Submission 1717

27 May 2026

To: Committee Secretary, Community Affairs Legislation Committee

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

I am a 49-year-old NDIS participant who has been on the Scheme for 8 years. I am autistic and have multiple physical and psychosocial disabilities. I live in SDA with 24/7 On-Site Support, and both that and my other NDIS supports have required me to go to the ART twice so far.

I am deeply concerned at the way this Amendment Bill undermines the founding principles of the Scheme and will lead to harm for disabled people, instead of focusing on the structural, systemic failures that threaten the Scheme. It is extreme Ministerial overreach and requires further scrutiny and major amendments before it can be passed.

With this Amendment Bill, the Minister has proposed a large number of changes to the NDIS Act (2013). These hand the person acting as Minister very broad decision-making powers over participants, narrowing their review pathways, without needing to return to Parliament for further scrutiny and review of legislation. Most of the changes act only to restrict access to the NDIS, NDIS supports, and NDIS funding as tightly as possible. Most concerningly, many of these changes have not been made public in speeches, websites, or fact sheets. They are only discoverable by reading the entire Amendment Bill and sections of the NDIS Act (2013), a daunting proposition.

Recommendation:

Require future legislative changes with full Parliamentary review and scrutiny rather than granting broad Ministerial powers in one fell swoop

Transparency and Scrutiny

Even with the last-minute extension of the submission deadline to 1st June 2026, this still leaves a consultation period for the Amendment Bill of only 2 weeks 3 days. This is manifestly inadequate given the sheer size of the Amendment Bill and the NDIS Act (2013), and the particular needs of the target population affecting accessibility, communication, information processing, executive function etc. The Australian Government Guide to Policy Impact Analysis is clear that a minimum of 30 days’ consultation is appropriate where possible.

In order to make my submission by the deadline I have had to push myself through increasingly severe pain, spasms, and fatigue. I cannot sleep at night because I am in so much pain from working on it during the day. My hands and forearms have swollen with my pain condition, and I cannot use them to care for myself. I have gone without drinking or eating for many hours on end because the seriousness of the risk this Amendment Bill poses has activated my autistic ‘hyperfocus’ to get a submission done.

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Recommendation:

• Extend the consultation period to a best practice minimum of 30 days.

False Economy

The Minister has made much of how the NDIS has ‘blown out’ in cost, is being undermined by rorts, fraud and noncompliance, and is financially unsustainable. I do not oppose tightening protections against illegal conduct that funnels money away from the plans of disabled people. I find it a significant burden that I must keep an ‘eagle eye’ on every single invoice that passes through my plan manager app to check if it is legitimate, because I frequently discover attempts by dodgy Providers to defraud me/my budget/the NDIS.

But when the Minister admitted that the system had been badly designed from the beginning, he did not then take the next logical step of focusing on that poor systemic, structural design that was threatening the Scheme.

If the system that disabled people rely on is not reformed but is simply tightened to reduce their access to supports or cut them off from support entirely, they will not disappear from Australia. We disabled people will continue to have needs, and we will end up in crisis. We will end up being a ‘cost’ elsewhere in Australian governments’ bottom lines when we land in an ambulance, an emergency department, a hospital ward, a mental health unit, or needing homelessness services, interacting with police, incarcerated, using school or higher education services …the ‘cost’ might have been removed from the ‘NDIS line item’, but it won’t have evaporated, just been shifted elsewhere.

I know from personal experience that my complex interplay of disabilities and medical conditions is simply not catered to by other government and community services and systems. The siloed nature of those services and systems mean that they always lack understanding of my ‘other’ issues and the intersections render their attempts at support traumatic and harmful rather than helpful. Or they refuse support altogether based on my intersections/complexity or ‘problem behaviours’. Without the NDIS, I am abandoned to die.

Instead, the Minister would do better to address the large number of structural failures that have created the crisis in the Scheme we now face. To begin with, the Amendment Bill is not reviewing the enormous administrative structure that underpins the Scheme. Why is there not a review occurring of the NDIA itself? The NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission which I can personally attest is a toothless tiger unless one has died? The lack of attention and underinvestment in workforce standards, training, pay & conditions? Again, I can personally attest to the woeful performance of undertrained, underpaid, burnt-out disability support workers sent out to care for a complex client like me. Moving between NDIS planners or Providers or having transfer/coordination between levels of the system is always chaotic with inadequate handover occurring. I have had 5 Planners in the last 15 months because Planner competence is so poor in general within the NDIA, they must continually be replaced for unprofessional conduct. The NDIA is so focused on drawing boundaries between what is the responsibility of the NDIS and ‘mainstream’ systems, that it fails to achieve any integration of its services with those mainstream systems e.g. health,

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mental health, housing, justice, aged care. People’s lives do not exist in neat boxes where systems don’t need to communicate or work with each other. Enforcing a greater proportion of plans being Plan Managed is a means to avoid a lot of the ‘rorts, fraud, and non-compliance’ the Minister is so concerned with, yet there is very little safeguarding against Self-Managed plans being taken advantage of. None of these structural elements are being given the same attention the Amendment Bill applies to participants and Providers.

Recommendations:

• Review and reform of the NDIA & the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission
• Invest in workforce standards, training, pay & conditions
• Improve handover between Planners, Providers, levels of system
• Improve Planner competence
• Improve integration between NDIA and ‘mainstream’ systems
• Enforce greater proportion of plans Plan-managed

Parts of the Amendment Bill Requiring Scrutiny

1. Defining functional capacity

The definition of functional capacity against which we are meant to be assessed, proposed in the new Section 9B, is not a real-world definition. It is a purely theoretical definition, and certainly not one that is possible to capture using any standardised assessment tool. People are whole people and tasks don’t exist in isolation. I might be able to empty the dishwasher or brush my teeth as individual tasks, but every task I do contributes to my overload of pain and fatigue and detracts from my ability to perform other tasks. If I am shut down psychologically I might ‘physically’ be capable of performing tasks but in reality totally incapable of remembering to go to the toilet, eat or drink for many hours.

It is not realistic or fair to assesses all people without the use of any assistance from “other people, assistive technology or modifications”. For many these things are normal integrated parts of their daily lives, not even necessarily supports sought from the NDIS, and there are no circumstances in which they would not be available to use.

It is also impossible to separate real human beings from their normal daily lives in their “environmental and personal circumstances”, particularly if an assessor is trying to conduct a single point-in-time assessment rather than drawing on evidence that takes a longitudinal view. My life looked very different when I was homeless and in mental health crisis, before I moved into safe, stable housing. This Part is made retrospective to reassess all existing NDIS participants, narrowing our eligibility criteria without review rights. This is not procedural fairness. Particularly when the tool for assessment does not yet exist! I know as an autistic person that we often ‘mask’ in assessment situations with strangers and ‘overperform’, pushing ourselves beyond our limits - without conscious awareness - compared to normal

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Daily life, giving highly distorted results. This can result in us being assessed as much more functional/less impaired than we really are, receiving less support than we need, or being classified as ineligible for a Scheme or Program.

Recommendations:

• Do not implement this Part as it stands.
• Maintain review rights.
• Incorporate a ‘no harm’ safeguard so no current participant is removed or loses supports through reassessment until equivalent, accessible supports are in place elsewhere.

2. Tightening the criteria for unscheduled plan reassessments a) None of the publicly available information, including the summaries and fact sheets, mention the proposed change to Subsection 48(3) that extends the time the NDIA has to respond to requests for plan reassessment from 21 days to 90 days. This is a more than fourfold increase in the delay imposed on participants who may be in desperate circumstances. Our support needs will not evaporate just because the NDIA has all this extra time to respond, and while we have a gap in support the false economy principle applies – we will end up in crisis in other Australian government systems.

b) The proposed insertion of Section 48A is intended to “tighten(s) the criteria for unscheduled plan reassessments”. However, this attempt has gone awry as it has neglected to include consultation with the disability community. If the department genuinely wants to corral eligibility for plan reassessment to situations where support needs directly related to listed disabilities are being impacted, then that should be how the legislation is worded, allowing individual variation to be captured. Trying to create a long list that is in versus out is never going to reliably capture reality, as real lives are messy and there are always scenarios that the NDIA is not going to have thought of because they do not live the lives of disabled people. This means that there are going to be countless people who in reality qualify for a plan reassessment but according to the NDIA do not. So is all about cutting down the numbers overall, not targeting more accurately. It is about restricting our ability to request a plan reassessment no matter how desperately we need it, if we don’t meet the NDIA’s strict criteria. We can be languishing without supports, but if we don’t get the box ticked, too bad. Life events can suddenly happen and a quick response is needed, not 90 days. I had a medical emergency last year when I nearly died from an infected gallbladder, and my support needs changed suddenly and remained substantially altered for months afterwards. I was fortunate enough to have enough flexibility in my plan to accommodate my needs, but under this proposed legislation a

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• A 90 day delay would have meant I got no help at all.

Recommendation:

• Do not implement this Part as it stands.

3. Strengthen link between an impairment and need for support

Yet again the NDIA is attempting to turn real-world living human beings into hypothetical creatures made up of separate boxes labelled with their disabilities and medical conditions. This is not how anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, etc. work in the real world. The real biological world is made up of systems that interact, that synergise and antagonise and are chaotic. It is impossible to separate the different processes affecting a person’s functional capacity and label some or a certain part ‘direct from listed disabilities’ and some ‘not’ to determine if a support should get NDIS funding. No assessor or assessment tool can do this. We cannot do this. We are whole people. If supports are denied to us because it is determined by the NDIA that one of our listed disabilities is being “impacted by another impairment in relation to which the participant does not meet either of those requirements” what do you think will happen? The logical consequence is that our listed impairments will deteriorate, and our functional capacity will decrease. We will need increased funded supports from the NDIA to compensate! This is false economy! The NDIA has refused for many years to fund Psychology in my plan. As a result, my Providers and Workers have not been trained to work with me, and I have struggled to assemble and maintain a Care Team and a roster of support. This has had a serious impact on my health and wellbeing as a whole person, including all my listed impairments. This change to the rules is being retrospectively applied to all existing NDIS participants, narrowing our eligibility without review rights. This is not procedural fairness. Restricting supports or forcing participants off the Scheme is simply false economy.

Recommendations:

• Do not implement this Part as it stands.
  • Maintain review rights.
  • Incorporate a ‘no harm’ safeguard so no current participant is removed or loses supports through reassessment until equivalent, accessible supports are in place elsewhere.

4. Commonwealth Minister to make determinations to reduce funding for groups of supports

This insertion of Section 34A was presented as having the goal of enabling a Ministerial determination to reset participant support budgets for social, civic and community participation and capacity building daily activities, as an immediate cost-saving measure. But what has not been publicised is that the way the legislation is

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written, it actually gives the Minister broad-ranging powers to cut any part of all NDIS participants’ budgets at any time into the future without any safeguarding or oversight! All the Minister has to do is claim ‘this is for the purpose of financial sustainability’. This change to the NDIS Act (2013) gives the Minister incredible power to cut the plans of all NDIS participants while being far removed from the vulnerable people involved and from taking any genuine responsibility when these decisions result in tragedy. It is also ridiculous to assert that safeguarding is assured by Subsection (3) “In making the determination, the Minister must have regard to the safety of participants” when a decision is being taken at a NDIS-wide level rather than at an individual level and Subsection (5) goes on to ‘clarify’ that such determinations take effect even if plan funds end up being cut below the costs of their reasonable and necessary supports.

These decisions, which are misdirected from the offset, will have devastating impacts on participants. This decision is the Minister telling disabled people that he would rather we go back to the bad old days of the evidence presented at the Disability Royal Commission Hearings where we are Shut In and Shut Out. This is the opposite of what the NDIS was set up to do. Facilitating participants participating in society, economy, and community is meant to be one of the outcome measures for the NDIS! If I lose my supported access to medical appointments what happens then? If I become cut off from my chosen family then my remaining tendrils of informal support dry up, and the NDIS ends up with a greater burden in other areas. A “simple shave off the top” of social, community or civic participation may look like a scheme level intervention without serious consequences, but for individuals it looks like isolation, mental health deterioration, collapse of daily routine, reduction or loss of employment/education/training, loss of access to health care, carer burnout, and increased risk of crises. As usual, the legislation has been set up so that these decisions to cut our funding - at any time, without warning - are not reviewable, vioating procedural fairness.

Recommendations: Do not implement this Part as it stands. Maintain review rights. Incorporate a ‘no harm’ safeguard so no participant loses supports until equivalent, accessible supports are in place elsewhere.

5. Plan Renewal Under the proposed new Section 50A (4)(b) “the making of the new plan does not involve the making of any reviewable decision”, i.e. we do not have right of review to the renewal of our plans under this Part. Unspent funds will no longer carry over at

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plan renewal, so if we are saving across plan periods for high-cost items that ability vanishes entirely. This can be very tricky for certain categories of funds where the costs fluctuate a lot instead of being regular across funding periods, e.g. where purchasing in bulk is a significant cost saving to the NDIA!

Recommendations:

• Do not implement this Part as it stands.
• Maintain review rights.

6. Reasonable and necessary supports a) The Amendment Bill alters Section 3 Objects of Act, substituting new Paragraph 3(1)(d) which replaces a simple statement of the provision of “reasonable and necessary supports” to “reasonable and necessary, so far as is consistent with the financial sustainability of the scheme”. Making this change to the central Object of the Act runs counter to the foundation of the NDIS as a system to support the most vulnerable. Instead of leaving the provision of reasonable and necessary supports on its own as the whole point of the NDIS, with the financial sustainability of the scheme always having been perfectly adequately covered legislatively by separate clauses, inserting it here distorts the Act itself and the NDIS from its core.

b) Once again the Department and the Minister has snuck in changes to the NDIS Act that fundamentally change NDIS participants’ entitlements to supports, with changes to Section 4 General principles guiding actions under this Act, Subsections 4(5) and (11). Here by substituting “NDIS” for “reasonable and necessary” the definitions of reasonable and necessary are being abandoned so that we can no longer claim entitlement to certain supports or levels of support.

c) The new Subsection 17A Principles relating to participation and plans adds in only some clauses from the proposed-to-be-repealed list in Section 31 Principles for preparation of plans in Division 1 of Part 2 of Chapter 3, leaving some principles missing entirely.

d) In this new Subsection 17B Principles relating to scheme sustainability, as elsewhere with the legislative changes, a point is made of the financial “desirability of supporting communities to respond to the goals and needs of participants”. Presumably this is in reference to programs the government wishes to establish or see established in the community that will take the place of NDIS supports for participants whose status it revokes or whose applications it rejects. Buzzwords like ‘Thriving Kids’ or ‘Foundational Supports’ come to mind. Yet again this is false economy. If people are going to be excluded from the NDIS, they must have somewhere to go where supports exist. In reality. Not hypothetically. And those supports must exist in programs which are equitable, which are themselves not

Submission 1717

starved for funds and resources and can only provide supports to a tiny proportion of people who need help. Or once again we run into false economy problems where people end up in other crisis systems. Putting into the legislation that funding “should be used efficiently” sounds very much like a statement of austerity measures being imposed on all participants and encoded into legislation. As already mentioned, the current issues with fraud, compliance etc. that the government is complaining loudly about are part of system & structure design – therefore not relevant to this part of the Act. There are already plenty of parts of the Act aimed at plans being used correctly.

e) Again, the Minister and the Department have hidden from view substantial changes to the rights of NDIS participants in how their plans are drawn up. They are proposing that Section 31 Principles relating to plans be repealed, and along with it many of the rights of NDIS participants. It is clear that the deletion of the right to have an individualised plan opens the door to removing plans tailored to our unique support needs, with human decision-making involved. Instead, this allows the NDIA to allot us cookie cutter plans from algorithms or black boxes that only take into account certain features/labels/rankings/scores, risking manifestly inappropriate and inadequate plans being spat out that leave us at high risk. It is clear that deleting the right of participants to direct the preparation of their own plan removes any right we have to be involved in the planning process. We no longer have any right to indicate supports our care team support us as nominating meet our needs. It is clear that by deleting all reference to strengthening and building capacity of families and carers to support participants, the NDIA is abandoning these families and carers. This is part of a general attempt to save money by shifting care onto families and carers. I can see a future where the NDIA is no longer interested in funding assistance such as respite for these families and carers so that they may continue to care in the long term, and will instead lurch into crisis. The NDIA is watering down its language, removing statements that mention rights like subsection 31(g) where a plan should “be underpinned by the right of the participant to exercise control over his or her own life”, and instead we are left with weasel words like “interests” and “capacity” to exercise choice and control. The proposed legislation deletes “achieving our individual aspirations” and “tailored and flexible responses to the individual goals and needs”. Yet again, anything reflecting individuality in plan design is removed so that the NDIA can pursue cookie cutter algorithmic plans that are not necessarily appropriate or adequate. Removing the pursuit of participant’s aspirations is again gutting the NDIA of one of its foundational tenets and outcome measures, making a mockery of this process.

f) The proposed insertion of subsection 33(2EA) is another part of the Amendment Bill that the Minister wants to quietly insert into the Act in an awkward location without notifying the disability community. This section of the Act is titled “Total funding amounts, funding component amounts and funding periods” and does what it

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says on the box – sets out how a plan budget is constructed with categories and funding periods. Yet the Minister and the Department are trying to sneak in further control from on high on every little detail of how participants receive supports by adding Ministerial control at any time of the funding, intensity, and worker ratio of any support for any and all participants!

g) The Amendment Bill adds into subsection 34(1) explanatory details for “Value for money considerations”, “Effective and beneficial considerations”, “Family etc. support—children”, and “Family etc. support—other matters” rather than relying on Rules or Guidelines. To an extent this is sensible as it provides clarity for all parties, but the proposed legislation goes off track from the beginning with the requirements to satisfy the criteria for Effective and beneficial. In s 34(1EF) a hierarchy of evidence is provided, but any or all of this list can be ignored by the NDIA at will! There is a clear minimisation of the role lived experience evidence plays in substantiating supports as effective and beneficial, both for individuals and groups. This flies in the face of a growing movement within research and academia.

With subsection 34 (1GHJ) this part of the proposed legislation does the heavy lifting of the massive shifting of support from the NDIS onto families. Yet again this is happening when the non-NDIS supports and support systems talked about in theory are not reality. The types of support listed that families are meant to be responsible for might be perfectly manageable in one case, but in another totally beyond the capacity of the family to cope without support. Without that support the family would be in crisis. Without that support the child’s development would suffer. Without that support the parent/carer/s could not function in Australia’s economy. And so on. Families are already overburdened and overstretched, even with the support they might receive from the NDIS, so either reducing their child’s support or revoking their status entirely when there is nowhere to go for replacement services will result in tragedies and massive suffering.

With subsection 34 (1K) the NDIA are looking for any way they can to deny supports to adult participants. Now instead of simply taking account of what “is reasonable to expect families, carers, informal networks and the community to provide” they are moving to a default position where this is assumed unless this “would expose a participant or another person to a material risk of harm, abuse or neglect that cannot be mitigated through informal or lower cost supports”. Once again, we are back in dreadful Disability Royal Commission Hearing territory, where the standard of care for disabled people, the standard of a life that the Australian government has decided to accept for us, is one just above outright harm, abuse and neglect! I have spent time living in homelessness. I have spent time living in awful SRSs. I have seen friends doing it tougher. This standard is not acceptable. But this Amendment Bill has goals of “supporting, maintaining and strengthening informal supports and community networks in preference to … funded supports”.

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Once again we see they are desperate to move as many people as possible away from the NDIS and NDIS supports into the community and relying on non-NDIS funded care where the community organisations, systems, and networks to support them do not exist, and it would be much less efficient to build them from scratch around the country, in scattered micro form, in any case. Once again, false economy.

Recommendations:

• Do not implement this Part as it stands.
• Maintain foundational principles of the NDIS and participant planning
• Avoid Ministerial overreach
• Incorporate a ‘no harm’ safeguard so no current participant is removed or loses supports until equivalent, accessible supports are in place elsewhere.

7. Plan suspensions and revocations

The proposed insertion of Section 40A deals with participants the NDIA categorises as ‘not contactable’. It is only when we get to 40A(2) that we get any details i.e. the CEO has to give written notice of a plan suspension. Everything under s 40A (1) is deliberately left completely vague and up to the CEO’s discretion! Who gets to define “reasonable attempts to contact the participant” and “the participant is not contactable?” Naturally it is the NDIA who has all the power and gets to decide on these definitions! This is ridiculous when you are dealing with disabled people who often have sensory impairments, cognitive impairments, executive functioning impairments, psychosocial impairments … the list goes on of ways that their disabilities affect communication. Then you have language barriers, and the various intersections all people, particularly vulnerable disabled people, may experience e.g., homelessness, exposure to family violence settings, admission to health and mental health care settings. The NDIA is also not necessarily going to have accurate records for every piece of contact information of every single participant at every moment in time. The NDIA may very well ‘attempt’ to communicate with us and then revoke our status if we do not answer according to NDIA criteria, but we are a group with the least capacity to answer and we are at the highest risk if we have our supports cut off. If I am in the depths of a mental health crisis I am not going to be interested in answering phone calls, and at the best of times I often forget I have a mailbox.

Recommendation:

• Do not implement this Part as it stands.

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8. Tightening meaning of permanence This wording of this subsection 25(1B) change to the disability requirements is a massive overreach of powers that either does not understand reality for disabled people or is aimed at revoking the status of as many participants as possible regardless of their functional status and risking their life and health. Many disabled people will have permanent disabilities that require significant NDIS support for them to stay alive, let alone have any other daily needs attended too, yet will be receiving treatment that aims to ‘improve’ or ‘alleviate’ the impact of their disability. That treatment will not make their disability go away and stop being permanent. It will not take away their need for significant supports on a daily basis. But it might technically have a chance of improving their situation so what would the NDIS do to them?

Section 25A is yet again giving all the power to define terms to the NDIA. Who decides whether a treatment is “evidence-based”? Who decides if a treatment will “reliably … materially improve, reverse, or alleviate the impact” of impairments? Who decides if a treatment is “regularly undertaken or performed in Australia”? Most cruelly of all, the NDIA acts again to deliberately exclude as many people as possible by specifically ruling out a lack of access to treatment due to common constraints like finance or geography as a mitigating factor. Disabled people exist all over Australia, in rural and remote areas with appalling lack of access to health care. Even in urban areas, access to health care involves long waiting lists and full practice books, and extreme difficulty if you have specific needs. Disabled people are among Australia’s most economically disadvantaged. As someone on a Disability Support Pension, I know how off-limits medical specialists are with their gap fees. As a queer person with a history of trauma & family violence, I know how hard it is to find practitioners who will meet my needs. How can the Department and the Minister cut off the access of multiply marginalised Australians to NDIS support and entrench their disadvantage? Will the NDIS force disabled people en masse to undergo utterly pointless medical treatments or take pointless medications, risking harmful side effects, simply to tick the necessary boxes?

And yet again the NDIA is failing to take a whole-of-person approach, as if we exist as separate little boxes of our impairments. I have already given the NDIA substantial evidence for all of my listed impairments that I have undergone all possible treatments for me – will the NDIA require me to re-prove this all over again for every impairment, with new evidence from every specialist?

This section is deliberately vague in its conclusion, saying only that it allows for circumstances and rules of any kind, for any types of impairments or participants, to determine if appropriate treatment has been undertaken. Once more the deliberate vagueness leaves all the power with the NDIA, the Department, and the Minister to exclude a participant or groups of participants at will. The Amendment Bill is careful to specify that all existing participants fall under the new criteria, of course.

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Recommendations:

Do not implement this Part as it stands. Incorporate a ‘no harm’ safeguard so no current participant is removed or loses supports through reassessment until equivalent, accessible supports are in place elsewhere.

9. Eligibility based on access to other services a) In Section 9 the NDIA is trying to exclude as many people as possible by defining a Work-related injury as one not just arising from employment but anything simply aggravated by employment. Just about any permanent disability is going to be aggravated by unsuitable employment! This is a sneaky way to catch people and exclude them.

b) With Section 25B(2)(3) the push to exclude people gets ridiculous. For both motor vehicle accidents and work-related injuries, the mere fact that the NDIA considers a person eligible under some legislation for compensation/benefits does not mean that any compensation/benefits are being received. The workplace/motor vehicle compensation/benefits systems in Australia are notorious for the trauma of dealing with their bureaucracies and the token support that can be extracted. Under the proposed Amendment Bill NDIS participants with significant support needs can have their status revoked, only to find themselves with zero support from the other system they are theoretically eligible for. This must not be allowed to go into the Act.

c) Section 24B(4)(5) is once again a bombshell part of the proposed legislation hidden from the disability community. It is deliberately vague and leaves all the decision-making power up to the Minister and the NDIA, but they can later decide at any time any impairment get excluded from the NDIA entirely, on a whim, because they have decided to categorise the entire impairment as the responsibility of supports from a non-NDIS system. Section 30(1)(c) under the proposed legislation allows the revocation of participant status if this criterion is not met, making it retrospective to all current participants, again attempting to cut as many participants as possible from the scheme. This must not be allowed to go into the Act.

Recommendations:

Do not implement this Part as it stands. Incorporate a ‘no harm’ safeguard so no current participant is removed or loses supports through reassessment until equivalent, accessible supports are in place elsewhere. Avoid Ministerial overreach

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Reducing claim times

The proposed insertion of Paragraph 45A(5)(a) will restrict people’s access to payment of legitimate claims when the NDIA is responsible for delays in the system. For participants, getting many supports funded has been made even more difficult since the institution of the ridiculous Support versus Non-Support lists that do not take account of function in the lives of disabled people. Now there is even more submission of reports to the NDIA in an effort to secure funding, and urgent purchases must often be made before the NDIA has processed applications due to delays in NDIA administration. When initial reports are rejected and resubmissions must occur, with further delays, one can see how 90 days is not long at all. Participants must not be cut off from being reimbursed for eligible NDIS supports.

Recommendation:

• Do not implement this Part as it stands.

Automation of administrative action

a)

The legislation has very deliberately been worded very generally and vaguely to allow for the automation of things that ought to involve human decision-making, such as assessment of participant eligibility for the NDIS, assessment of participant support needs, and creation of participant budgets and plans. Even from the beginning, the listed provisions include Section 33 for drawing up a participant’s plan, supports and budgets, then the specified provisions give the Minister freedom to automate anything at all in the future.

b) The so called ‘oversight and safeguards’ are token. The NDIA must create a ‘written’ SOP instrument that it is ‘satisfied’ comes to the same decisions the ‘CEO’ would. No external third party does any assessment or evaluation. The section on ’Notification of decisions” is carefully worded such that no human necessarily has to be involved in the process at all before the output goes to the affected participant or other party. The fact that the computer program is operating needs to be put on the NDIA website and a few more details go in the annual report, but nothing about its actual internal programming needs to be revealed. It can remain a true black box making decisions about participants’ lives without any humans involved. This is true automation of the work of NDIA planners, and this is horrifying in its implications for the lives (and deaths) of participants when the human element is removed.

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Recommendations:

• Do not implement this Part as it stands.
• Maintain human decision-making in participants’ plans
• Avoid Ministerial overreach

12. New framework planning

a)

The proposed insertion of subsection 3B before subsection 32K(4) aims to make more legislative changes focused on the magical ‘needs assessment report’ when the needs assessment tool has not yet been developed. The I-CAN version being used by the NDIA is still in early trials; it has not been validated, and there are very serious doubts about its applicability to the diversity of disability types represented in the NDIS. A functional capacity assessment tool under the Amendment Bill needs to address eligibility thresholds for individual impairments across all types of disabled people. We have conditions that are stable, fluctuating, & episodic, and somehow a single point-in-time tool must capture this variety. A tool must also address cultural and linguistic factors. It must do all this without risking not fully capturing our disabilities otherwise we might be excluded from the NDIS or have our support needs underestimated. I am a very ‘complex’ client for FCAs and my assessments often take far, far longer than allied health professionals have allocated. I usually require many sessions before we are done, and the questioning can be very frustrating for both parties. There is no way on earth a standard form, a stranger, and an allocated time slot will be a realistic approach for me.

The NDIA is very focused on moving away from treating participants as individuals and classifying us, labelling us, chopping us up into neat segments. While the publicised fact sheet talks about a lot of other things, the actual content of the Amendment Bill is dividing things up into levels. If all the supports & stated supports, groups and classes of supports will be divided up into levels of need then the NDIA really is talking about automated systems for classifying participants according to ‘levels’ of need for funding and supports.

b)

To make things worse, the Amendment Bill makes it clear in subsection 3C that those levels of need will be specified, made provision for, and allocated funding amounts that might not reflect the actual cost of providing the support. So you might get your automated allocation of funding for your needed support, but the actual cost might be higher, leaving you in a pickle.

c)

With subsections 3D and 3E, the Amendment Bill gives the NDIA the power to set maximum funding amounts for a support/a group or class of supports, and stop these maxima being exceeded in working out the total funding amounts in a participant’s plan. Again, this is a giant amount of power this Amendment Bill would grant to the NDIA that is not being made public. This is a significant risk to the safety of disabled people as there are no safeguarding provisions here. How would the NDIA determine that these maxima are not simply financial cut offs imposed for

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‘sustainability’, but that no participant would actually be put at risk by having a maximum imposed? There are always participants who have extremely high support needs within a particular type or class or group of supports.

Recommendations:

• Do not implement this Part as it stands.
• Do not proceed with I-CAN for FCA until it has been validated to identify the needs of all diverse groups of disabled people.
  • Retain human decision-making and individualisation in participant plans