Submission 1680

Submission to the Committee Secretariat

NDIS Amendment Bill 2026

Reason for making this submission

I am writing as a person with a fluctuating psychosocial condition and as a close friend and long-term ally to individuals who rely on the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). I am not currently accessing the scheme but may need to in the future. I see how vital the scheme is for my friends independence, safety, and community participation. While I support ensuring the NDIS remains sustainable for future generations, I am deeply concerned about the profound, compounding pressure these changes will place on people with disabilities, and their support networks of family and friends.

Key Areas of Concerns

Narrowing the definition of functional capacity

The issue: Stricter criteria for assessing functional capacity risk excluding people with complex, fluctuating, or psychosocial conditions.

The impact on participants, friends and family: When institutional support is taken away, families and friends must step in as unpaid carers. This shifts the financial and emotional burden onto informal networks, leading to severe relationship strain, caregiver burnout, and the erosion of mutual friendship dynamics. The inevitable strain on family and friends will also increase demand for formal carer support services and mainstream mental health care.

I sometimes appear highly functional but behind the scenes deal with a lot of chaos. If NDIS assessments are narrowed to reflect only my best days then I feel I have lost a valuable safety net. Friends and family will then have to constantly drop their own work and family commitments to provide emergency welfare checks and basic care which is emotionally exhausting and unsustainable. Personally I am often dependant on charities that work within this area for support and experience high levels of isolation. I have lost a few friends who are overwhelmed by my situation.

Changes to available supports and budgeting restrictions

The issue: Tighter restrictions on “approved supports” reduce flexibility and autonomy for participants.

The impact on participants, friends and family: Families and friends will have to spend hours navigating increased bureaucracy, managing appeals, and filling structural gaps. This reduces our capacity to work, impacts our own mental health, and changes our roles from loving friends and family members into exhausted administrative managers.

A friend who currently uses their budget flexibly to hire support workers specialising in community transport and social inclusion would lose this option under strict approved-support lists. Their family or friends would then have to provide transport to essential

Submission 1680

appointments and social activities, forcing them into a state of financial stress and lowered capacity for work and wellbeing. Worse yet, my friend may no longer be able to access social events which would impact their mental health and connection.

Erosion of independence and community inclusion

The issue: Reduced funding limits a participant’s ability to access the community independently.

The impact on participants, friends and family: Instead of engaging with our friends as peers in social and equal settings, we are forced into logistical care roles. True inclusion means participants have the structural support to live autonomously. When funding cuts reduce this autonomy, it shrinks the participant’s world and forces their social circle to become a crisis-management network rather than a community of peers.

The introduction of automated assessment systems

The issue: The potential transition toward algorithmic or automated decision-making processes for determining support needs is deeply alarming.

The impact on participants and loved ones: Stripping away the human element creates a high risk of systemic errors. If an incorrect or flawed system abruptly cuts off funding, the real-world consequences will be catastrophic. A clinical, detached approach could trigger vulnerable individuals into severe physical and mental health crises, and may result in suicide. The financial impact of this surely outweighs the current financial impact of the NDIS.

Accessing the existing mental health system is patchy at best. I know the government has previously put resources into services largely targeted at young people. Older people are expected to access paid professionals or charities. Given that their illnesses often reduce the resources available to do so there is a risk of a lot of people falling through the net. If the NDIS is no-longer able to bridge the gap then how is the government provisioning for these people? Is there perhaps a way that whole system can become more flexible so that it is a both and situation rather than an either or one?

The gendered nature of these reforms

These concerns are not evenly distributed across the population. Women With Disabilities Australia (WWDA) has identified that the Bill risks deepening existing inequalities for women, girls, and gender-diverse people with disability. Their submission notes that the reforms could particularly exclude people with fluctuating, psychosocial, chronic, pain-related, and trauma-related disabilities - conditions that disproportionately affect women and girls, and which already face delayed diagnosis, clinical dismissal, and barriers to evidence within health systems.

WWDA has identified three compounding risks that the Committee must consider:

Submission 1680

• People may lose access to supports before any genuine alternatives exist.

• The costs and labour of care will shift onto families - and within families, this burden falls disproportionately on women.

• Future rules, assessment tools, and evidence frameworks risk reproducing existing gender bias if designed without proper co-design.

I agree that the Bill must not proceed until a comprehensive gender impact analysis has been completed and made public, and until gender-responsive reforms have been co-designed with women, girls, and gender-diverse people with disability.

Source: Women With Disabilities Australia (WWDA), “Gendered Risks of the NDIS Amendment Bill 2026,” May 2026. Available at wwda.org.au

Thriving Kids: welcome but not yet a safe substitute

I want to acknowledge the Thriving Kids program as a genuinely encouraging and well-intentioned investment. The joint $4 billion commitment from Australian, state and territory governments to build earlier identification and support for children aged 8 and under with developmental delay and/or autism is long needed.

However, I am deeply concerned about the sequencing of these reforms. Thriving Kids is scheduled to begin its rollout on 1 October 2026, with full national scale not expected until 1 January 2028. The government has stated that changes to NDIS access arrangements are timed to coincide with the program reaching scale - but “expected to be at scale” is not the same as proven, tested, or shown to be effective.

Tightening NDIS eligibility before Thriving Kids has demonstrated it can reliably catch and support the children and families who would otherwise fall through the gap is dangerous. A program that is still rolling out, still settling its service design, and still engaging communities cannot be treated as an adequate safety net for removing existing, hard-won NDIS supports.

I urge the Committee to ensure that no changes to NDIS access arrangements take effect until Thriving Kids has been independently evaluated and shown to be successfully meeting the needs of the children and families it is designed to serve. The NDIS must remain a reliable backstop until there is clear evidence that the alternative is genuinely functioning.

Source: Australian Government Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, Thriving Kids. Available at health.gov.au/our-work/thriving-kids

Conclusion and recommendations

Reducing participant funding or restricting access does not eliminate the basic human need for support. Instead, any false "budget savings" achieved by tightening eligibility will simply

Submission 1680

be redirected to crisis intervention services, emergency departments, and acute mental health facilities when participants fracture under the strain.

I urge the Committee to:

• Halt any moves to automate funding assessments and mandate that all decisions retain comprehensive, empathetic human oversight.

• Acknowledge the real limits of informal support: ensure that sustainability assessments explicitly account for the limited capacity of friends and family to absorb extra care hours without facing burnout.

• Retain flexible definitions of functional capacity that accurately capture fluctuating and psychosocial conditions and real-world environments.

• Maintain flexibility in funding budgets so participants can choose the supports that genuinely work for them.

• Co-design all implementation: mandate that any new rules or lists of approved supports are developed directly with people with disabilities and their advocates.

• Explicitly factor in flow-on costs: account for the economic and mental health impacts of these amendments on informal carers and state-funded crisis services.

Thank you for considering this submission. I urge the Committee to ensure that sustainability measures do not come at the cost of the rights, dignity, and wellbeing of NDIS participants and their loved ones.

Brisbane, QLD