National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026
Submission 142
To the Committee,
I am writing in opposition to changes to the NDIS that reduce participant choice, restrict access to support, or force people into narrower and more institutional forms of care.
I live with chronic health conditions and physical disability myself, although I am not currently on disability support payments or the NDIS. I am fortunate to have forms of support and stability many people do not have access to, but I know very clearly how quickly autonomy can disappear when disability intersects with financial insecurity, caregiving responsibilities, isolation, or dependence on unsafe relationships.
Too often, discussions about disability support are reduced to budgets and administration, while the lived realities underneath are ignored. For many people, support is the difference between remaining connected to community or becoming isolated. It is the difference between safety and vulnerability. Between agency and dependence.
It is also a violence issue. Disabled people are often made more vulnerable to coercive control, family violence, institutional violence, poverty, and housing insecurity when they cannot access the support they need. Without adequate disability support, people lose the practical means to choose where they live, who assists them, who enters their home, who touches their body, and whether they can leave unsafe situations.
This has consequences far beyond any one individual. When people are denied agency, intergenerational patterns of violence and dependence are harder to interrupt. Families and communities are affected. Children are affected. Our whole society is affected when disabled people are pushed back into forced dependence instead of being supported to live with dignity, choice, and self-determination.
I know a woman in my wider community who uses a power wheelchair. She has been institutionalised before and is now deeply worried about proposed restrictions around unregistered support workers. She has carefully built a support team of people she trusts, people who treat her with kindness and dignity. That trust matters. Disabled people must have the right to choose who supports them through the intimate and vulnerable parts of daily life.
Choice of care is essential. Trust cannot simply be replaced by a registration category.
I also want to speak to what happens when disability supports are reduced or withdrawn. In the 1990s, I spent time in institutional disability care and witnessed people moved through forms of transitional and long-term care. The shock I still feel in my body when I remember those places is the violence of institutions: the way people can become dehumanised, managed, and calculated as numbers rather than recognised as full human beings.
When a government shows that it does not respect disabled people enough to support them properly, it sets a precedent for how others may treat them. It tells the broader society whose lives are considered worth care, whose autonomy can be limited, and whose suffering can be treated as acceptable. This is a form of slow violence.
I also want to acknowledge how difficult processes like this can be for disabled people to participate in. Many people are already carrying enormous administrative, physical, emotional, and financial burdens simply to survive day to day. Being required to repeatedly explain, justify, and publicly disclose painful or traumatic aspects of one’s life in order to be heard can itself become exhausting and harmful. People should not have to lay out the worst parts of their lives in order to prove that they deserve care.
These barriers shape who is able to participate in consultation processes and whose experiences remain unheard.
A society without the full participation and input of differently abled bodies loses so much. We lose knowledge, culture, creativity, care, perspective, and ways of living that make our communities more humane. When disabled people are excluded or forced into dependence, we
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026
Submission 142
do not become more efficient as a society. We become less just, less intelligent, and more willing
to tolerate harm.
When governments reduce disability support, the consequences do not disappear. The burden is
simply shifted onto disabled people, exhausted families, underpaid carers, emergency systems, hospitals, homelessness services, and community goodwill. The result is often deterioration, neglect, preventable suffering, and profound social isolation.
Inadequate disability support is not an abstract policy issue. It affects whether people can eat, wash, leave the house, maintain relationships, participate in community life, and remain safe. It affects whether people are allowed dignity and self-determination.
I am deeply concerned that current changes risk moving Australia backwards toward more restrictive and less humane systems. Efficiency and fraud prevention are important, but they
cannot come at the cost of autonomy, trust, and basic quality of life.
Disabled people deserve support systems that recognise their humanity, complexity, and right to direct their own lives.
I urge the Committee to reject changes that reduce participant choice, destabilise trusted support relationships, or make disability support harder to access and sustain.
Sincerely,
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