NDIA Accountability Project

Concerns regarding functional assessments and impacts on people with complex disabilities

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Submission 1716

Submission to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee Inquiry

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

This submission raises serious concerns regarding the proposed amendments to the NDIS Act contained in the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026. While ensuring the long-term sustainability of the NDIS is important, sustainability should not be pursued through reforms that reduce safeguards, narrow access to support, or undermine the Scheme’s ability to respond to the diverse realities of disability. Taken together, the proposed amendments represent a substantial shift toward a more centralised and restrictive administrative framework, with broader government discretion over eligibility, planning, reassessment, and funding decisions. There is concern that the reforms place increasing emphasis on cost containment and standardisation at the expense of individual circumstances, participant autonomy, transparency, and procedural fairness. Of particular concern is the likely cumulative impact these changes may have on people living with invisible, fluctuating, psychosocial, neurological, and complex disabilities. Many participants within these groups already face significant barriers obtaining specialist evidence, accessing healthcare, navigating complex systems, and maintaining stable supports. The Bill also risks increasing reliance on unpaid carers, emergency systems, and under-resourced community services by reducing access to early, preventative, and stabilising supports. In practice, this may contribute to increased hospitalisation, housing instability, family breakdown, social isolation, mental health deterioration, and long-term escalation of support needs, while shifting pressure onto other public systems that are already overstretched. Further concerns arise regarding transparency, accountability, and the adequacy of consultation undertaken with disabled people and representative organisations. The proposed expansion of automated and data-driven decision-making powers also requires far stronger scrutiny and safeguards to ensure that participants retain access to clear reasoning, meaningful review rights, and fair decision-making processes. Reforms of this scale should not proceed without robust independent review, comprehensive consultation, and clear evidence that the proposed changes will not disproportionately disadvantage disabled people or weaken access to essential supports and protections.

Key Concerns

1. Reduced Flexibility in Participant Planning

The proposed changes risk reducing the ability of participant plans to reflect individual circumstances, goals, and support needs. A more standardised planning framework may fail to account for the wide variation in how disability affects people’s daily functioning, particularly where needs fluctuate over time or cannot easily be quantified. Participants should not be forced into narrow funding categories that overlook the complexity of their lives or prioritise administrative efficiency over appropriate support.

2. Funding Reductions Without Individual Review

Submission 1716

The Bill would permit broad funding adjustments linked to financial sustainability considerations rather than individual reassessment of need. This creates concern that participants could experience reductions in supports despite no improvement in their functional capacity or circumstances.

Changes of this nature should be subject to strong parliamentary scrutiny, transparent criteria, and clear protections against arbitrary decision-making.

3. Automated Decision-Making

The Bill appears to expand the use of automated systems in areas that may significantly affect participant eligibility, funding, reassessment, and support access.

Decisions affecting disabled people should remain transparent, explainable, and subject to meaningful human review. Automated systems can reproduce existing biases and may fail to properly account for complex or non-standard presentations of disability.

At minimum, there should be clear safeguards requiring transparency regarding how automated tools are used, what factors are considered, and how participants can challenge decisions.

4. Limitations of Proposed Functional Assessments

The proposed approach to functional assessment appears overly narrow and may not adequately reflect the lived reality of many disabilities. Functional impact is not always constant, visible, or easily measured through standardised tools.

People with episodic or complex conditions may experience substantial impairment despite appearing capable during short assessments or isolated interactions. Factors such as exhaustion, cognitive overload, sensory regulation difficulties, cumulative impairment, reliance on assistive supports, and the interaction between multiple conditions should be properly recognised.

There is concern that simplified assessment models may disadvantage people whose disabilities do not fit conventional assumptions about impairment.

5. Treatment Expectations and Permanence Criteria

The revised permanence requirements may place pressure on participants to pursue ongoing medical interventions, therapies, or assessments in order to prove eligibility or maintain support access.

This is particularly concerning for conditions where treatment outcomes are uncertain, where available interventions carry risks, or where evidence-based options remain limited. Disabled people should not be placed in a position where access to supports depends on undergoing unwanted, inaccessible, financially prohibitive, or medically inappropriate treatment.

Many participants also face major obstacles obtaining specialist reports or historical documentation due to cost, workforce shortages, geographic location, or the complexity of their conditions.

6. Suspension and Reassessment Processes

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Expanded powers relating to reassessment and suspension may disproportionately affect participants who experience difficulties with communication, organisation, mental health, housing stability, trauma, or cognitive functioning.

There is concern that supports could be suspended because a participant misses correspondence, fails to respond within required timeframes, or is temporarily unable to engage with administrative processes due to disability-related barriers.

The loss of supports in these circumstances can place people at immediate risk and may destabilise housing, health, care arrangements, and community participation.

7. Lack of Available Alternative Supports

The reforms appear to assume that participants who lose access to supports will be able to rely on mainstream or foundational services instead. In practice, many health, housing, mental health, and community services remain inaccessible, overstretched, inconsistent, or unavailable, particularly in regional and rural areas.

Without substantial investment in these systems, reducing NDIS supports risks leaving many disabled people without practical alternatives.

8. Compliance and Investigative Powers

Although preventing fraud within the Scheme is important, stronger compliance powers must be balanced with safeguards that protect participants from intimidation, overreach, or punitive administrative practices.

Disabled people who have communication difficulties, fluctuating capacity, psychosocial disability, or limited advocacy support may be especially vulnerable within highly adversarial compliance systems. There is concern that participants themselves may increasingly feel treated as compliance risks rather than people requiring support.

Recommendations

This submission recommends that the Bill not proceed in its current form.

Before implementation, the following steps should occur:

  • Meaningful consultation and co-design with disabled people, carers, advocacy groups, and representative organisations;
  • Independent review of the proposed reforms from legal, disability rights, clinical, and safeguarding perspectives;
  • Stronger transparency and accountability requirements for automated and data-driven decision-making systems;
  • Legislative safeguards preventing broad or arbitrary reductions in participant supports without individual assessment;
  • Preservation of individualised planning and genuine participant involvement in all key decisions affecting supports;
  • Recognition within assessment frameworks of fluctuating, episodic, invisible, and cumulative disabilities;
  • Clear requirement that functional capacity assessments be conducted or informed by appropriately qualified and trained clinicians, including occupational therapists (OTs), who are specifically trained in functional assessment and the real-world impacts of

Submission 1716

disability, rather than relying on narrowly standardised or non-specialist assessment approaches;

  • Protection of bodily autonomy and the right to refuse medical treatment without loss of access to supports;
  • Strengthening of procedural fairness, accessible communication, advocacy access, and review pathways; and
  • Investment in accessible mainstream and foundational supports prior to any reduction in NDIS eligibility or funding levels.

The NDIS plays a critical role in enabling disabled people to live safely, participate in the community, maintain relationships, and avoid crisis situations. Reforms to the Scheme should strengthen fairness, accessibility, and stability rather than increasing uncertainty and barriers for participants who rely on these supports every day. Above all, policy settings must place the rights, safety, dignity, and lived experience of disabled people at the centre of decision-making, rather than prioritising cost containment as the guiding principle of reform.