National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 1565
Submission to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee Inquiry into the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026
I am writing as the parent of two Autistic children, and we live in regional NSW. I am also an Occupational Therapist who works across NDIS assessments, including the Functional Capacity Assessments the Scheme has relied on, so I see these changes from both sides: as a parent who lives with them, and as a clinician who writes the evidence they are meant to be based on. My two children need very different things, and that difference is part of why this Bill worries me. My younger child is doing comparatively well and needs less support. My older son, who is 18, has much higher support needs and still struggles with most of the basic skills of adult life despite years of effort from him and from our family. He cannot reliably or safely manage cooking, shopping, cleaning, rubbish, appointments, organisation or the general business of getting through a day without significant help. He is not short of intelligence or potential. What he is short of is the supports that would actually let him build those skills, and one of my real fears is that he will stay stuck at home indefinitely for that reason and no other.
What we asked for, and what happened
Last year we asked for increased NDIS funding aimed specifically at building his independence and daily living capacity at this important transitional age. We provided a comprehensive Functional Capacity Assessment (FCA), a Speech Pathology report and a reassessment from a Clinical Psychologist. Having written many of these assessments myself, I know what thorough evidence looks like, and ours was thorough. Almost every request was refused. The planner presented the outcome as a significant funding increase, and when I pointed out that the so-called increase only reflected higher support worker hourly rates, so that in real terms there was effectively no increase at all, I got no meaningful response. The additional supports we asked for, including Capacity Building and Short-Term Respite, were knocked back. That experience changed how I see the Scheme. A system that was meant to support disabled people now feels adversarial, and families spend their time gathering reports, chasing evidence, sitting through reassessments and lodging reviews to prove disability that is already documented at length. It is wearing, and this Bill reads to me as if it pushes still more of that weight back onto people with disability and carers already holding things together.
The supports we were asking for were not extras. We were trying to get help teaching my son to cook, clean, shop, manage himself safely and build the confidence to function as an adult, and he also has significant food sensory issues and ARFID linked to his Autism, where dietitian input and skilled support workers could make a real difference to his long term health and independence. If those supports were funded properly now, I absolutely believe he could become substantially more independent within a few years. That is exactly the kind of
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 1565
investment this Bill seems to work against. As I understand it, the Bill would allow the Minister to reduce whole categories of funding by a set percentage across every plan at once, and the categories already flagged for reduction include capacity building and community participation, which are precisely the supports my son was refused and precisely the supports he needs. I am also concerned by the proposal that an unscheduled reassessment can only be requested once a person can prove a significant and ongoing decline that substantially reduces their functioning. The whole point of building my son’s skills now is to prevent decline and to get ahead of a crisis later. A threshold that asks us to wait until he is substantially worse before we can ask for help sits very oddly beside the early intervention principles that are supposed to underpin the Scheme.
The proposed change to how supports must connect to a person’s impairment also worries me. Shifting the test to supports arising “directly” from an impairment may sound minor, but disability does not work in straight lines. My son’s anxiety and his food issues are not separate problems sitting beside his Autism, rather they come out of living as an Autistic person in a world not built for him, and I can easily see a planner, or an automated process, deciding those needs are a step too far removed to fund.
I also do not understand how two parts of this Bill are meant to fit together, and as an Occupational Therapist it is the part I find hardest to accept. As I read it, functional capacity is to be assessed in isolation, without a person’s supports, their assistive technology (AT) or their environment, and without the help other people provide. You cannot meaningfully assess functional capacity that way. A person’s environment, equipment and supports are not noise sitting on top of some “real” disability underneath, they are part of the connected picture of who the person is and what their support needs actually are, and that interaction between a person and their environment is the whole basis of the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) that underpins sound assessment. Pulling two parts of that picture out does not produce a truer baseline of need, it goes against the ICF and builds a picture that is both false and inequitable. It also sits oddly beside the funding side of the Bill, which then requires the agency to weigh up what families and informal supports can be expected to provide. My son would be assessed as though he has no one and no supports around him, and then funded as though he has us. Those two positions cannot both be true, and it is participants and their families who are left to carry the gap between them.
Regional access
Living regionally adds a layer of disadvantage that people in the cities often do not see. Even where funding exists on paper, there is frequently no suitable service to spend it on. We spent years trying to find an appropriate support worker for my son and eventually found someone excellent, but she is so overbooked that we might see her once every few weeks, because there simply are not enough suitable
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 1565
workers in our area. There may be others available on paper, but not every support worker is the right fit for every Autistic person, and trust, consistency and fit matter enormously. People sometimes say “move to the city”, but relocating is neither financially nor practically realistic for many families, and there is a particular irony for us in that one of my son’s own goals is to live in a city one day, something he cannot safely do yet precisely because he lacks the skills the refused supports were meant to build.
This is why the Bill’s approach to treatment and access alarms me. My understanding is that an impairment will not be treated as permanent unless a person has tried every appropriate treatment available in Australia, and that a treatment can count as appropriate regardless of whether the person can actually reach or afford it. For people in the regions, where the service may be hours away or simply does not exist, that is not a fair test. It turns access to the NDIS into a lottery based on your postcode.
Invisible disability and the public conversation
Autism is a spectrum, and my two children show that plainly. Both of them have a Level 2 Autism diagnosis, yet they function completely differently, and one needs far more support than the other. Reducing support needs to labels like “mild to moderate” while ignoring how a person actually copes in real life is both frustrating and, frankly, insulting. The recent public conversation has made this worse. A sitting One Nation MP, Barnaby Joyce, recently said publicly that with a million people on the NDIS he never knew there were “that many people with walking sticks”, and went on to say that anyone on the Scheme should be able to look a taxpayer in the eye and justify why that person should go to work to pay for them, or “maybe you shouldn’t be on the NDIS”. The message to families like mine is hard to miss. If a person’s disability is not visible to a stranger, their need is treated as doubtful, and they are expected to audition for support in front of the people funding it. There is a particular irony in this coming from someone who has drawn a large parliamentary salary and entitlements from the public purse for more than twenty years, now casting suspicion on disabled people for the supports they need from it. Comments like that are distressing, and they fall hardest on the people least able to perform their disability on cue, including many whose support needs are profound but invisible.
I am especially worried about people with psychosocial disability under these changes, because assessing functional capacity as a single snapshot, stripped of context, does not capture a conditions that can fluctuate, and increasing reassessment stress while reducing supports will not reduce anyone’s disability. It is far more likely to increase isolation, deterioration, hospitalisation and homelessness. Families keep hearing that the NDIS is “not the only lifeboat in the ocean”, but the systems people are supposedly being redirected toward are already overwhelmed or unavailable, especially in the regions, and the Bill appears to let the Minister declare
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 1565
almost any other government service an “alternative support” and exclude an impairment from the NDIS on that basis. For a lot of participants there is no backup waiting to catch them if their supports are reduced or removed.
Reports and independent assessment
I want to add something here as a clinician, because it goes to the evidence this Bill relies on. The agency has increasingly come to treat the reports we write as a place to look for reasons to cut funding rather than as evidence to act on. Because the rules keep shifting, those of us doing assessments are having to make our reports longer, more defensive and more heavily referenced, just to give participants some protection against a future cut or review. There is a grim irony in that, given the agency’s own chief executive has acknowledged that staff often do not have time to read the reports families are required, and frequently pay, to provide. This Bill makes that worse rather than better. As I understand it, the planning framework is moving toward a Support Needs Assessment conducted by the agency’s own assessors using a single standardised national tool, the I-CAN, which is set to displace the independent functional capacity assessments that clinicians like me currently write. At the same time, the cost and difficulty of obtaining independent assessment outside the agency has been climbing for years, and this legislation will put it further out of reach for most families. Together those changes remove the one independent clinical voice that currently sits between a participant and an in-house decision, at exactly the moment the rest of the Bill concentrates power inside the agency. A standardised conversation run by someone who has never met the person before cannot capture what a clinician who knows them can, and for people whose support needs are easy to underestimate in a single meeting, including many of the people I see, that is a real loss of protection. And when a person’s environment is stripped out of that assessment as well, as this Bill proposes, I have real concerns about whether an in-house process can fairly assess need at all.
Reviews, reassessments and safeguards
What concerns me most is the further weakening of review rights and safeguards. The agency already makes decisions that families experience as unfair or disconnected from the evidence we provide, which is why people pursue reviews and appeals in the first place. They do not do it for entertainment. They do it because they believe the decision was wrong and because they are desperate. Rather than improving the quality of those decisions, the Bill seems more focused on making them harder to challenge, including through automated decision making that participants cannot see into, and through reassessment and contact rules that can reduce or suspend a plan with little notice.
I have heard too many accounts of “check-in” phone calls that turn out, in practice, to be unscheduled reassessments, where funding is changed without the person having notice, a support person present, or time to gather evidence. The provisions that allow a plan to be suspended simply because someone could not be contacted
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 1565
will hurt exactly the people least able to manage a phone call on the agency’s timetable. I am also concerned about anything that reduces a participant’s ability to have a support person with them during reviews and reassessments, because many disabled people, particularly Autistic people and people with psychosocial or cognitive disability, cannot safely navigate those conversations alone.
Meanwhile the Bill writes financial sustainability into the test for whether a support is reasonable and necessary, with supports to be provided only “so far as is consistent with the financial sustainability of the scheme”. That puts the budget inside the legal question of whether a person gets what they need.
I also think it matters how we arrived here. The government commissioned focus group research from RedBridge Group, paid for with public money, to test which messages would make the public more willing to accept a smaller scheme. As that work was reported, the finding was that stories about fraud and rorting were what moved people toward supporting cuts, and that without that framing the public tended to oppose them, because the NDIS was seen as nearly as popular as Medicare. Whatever the intent, the steady public focus on fraud and excess since then has done exactly what that research suggested it would. A scheme the country was once proud of is now widely treated as a problem to be contained, and participants and providers have worn most of that shift. Genuine fraud and exploitation are real and should be pursued properly. But public support for cutting disability funding is not something a government should be paying to manufacture before it legislates against the people who depend on it.
What I am asking
I do not think many families would argue that the NDIS needs no reform, or that its long-term sustainability does not matter. But reform should not mean making disabled people and carers fight harder for basic support, proving disability that is already well documented, losing safeguards and review rights while the agency gains more power, or quietly handing more and more responsibility back to unpaid carers. People with disability already have enough to contend with without also having to fight the system meant to support them.
I am asking the Committee to slow these reforms down, and to insist on proper consultation and genuine co-design with disabled people, their families and experienced allied health clinicians before anything like this proceeds. Stop talking about disabled people and start properly listening to them.
My real fear was never that my son would become too dependent on support. It is that he will never be given enough of the right support, early enough, to have any real chance at the independence I believe he is capable of.
Submitted by a parent and Occupational Therapist in regional NSW.
Name withheld.