life is beneficial to those individuals (Zwack et al., 2023), their families (Silva et al., 2021), and the whole community (Gustafsson et al., 2013; Morikawa et al., 2024) in the long term. Halving the budget to support this will affect the health and well-being of participants and their families. Furthermore, the current minister has proposed cutting capacity building daily activity budgets by 10%, which will impede the ability of people relying on the NDIS to participate in society and their own lives. Building capacity for people with disabilities is about providing them with long-term autonomy which will reduce future need. It is an investment. Cutting this budget is short-sighted in the extreme. Particularly troubling are the proposed changes for family support, specifically of par- ents whose children have NDIS funding. Parents of children with disabilities face outsized burdens to provide even the minimum level of care expected of parents of children without disabilities. In particular the families and communities of people with disabilities already provide huge amounts of unpaid labour without good support which directly contributes to poverty (Lindsay et al., 2025). The NDIS is supposed to relieve this burden, even if that is by substituting informal or family care with paid work because the level of care required is too high for these people to bear alone.
Value for money
The bill proposes a change to the ‘value for money’ criterion that specifically includes leasing rather than owning equipment and modifications. Leasing arrangements forced upon people with disabilities limit their autonomy and the control they have over equipment they rely on. Likewise, leasing arrangement typically limit the changes that people are allowed to do to their equipment, adaptations that may be necessary if off-the-shelf options are not suitable.
Restriction of funding for indirect need
The NDIA is currently required to consider ‘a variety of factors, including environmental factors or the impact of another impairment’. Per intepretation by the Federal Court this can include interaction between eligible impairments and ineligible ones, which are quite common given the diversity of human lives. The new bill intends to restrict this by changing wording to specify that the need ‘directly arises’ from the eligible disability. Doing so is intended to reduce the cost of the program by excluding those interactions, which flies in the face of our best understanding of disability and how multiple impairments can have compounding effects.
Functional capacity assessment and definition
The proposed bill defines functional capacity as the ability to do an activity
• Without assistance from other people, assistive technology or modifications, and
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National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 1070
• In a context that excludes the impact of the person’s personal and environmental circumstances, as much as possible.
These exclude the very real and impactful context of a person’s actual life, finance, and home environment. It is a denial of the reality of impairment and disability which are deeply dependent on resources and surrounds. The experience of disability is variable and if the NDIS is going to address need rather than political convenience it must respect that reality.
Treatment options
As part of changing the criteria for permanent disability, the bill proposes that the NDIA must disregard whether ‘a person’s individual circumstances restrict the person from access- ing the treatment’, including geographic and financial barriers. Once again, this ignores the reality of living with disability, particularly for people outside major cities, or in major cities but without access to transport or funding. Preventing people with disabilities accessing the NDIS when they cannot access treatment that may reduce their need is perverse to put it mildly. In the long term, this will compound harms.
Automation and algorithmic decision making
A computer cannot be held accountable, therefore a computer should never make a deci- sion about the provision of care. Successive governments in Australia have implemented devastating automated decision making systems for vulnerable people, including the now infamous RoboDebt and the growing scandal regarding home care for the elderly. The effort to cut costs associated with administering a system like the NDIS through automation is ripe for abuse and harm as it has in the aforementioned cases. Participant safety and dignity depend on the existence of human decision making processes and human empathy. These are safeguards not money sinks. Algorithmic decision making processes are fundamentally dehumanising, an effort to allow the system to deny care without appeal or oversight that must be resisted. Thank you for your time,
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National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 1070
References
Gustafsson, K., Aronsson, G., Marklund, S., Wikman, A., and Floderus, B. (2013). Does social isolation and low societal participation predict disability pension? a population based study. PLoS One, 8(11):e80655.
Lindsay, S., Phonepraseuth, J., and Leo, S. (2025). Experiences and factors affecting poverty among families raising a child with a disability: a scoping review. Disability and Rehabil- itation, 47(15):3822–3840.
Macdonald, S. J., Deacon, L., Nixon, J., Akintola, A., Gillingham, A., Kent, J., Ellis, G., Mathews, D., Ismail, A., Sullivan, S., et al. (2018). ‘the invisible enemy’: Disability, loneliness and isolation. Disability & Society, 33(7):1138–1159.
Morikawa, M., Lee, S., Makino, K., Harada, K., Katayama, O., Tomida, K., Yamaguchi, R., Nishijima, C., Fujii, K., Misu, Y., et al. (2024). Social isolation and risk of disability in older adults: Effect modification of metabolic syndrome. Archives of Gerontology and Geriatrics, 116:105209.
Silva, A. P. d., Pacheco, L. M. F., Leit˜ao, F. N. C., Cavalcanti, M. P. E., Rocha, J. B. F. d., Moraes, S. D. T. d. A., and Bezerra, I. M. P. (2021). Mental health status and quality of life of people with disabilities in social isolation. Journal of Human Growth and Development, 31(3):470–475.
Zwack, C. C., McDonald, R., Tursunalieva, A., Vasan, S., Lambert, G. W., and Lambert, E. A. (2023). Stress and social isolation, and its relationship to cardiovascular risk in young adults with intellectual disability. Disability and Rehabilitation, 45(6):974–985.
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