Submission 1729

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

I am writing this submission from my perspective as an NDIS participant, an informal support provider/carer of friends and family members with disabilities, and an occasional paid support worker for participants on the NDIS. I live and work in suburban Adelaide, South Australia.

I do not support this Bill in its current form. I believe it will cause harm and risk the safety of people with a disability, whether or not they are accessing the NDIS, and will cause suffering to families and others who are supporting people with disability.

I oppose the framing of this Bill as being about the ‘sustainability’ of the NDIS, because this false simplification ignores the fact that cuts from the NDIS budget will translate into costs being shifted elsewhere in the Australian economy, not to mention the human costs of those impacted by the proposed Legislation.

I ask the Government to immediately pause progression of this Bill.

I request that the Government give more time at all stages of developing legislative changes regarding the NDIS and its sustainability, so that people with a disability and the people who support them can meaningfully participate and have input on Bills that directly affect their lives.

It has been very difficult for me to make this submission because the Government has only given us 16 (originally 14) days to make submissions to the Inquiry, the Bill is very large and legally complex, and there are hundreds more pages of information in the Explanatory Memorandum document. It would be difficult for anyone to provide meaningful feedback on this legislation in this time frame, and this challenge is even greater for those of us who are personally living with disability and/or are supporting people with a disability. Many of us are struggling with our basic daily functioning, and require additional support to process complex information and communicate our needs. There is so much that I would like to say about the proposed Legislation, but because of my disability I cannot in the time permitted. I want the Government to know that there are gaps in my submission. It was beyond my capacity to make this submission more coherent or concise in the time permitted.

My personal experience as an NDIS participant looking at this proposed Legislation

I am finishing writing this submission while an inpatient in a mental health facility, and my being here is in no small part because of the stress that this proposed Bill (and my writing of this submission) has caused me.

As a person living with complex mental health problems that cause me significant psychosocial disability, gaining access to the NDIS two years ago gave me hope that I might be able to have a future equivalent to that of an ordinary Australian.

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Before gaining NDIS access, I had for decades been unable to access sufficient mental health support from the mainstream health sector, or adequate psychosocial supports. Because of this, I had massive declines in my functioning over the years, becoming unable to work at all, completely socially isolated, and unable to keep myself physically safe. Intermittently, I was able to access short-term psychosocial support programs offered by health sector or NGO providers. But because they only offered a couple of hours of support a week and were time-limited in duration (at most being available for 3-6 months), the nature of my mental health conditions meant that these mainstream/community supports were inadequate, inappropriate, and near impossible for me to engage with because of my social impairments.

When I hear in discussions of this Legislation the Government cite psychosocial disability as being a key area in which it intends to tighten NDIS access, and its (still abstract) plans to build mainstream/Foundational Supports, I shudder in horror, knowing from experience how lacking those sorts of supports have been. There are already so many people with psychosocial disability who are not accessing the NDIS and who are in need of additional psychosocial support. I ask the Government to please first build mainstream/foundational psychosocial supports for those who cannot access the NDIS, before expelling current NDIS participants with psychosocial disability and adding their needs to the already inadequate mainstream system.

Since gaining access to the NDIS, my supports have been allowing me to better manage my physical and mental health, and helping me to manage my daily home responsibilities. Because of my access to NDIS supports I had been able to increase my hours of employment, up from 2 hours a week to between 4-8 hours a week (depending on my fluctuating capacity), and I had been able to reduce the frequency that I was seeing my GP from fortnightly to monthly.

Reading into this proposed NDIS Legislation has caused me extreme distress, rendering me unable incapable of keeping myself safe or performing basic activities of daily living in my home, and so I am at this moment an inpatient in a mental health facility. My current inpatient stay is the first since gaining access to the NDIS for psychosocial disability. By the rhetoric of the Government, it might be said that my current hospitalisation and mental health crisis falls solely under the responsibility of the mainstream mental health sector, and is not relevant to this current Inquiry into NDIS Legislation changes. However I would not be in this crisis if not for the fact that, due to this proposed Legislation, I (like hundreds of thousands more participants) am facing a future in which I might be expelled from the NDIS system entirely, or at a very minimum will lose significant percentages of my NDIS budget with no regard to my actual level of need. My current hospitalisation should be recognised as a warning sign to the Government of what will happen to other people like me if this reckless Bill is passed in its current form.

With some social/emotional support from my support workers (before this inpatient admission) and nursing staff during it, I have pushed myself to write this submission, because of the importance of the NDIS to me: - as an individual; - to the NDIS participants that I support when I am well enough to work as a peer-disability support worker; - to my close friend who relies on NDIS support for every aspect of her daily life;

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• as a potential avenue of future support for my family members that are not currently accessing the NDIS but may one day need to due to their own chronic health issues and disabilities
• and for all Australians.

Concerns regarding proposed NDIS access changes

Access to be based on functional capacity

1. How will the definitions in this Legislation account for disabilities that present with fluctuating functional capacity or entail impairments across many life activities? ◦I live with psychosocial disability and neurodevelopmental disorders. The impacts of my psychosocial disability on my daily functioning fluctuate dramatically. It is not clear to me from the proposed Bill how the NDIS will assess the eligibility and support needs of people with disability like myself who have fluctuating functional capacity. ◦Current NDIS legislation/rules already preclude NDIS access to people whose significant disability related functional impairments have a more ‘flattened’ profile across activities/life domains, rather than being confined to one domain (mobility, communication, social interaction, learning, self-care and self-management). I am concerned that the proposed Bill will continue to perpetrate discriminatory treatment against people with disabilities of these profiles. ▪For example, an individual might be moderately to severely impaired across multiple/all key areas of life activity, drastically limiting their functional capacity on a daily basis, however if they do not meet the required threshold of severity of functional impairment under at least one single key activity, they are not deemed eligible to access NDIS supports. This is unfair and unrealistic to how individuals live their lives: we are not fragmented beings, divided up by six key activities of life or domains of life functioning. We are whole people and should be respected and considered as such.

2. The proposed changes to the test of ‘functional capacity’ (s 9B) intends to assess an individual’s ability to do activities “without assistance from other people, assistive technology or modifications” and “excludes, as far as possible, the impact of the person’s environmental and personal circumstances”. This is mind-boggling to me as a person living with disability and a support person for people with disability. These proposed definitions seem a massive retreat from the social and rights based definitions of disability that have been globally recognised in UN Resolutions on the Rights of Persons with Disability. Nobody (disabled or otherwise) exists or ever performs any activity at all in isolation from their environment and personal circumstances.

Access based on permanence

I strongly object to the new wording around permanence of disability, and the proposed changes to requirements that a person has undertaken all “appropriate treatments”.

1. When I applied for NDIS access for my psychosocial disability, I was required to provide evidence of the treatments that I had undergone for my mental health conditions. My psychiatrist provided a 4 page long list comprising over 20 psychiatric medications and 10 different psycho-therapeutic modalities that I had engaged in over nearly two decades to treat my multiple mental health diagnoses. But if I am reassessed for NDIS eligibility in the

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future (as the proposed Bill suggests I will be), will that lengthy and comprehensive history be deemed sufficient? It is possible that the NDS will turn around and say that for one of my diagnoses, there’s yet one more medication that the NDs considers to be ‘evidence- based’ and ‘reliably expected to improve a person’s condition’, and so the NDIS could reassess me as being ineligible. This is so distressing to me. Surely it is my clinicians (psychiatrists, GP, psychologists, community mental health team) who are best equipped to assess the permanency of my impairments and the appropriateness and adequacy of the treatments that I have trialled. These sorts of decisions about an individual should not be made by distant bureaucrats in Technical Advisory Boards.

2. Under the proposed legislation, what happens if an individual like myself has very good reasons for not consenting to undergoing treatment/s for their condition(s) that the NDIS has deemed to be requirements for meeting the permanency requirement?

   1. For example, I have what my clinicians have considered to be “treatment-resistant depression”, which has failed to respond to over a dozen anti-depressants, alone or in combination with mood-stabilisers, other psychoactive medications, and psychotherapies. There is one treatment for depression that I have never tried: electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT). ECT has never been suggested to me by any of my treating psychiatrists, as they have not deemed it appropriate or proportionate, and if they did I would not consent, because of the potential for life-long adverse effects, including memory impairments. But if this Bill is passed, and the NDs apparatus decides that ECT is ‘evidence-based’ for treatment of Persistent Depressive Disorder, ‘reliably expected to improve a person’s condition’, and ‘regularly offered in Australia’, my refusal to consent to this invasive medical treatment could render me no longer eligible for access to the NDS. This to me would be an abhorrent breach of my human rights, effectively coercing or forcing me to undergo treatment against my will, without meaningful consent, as without doing as the NDIS demands, I would be left unable to access NDIS supports.

3. The Bill intends to remove consideration of a person’s individual circumstances when applying this test of permanence and assessment of whether a person has exhausted all treatment options. This is outrageously unjust.

   1. In these proposed changes, there is no appreciation of how difficult (if not impossible) it is for many people to access treatments when and where they are required. Among others, access to treatment is particularly difficult for: People living in remote or rural areas; First Nations People/Indigenous Australians; People of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse backgrounds; People of low-socioeconomic status. Individuals of these and other backgrounds face barriers to accessing treatment, including barriers that are economic, geographic, linguistic and cultural. It is not my/our/their fault when treatments known to be effective for our conditions are not accessible to us. We should not be punished for the failings of the Government and other service providers to make treatments accessible to all. And yet that is what this part of the Bill does. It condemns us to lives of misery if we are unable to access treatments that the NDs says we should have accessed, rendering us also unable to access disability supports to assist us to live ordinary lives, despite our enduring significant functional impairments. Little wonder then that as the details of this NDIS Legislation have been made public, persons with disability (myself and my friends included) have begun contemplating pathways for Voluntary Assisted Dying. Given the paucity of other disability supports

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and inadequacies of mainstream supports in Australia, if we are reassessed and deemed ineligible for NDIS supports, choosing death seems both reasonable and necessary.

4. What will this Bill mean for people with neurodevelopmental disorders, including Autism Spectrum Disorder, which are scientifically considered to be lifelong in nature, rather than medical conditions which can be treated?

• I can appreciate that children with an autism diagnosis might benefit from early interventions, which might potentially change their lifelong trajectories and improve their functioning such that they would not require the NDIS. But there are others among us (myself included) who only received a diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder well into our adulthood. My autistic traits (and the functional impairments that they entail) are well and truly neurodevelopmentally baked in by now. Is the Government going to demand that I undertake some sort of “treatment” if I am to have my Autism recognised by the NDIS?

5. I am concerned that there is not due consideration given in these proposed Legislation/Rule changes for the complex interactions that arise when an individual lives with co-morbid diagnoses, potentially changing how impairments present, as well as what treatments might or might not be suitable for that individual.

• Many people with live with more than one disabling condition. Treatment for one condition might in isolation be deemed by the NDIS to be ‘evidence based’, ‘reliably expected to improve a person’s condition’, and ‘regularly offered in Australia’, but that does not mean that it would be appropriate for an individual who is living with multiple conditions that cause them significant functional impairments. Blanket rules imposed upon everyone have the danger of suffocating the individual.

Planning and the removal of the “Whole of Person” approach from the Bill

I strongly object to changes in the Bill under 34(1)(aa), which do away with the “Whole Person” approach that has until now been recognised in NDIS legislation and its application. The proposal is to change wording of Legislation so that only NDIS supports “directly” arising from a qualifying impairment may be funded.

• This is deeply troubling to me, as it is completely mismatched to my lived reality as a person with disability. The psychosocial disability/psychiatric conditions for which I gained access to the NDIS affect every moment and aspect of my life. The impairments associated with these conditions impact my ability to access any kind of support, be it NDIS or otherwise.

• From my reading of the Legislation, I am unclear who will be making these decisions. Will it be NDIA Planners who are deciding if they think a support need directly arises from a qualifying impairment? I do not understand how the Government thinks that future NDIS Rules/Guidelines/Operating Procedures will be able to delineate between support needs that directly or indirectly arise from a qualifying impairment. Surely an individual’s treating clinicians/allied health professionals are best placed to make these sorts of determinations about whether a support need is linked to the conditions for which they gained access to the NDIS. This should not be a decision for the Government to make. It should not be written into Legislation like this.

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I ask the Government to drop amendments to 34 (1)(aa) and retain the existing law’s explanatory notes that retain a “Whole Person” approach.

Loss of principles relating to plans (s31) I oppose the Bill’s changes to principles relating to plans, which if passed will have detrimental effects on NDIS participants, eroding their rights, choices and control.

I request that the Government retain the principles in the current Legislation, particularly principles that planning: (a) be individualised; and (b) be directed by the participant; and (g) be underpinned by the right of the participant to exercise control over his or her own life; and (h) advance the inclusion and participation in the community of the participant with the aim of achieving his or her individual aspirations; and (i) maximise the choice and independence of the participant; and (j) facilitate tailored and flexible responses to the individual goals and needs of the participant.

Changes to Support Determinations and expansion of the Minister’s powers to reduce supports

I fiercely object to section s 34A of the Bill, which would enable the Minister to cut plans by instrument, without merit review rights. This is a contemptible overreach of power that should not be passed into legislation.

1.  This part of the Bill is terrifying. If we want to know what might happen if too much power is consolidated in the hands of a single power-holder in a Health Department, we need only look at what has occurred in the United States with the appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr as US Secretary of Health and Human Services. It is not inconceivable to think that a future Australian Minister might similarly use their administrative powers to go on personal crusades, causing significant harm to the health, well-being, and rights of citizens. I call on the Government to remove this part of the Bill.

2.  Aside from being an overreach of power, it is going to do great harm to NDIS participants if (s 34A) is enshrined in law and the Minister is permitted to reduce the funding of a certain category by a percentage. Though there's some line in the proposed Legislation about not making these reductions to support where there may be risk to the participants, there is no clarity about how this risk would be assessed or prevented from occurring.

3.   I object to the Minister’s plans (discussed in the press) to cut all participants’ Capacity Building funding by 10%. Arbitrary decisions like this can only do harm, as they fail to take into account the actual needs of participants. There are already so many limitations on what Capacity Building funding is allocated and how it can be used. Please do not make our lives more difficult.

I strongly object to the Minister’s stated intention to cut Social and Community Participation by a percentage beginning in October 2026.

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1. Representatives from the Government have lamented the growth in NDIS spending on Social and Community Participation supports recent years, and have in interviews and press statements given examples of this funding being used in a manner they deem wasteful, such as a support worker taking a participant out to a coffee shop then sitting on their phone. Commercial media has likewise latched on to these simplistic claims, asserting that the NDIS budget is wastefully being spent on taking participants to the movies or to get haircuts. In most Government/media discussions around these changes to the Bill that would allow the Minister to reduce funding by a percentage, what is absurdly absent is recognition of the reality of how many NDIS participants use their Social and Community Participation funding, and indeed how the current NDIS bureaucracy makes this use of their funding necessary.

2. I work as a Disability Support Provider for participants on the NDIS, doing a couple of hours of work a week when my health permits. Any time that I take any of my clients out of their homes in my car, I must bill that shift/that outing/that mileage under the participant’s Social and Community Participation funding. It is necessary to bill in this way in order to meet the requirements set out in the NDIS Pricing Arrangements and Price Limits Guidelines, so that I can be paid for the mileage that I travel transporting my clients. It is my understanding that in the past there was a different line item that would allow billing transportation of clients under their Core Activities of Daily Living budgets, but this was changed some years ago, and now the line item for this billing falls under Core Social and Community Participation.

3. In the past two years, some of the shifts/outings that I have had to bill to my clients’ Core Social and Community Participation portions of their plans have included:

   1. Taking a client whose psychosocial disability arises from childhood sexual trauma appointments that they would not have been able to get to or attend without support, e.g. dental appointments, a colonoscopy, psychiatrist appointments, chronic pain management clinics.

   2. Taking clients whose disabilities prevent them from being able to drive and/or carry out these tasks unassisted to do their grocery shopping, attend Foodbanks, go to the pharmacy, pay bills at the Post Office, go to submit physical paperwork to their landlord, or take their pet to a vet.

4. It is mind-boggling to me that from an NDIS administration perspective, these support tasks are being classified as “Social and Community Participation”. I do not think that my client, or any ordinary Australian, would consider a trip to hospital to have a colonoscopy performed to be a form of “Social and Community Participation”. The administrative rules are absurd.

5. If there has been growth in NDIS expenditure on the “Social and Community Participation” category of support over past years, I would urge the Government to carry out the necessary analysis to determine if that growth coincided with changes to billing rules which meant we as support providers could no longer bill client transportation under Core Activities of Daily Living. That’s what these activities are: essential activities of daily living. But we can’t bill like that.

6. I have grave concerns about the risks to NDIS participants, including my clients, if the Bill goes ahead in its current form and the Minister is permitted (s 34A) to reduce by a percentage categories of support, and he proceeds with his intention of cutting by 50% participants’ “Social and Community Participation”. How should my client decide which of the supports that I provide to them they should cut by 50%? Should they use their halved

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“Social and Community Participation” funding to attend vital health treatments, or should they use the funding to visit the Foodbank for essential groceries that they otherwise cannot afford?

7. In my own experience as an NDIS participant, I have never had the luxury of being able to use my Social and Community Participation funding to go to the movies or even out for coffee. My NDIS plan does not provide me with sufficient Core Activities of Daily Living funding to allow me to meet those support needs, and so I instead make use of the flexibility within the NDIS that allows me to spend my allocated Core Social and Community Participation funding on additional Activities of Daily Living supports, This is where the majority of that category of funding has been spent for me. On maybe a handful of occasions, I have used my Social and Community Participation funding to access support to transport me to and from mainstream medical/psychology appointments that I could not safely get myself to because of the impairments associated with my psychosocial disability. Approximately three times over a period of 2 years of NDIS support, I have been able to use my Social and Community Participation funding for its intended purposes, having a support worker take me to participate in a recreational activity that (because of my psychosocial disability impairments), I could not have attended without their support.

8. It feels like a mockery then when I hear the Minister or journalists berate wasteful expenditure of Social and Community Participation funding on outings to cafes or movies. But at the same time, if a person with disability does require NDIS support to go to a cafe or go to the movies, that is their right! If their disability denies them the capacity to do this unaided, then of course they need that support.

Automation in NDIS processes I request that the Bill must not proceed with proposals to introduce automation into the production of NDIS plans until the Government clearly communicates what information the automation will be relying on.

1. The Government has not told us what information they will be using, how the automation process will work, or how algorithms will be used to make determinations about funding processes. The Government still has not released evidence to prove the suitability and efficacy of its Support Needs Assessment Tool, which will have a role in these automated planning processes. We still have no evidence demonstrating that it is appropriate to be used by NDIS staff who are not allied health professionals, that it is appropriate for people with all forms of disabilities, that it is appropriate for use with people of Indigenous and CALD backgrounds. We still don’t know if we as participants will have the right to also submit evidence from our own treating professionals/support people to demonstrate our support needs. There are so many unknowns in all this planned automation, and this is terrifying to me.

2. The Government needs to slow down any further automation of NDIS processes, and learn the lessons of the diabolical “Robodebt” experience and the currently emerging issues arising from the use of the “Integrated Assessment Tool” in formulating Aged Care packages. I have read comments by the Minister attempting to assure the public that the proposed automation in the NDIS will not be “Robo-Planning”, and there will always be human involvement in the process. But what has been seen to date with use of the

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Integrated Assessment Tool in Aged Care is that the involvement of a human in the otherwise automated process is limited to inputting data and pressing a button to approve the plan that the tool spits out. This is not real human involvement. There is no humanity in this. If human staff members are given no power to question or override what the automated system spits out, they may as well not be there at all.

Registration of Providers

In theory, requiring registration of NDS providers is something that I support, as it could be protective of participants and enable greater scrutiny to prevent exploitative or fraudulent actors abusing the NDIS system. However the registration process must be proportionate and not so burdensome (financially, bureaucratically) as to discourage smaller providers and sole traders from registering and providing NDIs supports.

• From my own personal experience accessing my own NDIs supports, and the accounts that I have heard from other NDIs participants who I support, it is often the larger disability agencies that are engaging in unethical practices. In those agencies, individual staff sometimes have KPIs, which mean they are incentivised to bill for “busy work” or tasks that the participant themselves never requested. Bigger agencies can be much more difficult to communicate with when you are a person living with psychosocial disability, intellectual disability, or neurodevelopmental disorders. We NDIs participants should have the right to choose who supports us, and the Government has a role in protecting that right by not imposing onerous registration requirements.

• I would like to see the Government work with people with disability to co-design the registration requirements, and to collaboratively look at whether the NDIs billing structure and maximum rates for services might be revised to better account for different types of support providers with different qualifications and different registration requirements. For all that I support (and rely upon) the existence of independent disability support workers, it does trouble me to see advertisements by workers with minimal experience or qualifications demanding maximum pay rates for their NDIS support work. There seems to be an attitude among some working in the sector that if the system allows it, they should do it.

I ask the Government to please work collaboratively with people with disability to co-design changes to the provider registration system.

Proposed reforms to Support Coordination

I object to the proposal put forward in the Explanatory Memorandum that accompanies this Bill to reform Support Coordination. I oppose Options 3 and 4, which would see the Government “commissioning support coordination services”.

The nature of my psychosocial disability is such that I find it extremely difficult to trust others, and am frequently unable to communicate in socially expected ways. I would not have the capability to engage with any NDIS supports at all if not for the support of my NDIs Support Coordinator. They work for a small company and are very experienced in supporting people with psychosocial impairments and neurodevelopmental profiles like mine. If the Government proceeds with Options 3 or 4, Support Coordination agencies like the one that supports me will likely cease to exist.

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smaller companies or individual providers will not be able to compete with bigger businesses when the Government is commissioning support coordination services. This would be a tragic loss as it would cause harm to participants like myself, who have profound social and relational impairments.

This legislation unfairly makes people with disability bear the costs of the Government’s economic choices

There are some points that Government representatives have made in the press or that are touched upon in the Explanatory Memorandum for this proposed Bill which to some extent I agree with. Namely:

• The NDIS does need to be sustainable and protected for current and future generations of Australians. It would be a tragedy if the NDIS was abandoned entirely.
• Fraud within the NDIS system does need to be prevented from occurring and penalised when it does occur in a criminal nature.
• There is a need to improve efficiencies within the NDIS administrative system itself.
• There is a need for greater consistency and transparency in how access and planning decisions are made.
• The NDIS should not (in practice or perception) be the metaphorical “only lifeboat in the sea” for people with disability, and there is urgent need for Government investment in a comprehensive array of disability support programs outside of the NDIS.

But in saying that, it is my belief that there has been a lot that has been misrepresented, lost, obfuscated or minimised in Government representatives’ discussions of the proposed Bill, and in the proposed legislation itself.

Namely: 1. The Prime Minister and others in the Government have justified this proposed Bill on the basis that the “social licence” for the NDIS is under threat, and so cuts are necessary to preserve the existence of the NDIS. What they leave out is that the Government itself has a very fundamental role in granting that social licence. 1. When the NDIS is repeatedly framed by the Government as being a budgetary burden on the nation, and as a system that is riddled with fraud and wasteful expenditure, the Government is itself eroding the social licence of the NDIS. The Government is shaping public opinion, and is doing so in a way that encourages the general public to view the NDIS with hostility and contempt. 2. If the Government was truly concerned with consolidating the social licence of the NDIS, then it would be actively promoting to the public the very real benefits that the NDIS has offered to individual participants, their families, friends and communities. It would concentrate on the improved rates of employment that the NDIS has enabled participants. The Government would balance its focus on the budgetary expense of the NDIS with an equal or greater focus on the economic benefits that the NDIS offers to Australia as a whole, adding money back into the economy through the creation of employment and improved health and other outcomes of NDIS participants.

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I ask the Government to stop ignoring its own role in issuing the social licence for the

NDIS and to act more responsibly.

2. The sustainability of the NDIS is being framed in this Legislation and the Government’s

toricity purely in terms of extraction (i.e. the dollar figures extracted from the national budget to be directed to NDIS expenditure, which has significantly grown), and is discussed in isolation from other elements of the national budget. Instead of focusing only on what the Government is spending on the NDIS, the Government could look more holistically at the economy.

1. The Government could, if it chose to, comprehensively fund the NDIS, the Health System,

Aged Care and more if it did more to reform national revenue raising. Additional revenue could be generated, for instance by raising taxes on mining/resource extraction or gas exports, imposing higher personal taxes on the wealthiest individuals in Australia, or going further with its Capital Gains and Negative Gearing tax reforms (e.g. remove the grandfathering clauses). And the Government could choose other areas of federal expenditure to cut instead, like the monumentally expensive AUKUS military program, which has never had to undergo the same scrutiny that NDIS budgets (individually or as a whole) receive in regards to sustainability, reasonableness, effectiveness, its evidence base, or its social licence.

2. The Government has inadequately considered what the implications will be for other

areas of public expenditure if these drastic cuts to the NDIS are made. The needs of individuals with disability will not magically vanish just because their access to NDIS supports do.

3. What will happen instead is that in the absence of accessible and adequate NDIS supports for people with disability, there will be: increased hospitalisation of people with disability (like I currently am); more people with disability having to prematurely move into aged care beds; more people with disability using alcohol and illicit substances in the absence of healthy and adaptive psychosocial supports, and so increased costs to the health and criminal justice sectors; decreased workforce participation of people with disability and/or their carers, so reducing the income tax they might otherwise pay; and likely rises in rates of premature deaths due to worsening health, as well as suicide and filicide among people with disability and their desperate carers.

4. I ask the Government to share with the public theirs economic equations and how they take into account all these figures when calculating the economic sustainability of the NDIS scheme. There are costs (individual, societal, national) to the proposed Legislation that have not been adequately accounted for in development of this Bill.

3. The evaporation of state-funded or other non-NDIS disability supports in the years since

the roll-out of the NDIS is absolutely problematic and needs to be redressed. However the Government’s proposals to legislate this Bill and make significant cuts to the NDIS before alternative disability supports exist is pathologically problematic.

1. People with disability who are not currently on the NDIS don’t even have access to sufficient mainstream/foundational disability supports yet. Despite this, the Government intends to begin tightening NDIS access rules for future applicants and implementing eligibility reassessments for existing NDIS participants, reforms which will further increase the demand for (inadequate/non-existent) mainstream and foundational disability supports. This is ridiculous! The changes that would flow from

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This legislation will leave millions of people with disability to fall between the cracks, left with no access to the support that they require.

2. I cannot understand how the Government expects the comparatively paltry planned Federal and State investment in Foundational supports to meet existing needs of people with a disability, let alone compensate for the billions of dollars of proposed cuts to the NDIS budget over coming years. The Government should first significantly invest in mainstream and foundational supports, and then later when these systems are robust and providing support that is accessible and adequate, then consider where cuts to the NDIS might be made.

Closing

I support the existence of the NDIS now and into the future.

I oppose this Bill and ask Parliament to block its progression.