Submission 187 - Supplementary Submission

SUBMISSION TO THE SENATE STANDING COMMITTEE ON COMMUNITY AFFAIRS

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

Submitted by: [Name], [Title/Credentials], [State] Date: May 2026

1. Introduction and Overview

I am an Occupational Therapist and parent of three people with disabilities who has experience working directly with people with disabilities. I submit this response in a personal capacity, drawing on professional knowledge, direct clinical and advocacy experience, and deep concern for the rights and wellbeing of Australians with disability. The National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 (the Bill), introduced to Parliament on 14 May 2026, represents one of the most significant and dangerous retractions of rights for people with disability in Australia’s recent history. Framed as a sustainability measure, the Bill would — if passed in its current form — systematically strip legal protections, concentrate power in the hands of a single minister, remove individualised assessment, and introduce opaque algorithmic funding allocation, all while tightening access criteria in ways that are scientifically unsound and discriminatory in effect. This submission argues that the Bill must not be passed in its current form. The concerns raised are grounded in three intersecting frameworks:

• The history and theory of eugenics, and the structural parallels between this Bill and historical and contemporary policies that treat disabled lives as an economic burden to be managed and reduced;
• Disability justice, including Australia’s obligations under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), to which Australia is a signatory; and
• A pattern of coordinated, concurrent attacks on disability support systems across comparable liberal democracies — Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States — that cannot reasonably be attributed to coincidence. The submission calls on the Committee to recommend that the Bill be rejected, substantially amended, or returned for genuine co-design with the disability community before any further progress.

2. Structural Eugenics: The Lives of Disabled People as an Economic Problem

The word ‘eugenics’ is deliberately used in this submission. It is not hyperbole. Eugenics does not require gas chambers. Modern eugenics operates through policy: through the systematic withdrawal of resources, recognition, and rights from people whose bodies or minds deviate from a normative standard. When the state calculates the cost of supporting disabled people and responds by reducing access to that support, it is making a value judgement — that

Submission 187 - Supplementary Submission

disabled lives require justification; that disabled people must prove their need is great enough, their impairment visible enough, and their cost manageable enough to deserve support. The Bill embodies this logic in multiple provisions. Part 1 redefines access to the NDIS around ‘substantially reduced functional capacity,’ a framing that reduces disability to productivity deficit and excludes the social, environmental and relational dimensions of disability that are fundamental to contemporary disability theory and to the CRPD’s social model framework. Part 4 grants the Commonwealth Minister the unilateral, unreviewed power to reduce funding across entire categories of support for all participants simultaneously — with no individual assessment, no parliamentary vote, and no accountability mechanism. As one detailed legal analysis of the Bill observed, this power allows the Minister to cut what any participant can spend within a support category by any percentage, applying to every participant in that category simultaneously, with auto-renewing plans embedding the reduction indefinitely unless the Minister chooses otherwise.

This is not reform. It is the outsourcing of rationing decisions to ministerial discretion and algorithmic automation. It removes the human encounter at the centre of the NDIS — the planning meeting in which a person with disability and a planner work together to identify what that person needs to live a good life — and replaces it with a system in which no one needs to be in the room. The requirement, introduced under Part 1, that applicants demonstrate they have ‘undertaken all appropriate treatment’ before accessing the NDIS is particularly alarming. Defined in the broadest terms, this provision could be used to deny access to anyone who has not exhausted every possible medical intervention — a standard that disproportionately disadvantages people with complex, fluctuating, or poorly-understood conditions, and that reimports a medical-model framing of disability that rights frameworks have explicitly rejected. It also risks penalising people who have been unable to access treatment due to systemic barriers, financial constraints, or geographic disadvantage. These provisions do not secure the NDIS. They redefine who deserves it.

3. Australia’s Human Rights Obligations and the Social Model of Disability

Australia ratified the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) in 2008. The CRPD obliges Australia to recognise that disability results from the interaction between persons with impairments and attitudinal and environmental barriers that hinder their full and effective participation in society on an equal basis with others. This social model understanding of disability is not optional flavouring — it is the foundation of the legal framework under which Australia has committed to operate. The Bill systematically violates this framework. The proposed assessment instruments, including modified versions of assessments such as the i-CAN and CIQ-R functional capacity tools, have been altered from their standardised, evidence-based forms. I have received direct feedback from an Allied Health Professional who also has a disability who has participated in the trial of the Support Needs Assessment and indicates serious concerns:

• The modified instruments are no longer standardised or validated for the populations being assessed;
• The question design fails to identify support needs for people with invisible disabilities, including autism, acquired brain injury, complex trauma, chronic illness, intellectual disability, autoimmune derived disability and psychosocial disability;
• The instruments are structurally biased towards physical disability and impairment that is observable and quantifiable;

Submission 187 - Supplementary Submission

• Environmental and Social factors — the barriers, supports, and contexts that shape how disability is experienced — are explicitly excluded from consideration, in direct contradiction of the CRPD’s social model mandate;
• Contrary to exclusion of Environmental and Social Factors, the presence of informal supports in the person’s life is used as an excuse to reduce funding and supports from the Participant, even if those informal supports have no capacity to provide that support;
• The data produced by these instruments will be fed into an algorithmic funding allocation system, meaning that biased inputs will produce systematically discriminatory outputs at scale, with no individual review prior to completion of the NDIS Plan by a human that can make essential changes to the funding outcome for reasons of safety, human and disability rights or personal goals of the Participant; and
• The resulting NDIS Plan and funding is not able to be meaningfully challenged by the Participant through Internal and External Reviews, as the funding itself cannot be changed through Review mechanisms, and the Administrative Review Tribunal (ART) is having its powers reduced to merely being able to compel NDIS to ‘reassess’ using the same assessment and funding algorithm.

The CRPD Committee has repeatedly affirmed that assessments of disability must take account of the environmental and social dimensions of a person’s experience. An instrument that refuses to consider these dimensions is not a disability assessment — it is a physical impairment checklist. Its use to determine access to and quantum of NDIS support will produce outcomes that are both scientifically invalid and legally incompatible with Australia’s human rights obligations. The introduction of likely ‘block funding for specific undefined cohorts’ behind the algorithm ‘black box’ and algorithmic planning — displacing the individual, human-centred, reasonable-and-necessary framework — further undermines the rights-based architecture of the original NDIS. The scheme was designed to treat participants as individuals with unique lives and unique support needs and personal goals. Block funding and algorithmic allocation treat participants as statistical categories, a move that is structurally incompatible with the CRPD’s requirements for reasonable accommodation and individualised support. The extraordinary brevity of the consultation period — initially just ten days for submissions, only extended by three days to 1 June 2026 after hard lobbying by the disability community, with the Senate reporting deadline set for 16 June 2026 — also raises serious procedural concerns. Meaningful consultation with the disability community, as required under Article 4.3 of the CRPD, cannot occur in this timeframe, particularly given the breadth of changes proposed in the Bill that even lawyers experienced in assessing proposed legislation are having difficulty understanding – which is disability exclusion by structural barriers also. The truncation of public scrutiny for legislation of this magnitude and consequence is itself a rights violation.

A Coordinated International Pattern: Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States

The timing and structural similarity of disability support retractions across multiple comparable democracies cannot be coincidental. In the same period that Australia has introduced the Securing the NDIS for Future Generations Bill 2026, analogous attacks on disability support systems have been enacted or proposed in both the United Kingdom and the United States.

4.1 United Kingdom

Submission 187 - Supplementary Submission

In March 2025, the UK Labour Government published its Pathways to Work Green Paper, proposing cuts of over £5 billion to disability and health benefits by 2029-30. These measures include severe tightening of eligibility for Personal Independence Payment (PIP), halving of incapacity benefit rates under Universal Credit for new claimants, and the replacement of work capability assessments with the tighter PIP assessment. One disability commentator, quoted in coverage of these proposals, described the changes as ‘impossible to see as anything other than eugenics by economics.’ The UK Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill, introduced in 2025, was projected to push nearly half a million more disabled people into severe hardship. As with the Australian Bill, the cuts were framed as sustainability measures.

4.2 United States

In the United States, the Trump administration pursued what the Center for American Progress described as potentially the largest Social Security disability cut in history — changes to Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) eligibility criteria that could have reduced new claimants’ access by up to 20 percent overall and up to 30 percent for older adults. The administration also terminated federal support for SOAR — the outreach program helping vulnerable people with disability navigate the complex benefits application process — and closed multiple Social Security Administration offices. These moves occurred concurrently with steep cuts to Medicaid under the administration’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill,’ compounding the impact on disabled Americans who rely on multiple intersecting support systems. As with the UK and Australian proposals, these changes were framed in terms of financial sustainability and addressing ‘perverse incentives.’

4.3 The Pattern

The near-simultaneous pursuit of structurally identical policies across three countries — each framed in the language of sustainability and fraud, each involving tighter eligibility criteria, each shifting decision-making power away from individuals and towards administrative instruments and algorithmic tools, each disproportionately impacting people with invisible, psychosocial, or complex disability — suggests policy convergence that warrants serious scrutiny. Whether driven by shared economic ideology, cross-jurisdictional policy transfer, or coordinated influence from international financial institutions, the pattern is clear: people with disability in wealthy liberal democracies are being targeted as a cost to be reduced. This is the context in which the Securing the NDIS for Future Generations Bill must be understood. It is not an isolated domestic policy response to local pressures. It is part of a global retrenchment of disability rights.

5. Summary of Specific Concerns

In summary, this submission identifies the following concerns with the Bill as drafted:

• Part 1 (functional capacity access criteria): Redefines eligibility around a deficit model, excludes social and environmental dimensions of disability, and is incompatible with the CRPD’s social model framework;
• Part 1 (treatment requirements): The requirement to have ‘undertaken all appropriate treatment’ is vague, medically reductive, and will disproportionately exclude people with invisible, complex, or treatment-resistant disabilities, with cultural and religious preferences, and socio-economic, regional/remote and treatment access disadvantages;
• Assessment instruments: The modified i-CAN and CIQ-R instruments are no longer validated, evidence-based or standardised, are structurally biased against invisible

Submission 187 - Supplementary Submission

• And psychosocial disability, and exclude the environmental and contextual factors fundamental to accurate disability assessment;
• Algorithmic funding allocation: The use of biased assessment data to drive automated funding decisions removes individualised consideration and will produce discriminatory outcomes at scale;
• Part 3 (supports tied to access impairment only): Excludes funding for supports arising from secondary or consequential needs, creating an unjustifiably narrow definition of reasonable and necessary;
• Part 4 (ministerial funding determination powers): Grants the Minister unilateral, unreviewable power to cut funding for categories of support across all participants with no individual assessment, no parliamentary vote, and indefinite auto-renewal; this provision is constitutionally and ethically unacceptable;
• Part 5 (plan end dates): The removal of plan rollovers and unspent funds penalises participants for delays and inefficiencies that are frequently the NDIA’s own, not the participant’s, and reduces the ability of people with fluctuating disabilities or rapidly changing circumstances to respond to their support needs changes while waiting the increased period of 90 days for NDIS to respond to urgent Internal Review requests;
• Block funding and reduced planning individuality: Fundamentally incompatible with the rights-based architecture of the NDIS and with Australia’s CRPD obligations; and
• Consultation timeline: Ten days for public submissions on legislation of this scope and impact is not genuine consultation and does not meet Australia’s obligations under CRPD Article 4.3.

6. Recommendations

This submission recommends that the Committee:

• Recommend that the Bill not be passed in its current form;
• Recommend that the timeframe for Disability Community and Senate Committee consultation and scrutiny be significantly extended to at least 31 August 2026;
• Recommend that substantive amendments be required to completely remove the unilateral ministerial funding determination powers in Part 4 to ensure future Parliamentary scrutiny of legislative changes;
• Recommend that any revised eligibility framework be required to comply with the social model of disability as required by the CRPD and Disability Rights, incorporating environmental and contextual factors in all assessments;
• Recommend that no assessment instrument be used for NDIS access or funding decisions unless it has been independently validated for the full range of disability types present in the NDIS participant population, including psychosocial, cognitive, and invisible disability;
• Recommend that algorithmic or automated funding allocation not be introduced without a full human rights impact assessment and legislative safeguards for individual review;
• Recommend that genuine co-design with the disability community — including people with invisible and psychosocial disability, carers, and allied health professionals — be required before any revised legislation is introduced;
• Recommend that a broad, independent Risk Assessment be undertaken on the full breadth of this Bill, with inclusion of the Disability Community on a voluntary basis (not cherry-picked Disability Organisations by the Government);

Submission 187 - Supplementary Submission

• Recommend that any individual NDIS Participant Plan changes must include a Risk Assessment to ensure the current NDIS Plan and any future changes to their NDIS Plan is safe and enshrines their human rights,
• Recommend that all aspects of the NDIS Participant Plans are Reviewable; and
• Recommend that the Committee consider the international context of concurrent attacks on disability support systems in the UK and USA, and that it seek advice on whether this Bill reflects or is influenced by internationally coordinated policy agendas.

Conclusion

People with disability are not a budget line item. The NDIS was built on the revolutionary premise that every Australian with significant disability has the right to the support they need to live a good life — a life of dignity, participation, and genuine choice, on an equal basis as the non-disabled population of Australia. That premise is now under sustained and coordinated attack.

The Securing the NDIS for Future Generations Bill does not secure the NDIS. It transforms it: from a rights-based, individual-centred, social model scheme into a gatekept, medical-model, minister-controlled, algorithmically administered rationing system that will disproportionately exclude the most marginalised and least visible members of the disability community.

The disability community — and those of us privileged to work alongside it — are watching. We ask this Committee to act with the moral courage this moment demands, and to ensure that Australia does not join the UK and US in choosing austerity and eugenics over human rights.

I request that my name be withheld when uploaded for submission.

Occupational Therapist

30 May 2026