Submission 1151 - Supplementary Submission
Dear Committee Members,
I am writing this additional submission to express my concerns regarding the downstream economic impacts of the proposed, National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 This submission will focus on how the proposed bill impacts Women.
As a woman, a mother, a carer and a concerned citizen, I strongly believe that this bill is a massive step backward for women across Australia. This bill will negatively impact Carers, support workers, allied health professionals, hospital/Medicare health services and Teachers. All predominantly female industries.
Carers:
According to the 2024 National Carer Survey, 82.6 per cent of carers in Australia are women. Unpaid carers save the Australian economy an estimated $77.9 billion annually — more than the total projected cost of the NDIS for 2023-24.
Australian carers provide 2.2 billion hours of informal care each year. Over 2.6 million Australians — close to 11 per cent of the population — are carers, and women are more likely to be carers than men.
Primary carers spend an average of 35.2 hours per week providing care. Twenty-eight per cent spend more than 60 hours per week. Only 22 per cent of primary carers are employed full-time, compared to 43 per cent of the general population. This is the explicit result of the disproportionate role they play in providing care.
When the government removes supports from 160,000 NDIS participants, the care does not disappear. It transfers — overwhelmingly to women, who absorb it as unpaid labour, reduce their paid work hours, accumulate less superannuation, and retire into poverty. The government’s own gender equality strategy acknowledges women shoulder the majority of unpaid care. This budget compounds that inequality.
Submission 1151 - Supplementary Submission
sham contracting is an issue in support work.
The proposed bill however does nothing to help secure these (predominantly) women’s employment, it threatens their employment. Minster Butler is on record stating that social and community participation funding will be cut by an average of $7k/participant. This not only risks the health and wellbeing of the participant - it means their informal supports (carers) having to take on more hours risking their own employment, and it risks the employment of support workers themselves.
Allied Health Workers:
Allied health is the second largest clinical workforce in Australia made up of 80% women. Within sub-categories of allied health that percentage can be as high as 96.7% (Speech Pathologists). A large percentage are sole traders, many are disabled themselves or parents of disabled children, and they have a minimum of 4 years worth of specialised tertiary education - which means both HELP debts and years of missed earnings. This combination of factors means that job losses will hit them extremely hard.
Yet, the changes proposed in this bill threaten the entire Allied Health workforce via the removal of up to 16000 NDIS participants, plan reassessments resulting in reduced packages, and the transition to Thriving Kids which according to currently available details will not contain funding for individual allied health therapies. The proposal to transition to having NDIA staff administer the I-CAN for NDIS applicants as the core test of eligibility, also shows how little value the government places on the clinical decision making of the allied health workforce. Despite the tool being designed for administration by allied health professionals, Minister Butler stated at the Press Club that it is not the intention of the government to have Allied Health workers administer this tool. Instead it is to be NDIA employees with no training in disability. Prior practices including Planners/LACs not reading Functional Capacity Reports and other Allied Health reports (despite demanding them), ignoring the clinical reasoning of Allied Health professionals, cutting plans despite extensive evidence from multiple allied health professionals, and the requirement for participants seeking ART intervention to obtain (sometime multiple) independent reports, shows that there has been a culture of disdain towards allied health professionals within the NDIS for a long time. This bill seems to seek to remove allied health workers from disability support en masse. Neither is a good look for a government that purports to value equality for women.
Hospital/Medicare health services:
According to the ABS, there are 1.7 million health care workers in Australia, equal to 1 in 7 people. Of those 30% work in our hospitals. Within those hospitals overcrowding and overwork of employees is a big problem.
According to the Australian Medical Association’s Public Hospitals - Cycle of Crisis report, “Without reform, public hospital performance will only get worse as demand increases.”
Submission 1151 - Supplementary Submission
Australia’s population is growing and ageing, and the burden of chronic and complex disease is increasing. ED presentations are also increasing, as is the urgency of treatment required when patients arrive at the ED. Meanwhile, public hospital finances are being squeezed, as cost growth (inflation) plus demand growth for public hospital services is expected to exceed government funding growth.
Once again, this workforce is heavily female. 70% of the total health workforce are women, which increases to 88% when counting only nurses and midwives. Overloading health workers risks burnout, critical mistakes causing iatrogenic harm, medical negligence and malpractice, rapidly shrinking workforces as health workers quit, and workplace conditions that make it difficult to attract graduates.
Whilst the Prime Minister announced a $25b funding increase for public hospitals at the end of January, trebling the previous funding arrangement, removing NDIS support entirely for 1600 people, or partially for the remainder, will cause a significant surge in demand on our hospitals and medicare health systems.
The government recognises the risks of overloading health workers, stating on the AIWH website that “COVID-19 has shown the significance of prioritising the wellbeing of healthcare workers for the effective functioning of our health system. Failure to safeguard the wellbeing of healthcare workers may result in an unsustainable workforce, which will have wider implications for the quality and sustainability of all services provided within the health system” (AHHA 2022).
This bill seems to completely disregard the lessons that The Australian Health and Hospitals Association refer to in the above quote.
Teachers:
Education is yet another predominantly female industry that is in crisis. According to the ACARA website, “Australia’s teaching workforce continued to be predominantly female, with women making up 72.0% of FTE teachers in 2025. The gender difference was more pronounced at the primary level (82.4% female).” Meanwhile the National Teacher Workforce Action Plan states “In December 2022, Australia’s Education Ministers agreed the National Teacher Workforce Action Plan – a Plan acknowledging the national teacher workforce crisis and that it will take all levels of government to address.”
A 2024 study in the Australian Educational Researcher expands on the reasons for this crisis: “In addition to these environmental stresses numerous studies have reported that teachers feel their workloads are unmanageable, explained as ‘time poverty’. Such an increase in expectations without support fails to recognise the inherent complexity of the learning, behaviour and social needs of the children and young people in contemporary classrooms. Teachers’ professional identities are negatively impacted as they face an ongoing impost ‘of unceasing change, new initiatives, new programmes, new data reporting’. In addition to
Submission 1151 - Supplementary Submission
responding to the complex work of teaching, educators are concurrently expected to complete administrative duties for which they simply do not have adequate time. Similarly, Lawrence et al.’s (2019) study of 215 Australian secondary teachers and former teachers found burnout is more often associated with non-teaching-related workload (such as paperwork and meetings) than teaching-related work (such as planning). In essence, teaching is perceived by teachers to be an ‘expanded and expanding’ role.”
As Teacher attrition is already a national crisis; the rollout of Thriving Kids, which will predominantly be delivered via schools, is being met by teachers with trepidation. The lack of details leave educators expecting the worst. They fear increased workloads, responsibilities and scope - having to take on the roles of allied health professionals. Thus, Thriving Kids threatens to increase attrition as a result of burnout and over-work. “The Australian Education Union (AEU) said Thriving Kids must allow more staff to be employed to take on the “additional administration load”. Stating to the ABC that “We welcome the intent of the Thriving Kids program, but the reality in schools is that we’ve got an overburdened, under-resourced teaching workforce.”
The same ABC article states that “Federal NDIS and Health Minister Mark Butler did not respond to specific questions about what modelling had been done to ensure settings had capacity to take on Thriving Kids, the upskilling initiatives workers would have access to, how private sector workers could be utilised, or whether additional workers from overseas would be needed.“
Then there are the physical risks to teachers as a result of this bill. Across the teacher groups of social media that I am a part of, burnout and overwork are the second highest reason for leaving the profession. The top reason is student behaviour. Every single day, teachers in schools from all regions and all socio-economic classes are being sworn at, taunted with racist and misogynistic comments including sexual comments, and put in situations where their physical safety - or the physical safety of other students is at risk. Schools are already crumbling under the effects of a decade of “inclusive” education policies that are only inclusive in name. They lack the training, the time, the funding and the autonomy to implement truly inclusive educational practices and everyone is paying the price. Violence in classrooms from disabled children who are not receiving sufficient support is an epidemic, causing teachers across the country to take extended stress leave, or leave the profession. Sometimes teachers are physically injured requiring work-cover payouts and rehabilitation too.
Should Thriving Kids see teachers having to absorb the fallout of hundreds of thousands of disabled children having their individualised NDIS supports taken away, the school system is quite likely to collapse. It simply can not sustain the amount of teacher attrition, or frankly the amount of student attrition that is already happening, let alone the rates of attrition that will happen should this bill be enacted.
Which brings me back to-
Submission 1151 - Supplementary Submission
Mothers:
Both mothers of disabled children (who fall into the carer’s category) and mothers of non-disabled children are bearing the economic brunt of the failing school system. Home Education enrolments have increased by staggering amounts since Covid, and the primary reason people leave the school system is due to the lack of support for disabled students. The parents of children with disabilities are pulling their children out of school because the lack of support, accommodations, funding, and understanding of their disability/ies has caused their child to escalate to violence regularly resulting in continual suspensions, “reset days”, reduced timetables and expulsions. Other disabled children escalate with refusal to attend classes, (or school entirely,) elopement, climbing onto roofs, stripping their clothing, refusal to eat/drink or toilet, toileting accidents, and daily crying. These parents, seeing their children’s needs continually overlooked by schools who are pushed to the brink, are pulling their children out of school to attend distance education or home education.
Likewise, parents of children without disabilities are seeing their children miss out on learning because the teachers are stretched so thin trying to deal with the impacts of unsupported disabled students. They are seeing how little time is spent on learning vs behaviour management and safety concerns, they are seeing their Prep students coming home in tears having seen a child self harming or throwing chairs. They recognise that the schools are drowning, and so they too are pulling their children out in favor of distance and home education.
Teachers themselves are both quitting their jobs and pulling their own children from school to home educate in large numbers.
When a family resorts to home education, (or distance education), the economic burden of that decision falls disproportionately on women. Women are the ones who end up leaving employment entirely or reducing their hours significantly in order to take on the load of education for their children. They trade their own financial security - housing security, super, workplace progression, ease of return to the workplace - for their child’s education, risking poverty in order to make up for the failures of both State and Federal Governments to provide an education system that works. The more disabled children who are inadequately supported the higher the rates of women sacrificing their financial security to pull their children from school.
The Labor Government claims to support women, with policies pitched at closing the economic gaps between women and men. Passing this bill, will put millions of women into untenable positions, by jeprodising their employment opportunities, consigning them to a future of financial uncertainty. This bill also has the potential to become the last death knell of already crumbling essential services, namely hospital/medicare based health care and education, as well as causing mass unemployment or under employment for the nation’s second largest health workforce. The National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026, will not deliver positive outcomes for the Australian population, and women will bear the costs disproportionately.