NDIA Accountability Project

Critical Analysis of Embedded Disability Assumptions in the Explanatory Memorandum & Bill

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Submission 187 - Supplementary Submission

NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 — Disability Assumptions Analysis

NDIS AMENDMENT

Securing the NDIS for Future Generations Bill 2026

Critical Analysis of Embedded Disability Assumptions in the Explanatory Memorandum & Bill

Prepared: 30 May 2026 Status: Bill before Senate — Senate Committee Inquiry Open Perspectives covered: People with Disability | Informal Carers | Providers | Economic & Rights Arguments

Introduction

On 14 May 2026, the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 was introduced to Parliament. The 109-page Bill makes sweeping changes to the NDIS Act 2013, affecting access criteria, planning, funding, governance, and compliance. The Senate referred the Bill to the Community Affairs Legislation Committee for inquiry.

As an Unregistered NDIS Occupational Therapist and parent of three NDIS Participants, I am addressing assumptions about disability embedded in the Bill’s Explanatory Memorandum, second reading speech, and substantive provisions, from a personal perspective. For each assumption identified, it provides: a direct quote from the official documents, an analysis of why that assumption is erroneous, ableist, divisive, or rights-violating, and arguments from the perspectives of people with disability, informal carers, providers, and economic analysis with available data and references. I have used Artificial Intelligence to assist me with documenting my perspectives as I am absolutely exhausted by my role as a carer and the need to extensively address the issues I can see with this Bill, and I have endeavoured, to the best of my ability and knowledge, to ensure the information contained in this submission is accurate.

The analysis draws on the Explanatory Memorandum, the Bill (first reading), Minister Butler’s second reading speech (14 May 2026), the NDIS Act 2013, the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD), the Disability Royal Commission Final Report (2023), the Robodebt Royal Commission Report (2023), the Productivity Commission Disability Care and Support Report (2011), and published research in disability, economics, and health policy.

This document does not constitute legal advice or a professional opinion. It is intended to support informed public participation in the Senate inquiry process.

Summary of Identified Assumptions

The following 11 embedded assumptions are identified and analysed in this document:

  • Assumption 1: Disability is Primarily a Problem of Financial Sustainability
  • Assumption 2: Disability Exists Independent of Environment and Supports (the ‘Naked Assessment’ Fallacy)

Submission 187 - Supplementary Submission

NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 — Disability Assumptions Analysis

  • Assumption 3: Disability Follows Neat Causal Chains — ‘Direct’ Causation is Ascertainable and Meaningful
  • Assumption 4: Ministerial Discretion is an Appropriate Substitute for Individualised Assessment
  • Assumption 5: Auto-Renewal is Equivalent to Adequate Planning — Participants’ Needs Are Static
  • Assumption 6: Families and Carers are an Unlimited and Costless Resource — Formal Supports Should Replace Rather Than Supplement Family Care
  • Assumption 7: Disability Can Be ‘Permanentised’ by Treatment — Untreated Conditions Are Not Permanent
  • Assumption 8: People with Disability Are Primarily Suspected Fraudsters Who Must Be Monitored
  • Assumption 9: Algorithmic Decision-Making is Neutral and Superior to Human Judgement for Disability Assessment
  • Assumption 10: People Injured in Accidents or at Work Receive Adequate Compensation Elsewhere and Need No Further Support
  • Assumption 11: The NDIS Scope Has Expanded Beyond Its Intended Beneficiaries — Many Current Participants Do Not Have ‘Real’ Disability

Assumption 1: Disability is Primarily a Problem of Financial Sustainability

Schedule / Source: Overall framing & Explanatory Memorandum — Statement of Compatibility, Objects Clause (amended s.3(1)(d))

“The National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) is one of Australia’s most important social programs. The NDIS needs to be protected for people with permanent and significant disability and for future generations who will rely on it. These changes will put the NDIS back on a sustainable footing now and into the future.”

Submission 187 - Supplementary Submission

NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 — Disability Assumptions Analysis

This directly contravenes the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD), to which Australia is a signatory, particularly Article 19 (right to live independently in the community) and Article 26 (habilitation and rehabilitation). The UNCRPD Committee has consistently found that resource constraints cannot justify the non-fulfilment of disability rights.

Perspective: Informal Carers

For informal carers, this framing is a warning. The original Productivity Commission (2011) case for the NDIS was explicitly economic: investment in formal supports reduces the catastrophic downstream cost of carer breakdown. In 2022, it was found 3 million people in Australia were unpaid carers (12 percent of the population) which was estimated to be valued at $77.9 billion annually (Carers Australia, 2024). When formal supports are restricted in the name of fiscal sustainability, the cost does not disappear — it shifts to unpaid carers, Centrelink carer payments, carer mental health services, and hospital emergency departments. These costs do not appear in the NDIS budget. The government’s claimed saving of $37.8 billion over four years is a partial-ledger illusion.

Perspective: Providers and Sector

For providers, fiscal sustainability as a legal test creates profound uncertainty. Provider investment decisions, workforce planning, and service models depend on confidence that assessed needs will be funded. If ministerial determinations (see Assumption 4) can reset funding levels for entire support categories without individual assessment — legally — no business model is stable. DSP economists have warned this will accelerate market exit, especially in thin and remote markets, compounding access inequality.

Economic Arguments and Data

The 2011 Productivity Commission Report ‘Disability Care and Support’ (PC Report No. 54) modelled the NDIS on the premise that investment in individualised supports generates whole- of-government savings through workforce participation, reduced carer welfare dependency, and avoided crisis costs. No whole-of-government cost accounting accompanies this Bill. The $37.8 billion saving projection is NDIS-line only. Independent economists (e.g., Bonyhady, 2026; Brotherhood of St Laurence submission to NDIS Review, 2023) have consistently found that cutting disability support shifts, rather than eliminates, expenditure. KPMG modelling (2023) found that every dollar invested in supported employment for people with disability generates $2.30 in economic activity.

Rights Breached / Legal Concerns

UNCRPD Arts 4, 19, 26; NDIS Act 2013 original ss.3 and 4; Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (DDA) — systematic denial of supports on fiscal grounds may constitute indirect discrimination under the DDA. The Human Rights Law Centre has noted that inserting financial sustainability into the objects clause could be used as a legal justification to override individual rights assessments in ways that are facially neutral but disproportionately harm people with high support needs.

Assumption 2: Disability Exists Independent of Environment and

Supports (the ‘Naked Assessment’ Fallacy)

Schedule / Source: Schedule 1, Part 1 — Functional Capacity Assessment Provisions

Submission 187 - Supplementary Submission

NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 — Disability Assumptions Analysis

Quote from the Explanatory Memorandum / Bill

   "Functional capacity will now be assessed without assistive technology, without\n     home modifications, without help from other people, and excluding a person's\n       personal and environmental circumstances."

Submission 187 - Supplementary Submission

NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 — Disability Assumptions Analysis

or overturn before hearing (cited by Minister Butler himself), confirming that the planning system currently underestimates need at scale.

Rights Breached / Legal Concerns

UNCRPD Article 2 (definition of disability explicitly references the interaction with barriers); Article 26 (individualised habilitation must consider the person’s actual environment); WHO ICF framework. The Disability Royal Commission (2023) Final Report explicitly recommended person-centred, contextualised assessment. This provision moves in the opposite direction.

Assumption 3: Disability Follows Neat Causal Chains — ‘Direct’

Causation is Ascertainable and Meaningful

Schedule / Source:

Schedule 1, Part 3 — ‘Directly arising from an impairment’

Quote from the Explanatory Memorandum / Bill

“Supports will only be funded where the need for a support arises directly from an impairment for which the participant met the criteria for accessing the NDIS.”

Context and Background

The existing Act requires that supports arise ‘from an impairment.’ The Bill inserts a single word: ‘directly.’ No definition of ‘directly’ is provided anywhere in the Bill or accompanying Explanatory Memorandum. No guidance is given on how many causal steps separate ‘direct’ from ‘indirect.’ No regulatory mechanism is specified for resolving disputes about directness.

####### Analysis: Why This Assumption is Erroneous or Harmful

Perspective: People with Disability Disability science, neuroscience, and psychiatry uniformly recognise that disability operates in cascading chains of causation and interaction. An intellectual disability creates communication difficulties; communication difficulties create social isolation; social isolation creates anxiety and depression; anxiety worsens cognitive function; poor sleep — common in neurodevelopmental conditions — amplifies all of the above. Every link in this chain is clinically documented and functionally real. Under the new ‘directly’ test, which of these is fundable? The intellectual disability — probably. The communication difficulty — possibly. The anxiety arising three causal steps away — probably not, under a strict reading. For autistic people in particular, anxiety is not a separate condition — it is an intrinsic feature of being autistic in a world not designed for autistic people. Yet it could be characterised as ‘indirect’ by a cost-cutting planner or an algorithm, because the autism is the primary impairment and the anxiety arises from its interaction with the environment. The word ‘directly’ may remove funding for the supports autistic people most commonly need. A Masi et al (BMJ Open, 2021) found that for autistic children, the same intervention applied to each child, even those with demonstrably similar behavioural presentations, yields different outcomes, which supports the need for an individualised approach to early intervention for autistic chidren.

Perspective: Informal Carers Carers of people with complex and comorbid conditions — which describes the majority of high- eeds NDIS participants — will face the exhausting and re-traumatising process of re-justifying every element of their family member’s support package under an undefined new standard. This is not hypothetical. The AAT/ART caseload already reflects systematic NDIA underfunding.

Submission 187 - Supplementary Submission

NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 — Disability Assumptions Analysis

Adding an undefined ‘directly’ threshold to the funding test creates a new basis for denial that will not be resolved by regulation for years, during which carers must either absorb the gap or pay for legal advice they cannot afford.

Perspective: Providers and Sector

Support providers, behaviour support practitioners, and allied health professionals whose services address secondary and tertiary effects of disability — anxiety management, social skills, sleep therapy, communication support — face immediate funding uncertainty. This is precisely the cohort of providers working with the highest-complexity participants. Market exit by these providers, particularly in regional areas, would be catastrophic for the people they support and would drive crisis presentations in emergency departments, mental health inpatient wards, and the justice system.

Economic Arguments and Data

The AIHW Report ‘People with Disability in Australia 2023’ found that people with disability are 3.4 times more likely to experience high psychological distress, which is directly associated with secondary mental health conditions arising from primary disabilities. Defunding supports for secondary conditions shifts costs to Medicare (psychology sessions), state mental health services, and acute hospital admissions — all at higher per-episode cost than NDIS community- based support. The Mental Health Council of Australia has estimated that each preventable acute mental health admission costs approximately $15,000–$22,000, versus $4,000–$8,000 for sustained community support.

Rights Breached / Legal Concerns

UNCRPD Article 25 (health); Article 26 (habilitation and rehabilitation — explicitly requires attention to ‘secondary conditions’); DDA s.5 (direct discrimination if supports are denied based on a characteristic intrinsic to a disability). The statement of compatibility with human rights in the Explanatory Memorandum does not address how the ‘directly’ test interacts with secondary conditions — a conspicuous omission.

Assumption 4: Ministerial Discretion is an Appropriate Substitute

for Individualised Assessment

Schedule / Source:

Schedule 1, Part 4 — Ministerial Determination Power; Schedule 3 — Pricing Powers

Quote from the Explanatory Memorandum / Bill

“Part 4 enables the Commonwealth Minister to make determinations to reduce funding for groups of supports. This will enable a Ministerial determination to reset participant support budgets for social, civic and community participation and capacity building daily activities.”

Submission 187 - Supplementary Submission

NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 — Disability Assumptions Analysis

Analysis: Why This Assumption is Erroneous or Harmful

Perspective: People with Disability

The foundational principle of the NDIS Act — enshrined in s.4 and confirmed by the Full Federal Court in NDIA v Alvaro (2021) — is that supports are reasonable and necessary for the individual, not for a category. A ministerial determination that cuts social participation funding by 50% for every participant in that category, regardless of their individual circumstances, supports needs, goals, or clinical evidence, is the legislative abolition of individualised planning. For people whose only form of meaningful social connection — whose only escape from isolation, their only community participation — is funded through this category, a 50% cut is not an administrative adjustment. It is the removal of their right to exist in the world alongside others. Social isolation is a primary driver of depression, physical health deterioration, and premature death in people with disability (AIHW, 2023). The Minister’s pen is literally a public health intervention, applied at scale, with no health impact assessment.

Perspective: Informal Carers

When social participation funding is cut, participants stay home. When participants stay home, carers cannot go to work. When carers cannot go to work, household incomes fall, carer mental health deteriorates, and the risk of carer breakdown — with its associated costs to health, welfare, and child protection systems — increases. The government’s own Carer Gateway program, established because of recognised carer crisis, will face increased demand precisely because this Bill removes the respite value of social participation supports.

Perspective: Providers and Sector

Day programs, community access supports, group activities, and social enterprises built around the community participation support category are facing existential funding cuts applied by a single ministerial signature. Providers who have invested in infrastructure, leased premises, and employed workers on the basis of funded participant plans will have no legal recourse. The absence of sunsetting and parliamentary disallowance means there is no mechanism for sector engagement, no consultation requirement, and no accountability. Organisations that employ tens of thousands of disability support workers, including many workers who are themselves people with disability, face closure with no transition support. The NDS (National Disability Services) estimated in 2024 that the disability support sector employs approximately 370,000 workers. Abrupt funding category cuts threaten the sector’s workforce stability at precisely the moment the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission is demanding improved workforce quality and continuity.

Economic Arguments and Data

Social participation supports for people with disability generate documented economic benefits beyond their direct value (Per Capita / NDS, 2021). Per Capita found that every dollar invested in disability supports returns $2.25 in social and economic value. Similarly, Hutchinson et al (2024) found that returns were up to $2.65 per $1.00 spent over 3 years, rising to $12.63 for every $1.00 spent over 20 years for disability-inclusive social enterprise. The Government is reacting too soon based on ‘cost’ parameters only, given NDIS has only existed since 2013 and was not fully rolled out to all eligible people with disability until relatively recently, which is well before the long-term cost-benefits can be realised. Cutting social and community participation by 50% via ministerial decree ignores all this modelling, and predominantly impacts women with disabilities and women employed in the sector. The government’s $37.8 billion saving claim does not account for increased hospitalisation, increased emergency mental health presentations, or the collapse of social enterprise employment.

Submission 187 - Supplementary Submission

NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 — Disability Assumptions Analysis

Rights Breached / Legal Concerns

UNCRPD Article 26 (that assessments of support needs be based on multidisciplinary assessment); Article 19 (right to live independently and to be included in the community — explicitly includes access to community services and facilities on an equal basis with others); Article 30 (participation in cultural life, recreation, leisure and sport). Constitutionally, s.51(xxiiiA) of the Constitution limits Commonwealth social service powers to the individual: the High Court in Pape v Commissioner of Taxation (2009) confirmed that Commonwealth spending powers must relate to identifiable purposes. A ministerial instrument that reduces all plans in a category by a percentage, without individual support needs or risk assessments, may exceed the constitutional basis for the scheme. There is no human rights impact statement accompanying the Part 4 determination power.

Assumption 5: Auto-Renewal Is Equivalent To Adequate Planning — Participants’ Needs Are Static

Schedule / Source:

Schedule 1, Part 5 — Automatic Plan Renewal And Plan End Dates

Quote From The Explanatory Memorandum / Bill

“When a participant reaches their plan reassessment date, this will become their end date and a renewed plan will be created immediately after. Unspent funds at a plan end date will not roll over to the new plan.”

Context And Background

The Bill introduces automatic plan renewal, replacing the existing administrative practice of plan continuation. Plans will renew as identical copies at their end date. Unspent funds will not carry over. No reassessment of needs is required at renewal. The conditions for requesting an unscheduled reassessment are tightened significantly (requiring proof of ‘significant and ongoing change in functional capacity that substantially reduces ability to perform daily activities’).

####### Analysis: Why This Assumption Is Erroneous Or Harmful Perspective: People With Disability Disability is rarely static. For people with degenerative conditions — multiple sclerosis, motor neurone disease, early-onset dementia, Huntington’s disease — the entire value of early intervention (explicitly endorsed by the NDIS Act, s.25) lies in increasing support before function is lost. A plan that auto-renews identically from year to year cannot reflect progressive deterioration until the person’s condition worsens sufficiently to meet the ‘substantial reduction’ threshold. By that point, crisis may already have occurred. This is not hypothetical: the Disability Royal Commission documented extensive evidence of participants in crisis because their plans had not kept pace with their deteriorating conditions. This Bill would legislate that delay. For children with disability, auto-renewal is particularly damaging. A plan developed for an eight-year-old in a school environment is structurally inappropriate for a ten-year-old whose needs have evolved or a twelve-year-old entering a different educational phase. Childhood development does not respect plan renewal schedules.

Perspective: Informal Carers Carers provide the informal gap-filling between what a plan funds and what a participant needs. When a plan fails to keep pace with a participant’s changing needs, carers bear the difference— in extra hours, in foregone employment, in physical and psychological toll. Auto-renewal with

Submission 187 - Supplementary Submission

NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 — Disability Assumptions Analysis

no built-in reassessment formalises this pattern. The new ‘substantial reduction’ threshold for unscheduled reassessment means carers must wait until their family member is significantly worse before the system will respond. The emotional and practical burden of managing that deterioration falls on informal supports. The government is not saving money; it is transferring costs to the most financially and emotionally vulnerable people in the system.

Perspective: Providers and Sector

Support coordinators and behaviour support practitioners play a critical role in identifying when a participant’s plan no longer meets their needs. This Bill removes the systemic mechanism that would ordinarily trigger plan review. Providers who flag changing needs will have no pathway to resolution other than the tightened unscheduled reassessment process, which requires documentary evidence of ‘substantial’ deterioration — documentation that itself costs money (assessments, reports) that may only be fundable from the plan that is already inadequate. The circular logic traps participants and providers alike.

Economic Arguments and Data

The NDIA’s own Annual Report data shows that plans reviewed following a participant- equested reassessment increase in value by an average of 20% (cited by Minister Butler in his second reading speech). This means the current planning system systematically under-funds participants by approximately 20%, and that participants are correcting this through reassessments. Auto-renewal locks the under-funded plan in place. The downstream cost of under-funding — in crisis presentations, emergency hospitalisations, police call-outs, and child protection involvement — far exceeds the cost of adequate plan funding. AIHW data (2023) says that people with disability have hospital admission rates 2.5 times higher than the general population, with preventable admissions disproportionately linked to inadequate community support.

Rights Breached / Legal Concerns

UNCRPD Article 26 (individualised habilitation plans must be reviewed and adapted to changing needs and life stages and must be determined by multidisciplinary assessment); DDA s.6 (indirect discrimination where a facially neutral provision — identical auto-renewal — imposes disproportionate disadvantage on people with degenerative or episodic conditions). Administrative law principles of procedural fairness (affecting individual rights without individual assessment) are also engaged.

Assumption 6: Families and Carers are an Unlimited and Costless Resource — Formal Supports Should Replace Rather Than Supplement Family Care

Schedule / Source:

Schedule 1, Part 6 — Reasonable and Necessary Test; Parental Responsibility Codification

Quote from the Explanatory Memorandum / Bill

  "The CEO must not approve a support if its primary purpose is to reduce parental
  burden below what is reasonably expected. For all participants, the CEO must
   consider the desirability of maintaining and strengthening informal supports and
   networks within their communities."

Submission 187 - Supplementary Submission

NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 — Disability Assumptions Analysis

Context and Background

The Bill codifies, for the first time in primary legislation, that the CEO must consider ‘parental responsibility’ before approving supports and must not fund supports whose primary purpose is to reduce parental burden ‘below what is reasonably expected.’ For all participants, funded supports must not substitute for what informal supports ‘could’ provide.

The definition of parental responsibility includes supervision, personal care, transport, emotional support, behavioural support, and assistance with activities of daily living.

Analysis: Why This Assumption is Erroneous or Harmful

Perspective: People with Disability

For adult participants, the implication that the CEO must consider ‘informal support networks’ before funding formal support is a direct assault on the right to live independently. The NDIS was explicitly designed to move away from the charity-and-family model of disability support — where disabled people are dependent on the goodwill of those around them — toward a rights-based model in which support is an entitlement, not a favour. Codifying informal supports as the first resort re-entrenches dependency.

For many disabled adults, the ability to use NDIS funding to engage paid support workers rather than relying on family members is precisely what enables them to maintain autonomous adult relationships with their families, rather than carer-and-cared-for relationships. The Bill assumes that family support is available, adequate, appropriate, and freely given. It is none of these things for many participants. For those whose families are abusive, absent, deceased, or themselves aged or unwell, codifying informal support as the default is not just inadequate — it is dangerous.

Perspective: Informal Carers

For carers, this provision is extraordinary in its failure of recognition. The NDIS was created — as the Productivity Commission explicitly stated in 2011 — because the informal care system had reached and exceeded its limits. Carer burnout, forced workforce exit, family breakdown, and poverty were the documented outcomes of relying on families to provide what the state refused to fund. Of the 3 million Australians providing unpaid care, only 17.2% reported having good or excellent health compared to other Australians (45.9%); and being an unpaid carer reduces employment prospects with 55.9% stating they have been unable to accept employment opportunities which negatively impacts wellbeing and financial security; (Carers Australia, 2024).

Codifying parental responsibility as a legal standard before formal supports are considered is not family-friendly policy — it is policy that treats unpaid carers as an infinitely elastic subsidy for a scheme the government is choosing not to fund adequately. There is no corresponding recognition of carer rights, carer entitlements, or carer limits anywhere in this Bill.

Perspective: Providers and Sector

Providers offering services that assist parents in caring for children with high support needs — overnight support, in-home behavioural support, recreational programs that provide respite — face a new legal basis for funding refusal. A planner or algorithm can now deny any support whose ‘primary purpose’ is to reduce parental burden, as determined not by the parent but by the CEO. This standard is undefined, unappealable in its underlying logic, and will be applied inconsistently.

Providers cannot build services around funding categories that are legally vulnerable to denial on the basis of an assessment neither they nor the family member have participated in.

Economic Arguments and Data

The Productivity Commission (2011) modelled that every dollar invested in formal disability support generates long-run savings across the welfare, health, and justice systems, primarily by

Submission 187 - Supplementary Submission

NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 — Disability Assumptions Analysis

keeping carers in the workforce and preventing catastrophic family breakdown. Carers who remain in the workforce contribute income tax, superannuation, and productivity. Carers who leave the workforce cost the government carer payment (approximately $28,000/year at 2024 rates), health costs, and lifetime superannuation deficits averaging $150,000 per person (WGEA, 2023). The Bill’s downstream cost of carers leaving the workforce is not costed. Conservative modelling by the Brotherhood of St Laurence (2024) estimated that if just 5% of the 800,000 primary disability carers exit the workforce due to support cuts, the welfare and superannuation cost over ten years exceeds $6 billion — more than offsetting a significant portion of the claimed NDS savings.

Rights Breached / Legal Concerns

UNCRPD Article 19 (right to live independently and not to be obliged to live in a particular living arrangement — including a family arrangement — as a condition of receiving support); Article 23 (respect for home and family — support must enable, not coerce, family relationships); CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women) — unpaid carers are disproportionately women; policies that increase their care burden without recognition or compensation are a form of gender discrimination. The Carer Recognition Act 2010 (Cth) s.7 explicitly recognises that carers should not be expected to provide care to the extent that it affects their health or economic participation. This Bill codifies the opposite.

Assumption 7: Disability Can Be ‘Permanentised’ by Treatment — Untreated Conditions Are Not Permanent

Schedule / Source: Schedule 1, Part 8 — Treatment Requirement for Permanence

“Your impairment is not considered permanent unless you have tried every appropriate treatment available in Australia. Treatment may be considered appropriate regardless of whether your individual circumstances restrict you from accessing it. Individual circumstances include financial circumstances and geographical location.”

Context and Background

The Bill introduces a new test: an impairment is not ‘permanent’ (a required condition for NDIS access) unless the person has undergone ‘all appropriate treatment’ available in Australia. Critically, the Bill states that individual circumstances, specifically including the person’s financial circumstances and geographical location, are explicitly excluded from the consideration of whether a treatment is ‘appropriate.’ If the treatment exists in Australia, it is appropriate, regardless of whether the individual can access or afford it.

Analysis: Why This Assumption Is Erroneous Or Harmful

Perspective: People with disability This provision reveals a profound misunderstanding of disability. Many conditions for which people access the NDSI autism, Down syndrome, congenital brain injury, genetic disorders — are not amenable to treatment that would eliminate or substantially reduce the underlying impairment. There is no treatment for being autistic. There is no treatment that converts Down syndrome into a non-disability. For neurodevelopmental conditions in particular, ‘treatment’ is therapy to support function, not intervention that cures the condition. The Bill conflates treatment

Submission 187 - Supplementary Submission

NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 — Disability Assumptions Analysis

with cure. More dangerously, by explicitly excluding financial circumstances and geography from the definition of ‘appropriate treatment,’ the Bill creates a two-tiered access system based on socioeconomic status and location that the NDIS was specifically designed to eliminate. A wealthy urban family whose child can afford private paediatric therapy has a path to demonstrating treatment. A rural or low-income family cannot access that therapy, but the law says that is legally irrelevant to whether the treatment is ‘appropriate.’

Perspective: Informal Carers

For carers, this provision imposes a new and potentially endless evidentiary burden. To access or maintain NDIS access, they must now prove not only that their family member has a disability, but that they have exhausted every appropriate treatment in Australia. Allied health assessments demonstrating treatment completion are not free. They are typically funded from the NDIS plan that the person does not yet have. The catch-22 is structural: you need to access treatment to qualify for the NDIS, but treatment access often requires the income, transport, and services that the NDIS was designed to provide.

Perspective: Providers and Sector

Public paediatric services — already operating with 6–12 month waitlists in most metropolitan areas and multi-year waitlists in regional Australia (Raising Children Network, 2024) — are about to receive a flood of families who need to demonstrate treatment access to qualify for NDIS. The Bill does not fund expanded treatment infrastructure. It redirects demand onto a health system the government itself has acknowledged is inadequate (Minister Butler, National Press Club, April 2026). Allied health providers who work within the NDIS ecosystem face a paradox: their assessments demonstrating permanence of disability may now be challenged on the basis that more treatment should be tried, but the treatment capacity to meet that demand doest not exist.

Economic Arguments and Data

The cost of the treatment-first approach is borne by state and territory health systems (through public clinic demand), Medicare (through increased GP and specialist referrals), and families (through private treatment costs). The Explanatory Memorandum provides no costing of the demand increase on the health system this provision will generate. 83% of children with disabilities have unmet needs for support (Life Course Centre Working Paper Series No 2024- 37, December 2024) which indicates the likely impact on services outside NDIS, particularly where health and treatment services are scarce and lack funding already, which will be compounded if access is gatekept through changes to NDIS access criterion.

Rights Breached / Legal Concerns

UNCRPD Article 25 (right to health without discrimination — healthcare must be accessible, which includes geographically and financially accessible); Article 26 (habilitation and rehabilitation must be provided in a manner that respects the individual’s circumstances); Disability Discrimination Act s.5 (indirect discrimination — a condition that is facially neutral but disproportionately disadvantages people in rural/remote areas and those of lower socioeconomic status). The provision may also engage the right to equality before the law under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Article 26, ratified by Australia.

Assumption 8: People with Disability Are Primarily Suspected Fraudsters Who Must Be Monitored

Schedule / Source:

Schedule 1, Part 7 — Contactability and Plan Suspension/Revocation; Schedule 2 — Fraud and Compliance

Submission 187 - Supplementary Submission

NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 — Disability Assumptions Analysis

Quote from the Explanatory Memorandum / Bill

  "The CEO can suspend your plan if you are not contactable after reasonable attempts.
   If you remain suspended for 90 days, your participant status can be revoked entirely.
  No hearing. No formal decision against you."

Submission 187 - Supplementary Submission

NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 — Disability Assumptions Analysis

standard contact protocol. The 0.22% prosecution rate for NDS fraud (cited by Minister Butler) confirms that the compliance problem is not primarily a participant problem — most NDIS fraud is perpetrated by providers. Participant-targeted powers are disproportionate to the actual fraud risk.

Rights Breached / Legal Concerns

Common law procedural fairness — a decision to revoke an individual’s entitlement to government support without a hearing, without reasons reviewed by an independent body, and without appeal rights proportionate to the gravity of the decision, is a fundamental breach of natural justice and procedural fairness. Administrative law — the Explanatory Memorandum does not adequately justify the absence of a merits review pathway prior to revocation. Article 13 (access to justice on an equal basis with others, with appropriate procedural accommodations). Australian Human Rights Commission Act 1986 — the right not to have welfare entitlements removed without due process is an implied right in Australian administrative law (Plaintiff S157/2002 v Commonwealth (2003)).

Assumption 9: Algorithmic Decision-Making is Neutral and Superior to Human Judgement for Disability Assessment

Schedule / Source: Schedule 3 & 4 — Automated Decision-Making; New Planning Framework

“When used properly, technology can help deliver decisions more quickly, more consistently and more fairly. It can also free up the skills and judgements of our public servants to focus on the interactions where human involvement matters most.”

Context and Background

The Bill authorises automated programs to form the ‘state of mind’ of the CEO for planning and assessment decisions. The methodology, data inputs, training data, weighting algorithms, and appeal mechanisms for these automated decisions are entirely absent from the Bill and will be determined through later legislative instruments that Parliament cannot disallow.

Analysis: Why This Assumption is Erroneous or Harmful

Perspective: People with Disability

The Robodebt Royal Commission (2023) — commissioned by the same government — found that automated income averaging assessments were fundamentally flawed, produced mass incorrect debt notices, caused profound psychological harm, and contributed to deaths by suicide. Minister Butler acknowledged this explicitly in his second reading speech — and then introduced a Bill that authorizes automated assessment of disability support needs under a framework with equally undefined methodology. Disability is not quantifiable in the way income data is. It is contextual, fluctuating, documented in clinical language that is itself contested, and fundamentally resistant to algorithmic reduction. An algorithm trained on historical NDIA decision data will encode the biases and errors of that history — including the systematic underfunding documented by the 98% pre-hearing settlement rate in ART proceedings. It will produce wrong decisions at scale, consistently, without accountability, and with no requirement for human review of individual cases.

Submission 187 - Supplementary Submission

NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 — Disability Assumptions Analysis

Perspective: Informal Carers

Carers who understand their family member’s disability in its full human complexity — the good days and the bad days, the functional fluctuations, the things that work and the things that don’t — will have no ability to communicate that complexity to an algorithm. The NDIA’s current planning process, for all its failures, at least nominally involves a human who can be addressed, appealed to, and held accountable. An algorithmic process removes all of these possibilities. Appeals against algorithmic decisions are, in practice, inaccessible for people without legal representation — and the Bill tightens the reassessment provisions that are the primary non- legal correction mechanism.

Perspective: Providers and Sector

Allied health providers who invest in detailed functional assessments, therapy outcome reports, and clinical documentation — at cost to participants and to their own professional time — will have that documentation processed by an algorithm trained on criteria they cannot see, using weightings they cannot interrogate, producing outputs they cannot challenge meaningfully. The incentive to invest in quality clinical documentation collapses if the decision-maker cannot read or cannot be required to engage with it. The NDIA CEO’s own acknowledgment in 2025 that NDIA staff frequently do not read clinical reports is the human version of this failure. The algorithmic version simply institutionalises it.

Economic Arguments and Data

The Robodebt scheme resulted in the Commonwealth paying $1.8 billion in compensation and associated costs following the Royal Commission. Automated decision-making in high-stakes welfare contexts has a demonstrable track record of producing mass errors, subsequent correction costs, and significant harm that generates legal liability. The Bill provides no error rate modelling, no independent audit mechanism for algorithmic outputs, and no parliamentary oversight of the methodology that will determine the support entitlements of 760,000 Australians. The fiscal risk of a Robodebt-equivalent failure in disability planning — which would affect a population more vulnerable and with fewer resources to self-advocate — is not costed in the government’s savings projection.

Rights Breached / Legal Concerns

Robodebt Royal Commission findings (2023) — directly applicable; UNCRPD Article 12 (legal capacity — automated decisions affecting a person’s legal entitlements must be subject to appropriate review and must ensure appropriate safeguards including prevention of abuse by any party including the Government); the general right to explanation for automated administrative decisions (emerging in Australian administrative law, consistent with EU GDPR Article 22 which has been cited approvingly by Australian courts); Administrative Review Tribunal Act 2024 (people are entitled to merits review of administrative decisions affecting their rights — algorithmic decisions must not circumvent this). The Human Rights Act 2004 (ACT) and Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities Act 2006 (Vic) require that automated decision-making in public administration be subject to proportionality review.

Assumption 10: People Injured in Accidents or at Work Receive Adequate Compensation Elsewhere and Need No Further Support

Schedule / Source:

Schedule 1, Part 9 — Alternative Support Exclusions; Ministerial Determination Power for Alternative Supports

Submission 187 - Supplementary Submission

NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 — Disability Assumptions Analysis

Quote from the Explanatory Memorandum / Bill

“If your impairment was caused by a motor vehicle accident or a work related injury, and a compensation scheme exists for it, that impairment is excluded from your NDIS eligibility assessment. The Minister can declare any support an alternative support for any impairment by legislative instrument.”

Submission 187 - Supplementary Submission

NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 — Disability Assumptions Analysis

Economic Arguments and Data

Australia’s National Injury Insurance Scheme (NIIS), announced alongside the NDIS in 2013 as the alternative for catastrophic injury, has never been fully implemented across all states and territories. The assumption that compensation schemes provide an adequate alternative is factually incorrect for large proportions of people with accident-acquired disability. The gaps in the NIIS are documented by the Australian Injury Compensation Council (2023). Directing people to non-existent or inadequate alternatives does not reduce the economic cost of their disability — it shifts it to state-funded hospital and community health services, or leaves it with families.

Rights Breached / Legal Concerns

UNCRPD Article 2 (non-discrimination — the nature of disability’s cause is irrelevant to the right to support – which implies that the systems and schemes accessed by people with disability do not structurally create gaps in supports); Article 28 (adequate standard of living — which must not be contingent on the fortunes of a separate compensation system); DDA s.5 — distinguishing between ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ disability based on cause of injury has been found to constitute direct discrimination in comparable contexts. The unchecked ministerial determination power in Part 9 is arguably beyond the legislative mandate granted by the Constitution’s s.51(xxiiiA) welfare spending power, which has historically been interpreted as requiring individual assessment rather than categorical exclusion.

Assumption 11: The NDIS Scope Has Expanded Beyond Its Intended Beneficiaries — Many Current Participants Do Not Have ‘Real’ Disability

Schedule / Source: Explanatory Memorandum — Objects and Background; Schedule 1, Part 1 — Access Criteria

“The NDIS was established to support people with permanent and significant disability, but its scope has expanded to cover many Australians with less significant support needs.”

Context and Background

The government’s framing — both in the Explanatory Memorandum and the Minister’s second reading speech — consistently implies that the NDIS has been accessed by people who don’t’really’ qualify, or whose needs are ‘less significant.’ This frames current participants as, to varying degrees, illegitimate beneficiaries. The Bill is presented as ‘returning’ the scheme to its intended population.

Analysis: Why This Assumption Is Erroneous Or Harmful

Perspective: People With Disability

This framing is deeply offensive and factually contested. Every person currently on the NDIS has been assessed and approved through the existing access criteria. To characterise a category of participants as having ‘less significant’ needs — without specifying who, using what evidence — is to cast doubt over the legitimacy of the entire participant cohort. For people with psychosocial disability, intellectual disability, or autism, whose support needs may not be visibly apparent in the way a physical disability is, this language reinforces harmful stigma. It implies

Submission 187 - Supplementary Submission

NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 — Disability Assumptions Analysis

that ‘real’ disability is physical, visible, and severe — a profoundly ableist assumption that contradicts the biopsychosocial model on which the NDIS is legally founded. The Disability Royal Commission explicitly found that psychosocial disability, autism, and intellectual disability are routinely undervalued and under-supported in Australian service systems. This legislation does not address that finding — it amplifies the undervaluation.

Perspective: Informal Carers

Carers of people with psychosocial disability, neurodevelopmental conditions, or less visible disability forms have fought for decades to have their family members’ support needs recognised. The language of ‘scope expansion’ delegitimises that recognition. Families who have navigated complex access processes, provided extensive clinical documentation, and advocated tirelessly for appropriate support — only to be told, legislatively, that their family member may have ‘less significant support needs’ — experience that as a profound betrayal.

Perspective: Providers and Sector

The ‘scope creep’ narrative has been used to justify cuts without identifying specific, evidence-based criteria for who should be included or excluded. Providers working with early intervention cohorts — where the evidence for long-term benefit is strongest — face the greatest uncertainty, because early intervention participants by definition have ‘less significant’ current needs, with the explicit goal of preventing the development of ‘more significant’ needs. If ‘less significant’ current needs = inappropriate NDIS access, the entire early intervention logic is undermined.

Economic Arguments and Data

Early intervention for autism and developmental disability has the strongest evidence base for long-term cost reduction of any NDIS investment. Paynter et al (2015) found that intensive early intervention for autistic children reduces lifetime support costs, likely reducing reliance on specialist disability accommodation, and increasing future workforce participation. ‘Returning the scheme to its intended population’ by removing early intervention participants creates future high-needs adults who require significantly more expensive support — the economic opposite of the claimed saving.

Rights Breached / Legal Concerns

UNCRPD Article 1 (definition of persons with disabilities is broad and inclusive, explicitly covering those with long-term physical, mental, intellectual or sensory impairments — ‘significant’ is not a CRPD qualifier); Article 4 (obligation to take measures to modify or abolish laws that constitute discrimination — the ‘scope creep’ framing stigmatises disability and risks discriminatory application of access criteria).

Conclusion: What the Bill Reveals About Its Foundational Assumptions

Taken together, the eleven assumptions identified in this analysis reveal a consistent and troubling orientation in the Bill and its Explanatory Memorandum. Disability is framed primarily as a fiscal problem rather than a rights issue. People with disability are constructed as passive recipients of state largesse rather than active rights-holders. The informal care network — principally women — is treated as an elastic and costless resource. Algorithmic decision-making is offered as an improvement on human judgement without any of the safeguards that would make that plausible. And the scheme’s costs are attributed overwhelmingly to participant demand rather than to the administrative, legal, and fraud costs the government’s own data reveals.

Submission 187 - Supplementary Submission

NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 — Disability Assumptions Analysis

The NDIS was created on a clear principle: that people with permanent and significant disability have the same right to a fulfilling life as all Australians, and that achieving this requires individualised, rights-based, adequately funded support over a lifetime. That principle is not mentioned in the Bill’s title or its framing language. In its place is ‘sustainability’ — a word that appears not as a means to protect the scheme, but as a legal test that can override the rights of any individual participant whenever a budget calculation says so.

The economic cost of the assumptions embedded in this Bill — borne by carers, state health systems, mental health services, housing, and the justice system — is not counted in the government’s $37.8 billion saving projection. The human cost, borne by 760,000 Australians and their families, is not countable at all. Both deserve to be on the record before this Bill becomes law.

Occupational Therapist/Carer

30 May 2026

Key References

  • Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). (2023). Disability, Ageing and Carers: Summary of Findings. ABS.
  • Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW). (2023). People with Disability in Australia. AIHW.
  • Carers Australia. (2024). Caring for others and yourself; Carer Wellbeing Survey 2024 Report. Carers Australia.
  • O’Flaherty, M, Hill J and Smith-Merry J. Life Course Centre Working Paper Series No. 2024-37 (December 2024). Australian children with disabilities’ unmet support needs – evidence from the Better Support for Kids with Disabilities survey.
  • Justice and Equity Centre (JEC). (2026, May 22). Explainer: NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026. JEC.
  • National Disability Services (NDS). (2024). State of the Disability Sector Report. NDS.
  • Productivity Commission. (2011). Disability Care and Support (Report No. 54). Commonwealth of Australia.
  • The Royal Commission into Robodebt. (2023). Final Report. Commonwealth of Australia.
  • Royal Commission into Nature and Extent of Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability. (2023). Final Report. Commonwealth of Australia.
  • United Nations. (2006). Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD). United Nations.
  • World Health Organization. (2001). International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF). WHO.
  • Verdugo MA, Aguayo V, Arias VB, García-Domínguez L. A Systematic Review of the Assessment of Support Needs in People with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities. Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2020 Dec 18;17(24):9494. doi: 10.3390/ijerph17249494. PMID:

Confidential Analysis Document — May 2026 | Page 19 of 20

Submission 187 - Supplementary Submission

NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 — Disability Assumptions Analysis

Masi A, Dissanayake C, Alach T, Cameron K, Fordyce K, Frost G, Grove R, Heussler H, Silove N, Sulek R, Tucker M, Williams K, Eapen V. Clinical outcomes and associated predictors of early intervention in autism spectrum disorder: a study protocol. BMJ Open. 2021 Aug 9;11(8):e047290. doi: 10.1136/bmjopen-2020-047290. PMID: 34373300; PMCID: PMC8354249. Paynter, J, Riley E, Beamish W, Scott, J and Heussler, H. Brief Report: An evaluation of an Australian Autism-Specific, Early Intervention Program. International Journal of Special Education. 2015 (Vol 30, No 2 ) Per Capita / NDS. November 2021). False Economy: The economic benefits of the National Disability Insurance Scheme and the consequences of government cost-cutting. Hutchinson, C, Lester, L, Coram, V, Flatau, P and Goodwin-Smith, I. (2024) Beyond the bottom line: assessing the social return on investment of a disability-inclusive social enterprise. Emerald Publishing. Brotherhood of St Laurence. (2024). Submission to the NDIS Review. BSL. Butler, M. (2026, May 14). Second Reading Speech: NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026. House of Representatives Hansard. Australian Parliament. (2026). National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 — Explanatory Memorandum. Commonwealth of Australia.

This document may be used freely for the purpose of Senate Committee submissions, community advocacy, or media commentary. It is not legal advice.