Submission 1908

Submission to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee

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

Submitted by: Contact: Date: May 2026 Publication: I consent to this submission being published.

1. About this submission

I am an NDIS practitioner working in functional capacity evidence, advisory work and support coordination, delivered Australia-wide via telehealth. I hold qualifications in community services and case management, and in mental health, and I am provisionally registered as an MDT Specialist with MTARA. My professional work is informed by substantial lived experience, disability-related advocacy, systems navigation, and direct experience supporting participants and families within the NDIS and broader service systems. I also have experience preparing evidence-based advocacy material for participants, including material used in Administrative Review Tribunal matters.

I also write from lived experience. I am the mother and plan nominee of NDIS participants and have spent many years advocating for people who cannot easily advocate for themselves because of disability, communication barriers, psychosocial complexity, or reliance on others to be heard. The assessment and planning provisions in this Bill are not abstract to me. I have sat on both sides of the table: providing functional capacity evidence, depending on assessments for members of my own family, and standing in for people who rely entirely on others to be heard.

I make this submission because the Bill places functional capacity at the centre of both access to the Scheme and the calculation of participant budgets. That is the work I do, and the system I live within, which lets me offer the Committee frontline and lived evidence on how the assessment provisions are likely to operate in practice, and where they carry risk for participants.

I disclose openly that my work includes functional capacity evidence and assessment-related advisory work, which gives me a professional and commercial interest in this area of the Bill. I have framed my recommendations around participant outcomes, and I have deliberately not made any recommendation about who should be permitted to perform assessment work or about the commercial scope of that work. As a practitioner, as a parent within the Scheme, and as an advocate, my concern is the accuracy and fairness of assessment for the person being assessed.

I support the long-term sustainability of the NDIS and a consistent, evidence-based approach to functional capacity. My concerns are not with the principle of reform but with how key provisions are drafted, and with the substantial detail the Bill leaves to delegated instruments yet to be made. This submission is confined to the provisions on which I can speak with authority.

2. Summary of position

I make ten recommendations, set out in full at section 9. In summary:

Submission 1908

• I support functional capacity, rather than diagnosis, as the basis for access. The Bill is right in principle on this point.
• Disability is not uniform. Functional capacity is a profile that varies by domain, setting and day; a single standardised interview, conducted by an unfamiliar assessor in one sitting, cannot accurately capture it.
• However, the statutory threshold, the definition of functional capacity, and the assessment process itself are largely left to be set later by the Minister and by rules. The community is being asked to endorse a gateway whose operative content does not yet exist. These instruments should be disallowable, consulted on, and published before commencement.
• Functional capacity is dynamic and context-dependent. A standardised assessment instrument must be capable of being supplemented by individualised functional evidence, and assessors should be required, not merely permitted, to consider relevant evidence provided by a participant and their treating practitioners.
• The power to specify what an assessor “must not consider” is the provision of greatest concern. It should not be capable of excluding relevant, contemporaneous functional evidence. As the example below shows, excluding such evidence does not simply narrow the picture; it changes the answer.
• The instrument the Agency proposes to use (the I-CAN, version 6) was validated in the hands of allied health professionals. Administering it through assessors without clinical training departs from the evidence base on which it was validated, and the masking example shows what goes wrong.
• The scheme compels participants to obtain clinical evidence, then enables a model that can discount it, through non-clinical assessment, exclusion rules, and automated decisions. Where a decision departs from a participant’s clinical evidence, the decision-maker should have to engage with it and give reasons, with a clinically-informed review available.
• Participants who cannot report or advocate for their own functional capacity must not be disadvantaged by the assessment process; for them, third-party and contemporaneous evidence is often the only accurate evidence there is.
• The cost of mandated assessment should not fall on participants, and existing high-quality functional evidence should be accepted to avoid duplication.
• The Bill engages Australia’s binding obligations under the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and sits in tension with the NDIS Act’s own objects and principles. In particular, reducing community participation funding engages Article 19 and carries a foreseeable mental-health harm through social isolation. These limitations should be shown to be reasonable, necessary and proportionate before the Bill proceeds.

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What I support

Centring access on functional capacity rather than diagnosis is consistent with sound assessment practice. Two people with the same diagnosis can have very different functional capacity, and the same functional limitation can arise from very different conditions. Assessing what a person can and cannot do in daily life, rather than what label they carry, is the more accurate and more equitable basis for access. I support this shift.

My concern: a gateway with no published content

The difficulty is that the parts that determine who actually gets in are not in the Bill: the threshold for “substantially reduced” functional capacity, the operative definition, and the assessment method. They are to be settled afterwards, by the Minister and through rules, on the advice of a group not yet constituted. In practice this means Parliament and the community are being asked to approve the architecture of access without seeing the criteria that will be applied to real people.

This is a significant accountability gap. Where the substance of a major eligibility decision is left to delegated instruments, those instruments should be subject to disallowance by Parliament, developed through genuine consultation with people with disability and the practitioners who conduct assessments, and published in draft before the relevant provisions commence. The community should be able to see the gateway before walking through it.

4. The support needs assessment (Schedule 4)

Schedule 4 supports the rollout of new framework planning from 1 April 2027. Among other things, it enables rules to define the budget method by reference to the type of supports and the level of need arising from a support needs assessment; requires the assessment to identify support needs directly linked to the impairments for which a participant meets access; and enables rules to specify what information an assessor must and must not consider. These levers will, in combination, determine the funding a participant receives.

Underlying the concerns that follow is a single principle: disability is not uniform, and functional capacity is not a single number. A person’s functional capacity is a profile that varies across domains, across environments, and from one day to the next. It is typically higher in a quiet, predictable, one-to-one room than in the unpredictable settings of ordinary life, and it shifts with fatigue, stress, and whatever supports happen to be in place on the day.

A standardised instrument delivered as a single interview, by an assessor the person has never met and may never see again, captures one point on that profile, under conditions that are themselves unrepresentative. The Agency’s own consultation recorded the community’s fear of being assessed by strangers, and an unfamiliar setting and assessor change what a person discloses and how they present. This is most acute for people with psychosocial disability, communication disability, trauma histories, or those who mask. None of this argues against consistency. It argues that consistency bought at the cost of accuracy is a false economy: the assessment still has to be right for the individual in front of it.

4.1 What an assessor “must not consider”

From a practitioner and lived-experience standpoint, the power to specify by rule what an assessor must not consider is the most consequential provision in the Schedule. A functional capacity

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assessment is only as accurate as the evidence it is allowed to take into account. Functional capacity does not present in a clinic room in isolation: it is shaped by environment, fatigue, fluctuation, episodic deterioration, and the supports a person already has in place. Excluding categories of relevant evidence would produce assessments that are consistent but wrong.

This is not abstract for me. In my practice and advocacy I have repeatedly seen people present as highly capable in a structured, one-off interview in a way that bears little relation to their day-to-day functional capacity. I have watched, at close hand, how easily a point-in-time impression misreads a person who masks.

A single example makes the point clearly. The following is a de-identified composite drawn from practice; it is illustrative and does not describe any individual person.

Consider an autistic woman in her thirties, diagnosed in adulthood. In a structured, time-limited assessment she presents as articulate and composed: she holds eye contact, follows the conversation, and answers questions in order. A standardised observation conducted in that setting records her functional capacity as relatively intact. What the snapshot does not capture is the cost. She is masking, drawing on learned scripts and sustained conscious effort that she cannot maintain outside a predictable, one-to-one setting. In the days after such an interaction she experiences shutdown: unable to prepare meals, leave the house, or manage routine communication. Her capacity in unstructured, unpredictable, everyday environments bears little resemblance to her presentation in the assessment room. The evidence that reveals this is exactly the kind of contextual material a “must not consider” rule could set aside in favour of the in-room observation: her own account of post-interaction shutdown and fluctuation, a support diary, and reports from the people who see her daily. The result would be a woman recorded as far more capable than she is, and funded accordingly.

Masking is well documented, particularly among autistic women and girls, and is one of the clearest ways a standardised assessment can systematically understate functional impairment. It is not a rare edge case. I do not suggest that some structure on evidence is inappropriate; consistency is a legitimate aim. But a “must not consider” rule should never be capable of excluding relevant, current functional evidence about the individual being assessed. If certain evidence is to be excluded, the participant should be told what was excluded and why, and should be able to seek review of that exclusion.

The same provision carries an even sharper risk for participants who cannot report on their own functional capacity, such as those with significant cognitive or communication disability. The masking example concerns someone who can mask too well; many of the people I have advocated for over the years face the opposite problem: they cannot convey their capacity at all, and depend entirely on others to do so. For them, contemporaneous third-party evidence from family, support workers and treating practitioners is not supplementary. It is often the only accurate evidence that exists. A rule capable of excluding it would silence the very people least able to object, and least able to seek review of the result.

4.2 The proposed instrument, and who administers it

The power in Schedule 4 to determine who may carry out a support needs assessment is not abstract. The Agency has licensed the Instrument for the Classification and Assessment of Support

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Needs (I-CAN), version 6, as the basis for the new support needs assessment, to be conducted as an in-person interview by trained, accredited assessors with participants aged 16 and over. That is a category the Schedule 4 power would allow to be defined without requiring clinical training.

I support a strengths-based, internationally grounded instrument in principle. My concern is how, and by whom, it is administered. The I-CAN’s validation has been built over many years with allied health professionals administering it, and I am not aware of any published evidence establishing that it produces valid results in the hands of assessors without clinical training. Using a validated instrument outside the conditions under which it was validated does not carry that validation with it.

The masking example above is the failure this risks. The assessment is delivered as a single interview of around three hours. Recognising that a composed, articulate presentation conceals significant impairment, that a person is masking, is a clinical skill. An assessor without it, working from one interview, will in good faith record the participant as more capable than they are, and that error will be carried by the instrument’s score straight into the participant’s budget. The Agency’s own consultation has acknowledged that people with psychosocial or episodic conditions, whose needs are not easily shown at a point-in-time interview, are among those at greatest risk.

I share a concern raised by the allied health professionals, including occupational therapists, who built the instrument’s evidence base. This is not about professional territory. It is about whether the assessment reaches the right answer for the person in front of it.

4.3 Transparency of the budget method

If a participant’s budget is to be derived from their support needs assessment through a defined budget method, the participant should be able to understand how their assessed need translated into their funded budget, and should have a clear pathway to seek review of that translation. A funding decision a person cannot understand is one they cannot effectively challenge, and one a nominee or guardian cannot challenge on their behalf either.

5. The cost of mandated evidence

Under the current Scheme, participants are routinely required to fund the clinical and functional evidence the Agency asks for, whether from their plan or out of their own pocket. As a parent within the Scheme, I have lived this. A reformed assessment process must not deepen that burden. If a support needs assessment is to be mandatory, it should be provided or funded such that the cost does not fall on the participant, and high-quality functional evidence the participant already holds should be capable of being accepted, to avoid paying twice for the same picture of a person’s life.

6. The weight given to clinical evidence

The Scheme requires participants to obtain clinical and functional evidence, such as functional capacity assessments and allied health and treating-practitioner reports, often at significant personal cost. Yet the model this Bill enables moves the decision steadily further from that evidence. A support needs assessment administered by a non-clinical assessor may displace it; the power to specify what an assessor must not consider may exclude it; and the delegate who makes the binding decision is an administrative decision-maker, not a clinician, who is not required to adopt clinical

Submission 1908

The recommendations. The effect is a system that compels people to produce clinical evidence and is then structured to discount it.

The Bill also enables certain decisions to be automated (Schedule 3). Automating routine processing is sensible. But where automated processing contributes to translating an assessment into a budget, or to any decision affecting access or funding, the distance between the decision and clinical judgement grows further again. Functional capacity is nuanced; the further a funding decision travels from human, clinically-informed judgement, the greater the risk that genuine need is missed, and the harder it becomes for a participant to understand or challenge the outcome.

I do not say that an administrative decision-maker should be bound by every clinical recommendation; weighing evidence is a legitimate part of the role. I say that where a decision departs from the clinical evidence a participant has provided, the decision-maker should be required to engage with that evidence and give reasons for the departure; that automated processes should not finally determine a person’s access or budget without human, clinically-informed oversight; and that review should be available to someone with the clinical understanding to evaluate the decision. A participant who has paid for clinical evidence is entitled to know that it was read, weighed, and either accepted or answered.

7. Unscheduled plan reassessments (Part 2)

The Bill tightens the criteria for unscheduled plan reassessments, allowing them to be requested only by a participant, their plan nominee or guardian, and only where there have been significant and ongoing changes to support needs arising from a change in functional capacity.

Restricting who may request a reassessment to the participant and their representatives is reasonable, and for people who cannot self-advocate, the nominee and guardian are the entire safeguard. My concern is the test itself. Support needs can change significantly without a corresponding measurable change in functional capacity. A person’s informal supports may collapse, their housing may change, or a condition may be episodic or slowly deteriorating in ways that have not yet produced a clean step-change in measured capacity. A test framed solely around a change in functional capacity risks locking out people whose circumstances have genuinely changed. The threshold should expressly accommodate fluctuating and episodic conditions, progressive deterioration, and significant changes in a person’s support environment.

8. Human rights and legislative compatibility

I am a practitioner, not a lawyer. I raise the following because the Bill engages binding obligations that the NDIS Act itself adopts, and I urge the Committee, and the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights, to test these questions rather than treat them as settled.

8.1 The framework that applies

The Bill amends the National Disability Insurance Scheme Act 2013. The first object of that Act, in section 3(1)(a), is to give effect to Australia’s obligations under the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Its objects also include enabling people with disability to exercise choice and control in the planning and delivery of their supports, and their full inclusion in the community; its general principles in section 4 affirm equal rights, dignity and participation; and section 5 requires

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those who act for a person to involve them and to give effect to the decisions the person would make for themselves.

Under the Human Rights (Parliamentary Scrutiny) Act 2011, the Bill must be accompanied by a Statement of Compatibility, which the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights examines. A limitation on a protected right is permissible only where it pursues a legitimate objective and is reasonable, necessary and proportionate. The financial sustainability of the Scheme is a legitimate objective. The question the Committee should press is whether these particular measures are a proportionate means of pursuing it: a standardised gateway whose content is not yet written, a power to direct assessors to disregard evidence, automated decision-making, and reductions to community participation funding.

Article 12: legal capacity, will and preferences

Article 12 requires that the will and preferences of the person be respected and, so far as possible, predominate; it drives the shift from substitute to supported decision-making. An assessment model in which a standardised instrument, delivered in a single interview, can displace a person’s own account of their functional capacity, and in which rules may direct an assessor not to consider relevant evidence, runs against that principle. The masking example in section 4 is the concrete case: The person’s lived account is often the most accurate evidence there is, yet it is the evidence most exposed to being set aside.

Article 19: inclusion in the community, and the harm of isolation

Article 19 recognises the equal right to live in and be included in the community, and obliges the State to ensure access to community support services to prevent isolation or segregation. The Bill enables Ministerial determinations to reduce funding for social, civic and community participation. For many participants, this is the support that makes social contact possible at all. Reducing it does not make the underlying need go away. It simply leaves the person isolated.

The link between social isolation and poorer health is among the most firmly established in public health. The World Health Organization, through its Commission on Social Connection, has recognised social isolation and loneliness as a global public health priority: people who are lonely are around twice as likely to experience depression, and isolation is associated with anxiety and with thoughts of self-harm. For people with disability, community settings can already be harder to enter, and funded support is often the only bridge into them. Withdrawing that support predictably worsens mental health. A measure that produces a foreseeable health harm, in the name of a scheme whose own object is full inclusion in the community, demands the closest proportionality scrutiny.

The Scheme’s reliance on unpaid family support is not an abstraction. In my own lived experience and advocacy work, I have seen informal support arrangements become unsustainable when systems assume family care is a free and limitless resource. I raise this because the people carrying that load are rarely the ones with capacity left to tell a committee what it costs.

Article 5: equality, non-discrimination and reasonable accommodation

Article 5 requires equality and non-discrimination and the provision of reasonable accommodation. A single standardised instrument, applied uniformly, can indirectly disadvantage people whose

Submission 1908

Disability is not well captured in a point-in-time interview, including psychosocial, episodic, communication and masking presentations. Formal equality of process can produce substantive inequality of outcome. The framework should be required to accommodate these differences, not to override them.

8.5 Procedural fairness, automated decisions, and the Robodebt lesson

Australian administrative law requires procedural fairness: the right to be heard, to have relevant material considered, and to be given reasons. The NDIS external review pathway now sits in the dedicated NDIS Division of the Administrative Review Tribunal. The Bill’s enabling of automated decision-making, in a context where individual human review is not guaranteed, sits uneasily with these requirements. The Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme warned, in the plainest terms, against automated administrative processes that operate at scale without adequate human judgement and accountability. That lesson applies directly to decisions about a disabled person’s support.

8.6 Safeguarding and the participant’s risk profile

The Government cites the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability as a foundation for these reforms. That Royal Commission’s central concern was safeguarding. An assessment that misreads a person’s functional capacity also misreads their vulnerability: the supports holding their safety together, the risks that surface only outside a structured interview, the fluctuations a single sitting cannot see. A model that cannot capture a participant’s real risk profile cannot reliably identify who is at risk, and reform offered in the Royal Commission’s name should not weaken the Scheme’s capacity to see it.

8.7 Coherence and consultation

Two final points. A Bill that amends the NDIS Act in ways at odds with the objects and principles that same Act declares invites the question whether the amendments are consistent with the statute’s own stated purpose. And Article 4(3) of the Convention requires States to closely consult with and actively involve people with disability in decisions affecting them; a consultation window of barely two weeks, on a Bill of more than one hundred pages and this consequence, is difficult to reconcile with that obligation.

One thing about this process should be said plainly. The number of submissions this inquiry receives is not a measure of how the disability community feels about the Bill. Most of the people it affects are exhausted. They are managing serious disability, or caring for someone who is, and spending what little energy they have getting through the day. Reading a Bill of more than a hundred pages and writing to a Senate committee is beyond what many can manage, not for any lack of concern but because the system already takes everything they have. A low number of submissions is not approval. It is what happens when the work of speaking up is left, once again, to the few who can still manage it, on behalf of the many thousands who are affected and cannot.

9. Recommendations

Recommendation 1. That the statutory definition of functional capacity, the access threshold, and the assessment method be made by disallowable instrument, developed through

Submission 1908

      genuine consultation with people with disability and assessment practitioners, and
       published in draft before the relevant provisions commence.

Recommendation 2. That the assessment framework require a standardised assessment to be capable of being supplemented by individualised functional evidence; require assessors to consider relevant evidence provided by the participant and their treating practitioners; and ensure the assessment is designed to reflect variation in functional capacity across domains, settings and time, rather than resting on a single point-in-time presentation.

Recommendation 3. That any rule specifying what an assessor must not consider be incapable of excluding relevant, contemporaneous functional evidence about the individual; and that where evidence is excluded, the participant be informed of what was excluded and why, with a right to seek review.

Recommendation 4. That, where the support needs assessment relies on the I-CAN or a comparable instrument, it be administered consistently with the evidence base on which the instrument was validated, by assessors with the clinical skill that validity assumes, and that the rules made under Schedule 4 not authorise its administration by assessors lacking that skill.

Recommendation 5. That, where a decision (including an automated decision) departs from clinical evidence provided by or for the participant, the decision-maker be required to engage with that evidence and give reasons for the departure; that automated processes not finally determine a participant’s access or budget without human, clinically-informed oversight; and that a clinically-informed review pathway, including accessible merits review in the Administrative Review Tribunal, be available.

Recommendation 6. That the assessment framework expressly ensure that participants who cannot report or advocate for their own functional capacity are not disadvantaged, by requiring contemporaneous third-party evidence, from family, support workers and treating practitioners, to be considered and appropriately weighted.

Recommendation 7. That any mandated support needs assessment be provided or funded so that its cost does not fall on the participant, and that existing high-quality functional evidence be capable of being accepted to avoid duplication; and that participants be able to understand how their assessment translated into their budget, with a clear review pathway.

Recommendation 8. That the unscheduled reassessment threshold expressly accommodate fluctuating and episodic conditions, progressive deterioration, and significant changes in a participant’s support environment, not only a measurable change in functional capacity.

Recommendation 9. That the Committee, and the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights, satisfy themselves that the Bill’s limitations on the rights in the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, in particular Article 12 (will and preferences), Article 19 (inclusion in the community) and Article 5 (equality and non-discrimination), are reasonable, necessary and proportionate; and that the assessment and planning

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Submission 1908

The framework be amended to give effect to the objects and principles the NDIS Act itself declares in sections 3 to 5.

Recommendation 10

That no determination to reduce funding for social, civic and community participation proceed without assessment of its compatibility with Article 19 and its foreseeable effect on participants’ mental health through social isolation, and that such funding not be reduced where doing so would cause isolation or segregation contrary to the Scheme’s object of full inclusion in the community.

Closing

I thank the Committee for the opportunity to contribute. As a practitioner whose work involves functional capacity evidence, assessment-related advisory work and support coordination, and as a parent and advocate who lives within the Scheme, I would welcome the opportunity to assist the Committee further, including on the assessment methodology and evidence standards that this Bill leaves to be made.

NDIS practitioner in functional capacity evidence, advisory and support coordination

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