National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 1106
Submission to the Senate Standing Committee on Community Affairs Inquiry into the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026
Submission Category: Anonymous Submission
Author: Autistic/ADHD Mother, Multiply Disabled and Tertiary Educated Unpaid Carer
Date: 26 May 2026
- Introduction
I am writing as an Autistic/ADHD mother, a person living with severe physical disabilities (including degenerative spinal disease, chronic pain, hypermobility, pelvic prolapse, TMJ dysfunction and systemic autoimmune conditions), and the full-time, isolated carer of an Autistic, ADHD 6-year-old child with a Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA) autism profile.
I am tertiary educated, I formerly worked excessive hours paying high taxes, and long ago paid off my HECS debt.
Today, I am entirely financially dependent on my husband, receiving only a minimal fortnightly Carer Allowance while operating as a full-time unpaid carer. My own severe health conditions are profoundly exacerbated by the relentless physical and emotional demands of caregiving. I am too physically exhausted and time-poor to even apply to the NDIS for my own support.
I request that this submission remain strictly anonymous to protect my family’s privacy and out of a well-founded fear of administrative retaliation or arbitrary cuts to my son’s minimal funding package.
I strongly object to the proposed cuts targeting autistic children and their caregivers for the critical reasons detailed below.
- Structural Barriers: Procedural Injustice and Participant Fear
Firstly, I object to the profoundly unfair two-week window granted to participants, family carers, and allied health professionals to read, digest, and respond to legislation that fundamentally alters our survival. Forcing traumatised, exhausted families to analyse complex legislative adjustments under extreme time pressure is a severe failure of natural justice.
The Committee must recognise that you will not receive a high volume of submissions directly from the disabled children and adults most catastrophically affected by this Bill—specifically because they are disabled. The very nature of neurodivergence, high-anxiety profiles, permanent physical illness, and the exhausting 24/7 labor of survival means that those on the chopping block do not have the executive functioning, physical capacity, or time to write formal parliamentary templates. A lack of submissions from this cohort is not evidence of consent; it is evidence of a community operating at its absolute limits.
Carers are living in an induced state of high-stress survival. I recently experienced a severe panic attack, crying uncontrollably and entering a total fight-or-flight nervous system response, merely upon receiving a text message and a few minutes later, a phone call from the NDIA regarding a routine eligibility review for my son’s access. This bill perpetuates an environment of fear rather than support.
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 1106
- Key Objections to the Proposed Bill
Component 1: The Inseparability of Carer and Participant Well-being
The Bill seeks to widen definitions of “normal parental responsibility” to justify cutting or capping individual participant budgets. I reject this premise entirely. The Women With Disabilities Australia (WWDA) May 2026 Gendered Risks report notes that nearly 90% of primary carers for disabled children in Australia are women, and reducing funded supports shifts costs directly onto unpaid female labour. This Bill effectively legalises gender and disability discrimination by assuming that mothers can absorb infinite physical, emotional, and economic burdens.
As a parent with significant physical limitations, NDIS funding for my son is not a luxury—it is a safety protocol. Cuts to his funding do not simply reduce services; they actively accelerate the physical and neurological burnout of disabled parents who are holding these families together with zero respite.
Component 2: The Reality of Home Education for Autistic Kids and High-Anxiety Profiles
Autistic children with a PDA profile experience school can’t due to severe nervous system threat responses, necessitating specialised home education. The proposed cuts completely fail to account for the intense, 24/7 hyper-vigilance required by parents navigating complex neurodivergence without systemic institutional support.
Normal parental responsibility for a typical 6-year-old involves dropping them at a local school and working a regular day. My reality is entirely different:
• My son cannot access mainstream kindergarten or primary school. When I informed his kindergarten of his diagnostic traits, we were met with institutional silence and exclusion.
• When I attempted to discuss enrolling him in the local government school his sibling attends, the wellbeing officer stated they could not accommodate him, even when I—a qualified school teacher—voluntarily offered to stay on-site to co-regulate him.
• I am forced to home educate my child on top of managing my own severe physical conditions. I change his nappy pants countless times a day because he cannot use a toilet—a basic biological need that schools are unable to accommodate. When I expressed my concerns about toileting to a child psychologist I no longer engage with, he said my child would just have to learn to withhold his bodily functions while at school.
To claim that typical parenting is identical to parenting a profoundly dysregulated, high-anxiety disabled child is a complete disconnect from reality.
Component 3: The Hidden Cost of Reducing Early Intervention
Defunding support for a highly anxious 6-year-old child now will inevitably lead to catastrophic systemic costs later in the forms of acute mental health crises, parental workforce complete exit, and systemic medical collapse.
Minister Mark Butler and media narratives have repeatedly weaponised the claim that autism diagnoses are escalating purely to “game” the NDIS for funding. I take profound offense to this
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 1106
cynical framing. When my son was 3, two separate, expensive paediatricians agreed he met the criteria for autism but explicitly advised us not to seek a formal diagnosis at that moment because he was already receiving early intervention support. This poor advice delayed our access to targeted help. My son’s autism is permanent, lifelong, and severe.
Under the proposed framework, my son is precisely the kind of child flagged by the government to be diverted away from individualised NDIS funding and funneled into state-run, block-funded “foundational supports” via frameworks like “Thriving Kids.” My son cannot function in standard group environments. Diverting him to centralised programs will completely exclude him.
- The Failure of Participant Voice and Corporate Capture
There is a glaring disconnect between this rushed bill, the new direction of “foundational supports,” and the actual lived experience of autistic families.
• I do not need a patronising website, phone line, “parent training or “parent upskilling” I have spent a decade learning how to best support my neurodivergent kids.
• My son needs the continued professional, individualised support of our independent Speech Therapist, an Occupational Therapist, a Physiotherapist and perhaps a more neuro affirming Psychologist. Our speech therapist visits our home regularly and has given my son a voice, helping him articulate his thoughts when he otherwise falls into a non-speaking state due to nervous system shutdown.
The Bill seeks to enforce a mandatory NDIS provider registration system. This is a deliberate, corporate barrier to entry. Highly qualified, university-educated Speech Therapists and OTs who are already strictly registered with their own professional clinical bodies should not have to take on the astronomical financial and administrative burden of NDIS registration just to serve their clients. This policy excludes experienced independent practitioners while creating a lucrative market for large, block-funded corporate entities who had a seat at the table when these reforms were designed. This is the monetisation of disabled children’s basic development.
- Budget Insecurity and Fiscal Hypocrisy
Our current funding package is minimal—around $14,000 for capacity building and a tiny consumables budget we use for nappy pants and wipes. We have zero funding for support workers or community access. I am completely burnt out and housebound most of the time, yet I have been too terrified to ask the NDIA for the support worker funding we desperately need, out of fear that the Agency will use the review to strip away the tiny amount of funding we already have.
The government claims that social and community participation funding does not represent “value for money” for the taxpayer. Yet, the government has never posed a single question to us regarding how valuable these supports are. Furthermore, the fiscal argument for this Bill is a fallacy. The government claims it must rein in costs, yet it spends millions of taxpayer dollars hiring top-tier legal teams to fight disabled people at the tribunal system (ART)—cases that the government consistently loses because independent reviews prove the participants need the support. This Bill is a cynical attempt to bypass legal checks and balances because the courts are blocking the Minister’s cost-cutting agenda.
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 1106
- Conclusion
I urge the committee to reject any amendments that redirect or reduce funding for neurodivergent children and to protect the sustainability of disabled caregivers who are already operating at their absolute physiological limits.
If families break under this weight, the ultimate cost to state medical, psychiatric, and emergency systems will far exceed the cost of maintaining individualised NDIS care. Australia must do better than balancing its federal budget on the backs of vulnerable children and their exhausted mothers.
Thank you for considering my submission.