National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 1270
Submission to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee
SUBMISSION TO PARLIAMENT Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026
“Hearing an 8-year-old ideate over the world being a better place without him in it — because he can’t understand others — is a sound no parent should ever have to hear. We paid roughly $20,000 a year out of our own pockets to stop that voice from getting louder, while we waited 17 months for the NDIS to acknowledge our son existed.”
Carer and Parent of an NDIS Participant — Queensland May 2026
Executive Summary
This submission is made by , a Queensland-based parent and carer of , a child diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder Level 2, Tourette’s Syndrome, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, General Anxiety Disorder, and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. I write from direct lived experience: 37 months inside the NDIS system, two failed applications, one lost file, one rejected review, more than $20,000 a year of out-of-pocket therapy costs while we waited, and an 12-year-old boy who is only now, in March 2026, receiving his second plan when he should have been on his fourth.
I make this submission because the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 will compound, not correct, the harm being done to participants and families. The Bill, as drafted, makes four foundational errors:
• It punishes participants for a pricing crisis the Government created. Mandated price caps became the market price; allied health providers rationally moved to the cap; non-NDIS prices followed. A one-hour therapy session now costs nearly $400 because providers did exactly what the rules instructed them to do. Cutting participant budgets to fix this is asking disabled people to pay for a policy failure they had no part in. • It treats social participation as a privilege rather than a right. Halving social, civic and community participation funding cut tells disabled Australians they may live alone in their homes and call that inclusion. It is not inclusion. It is segregation by budget instrument. • It expands “parental responsibility” in ways that quietly transfer the cost of disability to families. The Bill’s codification of parental responsibility, and the requirement that the CEO consider “strengthening informal supports,” risks reclassifying disability-specific care as ordinary parenting — a category that does not, and cannot, accommodate three weekly therapy sessions, community access, and a school transition for a child with five co-occurring conditions.
Family Submission — NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 — Page 1
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 1270
Submission to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee
• It treats the NDIS’s administrative dysfunction as if it does not exist. The NDIA is running roughly six months behind on plan reviews. Cutting funding will not help it catch up. It will starve the system of the resources required to function while simultaneously expecting it to do more with less.
The central question for this Committee is simple. If the government created the pricing problem, why are participants being asked to absorb the cut? If social participation is a human right under the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, to which Australia is a signatory, how can it be halved by ministerial instrument? And if an inclusive and equitable society is one of the four foundational pillars of Australian democracy, how is this Bill consistent with it?
Part 1: About Our Family and Our Son
Our son has five concurrent neurological diagnoses: Autism Spectrum Disorder Level 2, Tourette’s Syndrome, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, General Anxiety Disorder, and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. These are lifelong conditions. They interact. They require coordinated, consistent, and specialised support from Occupational Therapy, Psychology, Speech Therapy, and Behaviour Support, not as luxuries, but as the foundation on which his ability to function, learn, and connect rests.
started high school in January 2026. The transition to secondary school is hard for any child. For a child with ASD Level 2 and four co-occurring conditions, it is a clinical event. His clinical team; his OT, both psychologists, his speech therapist; each recommended increased supports in the months leading up to the transition. None of those supports were funded when he started high school, because his second plan review had been sitting unresolved for over five months at that point. He walked into Year 7 with the same plan he had in Year 5.
1.1 — The Cost We Paid Before the NDIS Stepped In
In the period between ’s diagnosis and his first NDIS plan, our family privately funded his supports at a cost of approximately $20,000 per year. We did this not because we wanted to, and not because we had the means to, but because the alternative was to watch our son deteriorate.
“We paid those amounts because at 8 years old, our son was ideating over the world being a better place without him in it. He told us, repeatedly, that he didn’t understand other people and that everyone would be happier if he wasn’t around. That is what an 8-year-old said. To his parents. Because no funded support was reaching him.”
We paid those prices into the same inflated market the NDIS price guide created — the prices we, as private clients, were charged were elevated because providers had calibrated their entire fee structure to NDIS rates. We funded our son’s survival with money we did not have, in a market the Government itself had inflated, while the Agency designed to support us lost our paperwork and told us to wait.
Part 2: Our Experience of the NDIS — A Chronology of Failure
Family Submission — NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 — Page 2
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 1270
Submission to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee
I include this account not as a complaint, but as evidence. The Government’s argument for this Bill is that the NDIS is working well enough that the conversation is now about cost control. That argument cannot stand against the reality of what families like ours have experienced.
2.1 — The Lost Application (April 2023 – February 2024)
We attended our initial intake meeting at Carers Queensland in April 2023. We were told we had everything required and the NDIA was running behind. Months passed. Multiple follow-up calls produced only generic reassurances. In early February 2024, approximately ten months later, we were informed our application did not exist in the system. It had been misplaced. We were told to start over.
Ten months. A child with five co-occurring lifelong neurological diagnoses, in the period when early intervention has the strongest evidence base. Lost in a filing system.
2.2 — The Second Application (February – September 2024)
Our second intake meeting was held on 14 February 2024. We were told to update ’s diagnostic documentation because the NDIA preferred reports under 12 months old, despite his conditions being permanent. We complied. The application was re-submitted on 19 February 2024.
What followed was six months of obstructed progress:
• Weekly calls. Consistent reassurance we were “in the correct queue.” Escalation reference number 04948303. No action. • Letter from the NDIA confirming a decision within 28 days. No decision. • On 12 June 2024, a two-hour phone call finally exposed the root cause: a mismatch between an address saved in Centrelink and the application address, despite the postal address matching. This had never been communicated to us, or to our LAC, at any point in the four months prior, it had not been raised as an issue, our file was just left untouched. • We updated Centrelink and provided supplementary government documentation. • On 4 September 2024; 17 months after the initial intake; ’s first plan was approved.
17 months. Not because his case was clinically complex, which it is, because of administrative error, lost paperwork, and a refusal to communicate the actual reason for the delay. That is the system being asked to deliver more efficient outcomes with less funding. 17 months for what was publicised when we first applied as a maximum of 28 days.
2.3 — The First Plan Review: Rejected on a Technicality
’s first plan was insufficient to meet his support his needs, and when we asked the delegate we were told we would need carer’s impact statements, and functional capacity assessments, both things we had asked our LAC about as we had heard that they may be required but we were reassured by our LAC that they wouldn’t be required. Our Planning Call with the delegate occurred late afternoon on the 4th September 2024 and we received the plan on 5 September 2024 the next morning. After receiving feedback from the delegate that the items we were explicitly told would not be required by our LAC would be needed in order for s plan to actually meet his needs, and that we would have a 3 month window to request that the plan be reviewed we set to work on writing our carer impact statements, sourcing an OT so that we could have a FCA completed On 5 December 2024 we submitted a request for review. We were rejected on the grounds that we were one day late. The 3-month review
Family Submission — NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 — Page 3
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 1270
Submission to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee
window had been calculated from the plan date when the call was, not the date we received it. One day. After 17 months of delay caused by the Agency itself.
2.4 — The Second Plan Review (September 2025 – March 2026)
We prepared early and thoroughly for ’s plan renewal, which was due 4 September 2025. We uploaded a Functional Capacity Assessment from his OT and reports from both his psychologists ahead of the due date. We later added a Speech Therapy report once our wait list cleared.
The due date came and went. So did the next five months.
• 30 January 2026: Almost five months past due. Followed up. Case escalated. • 28 February 2026: Followed up. Discovered the previous escalation had been cancelled due to an “internal error,” with no notification to us. Escalated again. • 4 March 2026: Followed up. Lodged a formal complaint. • Late March 2026: ’s second plan was finally approved — nearly seven months after its due date. During that seven-month wait, started high school. The clinical recommendations for transition support were never funded in time. Year 7 began with the support level designed for Year 5. The harm caused by that gap cannot be retroactively repaired.
The full scorecard. From initial intake in April 2023 to receipt of ’s second plan in March 2026: 35 months for two plans, when we should have been on our fourth. Two years of that delay was entirely the Agency’s. During the gap, and prior to application we self-funded approximately $20,000 per year of therapy, while the Government described the scheme as financially unsustainable due to overspending.
Part 3: The Government Created the Pricing Problem It Now Blames on Participants
The Bill’s central justification is cost growth. The Government points to expenditure rising from $4 billion to $12 billion in five years on social, civic and community participation alone. What is absent is honesty about why that growth occurred.
3.1 — How Price Caps Destroyed Market Competition
The original design of the NDIS assumed that participant choice would create competitive market pressure on providers. That assumption required a competitive market. Instead, the NDIA introduced the Pricing Arrangements and Price Limits, a Government-mandated rate card defining the maximum price a registered provider may charge.
The predictable consequence: the price ceiling became the price floor. Across allied health, providers moved to the cap because:
• The cap signals what the Government has determined a service is worth. • Operating below the cap while competitors charge the maximum is commercially unsustainable. • Workforce costs, insurance, and compliance overhead are real and rising. • Non-NDIS private fees followed the same trajectory, because the NDIS rate is now the established market expectation for allied health services.
3.2 — What This Looks Like on an Invoice
Family Submission — NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 — Page 4
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 1270
Submission to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee
We have experienced both sides of the spectrum, in our experience allied health whom NDIS only form a portion of their client base tend to stick to the more standard approach for billing. This is the price, for a session including note taking $180 -$270 a session. (still quite high but now considered market thanks to price caps) Where allied health whom NDIS from a large part of the client base A single one-hour therapy session in our family’s experience is typically invoiced as follows:
• $192 per hour for one hour of face-to-face therapy • $96 (half-hour) of non-face-to-face time for notes, report-writing and planning • $96 (half-hour) of travel Total cost of a one-hour session: approximately $384. Every line item is permitted under the NDIS Pricing Arrangements. Every provider is doing exactly what the rules say they can do. This is not a rort. It is the policy outcome the Government legislated.
We were not on the scheme in the early days and there is no doubt that $60-70 that I have heard was funded as the hourly rate then was nowhere near enough. But how can Queensland health value allied health at $43 per hour and NDIS value them at $384 in face to face time. The problem we have been experiencing is that the NDIS is now saying despite the publicised rates, they are not funding the indirect time now or the travel time. That’s great, then it shouldn’t be an approved charge, as providers won’t take it off their bills and the outcome is the participants are now just receiving less therapy.
Providers did what they were instructed to do. The Government wrote the rate card. The Government approved the billable categories. The Government set the price floor by capping the price ceiling. The resulting cost is a policy outcome not a provider failure. Cutting participant budgets to fix this is punishing the wrong people. Participants become the enforcement having to argue with providers over billing.
3.3 — The Non-NDIS Market Has Been Pulled Up With It
Because NDIS rates have set the benchmark for allied health pricing nationally, non-NDIS clients pay inflated prices for the same services. When participants lose funding, they will be forced into a market the NDIS itself inflated. The result is double harm: less funded support, at prices that would not have been this high without the scheme’s own pricing framework.
3.4 — The Proposed Solution Does Not Fix the Market
Cutting participant budgets does not address provider pricing behaviour. It does not introduce competition. It does not reduce the per-session cost. It simply means participants get fewer sessions for the same price. For a child like , “fewer sessions” is not a budget line item. It is fewer hours of speech therapy during a school transition, fewer OT sessions to manage sensory overload, fewer psychology appointments while his anxiety escalates or when a stim or tic causes self harm.
3.5 — The False Economy of “Disability-Specific” Products
The pricing distortion does not end with therapy. It runs through the entire NDIS supply chain. Where the Agency requires that a funded product be “disability-specific,” (which is everywhere) participants are systematically forced to pay multiples of the price of an equivalent product available at a supermarket not because the disability-specific item necessarily delivers a better outcome, but because the NDIS will not fund the alternative. (this is to not take away from instances when the disability specific item is needed and does deliver better outcomes, it is just not a requirement in every case)
Family Submission — NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 — Page 5
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 1270
Submission to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee
An acquaintance of ours has a wheelchair-using daughter who requires incontinence pads. The pads available at any major Australian supermarket would meet her clinical need entirely. The pads the NDIS will fund badged as “disability-approved” cost approximately eight times the supermarket equivalent. The family has no choice. The disability-specific product is the only option the scheme will pay for. So the NDIS pays eight times what the same need could be met for, the family is locked out of a cheaper option, and the system reports the higher cost as expenditure that must be controlled.
Multiplied across hundreds of thousands of participants and every category of consumable, equipment and assistive item the scheme classifies as “disability- specific,” this is not a minor inefficiency. It is a structural overpayment built into the architecture of the scheme. And it is one the Government has chosen not to address in this Bill, while simultaneously asking participants to absorb a 50% cut to community participation funding to manage cost growth.
The legislative tool to fix this already exists. Section 10(6) of the NDIS Act expressly contemplates a non-NDIS support replacing an NDIS support where the cost is the same or lower and the outcome is the same or better. The grocery-store pad is both. The Agency’s practice of restricting funding to “disability-approved” alternatives is, at minimum, inconsistent with the spirit of that provision and at maximum, a direct cause of the cost growth the Government now cites as justification for cutting participant budgets.
The Government should not be cutting participant funding while the system is structurally overpaying for the goods and consumables those participants need. Reform the supply side first. Allow participants to buy non disability specific products if it meets their needs. Reimburse at the lower rate. Capture the saving. Then, and only then, is there a credible argument that the scheme has done what it can to control costs before reaching for the participant’s budget.
The problem is the blanket expectations. There will 100% be participants who need the disability specific pads and they need to have them funded, but the NDIS is not looking at the needs of the individual, they are just saying pads needed? this is the funding for them. And then participants have to go and get the right products in order to be funded, it is harder, costs more time and more money.
Part 4: Social Participation Is a Right, Not a Privilege
The Bill’s proposed 50% cut to social, civic and community participation funding rests on an unspoken assumption: that this category of support is somehow optional. A discretionary add- on. Something that can be halved without serious consequence.
That assumption is wrong, and it is dangerous. Australia is a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Article 19 of that Convention guarantees the right of disabled persons to live in the community with choices equal to others, with access to a range of community support services necessary to support living and inclusion in the community, and to prevent isolation or segregation. Article 30 guarantees the right to participate in cultural, recreational and sporting life on an equal basis with others.
To halve funding for community participation, by ministerial instrument, without individual assessment, is to tell disabled Australians that their inclusion in the community is contingent on a budget line the Minister can adjust at will. That is not the language of human rights. It is the language of cost containment dressed up as reform.
4.1 — An Inclusive and Equitable Society
Family Submission — NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 — Page 6
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 1270
Submission to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee
Australian democracy rests on a set of foundational pillars, among them, that we are an inclusive and equitable society. We do not deliver on that pillar by sending disabled children home and telling them their participation in school events, sport, hobbies, community groups, friendships, and public life is now subject to a 50% reduction.
Telling a disabled child they may have half the community access they previously had, not because their needs have halved, but because the Government has decided to spend less, is not reform. It is segregation by budget instrument. And it cannot be reconciled with the inclusive and equitable society this country claims to be.
4.2 — What “Community Participation” Actually Funds
For children with disability, social and community participation funding is what enables:
• Supported attendance at events, excursions, sport, and community activities • Group-based social skills programs with proven outcomes for ASD • Capacity building for independent travel, friendships, and community life • Engagement with peers, the single most protective factor against the suicidal ideation we have already heard from our son Halving this funding does not save money. It transfers the cost to mental health systems, emergency departments, schools, and the courts. It is an act of fiscal short-sightedness dressed as fiscal responsibility.
Part 5: “Parental Responsibility” and the Hidden Transfer of Cost to Families
The Bill codifies parental responsibility into the NDIS Act in a way that risks reclassifying disability-specific care as ordinary parenting. The CEO will be required to consider “the desirability of maintaining and strengthening informal supports” rather than replacing them with funded supports. In practice, this provision will be used to refuse funding on the basis that a parent should provide the care themselves.
Let me be absolutely clear about this. Our family is not, and never has been, looking to outsource parenting. We do not seek to be relieved of our role. We are parents. We do what parents do. What we are asking is that the additional care our son requires, the care that exists because of his disability, that exists beyond what any non-disabled child of his age requires, be recognised as what it is: disability support, not parenting.
5.1 — What Parenting a Child Like Actually Looks Like
In any given week, on top of the ordinary work of raising an 12-year-old, our family is expected to:
• Transport to and from three separate therapy appointments (OT, Psychology, Speech), often during school hours, requiring time off work for the carer attending • Attend, observe, and follow through on therapeutic homework between sessions, integrating clinical recommendations into daily routines • Manage the executive function support, sensory regulation, social translation, and behavioural scaffolding that ASD Level 2 and co-occurring conditions require throughout the entire day • Provide the additional emotional containment required for Tourette’s, OCD, and General Anxiety Disorder, often involving extended periods of de-escalation
Family Submission — NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 — Page 7
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 1270
Submission to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee
• Facilitate social and community participation that would not otherwise occur, because without facilitation, it does not happen • Coordinate between school, clinicians, and the NDIA, including an inordinate amount of hours following up on lost applications, cancelled escalations, and overdue reviews • Sustain advocacy through a 35-month bureaucratic process that has, in itself, become a significant cause of our family’s exhaustion
That is not parenting. That is parenting plus a part-time job in case management, plus a part-time job in transport, plus a part-time job in clinical support, plus a part-time job in advocacy. No parent of a non-disabled child is asked to do anywhere near this. To call any of it “parental responsibility” is to redefine the word until it means nothing.
5.2 — The Bill’s Definition Undoes the Original Logic of the NDIS
The NDIS was created explicitly, on the recommendation of the Productivity Commission because the informal care system was collapsing. Families were leaving the workforce, breaking down, divorcing, getting sick, going bankrupt, and burning out. The scheme’s economic case rested on the recognition that formal supports prevent that catastrophic cost.
The Bill’s expanded definition of parental responsibility, and its instruction to the CEO to prefer informal supports, reverses that logic. It quietly shifts the cost of disability back onto families financially, physically, and psychologically. It is a return to the system the NDIS was designed to replace.
Part 6: The NDIS Supports the Whole Person, Not the Diagnosis
One of the most concerning features of the Bill is the way it shifts the scheme away from a long-established principle: that the NDIS funds the support needs of the whole person, not the support needs of a single approved diagnosis. The Bill’s tightening of eligibility around “substantially reduced functional capacity” tied to specific impairments, combined with its Ministerial powers to reduce supports by category, creates an environment in which the Agency can refuse to fund supports that arise from a co-occurring condition simply because that condition is not the diagnosis that gained the participant access to the scheme.
This is contrary to the founding principles of the scheme, contrary to the express words of the NDIS Act, contrary to the Agency’s own published policy direction, and contrary to a decade of tribunal and Federal Court decisions. It must be corrected before the Bill is passed.
6.1 — What the NDIS Act Already Says
Following the 2024 reforms, the NDIS Act expressly directs the Agency to assess a participant’s budget by reference to the whole-of-person disability support needs of the participant. Section 32K of the Act provides that the reasonable and necessary budget for a participant’s plan is informed by a support needs assessment under section 32L, and section 32L expressly requires that assessment to record the participant’s whole-of-person disability support needs. The language is not accidental. It is the legislative articulation of a principle the disability community fought for and Parliament endorsed: that participants are people, not diagnoses.
The NDIA itself has publicly framed its rollout of Impairment Notices as “a move away from diagnosis focus and a transition into a whole of person approach.” That is the Agency’s own
Family Submission — NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 — Page 8
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 1270
Submission to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee
position. It is on the record. It is correct. And it is irreconcilable with provisions in the current Bill that would let the Agency refuse to fund a support because the underlying need arises from a co-morbid condition rather than the condition that secured the participant’s access.
6.2 — Why This Matters for a Child Like
has five diagnoses. They are not five separate problems running on parallel tracks. They interact, overlap, and compound. The clinical picture cannot be neatly carved up and attributed to one diagnosis or another and pretending it can be will cause direct harm.
To take one concrete example: can engage in repetitive movements that, if sustained or escalated, cause him physical self-harm. That repetitive movement could be:
• an autism-related stim, requiring sensory regulation and OT-led intervention; • a Tourette’s tic, requiring habit-reversal training and neurological management; • an OCD compulsion, requiring exposure and response prevention from a psychologist; • or an anxiety-driven behaviour, requiring CBT, regulation strategies, and environmental adjustment. Each has a slightly different evidence-based treatment pathway. Often, only after a clinician has worked with can it be determined which pathway is doing the work in a given week. Sometimes more than one is.
Under a regime that funds only the diagnosis that gained the participant access in ’s case, ASD Level 2 the Agency could refuse to fund the supports that address the Tourette’s tic, the OCD compulsion, or the anxiety response. A child injuring himself would be told the funded support stops at the door of whichever condition was approved. That is not a hypothetical risk. It is the logical operation of a scheme that funds diagnoses rather than people and the Bill, in its current form, moves the scheme in that direction.
6.3 — What the Tribunals and the Courts Have Said
The principle that the NDIS supports the participant, not the diagnosis, is not novel. It is reflected in a decade of administrative and judicial decisions, including Mulligan v National Disability Insurance Agency [2015] FCA 544 and the McGarrigle line of cases, culminating in National Disability Insurance Agency v McGarrigle [2017] FCAFC 132. Two principles emerge consistently from that body of case law:
• Reasonable and necessary supports, once identified, must be fully funded. The Federal Court in McGarrigle v NDIA [2017] FCA 308 held that the NDIS Act does not permit the Agency to only partially fund a reasonable and necessary support. The financial sustainability of the scheme does not give the Agency a discretion to underfund individual participants. • Functional capacity is assessed across the whole of a person’s impairments, not condition by condition. In Mulligan, the Federal Court held that the Tribunal had erred in law in failing to properly consider the combined functional impact of the applicant’s multiple impairments. The proper assessment looks at the person, in totality, not at any single condition viewed in isolation. The mental health access guidance published by the NDIA reinforces the same point in a different way: it expressly notes that a specific diagnosis is not required for access, because access is determined by functional impact, not diagnostic label. The scheme has always understood, in its own published materials, that diagnoses are a gateway, not a cage.
6.4 — What the Bill Does to This Principle
Family Submission — NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 — Page 9
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 1270
Submission to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee
The Bill’s reframing of access around “substantially reduced functional capacity” tied to specific impairments, its Ministerial powers to reduce supports by category, and its narrowing of unscheduled reassessment criteria, will together push the Agency toward a diagnosis- bounded view of what it funds. Planners under pressure to find savings will be incentivised to refuse supports that arise from co-morbid conditions, on the basis that those conditions are not the “in-scope” diagnosis. Participants challenging those refusals will face a hardened legal framework that no longer presumes whole-person assessment.
This is not reform. It is the reintroduction of a problem the disability sector and the courts have been working for a decade to eliminate. The Government’s justification cost control cannot override an established statutory principle that recognises participants as whole people. As the Federal Court held in McGarrigle, the financial sustainability of the scheme is not a licence to underfund the reasonable and necessary needs of an individual participant.
The Committee should ensure that any amendment to the Act preserves, in plain language, the whole-of-person principle set out in sections 32K and 32L. Supports must be funded by reference to the participant’s total functional support needs, regardless of whether those needs arise from the diagnosis that gained access or from a co-occurring condition. A scheme that funds only the gateway diagnosis is not the NDIS the Parliament created and not the NDIS the disability community has fought for.
Part 7: Specific Concerns With the Bill
7.1 — Ministerial Power to Cut Without Individual Assessment
The Bill grants the Minister the power to reduce funding for entire categories of supports, by legislative instrument, applied uniformly across every plan, with no individual assessment, and without sunsetting provisions. The instrument is valid even where a participant’s plan can no longer cover the full cost of their reasonable and necessary supports.
This is a complete abandonment of the original intent of the NDIS. The scheme was designed to be individual, needs-based, and rights-based. A blunt instrument that halves community participation funding for every participant in the country, the disabled child whose only social contact is a supported community group, the adult whose budget is the only thing standing between independent living and institutionalisation, the family who calibrated their entire support plan around a known funding envelope, cannot coexist with that design. It is the opposite of person-centred planning.
7.2 — Participants Cannot Budget or Schedule Therapy When the Minister Can Cut at Any Time
The practical operation of allied health in Australia depends on planning. Providers routinely require participants to commit to blocks of work 10-session packages, 20-session packages, intensive programs, because that is how clinical outcomes are delivered. These blocks must be funded in lumps, often in advance, and the participant must know that the funding will be there for the duration of the block.
Under the proposed Ministerial power, a participant could sign up to a 20-session OT block on Monday and lose half of their community participation funding on Tuesday. Providers cannot operate on this basis. Participants cannot plan on this basis. Families cannot budget on this basis.
With NDIS funding now released in smaller, more frequent payout periods rather than as a single annual allocation, the impact compounds. Therapy blocks must be paid in
Family Submission — NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 — Page 10
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 1270
Submission to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee
lumps. Funding arrives in fragments. And the Minister can reset budgets at any time without individual assessment. No participant can responsibly commit to a clinical program in that environment. Therapy becomes a week-to-week gamble and clinical outcomes suffer accordingly.
7.3 — Removing Rollover of Unspent Funds
The Bill proposes to eliminate the rollover of unspent funds. This change is presented as an efficiency measure. In practice, it is profoundly punitive, for two reasons.
Participants routinely use rollover deliberately. Some supports, assistive technology, intensive therapeutic programs, equipment, modifications, are expensive enough that participants save a portion of their plan over the course of the year to afford them. Removing rollover removes the only mechanism by which participants on tight plans can access higher-cost supports.
7.4 — Tighter Eligibility and Plan Reassessment Rules
The Bill narrows the criteria under which unscheduled plan reassessments can be requested. For families like ours, whose child’s support needs change with every developmental stage, school transition, and clinical recommendation, the ability to seek reassessment is essential. Restricting it forces families to wait until the next scheduled review, reviews which, as our experience shows, are themselves running months past their due date.
7.5 — The Agency Cannot Catch Up With Less Money
This is the simplest, most damning point in the Bill’s logic. The NDIA is currently running approximately six months behind schedule on plan reviews. Our second plan review took seven months past its due date to resolve. Multiplied across the participant base, this represents a national administrative deficit measured in tens of thousands of person-years of waiting.
The Bill’s response to this is not investment. It is reduction. Less funding for participants. Less work, in theory, for the system. But the work is not optional, it is the work of administering the lives of disabled Australians and their families. Cutting funding does not eliminate that work. It eliminates the capacity to do it.
If the NDIA is already six months behind, how does reducing the resourcing of the scheme bring it back to schedule? It cannot. The Bill’s implicit answer, that fewer participants will need fewer reviews, is the most honest version of the policy on offer, and it is the one disabled Australians are right to fear.
Part 8: Recommendations to the Committee
The Committee is urged to recommend the following amendments and conditions before the Bill is passed.
Recommendation 1: Remove the Ministerial power to reduce funding across categories without individual assessment Any reduction in participant budget allocations must be assessed on an individual, needs- based basis, in accordance with the founding principles of the NDIS. A blanket determination is incompatible with person-centred planning and inconsistent with Australia’s obligations under the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
Recommendation 2: Withdraw the proposed 50% cut to social and community participation funding
Family Submission — NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 — Page 11
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 1270
Submission to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee
Social and community participation is a human right, not a budget line. The proposed cut must be withdrawn. If specific categories of community participation expenditure require reform, that reform must be done through individual planning conversations and provider market reform, not by ministerial instrument.
Recommendation 3: Address pricing distortion through market reform, not budget cuts The Government’s pricing framework caused the price inflation it now treats as a justification for cuts. The appropriate response is to reform how provider prices are set, through transparent benchmarking, genuine competition, and differentiated pricing, not to reduce participant funding. What disability supports are currently funded, is there a cheaper mainstream alternative, that if offered to participants would happily be accepted?
Recommendation 4: Reject the expanded definition of parental responsibility The Bill’s codification of parental responsibility and its instruction to the CEO to prefer informal supports must be removed or substantially amended. The original economic and ethical case for the NDIS rests on recognising disability-specific care as additional to ordinary parenting. That principle must be preserved.
Recommendation 5: Retain the rollover of unspent funds, and add explicit protection where unspent funds result from NDIA delay Rollover is a tool participants rely on to access higher-cost supports. It must be retained. At minimum, any future restriction must include an explicit protection for funds unspent due to NDIA administrative failure, lost applications, cancelled escalations, overdue reviews, or other Agency-side delay.
Recommendation 6: Preserve and strengthen participants’ access to unscheduled plan reassessments Tightening the criteria for unscheduled reassessments will harm families whose children’s needs change with every developmental stage or transition. Reassessment rights must be preserved and, where review wait times exceed published timeframes, an automatic right of escalation must be established.
Recommendation 7: Make any budgetary measure contingent on demonstrated NDIA administrative compliance It is not legitimate to reduce participant funding while the Agency continues to lose applications, cancel escalations without notice, and process plan reviews months past their due date. Any cost-saving measure in the Bill should be contingent on the NDIA first demonstrating compliance with its own published timeframes.
Recommendation 8: Commission an independent audit of NDIA processing performance The Committee should recommend an independent audit covering: application processing times, rates of lost or misplaced applications, escalation cancellation rates, plan review overdue rates, and communication failures between the NDIA, LACs, and participants. Reform that does not start here will fail.
Conclusion
The NDIS was created to give disabled Australians genuine choice, control, and access to the supports they need to live good lives. For our family, it has been a 35-month journey marked by lost paperwork, ignored escalations, a one-day rejection of a plan review, $20,000 a year
Family Submission — NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 — Page 12
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 1270
Submission to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee
of out-of-pocket therapy costs while we waited, and an 8-year-old asking whether the world might be better without him.
Our son is 12 now. He has only just received his second plan, when by any reasonable measure he should be on his fourth. He started high school without the transition support his entire clinical team recommended. The damage of that gap cannot be undone.
And now, the Government’s response to a cost problem it created is to ask families like ours to absorb the cut. To halve community participation funding for our son and call that reform. To redefine parental responsibility so the additional care his disability requires becomes ordinary parenting. To remove rollover so we cannot save toward the larger supports he will need as he grows. To restrict reassessment so we cannot respond when his needs change. To grant the Minister the power to cut at any time, without notice, without individual assessment, and without expiry.
This is not securing the NDIS for future generations. This is dismantling the NDIS for the current generation. The Government’s justification, that the scheme is too expensive sidesteps the fact that the price inflation was created by the Government’s own pricing framework, that the administrative dysfunction was created by the Government’s own Agency, and that the people now being asked to pay for those failures are participants with lifelong disability and the families who care for them.
If an inclusive and equitable society is a pillar of Australian democracy, this Bill in its current form is inconsistent with it. I urge the Committee to recommend the amendments set out in Part 8, and to refuse to pass the Bill in its current form.
Submitted by:
Date: May 2026
State: Queensland, Australia
Capacity: Parent and carer of an NDIS participant with Autism Spectrum Disorder Level 2, Tourette’s Syndrome, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, General Anxiety Disorder, and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder
Appendix: Chronology of Events
The following timeline summarises the key events in our family’s NDIS journey for the Committee’s reference.
• April 2023: Initial intake meeting with LAC (Carers Queensland). Application submitted. • April 2023 – February 2024: Approximately ten months of waiting. Multiple follow-up calls. Family self-funding therapy at approximately $20,000 per year. • February 2024: Informed application had been lost. Second intake meeting held 14 February 2024. Updated diagnostic documentation provided. Application re- submitted 19 February 2024. • March – May 2024: Multiple follow-up calls to LAC and NDIA. Consistently told application is “in the queue.”
Family Submission — NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 — Page 13
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 1270
Submission to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee
• 12 June 2024: Two-hour NDIA phone call identifies root cause: address mismatch between Centrelink and application, never previously communicated to family or LAC. • 15 July 2024: Updated Centrelink address and additional government documentation provided. • 4 September 2024: First plan approved — 17 months after initial intake. • 5 December 2024: Plan review request submitted — rejected as one day late (counted from plan date, not receipt date). • Before 4 September 2025: Functional Capacity Assessment from OT and reports from two psychologists uploaded ahead of plan renewal date. • Late 2025: Speech Therapist engaged after navigating wait lists; report uploaded to NDIA. • January 2026: commences high school without transition support funding. Plan review still outstanding. • 30 January 2026: Follow-up call. Case escalated. • 28 February 2026: Follow-up call. First escalation found to have been cancelled due to internal error, with no notification. Second escalation lodged. • 4 March 2026: Follow-up call. Formal complaint lodged. • Late March 2026: Second plan approved — nearly seven months after its due date, 35 months after initial intake. Should be on fourth plan by this point. • May 2026: This submission lodged.
Family Submission — NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 — Page 14