Submission to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee

Inquiry into the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026

Submitted by: Aaron Cotton, Acorn Homes Supported Living & Marco Polo Portal Contact:

Date: 28/05/2026

Publication: | consent to this submission being published with my name.

About me

| am Aaron Cotton, founder of Acorn Homes Supported Living, a small Supported Independent Living provider currently supporting eight participants with high-intensity needs. | am also the founder of Marco Polo Portal, an Australian housemate-matching platform that gives NDIS participants real choice over who they live with; built because that choice did not, in practice, exist anywhere else in the scheme. | service as a member of the Advisory Council to the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission.

This submission is in my personal and professional capacity. It does not represent the views of the Advisory Council to the NDIS Quality and Safegards Commission, or of any other body to which | belong.

| support the work of placing the NDIS on a sustainable long-term footing. | do not support this Bill in its current form. The Bill contains a number of changes that, in my view, the Committee should recommend be amended before passage. | set them out below.

Why this submission is different

The disability sector has many voices, and the loudest in this consultation will be the ones with the largest back offices. National Disability Services and the established residential providers have been heard at length — including on points that, if | may be plain, would conveniently return the sector to the congregate care arrangements they are best equipped to deliver and least willing to change.

| write from a different vantage:

as asmall provider running 1:1 and 1:2 supports for participants at the higher-intensity end of the scheme; exactly the people this Bill claims to protect and most exposes to harm;

¢ as the founder of a tool already doing what the scheme says it wants; putting choice and control into one of the largest decisions a participant makes, who they share

their home with

doing it at a fraction of the cost of traditional support coordination; and

as amember of the Advisory Council to the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission; the body whose remit this Bill, in several places, quietly duplicates.

Those three vantages cover a lot of the same ground. They also illuminate provisions that have largely escaped public attention. | focus this submission on those.

The architectural shift: from choice and control to “consistent with sustainability”

The single most important change in this Bill is not in the schedule everyone is talking about. It is in section 3.

Section 3(1)(d) is rewritten so the scheme’s objects become NDIS supports “consistent with the financial sustainability of the Scheme.” Section 31 — the planning principles directing decisions to be individual, choice-led and participant-directed — is repealed in full. New section 17B then requires the CEO to have regard to scheme sustainability in every planning decision.

These three changes work together. Read in isolation, “consistent with sustainability” sounds prudent. Read together, they reorient the scheme away from rights and toward cost. The legal architecture used to argue for individual supports — McGarrigle’s requirement that reasonable and necessary supports be fully funded, Eastham’s “whole of person” approach, the courts’ use of the Act’s objects to give weight to participant choice — is either overridden by other provisions in this Bill (sections 34A, 34(1)(aa), 17B) or has its interpretive foundation removed.

This matters for everything | do. Acorn Homes exists because participants asked for it. Marco Polo Portal exists because participants asked for it. Both depend, in the most direct way possible, on the scheme treating the participant as the person whose life is being planned — not as an entry in a budget line whose acceptable cost has been determined by Ministerial instrument. If sustainability is the override, choice and control is the suggestion.

Recommendation: Amend section 17B so that financial sustainability is one of several considerations the CEO must weigh — alongside the choice and control, individualisation and participant-direction principles previously contained in section 31 — rather than an override that sits above the reasonable and necessary test. Retain the planning principles previously in section 31 in modified form within Part 2 of the Act.

Whole of person, undone (section 34(1)(aa))

Section 34(1)(aa) adds a single word: “directly.” A support is now fundable only if the need arises “directly” from a qualifying impairment. This reverses the Federal Court’s decision in

Eastham, where the Court described the whole-of-person approach as commonsense, and pulls apart the support needs of people whose disabilities interact.

The participants we support at Acorn Homes do not have a single impairment that produces a tidy support need; they have multiple impairments that interact constantly. A participant with intellectual disability and a co-occurring psychosocial condition does not present a separable set of supports, one funded under each diagnosis. Their need for behavioural support arises from both, at the same time, in the same shower at six in the morning. The word “directly” is a small word that produces a great deal of paperwork and very little additional rigour.

Recommendation 2. Delete the word “directly” from section 34(1)(aa) (and consequentially section 32L(6)), restoring the whole-of-person approach achieved in the 2024 amendments and confirmed in Eastham.

The veto by missing research (section 34(1E)-—(1F))

Section 34(1E)-(1F) creates a new evidence hierarchy for deciding whether a support is “effective and beneficial.” Peer-reviewed research sits at the top. Lived experience and the clinical experience of treating practitioners sit, at best, near the bottom — and section 34(1F) allows the CEO to refuse to be satisfied if peer-reviewed research is absent, even where everything else supports the participant.

The difficulty is that novel supports are, by definition, the ones for which peer-reviewed research is missing. Marco Polo Portal has no peer-reviewed cohort study. Neither, for that matter, did the NDIS itself in its first ten years. A clause that vetoes novel supports for lack of pre-existing research is a clause that says the scheme prefers what already exists, however poorly it works — which, given what already exists, is a remarkable thing for the scheme to be saying.

Recommendation 3. Amend section 34(1E) to give the lived experience of the participant and the clinical experience of treating practitioners genuine evidentiary weight alongside peer-reviewed research. Remove section 34(1F) so that missing peer-reviewed research cannot operate as a veto on novel or individualised supports.

Worker-to-participant ratio caps and the back door to congregate care

Proposed sections 33(2EA) and 33(2EB) allow the Minister to set, by determination, maximum amounts of funding for particular supports, maximum frequency and duration, and — critically for the work | do — maximum worker-to-participant ratios. Sections 33(2G)—-(2H) and 209(2AA)—(2AB) then allow the cap values themselves to sit in a document the Agency can update without further parliamentary scrutiny.

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The cap rule is disallowable. The cap number is not. This is the legal equivalent of regulating the size of the price tag while leaving the price to be filled in later.

For Acorn Homes specifically: we run 1:2 ratios throughout the day for participants whose support needs include continuous behavioural oversight, complex health management, and active safeguarding. We run 1:1 for showers, for community access, and for any moment a participant’s behaviour may put themselves or another person at risk. These ratios are not lifestyle choices. They are the difference between safe support and serious harm and in some cases between safe support and a coronial inquest.

A worker-to-participant ratio cap set as a cost control by Ministerial instrument cannot magically reduce the supervision a participant needs. It can produce one of three outcomes: unsafe support, congregate settings (where one worker can supervise more participants at once), or a participant being pushed out of community-based SIL and back into the kind of large-scale residential arrangement the Disability Royal Commission spent five years documenting. None of those outcomes is what the Government says it wants. All three are what the drafting permits.

Recommendation 4

Amend sections 33(2EA) and 33(2EB) so that worker-to-participant ratio limits cannot be set as cost ceilings by Ministerial determination overriding an individualised safety assessment. Where ratio-related standards are to be set, they should be safety floors set by the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission — the body whose remit is participant safety — not cost ceilings set by the Minister.

Recommendation 5

Require cap values themselves to sit in the disallowable NDIS rule, not in a document incorporated by reference under sections 33(2G)—(2H) and 209(2AA)—(2AB).

The Minister can quietly cut your plan, with no review (section 34A)

Section 34A allows the Minister to reduce funding by percentage across a support category by legislative instrument. The Explanatory Memorandum confirms these reductions are not subject to merits review ({] 285). The first reduction is already announced: social and community participation funding, phased in from October 2026.

For participants with very high support needs, social and community participation funding is not lifestyle expenditure. It is part of how essential supervision, behavioural support and active safeguarding are delivered outside the home. A blanket percentage cut to that funding produces unsafe gaps in support for the participants who can least afford them. The Explanatory Memorandum gestures at safety considerations. The safety carve-out is not on the face of the Act.

Recommendation 6

Amend section 34A so any percentage reduction is preceded by mandatory consultation with the disability community and a published impact statement.

Provide an enforceable exemption mechanism on the face of the Act for participants with

high or complex support needs. Preserve individual merits-review rights where a reduction produces a harmful change in a participant’s plan.

Forced sharing, commissioning, and the return of institutions

| am not opposed to sharing. Sharing is inevitable. The honest position is that 1:1 funding for every participant is neither affordable nor reasonable; a great many Australians without disability cannot afford to live alone either. The question is not whether people share. It is with whom, and at what scale.

Sharing with one or two compatible people you have chosen is reasonable, often dignified, and frequently preferable to living alone. Sharing with three to sixty people you did not choose is something else — and the Disability Royal Commission devoted thousands of pages to documenting what that something else looks like. Forced sharing with strangers, with minimal safeguards against incompatible or violent housemates, is not a hypothetical concern. It is the predictable outcome of every funding mechanism in this Bill that pushes toward congregate settings without naming them.

Marco Polo Portal exists because the alternative was leaving compatibility to the kind of housemate-matching that, in practice, produces co-tenancies between participants with no shared interests, no behavioural compatibility, and no realistic exit option. We built the platform because we ran the SIL service first and saw what the current system produces when it goes wrong.

Two specific provisions in this Bill make these problems worse, and one absent provision makes them inevitable.

Section 25B and aged care

Proposed section 25B excludes from the NDIS people whose impairment is covered by a compensation scheme — regardless of whether the compensation scheme actually pays for the supports they need — and allows the Minister to declare other systems “alternatives” by rule. The Explanatory Memorandum names aged care. The effect is that people with disability over 65, and First Nations people who can access aged care from 50, may lose their disability-specific supports and be redirected into a system structured around residential care.

Recommendation 7. Amend section 25B so an “excluded impairment” only applies where the compensation or alternative scheme actually pays for the supports the participant needs. Any section 25B(4) declaration of an alternative system must be a disallowable instrument with mandatory consultation with the disability community, and additional consultation with First Nations representative bodies where the declaration affects First Nations people.

Commissioning of home and living

The Government’s reform timeline commits to consultation on the commissioning of home and living supports from July 2026. The Bill does not require those commissioning arrangements to preserve participant choice over who they live with, or to constrain the scale of shared settings. Commissioned housing supports designed to be more “efficient” will be efficient in exactly the way large-scale congregate care was efficient: cheaper per participant, easier for providers to staff, and very difficult to safely leave.

Recommendation 8

Insert into the Act a principle that funding and commissioning arrangements for home and living supports must not mandate, incentivise, or have the practical effect of producing congregate or institutional settings, and must preserve the participant’s right to choose who they live with and at what scale. Anchor this principle in the findings of the Disability Royal Commission.

The Government’s reform timeline also commits to a commissioned support coordination and connection function from 2028. | do not oppose this in principle. A genuinely well-designed navigation function could solve real problems with the current support coordination market. But “commissioned” can mean two very different things: a multi-provider environment in which tools and services compete to serve participants, or a single contract held by whichever organisation has the largest existing footprint.

Marco Polo Portal is positioned to be a tool within a properly designed navigation function — not a competitor to it. We deliver, at a fraction of the cost of traditional support coordination, the specific function of matching participants with compatible housemates. We exist because of disability — there is no reason a non-disabled person would need this platform — and our cost per participant is materially lower than the support coordination time the same matching would otherwise consume.

The policy question is not whether the scheme should fund tools like Marco Polo. It plainly should: they reduce cost, advance choice and control, and do not push toward institutions. The drafting question is whether the Bill, as currently structured, makes such tools fundable. On a literal reading of section 34, with its new emphasis on supports “directly” linked to a qualifying impairment and its evidentiary hierarchy that prefers peer-reviewed research over anything actually new, the answer is unclear at best.

Recommendation 9

Any commissioned support coordination or navigation function must be multi-provider, must be required to incorporate participant-choice tools (including but not limited to housemate-matching platforms), and must not operate as a monopoly that crowds out the kinds of innovation participants have asked for.

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Pole

Recommendation 10.

Clarify in section 34 (or by accompanying NDIS Rule) that disability-specific tools and services that reduce reliance on more expensive supports — including digital tools that deliver choice and control in housing and living arrangements — are explicitly fundable as NDIS supports where they meet the reasonable-and-necessary criteria. A housemate-matching platform is required only because of disability; it costs less than the support coordination time the same matching would consume; and it advances choice without pushing toward institutional settings. It should be eligible for funding, not consigned by drafting accident to the “not directly disability-related” category.

4. Stripping the ability to question what the Agency does

Several of the Bill’s most significant individual decisions are made non-reviewable:

decisions to transition a participant into a new framework plan (section 32B(2A));
automatic plan renewals (section 50A); and
the effect of Ministerial support determinations on individual plans (section 34A, per Explanatory Memorandum { 285}).

Add to that the “alterations” the Minister may make to renewed plans — alterations that, on the face of section 50A, may include the removal of time-limited funding or temporary variations from the renewed plan, without the participant being involved in the renewal and without any review pathway.

A scheme being asked to operate at a different scale and pace cannot also be a scheme in which the most consequential individual decisions are insulated from challenge. The Robodebt Royal Commission’s findings on automated, unreviewable Commonwealth decision-making should be required reading for anyone designing this part of the Bill.

Recommendation 11.

Make decisions to transition participants into new framework plans (section 32B(2A)), automatic plan renewals (section 50A), and the application of support determinations to individual plans (section 34A) reviewable. Where the Minister’s alterations to a renewed plan are more than purely administrative, they constitute new decisions and must be reviewable.

5. Ministerial overreach

Two provisions concentrate power in a way that should give the Committee pause regardless of the present Government’s intent, because the Bill will outlast this Parliament.

Pricing (section 45C) The Bill gives the Minister power to set maximum prices for Agency-managed and plan-managed supports. The NDIS Review’s Recommendation 11 explicitly proposed that

pricing should sit with the Independent Health and Aged Care Pricing Authority — the same

independent body that prices hospital and aged care services. The Bill goes the opposite way: less independence, more “flexibility,” and the Minister of the day deciding what providers can charge.

It is not difficult to imagine a future Minister using that flexibility in ways that would be unhelpful to the participants and providers this Bill is supposed to protect. It is the role of primary legislation to make that flexibility difficult to use badly.

Recommendation 12. Implement NDIS Review Recommendation 11. Amend section 45C so maximum-price determinations must be made on the binding advice of the Independent Health and Aged Care Pricing Authority, not on the advice of the Agency.

The Henry VIII clause (Schedule 5)

Schedule 5 allows the Minister to make rules that modify how the NDIS Act operates for twelve months after passage, without those rules being passed by Parliament. The Government says this is necessary to respond to implementation issues. Parliament’s own scrutiny committees have, repeatedly and consistently, said clauses of this kind require strict safeguards. The Bill provides almost none.

Recommendation 13. Narrow the Schedule 5 transitional rule-making power: limit it to specifically enumerated transitional issues, reduce the duration, require mandatory consultation with the disability community before any such rule is made, and require a published impact statement.

Access changes that produce predictable harm

The “naked person” functional capacity test (section 9B)

Proposed section 9B defines functional capacity as a person’s ability to do an activity “without assistance from other people, assistive technology or modifications” and ina context that “excludes, as far as possible, the impact of the person’s environmental and personal circumstances.” That is not how disability works. The whole purpose of an assistive technology is to change what a person can do. The whole purpose of supports is to change what a person can do. A test that asks how someone functions without supports is, by design, a test that overstates functional capacity in proportion to how well the person’s existing supports work — and then uses the overstatement to remove the supports that produced it.

The standardised assessment tool itself is not in the Bill. It will come later, by rule. Parliament is being asked to vote on the legal shell of a test it has not seen, and existing participants may be reassessed under it.

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Recommendation 14.

Delay the commencement of the section 9B test until the assessment tool has been published in draft, consulted on with the disability community, piloted with diverse cohorts (including people with intellectual disability, psychosocial disability, rare conditions, First Nations and CALD participants), and made subject to disallowable parliamentary scrutiny. The tool must not be used to remove existing participants from the scheme.

“All appropriate treatment” (section 25A)

Section 25A requires a person to try “all appropriate treatment” before they can access the NDIS. Section 25A(2) provides that treatment is appropriate “regardless of whether the person’s individual circumstances restrict the person from accessing the treatment.” This overturns NDIA v Davis (2022). If the treatment exists but you cannot afford it, cannot reach it, or are on a five-year waiting list, the Bill treats you as having access to it.

This will disproportionately affect First Nations people, people in regional and remote areas, people on low incomes, and people with intellectual disability — exactly the cohorts the scheme is supposed to serve best.

Recommendation 15.

Remove or qualify section 25A(2) so that the participant’s actual ability to access a treatment — including geography, cost, wait lists, and disability-related access barriers — must be considered in deciding whether a treatment is “appropriate.” Preserve a participant’s right to refuse treatment for personal reasons without losing scheme access.

Plan suspension and revocation

Section 40A allows the CEO to suspend a plan when a participant is “uncontactable” after “reasonable attempts.” Neither term is defined. Section 30(1A) allows revocation after a further 90 days, or directly without the 90-day window under section 30(1A)(a). The contact attempts are not required to meet a participant’s accessibility needs. The Agency is not required to consider whether suspension itself would place the participant at risk.

The participants most likely to be “uncontactable” through no fault of their own are the participants who can least afford the consequences: people with cognitive disability and no nominee; people with complex communication needs; people in hospital; people in a mental health admission; people experiencing housing instability; people whose support coordinator has just changed. These are the people the scheme was built for. They should not lose access because they did not answer a phone call.

Recommendation 16.

Define “reasonable attempts” in sections 40A and 30(1A) as requiring evidenced contact through every channel the participant has provided — including any nominee, support coordinator, or listed emergency contact — appropriate to the participant’s communication needs, and spread over a minimum 60-day period.

Build in protected-circumstance exclusions

that pause the clock (hospitalisation, mental health admission, bereavement, accessibility breakdown, short overseas travel). Remove the direct-revocation pathway in section 30(1A)(a)

Compliance, and the small-provider squeeze

| support genuine integrity measures. Fraud in the NDIS is real, it harms participants, and providers who engage in it should face serious consequences. None of the recommendations that follow soften the integrity intent of this Bill.

But the integrity provisions, as drafted, do not weigh equally on all providers. They weigh on small providers, who carry their compliance load personally, and on participants, who are now liable for civil penalties under sections 53(2)-(3) for administrative non-compliance.

The claim window and record-keeping debt (sections 45A, 45B, 182)

Section 45A(5)(a) cuts the claim window from two years to 90 days. Section 45B requires participants to retain records for three years, nominees for five, providers for seven. Section 182(4) provides that if you cannot produce a specified record, you owe an automatic debt equal to the claim — with no defence available. Providers have a defence pathway via rules made under section 45B(4); participants do not. There is no obvious reason for this asymmetry, and the Justice and Equity Centre and Darren O’Donovan have set out the legal problems with it at length.

A multi-billion-dollar provider has a back office, a compliance team, and software that retains everything in triplicate. A small provider running eight participants on high-intensity support does the records personally, often at the end of a fourteen-hour day. A participant self-managing their plan does them between hospital appointments. The Bill creates a compliance regime designed for the back-office-equipped, and quietly disadvantages everyone who is not — which is to say, almost everyone the scheme exists for.

Recommendation 17. Extend the claim window in section 45A(5)(a) beyond 90 days, with a meaningful “exceptional circumstances” discretion that explicitly contemplates hospitalisation, family emergency, and the practical realities of small-provider operation and self-management. Introduce reasonable-excuse and proportionality defences for record-keeping debts under sections 45B and 182(4), available to participants, nominees and small providers. Apply tiered, proportionate obligations so that the compliance load matches the size and capacity of the regulated party.

Two regulators doing the same work (Schedule 2 Part 2)

Schedule 2 Part 2 of the Bill gives the NDIA its own set of inspectors, investigators, civil penalty powers, infringement notice powers and enforceable undertaking powers (sections 73ZSH-73ZSK). These sit alongside — and substantially duplicate — the powers of the

Recommendation 18

Consolidate the enforcement powers proposed in Schedule 2 Part 2 within the existing NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission rather than establishing a parallel NDIA enforcement function. Remove participant-facing civil penalties under sections 53(2)—(3) for administrative non-compliance, which punish vulnerable people for the complexity of a system they did not design.

9. An independent post-implementation review

The combined effect of the changes in this Bill — new access test, new evidence hierarchy, ew caps, new commissioning regimes, new automated decision-making, new compliance powers — is impossible to model in advance. No one knows what the cumulative impact will be on participants. That is reason enough to require the kind of independent review this Parliament would expect for any Bill of comparable consequence in any other portfolio.

Recommendation 19

Insert into the NDIS Act a statutory requirement for an independent post-implementation review of the changes made by this Bill, to be commenced no later than two years after Royal Assent and reported publicly to Parliament. The review must include mandatory consultation with the disability community, evaluation of participant safety outcomes, cohort-disaggregated analysis, and a published government response within six months of tabling. Material findings of harm should trigger an obligation on the Minister to introduce remedial amending legislation.

Closing

| support placing the NDIS on a sustainable footing. | do not accept that the way to get there is to pass this Bill as drafted. The nineteen amendments above would not derail the Government’s policy direction. They would not materially reduce scheme sustainability. They would, however, protect the participants this scheme was built for from the parts of the drafting most likely to harm them—by accident or by design. They would preserve the parliamentary oversight the Bill is, in several places, quietly handing away. And they would keep the door open for the kind of innovation — small providers running high-intensity supports the institutional sector will not,

Consolidated recommendations

Each recommendation is numbered above where the issue is discussed; they are repeated here in the same order for ease of reference.

1. Amend section 17B so financial sustainability is one of several considerations the CEO must weigh — alongside the choice and control, individualisation and participant-direction principles previously contained in section 31 — rather than an override. Retain the planning principles previously in section 31 in modified form within Part 2 of the Act.
2. Delete the word “directly” from section 34(1)(aa) (and section 32L(6)), restoring the whole-of-person approach achieved in the 2024 amendments and confirmed in Eastham.
3. Amend section 34(1E) to give lived experience and treating-practitioner clinical experience genuine evidentiary weight alongside peer-reviewed research; remove section 34(1F) so that missing peer-reviewed research cannot operate as a veto on novel or individualised supports.
4. Amend sections 33(2EA) and 33(2EB) so worker-to-participant ratio limits cannot be set as cost ceilings by Ministerial determination overriding an individualised safety assessment; ratio-related standards should be safety floors set by the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission, not cost ceilings set by the Minister.
5. Require cap values themselves to sit in the disallowable NDIS rule, not in documents incorporated by reference under sections 33(2G)-(2H) and 209(2AA)-(2AB).

Amend section 34A so any percentage reduction is preceded by mandatory consultation with the disability community and a published impact statement; provide an enforceable exemption mechanism on the face of the Act for participants with high or complex support needs; preserve individual merits-review rights where a reduction produces a harmful change in a plan.
Amend section 25B so an “excluded impairment” only applies where the compensation or alternative scheme actually pays for the supports the participant needs; any section 25B(4) declaration must be a disallowable instrument with mandatory consultation, including with First Nations representative bodies where relevant.
Insert into the Act a principle that funding and commissioning arrangements for home and living supports must not mandate, incentivise, or have the practical effect of producing congregate or institutional settings, and must preserve the participant’s right to choose who they live with and at what scale. Anchor in the findings of the Disability Royal Commission.
Any commissioned support coordination or navigation function must be multi-provider, must be required to incorporate participant-choice tools (including housemate-matching), and must not operate as a monopoly that crowds out market innovation.
Clarify in section 34 (or in an accompanying NDIS Rule) that disability-specific tools and services that reduce reliance on more expensive supports — including digital tools that deliver choice and control in housing and living arrangements — are explicitly fundable as NDIS supports where they meet the reasonable-and-necessary criteria.
Make decisions to transition participants into new framework plans (section 32B(2A)), automatic plan renewals (section 50A), and the application of support determinations to individual plans (section 34A) reviewable. Where the Minister’s alterations to a renewed plan are more than purely administrative, they constitute new decisions and must be reviewable.
Implement NDIS Review Recommendation 11: amend section 45C so maximum-price determinations must be made on the binding advice of the Independent Health and Aged Care Pricing Authority, not on the advice of the Agency.
Narrow the Schedule 5 transitional rule-making power: limit it to specifically enumerated transitional issues; reduce the duration; require mandatory consultation with the disability community; require a published impact statement.

Delay commencement of section 9B functional capacity test

Delay commencement of the section 9B functional capacity test until the assessment tool has been published in draft, consulted on, piloted with diverse cohorts, and made subject to disallowable parliamentary scrutiny. The tool must not be used to remove existing participants.

Remove or qualify section 25A(2)

Remove or qualify section 25A(2) so the participant’s actual ability to access a treatment — including geography, cost, wait lists, and disability-related barriers — must be considered. Preserve a participant’s right to refuse treatment for personal reasons without losing scheme access.

Define “reasonable attempts”

Define “reasonable attempts” in sections 40A and 30(1A) as evidenced, accessibility-appropriate contact through every channel the participant has provided, over a minimum 60-day period, with protected-circumstance exclusions. Remove the direct-revocation pathway in section 30(1A)(a).

Extend claim window

Extend the claim window in section 45A(5)(a) beyond 90 days with a meaningful exceptional-circumstances discretion. Introduce reasonable-excuse and proportionality defences for record-keeping debts under sections 45B and 182(4), available to participants, nominees and small providers. Apply tiered, proportionate obligations.

Consolidate enforcement powers

Insert statutory requirement for post-implementation review

Insert into the NDIS Act a statutory requirement for an independent post-implementation review commenced no later than two years after Royal Assent, with mandatory consultation, cohort-disaggregated analysis, a published government response, and a duty on the Minister to introduce remedial legislation where the review finds material harm.