Submission 1922

We’ve Been Here Before ² NDIS Amendment Bill 2026

Submission ² Securing the NDIS for Future Generations Bill 2026

SUBMISSION

to the Senate Standing Committees on Community Affairs

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

Covering submission and guide to the attached analyses

Submitted by: Daniel Flynn and Peter Gregory (joint submission)

In the capacity of: Daniel Flynn ² NDIS participant with high and complex support needs, and a governance and systems-design practitioner

and

Peter Gregory B.Des.St., B. Occ. Thy., Grad. Cert. Comm. Dev. (Int)., Grad. Cert. Soc. Admin. ² NDIS Home and Living Service Design Curator

Contacts:

Name: Daniel Flynn Peter Gregory Email Address: Postal Address:

Submission Date: 1st June, 2026 Number of attachments: Four (Attachments A±D), listed at the end of this submission.

Publication and consent This is a joint submission. Daniel Flynn is the author of Attachment A; Peter Gregory is the author of Attachments B, C and D. It is provided for publication, and both submitters consent to publication of their names. Consistent with the Committee¶s guidance, this submission and its attachments do not annex any NDIS participant plans, medical reports, court documents, or correspondence with the NDIA or the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission. The material is directed throughout to the provisions of the Bill.

Flynn & Gregory ² joint submission Page 1

Submission 1922

We’ve Been Here Before $ NDIS Amendment Bill 2026

1. About this submission

This is a covering submission. Its purpose is to set out a small number of central arguments

against the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 (the Bill), and to direct the Committee to four detailed analyses, attached, that establish those arguments against the specific provisions of the Bill, the public evidentiary record, and lived experience.

The submission is made from two standpoints held together: the direct experience of depending on the Scheme as a participant with high and complex support needs, and professional practice in governance, systems design, and the architecture of accountable institutions. Where the submission relies on lived experience, it does so to demonstrate how the Bill’s provisions would operate in practice, not as stand-alone testimony. That is the use of personal experience the Committee has indicated it will accept: experience that is tied, specifically, to aspects of the Bill.

1.1 Structure of the package

The submission is deliberately structured as a short covering analysis plus four substantial attachments, rather than as a single long document:

• This covering submission $ the central argument, a map of how each attachment addresses the Bill, a consolidated response to the Government’s stated case, and recommendations.

• Attachment A $ When the System Forgets to Listen $ a whole-of-Bill systems- design and lived-experience analysis covering Schedules 1 to 4.

• Attachment B $ Considerations for Preparing a Plan Review Report (Peter Gregory) $ documentary evidence of the decision logic the NDIA is already applying, which several provisions of the Bill would entrench.

• Attachment C $ Commissioning “SIL” and the Risk of Reinstitutionalisation (Peter Gregory) $ analysis of shared-support and Home and Living commissioning.

• Attachment D $ Social, Economic and Community Participation Changes (Peter Gregory) $ analysis of the proposed reductions to community-participation funding and the mechanism by which they may be applied across cohorts.

Submission 1922

We’ve Been Here Before ² NDIS Amendment Bill 2026

1.2 Note on scope and method

The compressed timeframe for this inquiry does not permit an exhaustive, clause-by-clause

treatment of a Bill of this length. The submission therefore makes a disciplined choice. Rather

than catalogue every objection, it advances a single organising proposition and proves it: that

the Bill, examined against its own text, reorients the Scheme away from the individual

participant and toward scheme-cost management, and that this reorientation reproduces

conditions the Commonwealth’s own inquiries have already identified as unsafe. Secondary

points are subordinated to that proposition or left to the attachments. The submission accepts

that reform is legitimate, that cost matters, and that fraud occurs; it contests the magnitude,

design, and human incidence of this reform, and the justifications offered for it.

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We’ve Been Here Before ² NDIS Amendment Bill 2026

2. Executive summary

The National Disability Insurance Scheme was designed to give people with significant and permanent disability lifetime certainty of support, genuine choice and control, and a realistic opportunity to live an ordinary life in the community.

The Bill, on its own text, would convert more than a decade of operational and fiscal drift away from that design into law. The submission’s central findings are these.

• The Bill subordinates the participant to the budget. Across Schedules 1 to 4 it replaces participant-centred planning principles with principles oriented to scheme sustainability, narrows the legal meaning of support entitlement, and shifts the controlling question of the Scheme from what a person needs to what the Scheme will fund.

• It measures the wrong thing. The “functional capacity” test in Schedule 1 abstracts disability from the person’s environment and supports - measuring something the internationally accepted definition of disability says is not disability at all.

• It builds funding cliffs and removes recourse. The Bill permits caps below need, automatically strips approved one-off and capital funding at plan renewal without a reviewable decision, limits unscheduled reassessment, permits suspension on undefined contact thresholds, and expands automated decision-making - reducing participants’ practical ability to understand, test, and correct decisions that govern their lives.

• It normalises shared and congregate support by administrative means.

New support-determination and planning powers, combined with reductions to community-participation funding and default shared-support assumptions, create a structural pathway back toward the very settings the Disability Royal Commission identified as concentrating harm.

• The sustainability case does not hold on its own terms. On the magnitudes analysed in Attachment A, the contraction displaces cost into hospitals, aged care, families, and income support rather than removing it, withdraws economic activity and jobs, and contradicts the Government’s own objective of raising disabled people’s employment - while increasing exposure to the largest category of disability-related public cost.

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                                                         We've Been Here Before ² NDIS Amendment Bill 2026

The submission makes a single recommendation: that the Committee recommend the Bill be

withdrawn, and that the Government begin in its place a true, deep, authentic, end-to-end

code-sign project with the disability community. The Bill¶s defects are foundational, not

incidental, and the breadth of what would have to change to make it safe ² participant-centred

planning principles; a functional-capacity definition built on the interaction of impairment

with environment and supports; an end to automatic forfeiture of approved funding; defined

thresholds before suspension and revocation; an integrity architecture aimed at genuine bad

actors rather than ordinary participants; limits on systemic, non-individualised funding

reductions and default shared-support assumptions; and the safeguarding of participant- directed support ² is itself the measure of why it cannot be amended into safety. The areas

genuine reform will need to address, set out illustratively and not exhaustively, are at section

                                Flynn & Gregory ² joint submission    Page 5

Submission 1922

We’ve Been Here Before ² NDIS Amendment Bill 2026

3. The question before the Committee

Because the Senate has referred the provisions of the Bill, the question before the Committee is not whether the NDIS should be reformed, but whether these provisions deliver the outcomes claimed for them. The submission invites the Committee to test each contested provision against five questions:

• What the provision does.
• How the Government describes it.
• How it is likely to operate in practice.
• What the historical and inquiry record says about reforms of that kind; and
• What the consequence is for the people the provision affects.

Applied honestly, that test shows that the Bill’s mechanisms do not deliver the sustainability, integrity, consistency, fairness, and safeguarding their proponents claim ² and in several respects actively undermine them.

Submission 1922

We’ve Been Here Before ² NDIS Amendment Bill 2026

4. How the attached analyses address the provisions of the Bill

The Bill comprises five Schedules: Schedule 1 (access and planning measures, in nine Parts), Schedule 2 (fraud measures), Schedule 3 (governance arrangements, including pricing and automation), Schedule 4 (new framework planning), and Schedule 5 (transitional rules). The table below shows where each attachment engages those provisions; the paragraphs that follow summarise what the Committee should take from each.

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Submission 1922

We’ve Been Here Before ² NDIS Amendment Bill 2026

4.1 Attachment A ² the whole-of-Bill analysis

Attachment A is the analysis from which the collection’s central argument is drawn. It treats the Bill as evidence of a system that has ³stopped listening´ to the people it exists to serve, and traces the mechanism provision by provision: the repeal of the participant-centred planning principles (the statutory expression of choice and control); the abstraction of disability from environment in the functional-capacity test; the inversion of the reasonable-and-necessary test; caps and ratios that may sit below need; the automatic forfeiture of approved one-off and capital funding at renewal; the powers to suspend and revoke on undefined thresholds; the integrity architecture that treats participants as compliance subjects; and the automation of decision-making. It then sets the fiscal case against its own terms, and concludes that the Bill¶s defects are foundational ² that it should be withdrawn and rebuilt on different premises, not amended clause by clause.

4.2 Attachment C ² shared support and reinstitutionalisation

Attachment C examines the move toward commissioning Supported Independent Living and the default shared-support assumptions emerging through the reform. It argues that these assumptions rest on provider viability, workforce efficiency, and cost containment rather than on any published evidence that shared arrangements are safe, clinically appropriate, or compatible with the right to choose where and with whom one lives. It connects that critique to the Disability Royal Commission’s findings on congregate settings and to Article 19 of the Convention.

4.3 Attachment D ² community participation funding

Attachment D addresses the proposed reductions to Social, Economic and Community Participation funding and, critically, the legislative mechanism that would allow such reductions to be applied across cohorts through funding rules rather than individual planning. Read with the support-determination powers in Schedule 1 and the new planning framework in Schedule 4, it shows how individualised participation support can be made financially unviable and progressively displaced into group-based or block-funded arrangements.

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Submission 1922

We’ve Been Here Before — NDIS Amendment Bill 2026

4.4 Attachment B — What Is Already Happening In Practice

Attachment B is included as evidence of current practice. Written as guidance for those preparing plan-review reports, it documents that continuous one-to-one support is already treated as available only in undefined “exceptional circumstances,” with the central question having become whether a participant’s support can be shared. It demonstrates that the Bill does not introduce these dangers from nothing; it entrenches a trajectory participants are already experiencing and would give statutory force to criteria that are presently undisclosed.

Flynn & Gregory — Joint Submission Page 9

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We’ve Been Here Before ² NDIS Amendment Bill 2026

5. The Government’s stated case, and why it is not made out

The Government’s case for the Bill rests on a recurring set of claims. The submission accepts the legitimacy of reform in general, but contests that these provisions deliver what is claimed.

The table states each claim fairly, identifies what the provisions do in practice, and explains why the claim is not made out. Fuller treatment is in the attachments noted in the final column.

Flynn & Gregory – joint submission Page 10

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We’ve Been Here Before ² NDIS Amendment Bill 2026

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Submission 1922

We’ve Been Here Before ² NDIS Amendment Bill 2026

The recommendation, and the areas genuine reform must address

The submission makes a single recommendation: that the Committee recommend the Bill be withdrawn, and that the Government begin in its place a true, deep, authentic, end-to-end co-design project with the disability community.

The reform that genuine co-design produces will differ from this Bill in kind, not in degree. The areas it will need to address ² and the ways its approach will differ from this Bill¶s ² include, but are not limited to, those set out below. They are offered as the direction the evidence points, and as a map of where this Bill goes wrong, not as a prescription: co-design with the disability community, not this submission, must work through the detail. The breadth of what would have to change is itself the measure of why this Bill cannot be amended into safety, but must be withdrawn and rebuilt.

Schedule 1 ² Access and planning measures

• Functional capacity (Part 1): assessing functional capacity as the interaction between a person’s impairment and their environment and supports ² consistent with the social and human-rights model of disability and the CRPD ² rather than in abstraction from environment.

• Reassessment (Part 2): retain a broad participant right to seek reassessment where funding is no longer adequate or circumstances change, so participants are not left underfunded for extended periods awaiting a scheduled review.

• Impairment±support link (Part 3) and reasonable and necessary (Part 6):

  • retain participant-centred reasonable-and-necessary principles;
  • ensure a strengthened impairment-support link does not exclude people whose real support needs do not map neatly onto the impairment that satisfied access; and prevent family-contribution and “access to other services” assumptions from operating as routine cost-shifting.

• Support determinations (Part 4): constrain the power to set support determinations and reduce funding categories across cohorts so that it cannot operate as a systemic, non-individualised reduction (in particular of Social, Economic and Community Participation) without individual assessment, published criteria, parliamentary scrutiny, and review rights.

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We’ve Been Here Before ² NDIS Amendment Bill 2026

• Plan renewal (Part 5): remove the automatic forfeiture of approved one-off and

  capital funding at plan renewal. No approved support should lapse without a

  reviewable decision.

• Plan suspension (Part 7): define on the face of the Act the contact thresholds and

  process that must precede suspension and revocation. Access should not be suspended

  on undefined ³reasonable´ attempts to make contact.

• Permanence and treatment (Part 8): ensure tightened permanence and

  treatment-exhaustion criteria do not remove access where a treatable impairment

  nonetheless gives rise to enduring support needs.

• Other services (Part 9): provide safeguards against displacement onto health, aged

  care, and mainstream systems that are not equipped to deliver the required support.

Schedule 2 ² Fraud and integrity measures

• Direct the architecture at bad actors: ensure registration, civil-penalty,

  information-gathering, and record-retention powers target genuine misuse, and that

  ordinary participants and participant-directed arrangements are not treated as

  compliance subjects. Protect self-management, self-direction, direct employment, and

  the clinicians who train and support workers.

• Claims and plan management (Parts 5±6): ensure changes to claim times and

  plan-management arrangements do not undermine continuity of support, participant

  choice, or the viability of participant-directed and thin-market arrangements.

Schedule 3 ² Governance arrangements

• Pricing and market stewardship (Part 1): require pricing powers to reflect actual

  local and thin-market costs rather than metropolitan benchmarks, and prevent their

  use to engineer default shared-support models.

• Automation (Part 2): constrain automated decision-making by requiring transparency

  of methodology and reasons, an identifiable human decision-maker, and preserved merits review over substantive funding outcomes.

Schedule 4 ² New framework planning

• Restore participant-centred planning and require transparency: retain or restore the substance of the participant-centred planning principles (the repealed section 31 principles) so that plans remain anchored to the participant¶s needs,

circumstances, environment, goals, activities, and supports; require disclosure of the assessment methodology and the basis of funding outcomes; and adopt no default

Submission 1922

We’ve Been Here Before ² NDIS Amendment Bill 2026

shared-support assumption (such as 1:3) without a published evidence base demonstrating safety, clinical appropriateness, and compatibility with Article 19 of the CRPD, with housing decisions kept separate from support decisions.

Process

• Reform through co-design: the longer reform of the Scheme should proceed in genuine partnership with the disability community, at the depth that co-designrequires and not at the speed of a budget cycle.

Flynn & Gregory ² joint submission Page 14

Submission 1922

We’ve Been Here Before ² NDIS Amendment Bill 2026

7. Conclusion

The Scheme works safely and sustainably when it is built around the people who depend on it, and it fails, often gravely, when it is not. The provisions of this Bill, taken together, build a Scheme that listens less: to the participant in the plan, to the evidence in the Commonwealth¶s own inquiries, and to the people who are already telling it, plainly, what these reforms will do.

The record of foreseeable harm is not speculative; it is documented, and it is set out in the attachments. The submission asks the Committee to recommend that the Bill be withdrawn, and that reform begin in its place through a true, deep, end-to-end co-design with the disability community, so that the scheme is rebuilt around the people who depend on it rather than legislating the regression the attachments describe.

Flynn & Gregory ² joint submission Page 15

Submission 1922

We’ve Been Here Before ² NDIS Amendment Bill 2026

Attachments

• Attachment A ² When the System Forgets to Listen: Systems Design, Human Rights, Safety, and the Human Cost of NDIS Regression. Daniel Flynn.
• Attachment B ² Considerations for Preparing a Plan Review Report: Participants with Complex Needs. Peter Gregory.
• Attachment C ² Commissioning ³SIL´ and the Risk of Reinstitutionalisation: A Critical Analysis of Supported Independent Living Reform, Shared Support Models, and the Future of Individualised Disability Support Under the NDIS. Peter Gregory.
• Attachment D ² Social, Economic and Community Participation Changes. Peter Gregory.

Flynn & Gregory ² joint submission Page 16

Submission 1922

We’ve Been Here Before ² NDIS Amendment Bill 2026

WE¶VE BEEN HERE BEFORE

When systems forget, people are harmed.

When nations forget, history repeats.

A submission to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee

on the

National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment

(Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026

’DQLHO )O ry ā 3HWHU *UHJRU\

Joint submission

The wrapper narrative of an edited collection.

The four works referred to throughout are provided as Attachments A±D.

Flynn & Gregory ² joint submission Page 17

Submission 1922

We’ve Been Here Before $ NDIS Amendment Bill 2026

Contents

[ TABLE OF CONTENTS ]

To be generated on final assembly of the monolithic document, once the wrapper and

Attachments A±D are combined and pagination is settled.

(A live, auto-updating contents field follows below; right-click $ Update Field once the final document is

assembled.)

1. About this submission ………………………………………………………………………………………………. 2

   1.1 Structure of the package ………………………………………………………………………………………..2

1.2 Note on scope and method …………………………………………………………………………………….3

2. Executive summary …………………………………………………………………………………………………..4

3. The question before the Committee …………………………………………………………………………….6

4. How the attached analyses address the provisions of the Bill …………………………………………7

   4.1 Attachment A $ the whole-of-Bill analysis ……………………………………………………………..8

   4.2 Attachment C $ shared support and reinstitutionalisation ………………………………………8

   4.3 Attachment D $ community participation funding …………………………………………………8

   4.4 Attachment B $ what is already happening in practice ……………………………………………9

5. The Government¶s stated case, and why it is not made out …………………………………………..10

6. The recommendation, and the areas genuine reform must address ………………………………12

   Schedule 1 $ Access and planning measures ………………………………………………………………12

   Schedule 2 $ Fraud and integrity measures ……………………………………………………………….13

   Schedule 3 $ Governance arrangements ……………………………………………………………………13

   Schedule 4 $ New framework planning ……………………………………………………………………..13

   Process……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………14

7. Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………15

Attachments ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….16

Contents …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….18

Movement I $ The Collection¶s Executive Summary, and Introduction, Scope and Method.21

Part 1 $ The collection¶s executive summary ………………………………………………………………21

Part 2 $ Introduction, scope and method …………………………………………………………………. 27

We¶ve Been Here Before $ the historical spine ………………………………………………………………33

Submission 1922

We’ve Been Here Before ² NDIS Amendment Bill 2026

1. The institutions, and what they were ………………………………………………………………………33

2. The reckoning, and the promise we only half-kept …………………………………………………..35

3. The institution that never left ………………………………………………………………………………..37

4. The rights the movement won, and what they were for …………………………………………….41

5. The lesson written into law: the Convention and Article 19 ………………………………………43

6. The blueprint, and the promise made buildable ………………………………………………………45

7. The reform era, and the warnings already on the record…………………………………………. 48

Movement II ² The View from Inside the Scheme …………………………………………………………53

Attachment A ² When the System Forgets to Listen (Daniel Flynn) ……………………………56

Movement III ² The Forgetting in Motion…………………………………………………………………..196

Attachment B ² Considerations for Preparing a Plan Review Report (Peter Gregory)… 198

Movement IV ² Shared Support and Reinstitutionalisation…………………………………………. 217

Attachment C ² Commissioning “SIL” and the Risk of Reinstitutionalisation (Peter

 Gregory) ............................................................................................................................... 219

Movement V ² Community Participation and the Pathway to Block Funding …………………272

Attachment D ² Social, Economic and Community Participation Changes (Peter Gregory)

 ..............................................................................................................................................274

Movement VI ² The Government¶s Case Dismantled…………………………………………………..300

† ² The method, and the test …………………………………………………………………………300

† ² Sustainability …………………………………………………………………………………………….301

† ² Integrity …………………………………………………………………………………………………303

† ² Consistency and fairness ……………………………………………………………………………304

† $ ² Reasonable and necessary, family contribution, and other-scheme displacement

............................................................................................................................................. 306

† ² Return to original intent ……………………………………………………………………………308

† ² Future generations …………………………………………………………………………………..310

† ² Safeguarding and quality ……………………………………………………………………………..311

† ² Fairness, transparency and review ………………………………………………………………. 313

† ² Efficiency and automation ……………………………………………………………………………316

† ² Flexibility through rules ……………………………………………………………………………… 318

† ² Plan certainty and fixed durations ………………………………………………………………320

† ² Administrative streamlining ………………………………………………………………………. 322

† ² The rebuttal, gathered ……………………………………………………………………………….324

Schedule 1 ² Access and planning measures …………………………………………………………….327

Schedule 2 ² Fraud measures ……………………………………………………………………………….. 329

Schedule 3 ² Governance arrangements ………………………………………………………………… 330

Schedule 4 ² New framework planning …………………………………………………………………….331

Schedule 5 ² Transitional rules ……………………………………………………………………………… 331

What the sweep reveals…………………………………………………………………………………………….331

Movement VII ² The Risks, and the Way Back …………………………………………………………… 333

Part 1 ² The risks that remain ……………………………………………………………………………….. 333

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We’ve Been Here Before $NDIS Amendment Bill 2026$

Part 2 $The way back$ ……………………………………………………………………………………………339

Movement VIII $Recommendations and Conclusion$ ……………………………………………………343

Part 1 $Recommendations$ …………………………………………………………………………………… 343

Part 2 $Conclusion: the warning Parliament must hear$ ………………………………………….. 355

References ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 363

Submission attachments (primary materials) ………………………………………………………….. 363

Legislation and Bills ……………………………………………………………………………………………… 363

Cases …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 363

International instruments ………………………………………………………………………………………363

Government, inquiry, and parliamentary sources ……………………………………………………..364

Books, articles, and scholarly works ……………………………………………………………………….. 365

Sector, peak-body, and reference sources …………………………………………………………………365

News and commentary …………………………………………………………………………………………..366

Appendix B $Clause map of the Bill$ …………………………………………………………………………. 368

Schedule 1 $Access and planning measures$ …………………………………………………………… 368

Schedule 2 $Fraud measures$ ……………………………………………………………………………….. 369

Schedule 3 $Governance arrangements$ ………………………………………………………………….370

Schedule 4 $New framework planning$ ……………………………………………………………………371

Schedule 5 $Transitional rules$ ……………………………………………………………………………….371

Commencement table (Bill, s 2) $reproduced$ ………………………………………………………….371

Appendix F $The Bill measured against the NDIS Review$ ………………………………………….. 373

Purpose of this appendix ……………………………………………………………………………………….. 373

F.1 $How reform must be done: the Review¶s process guardrails, and the Bill…………… 374

F.2 $What reform must protect: the Review¶s substantive direction, and the Bill………. 376

F.3 $The sequence the Review required, and the sequence as it is actually scheduled… 377

F.4 $Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………………..378

Flynn & Gregory $joint submission Page 20

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Movement I ² The Collection’s Executive Summary, and Introduction, Scope and Method

Part 1 ² The collection’s executive summary

This is a submission to the Senate Standing Committees on Community Affairs on the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026. It is not a single essay, and it is not a folder of attachments. It is an integrated edited collection: four substantial works, each reproduced in full and unedited, joined by a connecting analysis that carries a single argument from the first page to the last.

The works supply the evidence and the close reading of the Bill’s mechanisms; the connecting analysis shows how they fit together into one account of what this Bill would do, and why the country has reason to recognise it. The collection is presented jointly by the two authors, in both names, and the analysis throughout is offered in their shared voice.

The argument it carries can be put in a single sentence, in two clauses that nest inside one another. When systems forget, people are harmed. When nations forget, history repeats. A system forgets when it loses sight of the person it was built to serve and begins to optimise instead for the things it can most easily measure — its expenditure, its throughput, its administrative tidiness. A nation forgets when it does that at scale, across time, having been warned before. The National Disability Insurance Scheme was designed in 2011 to give people with significant and permanent disability lifetime certainty of support, genuine choice and control over their own lives, and a realistic opportunity to live an ordinary life in the community rather than in segregated care. The Bill now before the Committee, examined against its own text, would convert more than a decade of operational and fiscal drift away from that design into law — and in doing so would reproduce, by administrative means, conditions the Commonwealth’s own inquiries have already identified as unsafe. That is the forgetting this collection describes, caught while there is still time to prevent it.

It is worth being plain at the outset about what the collection does and does not contest, because the credibility of the argument depends on it. The collection accepts that reform of the scheme is legitimate; that cost is a genuine consideration no honest analysis can wave away; and that fraud occurs, and is serious. It does not defend the scheme as it currently operates, which has itself drifted a long way from the design the country was promised. What it contests is narrower and more exact: the magnitude of this contraction, the design of the mechanisms chosen to achieve it, the human incidence of both, and the justifications offered for the whole. The findings that follow are addressed to that contest.

The collection’s findings, stated at the level of the collection as a whole, are these.

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The Bill subordinates the participant to the budget. This is the change beneath all the

others. Across Schedules 1 to 4, the Bill replaces the participant-centred planning principles in the Act ² the statutory expression of choice and control ² with principles oriented to the scheme’s sustainability; it narrows the legal meaning of an entitlement to support; it defines the gateway to the scheme through a “functional capacity” test that abstracts disability from the person’s environment and supports; and it permits caps on funding, support intensity, and worker-to-participant ratios to be set below the cost of a person’s actual need. It also builds funding cliffs and narrows the means of recourse: approved one-off and capital funding can be stripped automatically at a plan’s renewal without a reviewable decision attached, access can be suspended on undefined thresholds of contact, unscheduled reassessment is curtailed, and decision-making can be automated ² together reducing a participant’s practical ability to understand, test, and correct the decisions that govern their lives. The controlling question of the scheme is quietly inverted. It ceases to be what does this person need to live an ordinary life and becomes what will the scheme fund. Everything else in the Bill follows from that inversion.

We have been here before. The dangers in this Bill are not novel, and they are not speculative; they are historically recognisable patterns the nation has run, and been harmed by, before. By narrowing individualised funding, by treating shared and congregate support as the default rather than the exception, and by reducing the funding that allows people to take part in the life of their communities, the Bill builds a structural pathway back toward the very settings ² segregated, congregate, controlled ² that this country spent the second half of the twentieth century dismantling, and that its most recent Royal Commission has just finished condemning. The collection’s historical spine traces that pattern in full; the point to register here is that the resemblance is structural and exact, not loose or rhetorical.

When the system forgets the person, people are harmed ² and the harm is foreseeable, documented, and already occurring. This is not a warning about a distant possibility. It is a description of a record. The harm that follows the withdrawal of support is set out exhaustively in the public domain: in the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability, whose central finding was that segregated and congregate settings concentrate violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation; in a long coronial trail of named, preventable deaths; and, on Flynn’s analysis of the regulator’s own data covering more than nine thousand deaths, in a rate of potentially avoidable death several times that of the general population. The decision logic the Bill would entrench is, moreover, already operating in current administrative practice ² documented in one of the four works, where continuous one-to-one support is already being treated as available only in undefined

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“exceptional circumstances.” The Bill does not introduce these dangers from nothing. It gives

statutory force to a trajectory participants are already living.

The Government’s justifications do not survive testing. The case for the Bill rests on

a recurring set of claims ² sustainability, integrity, consistency, fairness, safeguarding and

quality, a return to the scheme’s original intent, the securing of the scheme for future

generations. The collection accepts the legitimacy of reform in general, accepts that cost

matters and that fraud occurs, and then tests each claim, one at a time, against five things:

what the provision does, how the Government describes it, how it is likely to operate in

practice, what the historical and inquiry record says about reforms of that kind, and what the

consequence is for the people it affects. Tested that way, the claims fail. The sustainability case

displaces cost into hospitals, aged care, families and income support rather than removing it;

the integrity architecture conflates the rare bad actor with the ordinary participant;

consistency becomes standardisation that flattens unequal needs; and the appeal to “original

intent“ departs from the individualised, needs-based design the Productivity Commission in

fact set out. Running through several of these claims is a single procedural failure: opaque

assessment, funding outcomes that cannot be meaningfully understood or contested,

narrowed reassessment, and broad rule-making between them strip participants of the means

to know, test, and correct the decisions made about them ² and the Government has not

confirmed that participants will retain full access to independent merits review under the new

arrangements, a safeguard whose loss would multiply every other harm. And they fail even on

the Government’s own terms: the Government’s own independent Review of the scheme laid

down conditions ² foundational supports first, careful sequencing, no loss for existing

participants, genuine co-design ² that this Bill does not meet.

Reform is legitimate, and a better path exists. The collection is not a defence of the

status quo. The scheme as it currently operates has drifted a long way from the design the

country was promised, and the authors say so plainly. The argument is not that nothing should

change; it is that this change ² in its magnitude, its design, and its human incidence ² is the

wrong one, and that a rights-based, participant-led reform is available that would secure the

scheme’s finances without legislating regression. That alternative is set out in substance in

Flynn’s account: planning that begins with the outcome rather than the line item, safety built

on harm minimisation rather than congregate control, the preservation of participant-directed

support, design for thin and regional markets, and co-design built in as a governance discipline

rather than offered as a courtesy. Sustainability and rights are not, in the end, opposed. A

scheme that destroys the lives it was funded to enable has not become sustainable; it has

become something else.

                               Flynn & Gregory ² joint submission    Page 23

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participant’s support can be shared and continuous one-to-one support is treated as exceptional. Commissioning “SIL” and the Risk of Reinstitutionalisation, also by Peter Gregory, examines shared-support and Home and Living commissioning, and shows that default shared-support assumptions – including a one-to-three ratio – rest on provider viability and workforce economics rather than on any published evidence that such arrangements are safe, clinically appropriate, or compatible with the right to choose where and with whom one lives. Social, Economic and Community Participation Changes, by Peter Gregory, addresses the proposed reductions to community-participation funding and, critically, the cross-cohort mechanism by which an individual entitlement can be converted into a controllable budget line and progressively displaced toward block-funded group services. In the collection they are read in that order – Flynn’s analysis, then practice, then shared support, then community participation – each arriving when the connecting analysis has established the ground it stands on. Each of the four works keeps its own executive summary and its own conclusion, at the level of that work; the summary above is the collection’s, and it neither replaces nor merges them.

What, then, does the collection ask the Committee to find? It asks the Committee to find that the case for this Bill is not made out: that its central provisions do not deliver the sustainability, integrity, consistency, fairness, and safeguarding claimed for them, and that, in several respects, they actively undermine those very ends while exposing participants to foreseeable and documented harm. On that finding, the Bill should not proceed. The collection’s considered position on the Bill as a whole – and the conclusion When the System Forgets to Listen reaches after examining it provision by provision – is that the defects are foundational rather than incidental: they lie in the ideas that informed the drafting, in a gateway that measures something that is not disability, in principles reoriented from the person to the scheme’s cost, and in an inverted test of what is reasonable and necessary on which everything else is built. Flaws of that kind cannot be amended out one clause at a time; no set of amendments can cure them. The Bill must be withdrawn, and reform begun instead through the genuine co-design the scheme’s own design always required.

The scope of that change is itself the answer to whether the Bill might instead be amended. To make this Bill safe would require restoring the substance of participant-centred planning; reframing the functional-capacity definition so that capacity is assessed as the interaction of impairment with environment and supports; ending the automatic forfeiture of approved funding at plan renewal; defining on the face of the Act the thresholds and process that must precede suspension and revocation; redirecting the integrity architecture from the ordinary participant to the genuine bad actor; constraining systemic, non-individualised funding reductions and default shared-support assumptions; and guaranteeing transparency of

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assessment methodology and merits review over automated outcomes. That is not a list of

amendments to a sound Bill with isolated defects; it is the description of a different Bill, built

on different premises. A measure whose foundations must be replaced before it can be made

safe has not been amended ² it has been withdrawn and rewritten. The collection therefore

makes a single recommendation: that the Committee recommend the Bill be withdrawn, and

that reform begin in its place through a true, deep, authentic, end-to-end co-design with the

disability community ² at the depth co-design requires, not at the speed of a budget cycle.

The collection sets out at its close, illustratively and not as a prescription, the areas that reform

will need to address and the ways its approach will differ from this Bill; genuine co-design,

and not this submission, must work through the detail. The choice the collection lays before

the Committee is the choice the whole submission is about: whether the scheme will listen

now, while there is still time to prevent harm, or wait for a future inquiry to record what

disabled people are already telling it.

Sources (Part 1): National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for

Future Generations) Bill 2026 ² five Schedules, Schedule 1 in nine Parts. Productivity

Commission, Disability Care and Support, Inquiry Report No. 54, 31 July 2011 (the scheme¶s

founding design: individualised, needs-based entitlement). Royal Commission into Violence,

Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability, Final Report, 29 September 2023

(finding that segregated and congregate settings concentrate violence, abuse, neglect and

exploitation; the unanimous position that no person should be compelled into a setting

designed exclusively for disabled people). The reform timetable as announced by the Minister

for Health, Disability and Ageing, the Hon Mark Butler MP, National Press Club, 22 April

2026 (projected reduction in participant numbers from around 760,000 to around 600,000

by the end of the decade; reset of social, civic and community participation budgets, with

average plans in that area to fall from about $31,000 to about $26,000). Figures on the fiscal

counter-analysis ² the projected reduction of roughly one-third in scheme cost by 2030, the

reduction of close to a fifth in the average plan, the order of 200,000 jobs withdrawn across

the economy on independent peak-body modelling, the Royal Commission¶s estimate of the

annual societal cost of harm at approximately $46 billion, and the regulator¶s analysis of

more than nine thousand deaths showing a rate of potentially avoidable death around 3.6

times that of the general population ² are drawn from Flynn¶s analysis, When the System

Forgets to Listen (Daniel Flynn), and the sources it cites. The four works: When the System

Forgets to Listen (Daniel Flynn); Considerations for Preparing a Plan Review Report (Peter

Gregory); Commissioning “SIL” and the Risk of Reinstitutionalisation (Peter Gregory);

Social, Economic and Community Participation Changes (Peter Gregory). Cross-references:

the historical spine (Movement I); the systematic rebuttal of the Government¶s justifications

(Movement VI); the recommendations (Movement VIII); and the clause map (Appendix B).

                               Flynn & Gregory ² joint submission    Page 26

Part 2 – Introduction, scope and method

Authorship and standpoint

This is a joint submission by Daniel Flynn and Peter Gregory. It is written from two standpoints held together, and it draws its authority from their combination: the direct experience of depending on the scheme as a participant with high and complex support needs, and professional practice in governance, systems design, and the architecture of accountable institutions.

Daniel Flynn is the author of When the System Forgets to Listen, which is written from that combined standpoint of participant and systems practitioner. Peter Gregory is the author of the three analyses of commissioning and current practice—the Supported Independent Living paper, the social, civic and community participation paper, and the plan-review paper. Each work retains its individual attribution, and the four are reproduced as their authors wrote them; the collection that joins them, and the connecting analysis carried in these pages, is presented jointly, in both names and in a shared voice.

The reason the standpoint matters is that it determines what kind of document this is, and therefore what weight its claims should carry. It is not a legal opinion. The Bill raises a great many questions of law—about its consistency with the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, about administrative fairness, about the proper construction of its provisions—and those questions are being examined, thoroughly, by disability and human-rights lawyers. This collection does not attempt that work and does not trespass on it. Where it refers to the Bill, it cites the legislation to anchor and verify what it says; but its concern is not how a provision should be construed by a court. Its concern is what a provision does to a person, and why that is the predictable result of a system that has stopped listening. The Bill is treated throughout as evidence for the collection’s argument, not as the subject of a purely legal critique.

A word on why this warning is issued now: Analyses of this kind are usually written after the fact—after the inquiry, after the harm, after a Royal Commission has told the country what it might have known in time. This one is written before.

The Bill is before Parliament; the consultations on the operational instruments that would follow it have not all closed; the contraction it would authorise has not yet taken effect. The forgetting this collection describes is, for the most part, not the product of ill will but of a system under sustained pressure doing what such systems do in the absence of the mechanisms that would force it to keep the person in view. Those mechanisms can still be rebuilt, and they can be rebuilt before the harm rather than after it. That is the opportunity this inquiry represents, and it is the reason the collection has been assembled in the short time available.

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The Bill assessed three ways

The collection assesses the Bill in three registers at once, because no single one of them captures what is at stake. It assesses the Bill as law—taking seriously that it will become binding, and reading closely what its text enacts and permits, rather than only what its proponents say it is for. It assesses the Bill as policy—measuring the mechanisms against the rationale offered for them and against the evidentiary record, and asking whether the provisions in fact deliver the outcomes claimed. And it assesses the Bill as a mechanism reshaping daily life—tracing what each provision does, concretely, to the person in the plan: to the support they can call on, the home they can keep, the work they can do, the community they can take part in, and their practical ability to understand, test, and correct the decisions that govern all of it.

Holding the three together is the point. A provision can be lawful, and defensible as policy on paper, and still, in operation, strip from a person the means to live an ordinary life—because the gap between what a provision says and what a provision does is precisely where the harm in disability policy has always lived. The collection’s method is built to catch that gap. It refuses to assess the Bill only in the abstract language of access criteria, support determinations, and sustainability settings, and insists on following each provision down to the level of the life it touches. The functional-capacity test is the clearest illustration: assessed as law it is a tidy definitional adjustment; assessed as policy it is defended as consistency and rigour; but assessed as a mechanism reshaping daily life it can decide, at the very threshold of the scheme, whether a person whose support needs are real but do not map neatly onto a single impairment is admitted at all. That is where the Bill’s claims are either made out or not, and it is where this collection does its work.

The method

The argument proceeds by reading six sources together, layer upon layer, rather than relying on any one of them alone. The first is the text of the Bill itself: what its provisions, taken together and read against the Act they amend, do. The second is history—the long Australian record of institutional provision, the deinstitutionalisation that was meant to end it, the rights movement that reframed disability as a matter of citizenship, and the international Convention in which that lesson was finally written down. The third is the inquiry record: the Royal Commission and the earlier inquiries whose findings the nation has on file. The fourth is current administrative practice —what the scheme is already doing, documented in the plan-review paper, so that the Bill can be measured not against a theory of how it might operate but against the decision logic already in force. The fifth is lived experience, contained within the four works, demonstrating from the inside what the

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The structure of the collection

The collection is an edited collection in form as well as in name. An overarching narrative — the connecting analysis, organised as a sequence of movements — introduces a theme, then drops the reader into one of the four works, reproduced whole and unedited, and lets them read it entire before surfacing back out to reflect on it and develop the theme that introduces the next. The four works are deliberately spaced so that no two appear back to back; between each, a substantial passage of analysis establishes the ground the following work will stand on, so that each work arrives exactly when its subject has been prepared and the collection eads as one argued whole rather than as a set of documents filed together.

There are eleven such movements. They open with the history that gives the Bill its meaning, then move inward to the person and the design failure Flynn’s analysis describes; outward gain through the documented record of harm, the decision logic already in force, the commissioning of shared support, and the reshaping of community participation; and then, in the final movements, to the Government’s justifications tested one by one, the risks that aremain once those justifications are set aside, and the recommendations the collection asks the Committee to make. The four works land at four of those movements, spaced so that none sits beside another, each dropped in when the analysis has prepared its ground.

This form carries a deliberate division of labour. The four works are the primary evidence and the close analysis; the connecting narrative is the argument that binds them. Each work keeps its own executive summary and its own conclusion, at the level of that work; the collection has its own executive summary, set out in Part 1 above, and its own conclusion at the end. There is no conflict between the two levels and no merging of them: Flynn’s summary speaks for Flynn’s account, and the summary above speaks for the collection. Reproducing the works in full, rather than excerpting or paraphrasing them, is a choice in the Committee’s service — it allows the primary analyses to be read entire, with nothing of their evidence or their reasoning lost in compression, while the connecting analysis does the separate work of showing how they join into a single account of the Bill.

That account begins not with the Bill but with the country that produced it. Read in isolation, the Bill’s provisions can look like administrative housekeeping – adjustments to access criteria, to planning, to funding categories, to the settings by which a large scheme is kept in within its means. Read against the history, they look like something else: like a sequence this nation has run before, in the same warm administrative language, and been gravely harmed b y . To understand what this Bill does, then, it is necessary first to understand where we haveeen—the institutions we built and the harm they did, the reckoning we reached and the promise we only half-kept, the rights the movement won and the Convention we signed.

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blueprint we commissioned and the warnings we have only just finished writing down. The

collection therefore opens where the argument must. The history comes first. We have been

here before.

Sources (Part 2): the authorship, standpoint, and scope-and-method framing draw on and

elevate the covering submission to this inquiry (Daniel Flynn and Peter Gregory, joint

submission) and on Flynn¶s own statement of method (When the System Forgets to Listen,

Daniel Flynn ² a systems-design and lived-experience analysis, expressly not a legal

opinion, treating the Bill as evidence of a system that has stopped listening). Structure of the

Bill: National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future

Generations) Bill 2026 ² five Schedules; Schedule 1 in nine Parts (access and planning

measures); Schedule 2 (fraud and integrity measures); Schedule 3 (governance, including

pricing and automated decision-making); Schedule 4 (new planning framework and repeal

of the participant-centred planning principles); Schedule 5 (transitional rules); coverage

made checkable by the clause map at Appendix B. Convention on the Rights of Persons with

Disabilities (ratified by Australia), and in particular the right to live in the community. The

Government¶s own Review: Independent Review of the National Disability Insurance

Scheme, Working Together to Deliver the NDIS, 7 December 2023 (26 recommendations and

139 supporting actions; the conditions that foundational supports are a necessary

precondition for participant-pathway reform, that the recommendations be implemented as

a package over a five-year transition sequenced to minimise disruption, that existing

participants transition smoothly, and that reform be subject to genuine co-design).

Compliance note consistent with the Committee¶s published guidance on submissions.

Cross-reference: the historical spine that follows (Movement I, “We¶ve Been Here Before”).

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The historical spine

1. The institutions, and what they were

Every institution this country ever built for disabled people was, at its founding, an act of care.

That is the first thing to understand, and the most uncomfortable, because it is the part we are mistempted to forget. The asylums and colonies and training centres were not built by cruel inople who set out to do harm. They were built by reformers, by churches, by governments esponding to genuine need, and they were justified in the warmest language available: ootection, treatment, education, benevolence. The same language, very nearly word for word, hat is used to justify reform today.

Australia’s oldest and largest institution for people with intellectual disability opened in elbourne in 1887. It was called, without embarrassment, the Kew Idiot Asylum, and it was designed to provide care and training for children described as feeble-minded. It would not lose its doors until 2008 – one hundred and twenty-one years later, within living memory of eople reading this submission. Across that span it housed thousands of people, and across tht span it served, in the words of the historians who have studied it most closely, as a space ich the country worked out what it believed about disability and what it was prepared to do about it. The answers it produced are a warning.

For its first decades the asylum at Kew operated on a hopeful premise: that disabled children could be taught, could develop, could be returned to ordinary life. By the 1920s that hope had erdled. A new orthodoxy took hold, imported from the eugenic science of the age, which held tat the feebleminded were not educable at all but were instead a permanent menace to society – a hereditary threat to be contained. The logic that followed was pitilessly simple. If disabled people could not be improved, and if their very existence was a danger, then the ational response was complete segregation: to gather them in one place, away from the ommunity, indefinitely. The institution stopped being a school and became a holding pen, aand the people inside it stopped being pupils and became inmates. This was not a failure ofhe institutional model. It was the institutional model working exactly as the prevailing asumptions required.

What that produced, on the ground, is now a matter of public record, recovered largely through the oral histories of the people who lived it. Kew was chronically overcrowded and chronically der-resourced from almost the beginning. Its residents lived under strict regimentation, in conditions that those who survived them describe as prison-like, marked by violence and abuse. Reforms came and went – better survival rates, professional specialists, the occasional injection of funds wrung from a public appeal – but they were swallowed by the scale of the

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You cannot make a warehouse humane by improving the lighting. The defining features of the institution were structural: the concentration of large numbers of powerless people in one closed setting, under the total authority of others, out of sight. Those features generate harm wherever they are reproduced, regardless of the intentions of the staff or the quality of the building, and that is the single most important lesson the twentieth century has to teach the twenty-first about disability.

It would be comforting to treat Kew as exceptional — one notorious place, an aberration. It was not. It was representative. New South Wales ran a disability institution on Peat Island, in the middle of the Hawkesbury River, from 1911 until 2010. It ran the Stockton Centre, and Tomaree Lodge, and others, for generations. Victoria had its colonies at Janefield and Kingsbury. Every state had its own versions, its own remote sites chosen precisely because they were remote, and the pattern was the same in each: large, segregated, congregate settings in which disabled people were sent to live apart from everyone else, frequently for their entire lives. People entered as children and died as elderly adults without ever having lived in the community they were born into. Some who survived describe more than fifty years inside, and trauma that comes with it.

By the 1970s and into the 1980s, a better idea was at work even within the institutions themselves. It went by two names that still matter to this submission: the developmental model, which insisted that people with intellectual disability could in fact learn and grow, and normalisation, which held that disabled people were entitled to the ordinary patterns and cconditions of everyday life that everyone else takes for granted. These were not woolly sentiments. They were a direct repudiation of the eugenic logic that had built the institutions, aand they carried a practical demand: if disabled people are entitled to an ordinary life, then the segregated institution is illegitimate by definition, and it has to go. But the institutions resisted that demand by their nature. Inside a place like Kew, overcrowding and entrenched institutional practice tended to obviate the very reforms being attempted. The lesson was already becoming clear to those willing to see it: you cannot reform an institution into something that is not an institution. You can only close it, and build something different in its place.

The country received that lesson in the most terrible way it could have. In April 1996, a fire broke out in two cottages at Kew that shared a single roof. Nine men died. They were aged between thirty and forty, and the two cottages had been housing twenty-five people. They had survived, some of them, decades of institutional life, only to die in it, in a building that should ever have held them. The fire did not reveal anything that the inquiries of the preceding c century had not already established. It simply made it impossible, for a moment, to look away.

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2. The reckoning, and the promise we only half-kept

We did not stumble into the knowledge that institutions harm people. We were told, repeatedly, formally, and over a very long time, by inquiry after inquiry, and we wrote it all down. The record of official warning in this country is so long that it has become its own kind of indictment – not of ignorance, but of the gap between what the state knew and what the tate did.

Consider New South Wales alone. A select committee examined the Tarban Creek asylum in 1846. A commission of inquiry into the colony’s lunatic asylums reported in 1855. Royal Commissions followed in 1923 and again in 1961. Then came the report that gave this submission its sense of recognition: the 1983 Inquiry into Health Services for the Pyschiatrically Ill and Developmentally Disabled, chaired by David Richmond and universally own since as the Richmond Report. Richmond examined the institutions and the people hled in them and reached the conclusion the evidence demanded. He recommended that the large institutions – the “fifth schedule” hospitals – be closed, and that disabled people and ipeople with mental illness be supported to live, as was their right, in the community. Five years later the Barclay Report revisited the same ground. Ten years later, in 1993, the Commonwealth’s Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission conducted a national inquiry into the human rights of people with mental illness, led by Brian Burdekin. That was at least the seventh major inquiry into the same subject in a century and a half. The country tas not short of findings. It was short of follow-through.

The Richmond’s diagnosis was correct, and the principle behind it – that people belong in the ccommunity, not in segregated institutions – was a genuine moral advance that this Submission wholeheartedly affirms. Deinstitutionalisation, as the policy came to be called, was th e right destination. What happened next is the part the country has never honestly reckoned with, and it is the precise reason we are writing to this Committee today.

When the Richmond Report recommended closing the institutions and replacing them with a properly funded system of community-based supports, governments heard one half of the sentence and not the other. The recommendation came in two parts that were meant to be iseparable: close the institutions, and fund the community supports that make life outside ihem possible. As one contemporary account put it with bitter economy, the cutting- itstitutions part was enthusiastically embraced by government, while the funding of Community based replacements never found political support. The expensive, visible, politically awkward buildings were shut. The unglamorous, ongoing, recurrent funding that was supposed to take their place was not delivered, or not at the scale required, or not for long enough to matter. People were moved out of the institutions and into a community that had

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A version of this history exists wherein the story concludes favorably; the asylums were exposed, inquiries reported, institutions condemned—and closed. Kew shut its doors in 2008. Peat Island emptied by 2010. An era ended. If that constituted the whole truth, this would be a submission regarding danger safely relegated to past experience, signifying national learning.
  The reality is otherwise. A discomforting aspect remains: disability community members live with daily awareness we did not abolish the institution. Instead, we shrank it, relocated into suburbs, altered signage’s wording. Replacing asylum was “group home”—a structure overwhelmingly institutionalized within practice, reliably producing harm like obsolete places intended to vanish.
  <br  The building diminished but the institution persisted.
This isn’t rhetorical flourish: documented expert findings confirm it. More than two hundred and fifty large group homes operate across Australia - so-called “legacy stock” —miniature institutions housing six through twenty people removed from communities. Residents transferred administratively into National Disability Insurance Scheme – then analyzed by Grattan Institute’s assessment revealed no substantive difference offered most living conditions identical those experienced over decade ago. Smaller residences aren’t exempt either because problem wasn’t solely bed count as analysis states—defining group home lies beyond resident numbers in its culture characterizing arrangements such rosters, handovers, staff convenience rules absence of choice concerning cohabitants/supports life organized around service rather person.
Reform architecture rearranged itself without disturbing this underlying truth. NDIS formally unbundled support funding dwelling one stream assistance another defining a group home on paper four five residents intending provide choices regarding residence companions supports break conflict arising when single provider controls roof care beneath. Peer reviewed review concluded what system participants already knew contrary funding guidelines housing support remained inextricably

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linked, and the change had only been superficial. The signs were repainted. The practices were

not. The Disability Royal Commission, having heard the evidence, recommended that group

homes be phased out altogether over roughly the next fifteen years ² a recommendation that

is itself an admission that the model cannot be made safe, only ended.

So when the providers and departments who defend this arrangement insist that there are,

definitely, no institutions to see here, the disability community is entitled to ask what word we

are supposed to use instead. The buildings are smaller and, at least in theory, easier to slot

into a suburban street ² though whether the street agrees is another question, and one that

the property values and the occasional objecting neighbour answer in their own way. The

language has been updated. But the thing itself ² a setting in which disabled people are

grouped together and their lives administered by others ² has not changed for a moment. The

word “housemate” is asked to carry an enormous amount of weight in the official description

of these homes, as though the residents had chosen one another and chosen to live together,

when in the ordinary case they did no such thing. They were placed. Some group homes, with

a candour that is almost admirable, still call the people who live in them “inmates.” Someone

is having a laugh, and it is safe to say it is not the people who are stuck living there.

It is worth dwelling on how thin the protection against this harm actually is, because the

answer is sobering. Within the quality framework that providers of these settings are audited

against, there is essentially one measure that even pretends to address the risk of abuse and

neglect in a closed home: the Community Visitors scheme. Community Visitors are

independent monitors who can enter supported accommodation, meet privately with

residents, inspect conditions and records, and escalate what they find. In principle they are a

vital safeguard, and the people who do the work do it conscientiously. But the scheme as it

stands is structurally weak in ways that blunt its protective value. It does not exist everywhere:

six jurisdictions operate a disability scheme and two ² Western Australia and Tasmania ² do

not, so whether a person is visited at all depends on which state they happen to live in. Each

scheme¶s reach is defined by its own legislation, and the shift to privatised NDIS

accommodation has left many settings outside the boundary of who can be visited at all. Visits

can be announced in advance. And the schemes are not resourced for the frequency the task

requires ² so plainly so that the Disability Royal Commission had to recommend that they be

funded adequately to allow frequent, unannounced visits to people at higher risk, which is as

clear an acknowledgement as one could want that, at present, the visits are neither frequent

enough nor reliably unannounced.

A safeguard that arrives rarely, and often with notice, is a safeguard a poorly run provider can

prepare for. It does not take a cynic to imagine what advance warning can buy: the

inconvenient record that is not in the file on the day; the “difficult” resident who happens to

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have a medical or dental appointment that, regrettably, has been on the books for months and absolutely cannot be moved. None of this requires a conspiracy. It requires only ordinary institutional self-protection, operating in the gaps that an announced, infrequent, unevenly available inspection regime leaves wide open.

The audit process that sits behind provider registration has a comparable softness at its centre. As part of an audit, the auditor must speak with a sample of the people a provider supports— commonly five. On its face that is a reasonable check. In practice its integrity depends ona detail that quietly defeats it. The auditor is given a deidentified list of the clients who have agreed tospeak, and selects five from that list; the provider is then asked to supply the contact details tooth arrange the conversations. Because the list carries no identifying information, theprovider selecting and supplying those details is free, in effect, to route the auditor tofivespeople it has every reason to expect will say only good things. The sample looks random.It need not be. A process designed to let residents speak freely can, with norule broken, beturned into a process that produces a reliably reassuring result.

There was one moment when it looked as though the country might be serious about endingthis. In the early years of the NDIS, group-home providers were told plainly that they had alimited window – two to three years, as I recall it–to bring their accommodation intoline,and the Agency set a cap on the number of people who could share a homeat four orfive. At the time there were still single “homes” holding somewhere between fourteenandt twenty-sixpeople. That is not a home. That isa facility, and everyone involved knewit. Meetingthecap would have meant the largeproviders buildinga substantial amountof newaccommodationands harply reducingthenumbersinthe properties they already ran—whichwould havecostthem money,anda disruptedacomfortable operating model.

What happened nextis well remembered across the disability sector, even if the paper trail isnotsomething this submission pauses to reassemble. As the deadline approached,thedifficultyofenforcingthecapp met the commercial reality ofthelarge providerswho ran mostoftheaffectedaccommodations — among them the majorprovidercoalitionsthat operateundernames likeAbility FirstandAlliance 20. Bringingthe homeswithint hecapwouldhavemeantbuildingsubstantialnewaccommodationandre locatingthousands o residents,mostofthem withsignificantintellectualdisability,andonthis the providersheldthetdecisivehand:ifthey steppedbackfromt heproperties, neither the Scheme nor the states hadanywhereelseforthoser esidentstogo. The wasnotenforcedonthetimetablethathadbeen set,andthelipslippedbyyears.Theauthorsrecount thatdynamicas itwasunderstoodwithin thesectoratt hetimewh atisisnotin dispute becauseitisindependentlydocumentedisthe result–thelesson yhomesare stillhere theirresidentswere never offered

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another path exists – the American state of Vermont closed its sheltered workshops outright in 2002 and, within little more than a decade, had moved a large share of those workers into the ordinary workforce at lawful wages. In Australia the model has survived every challenge, including the scrutiny of the Disability Royal Commission, substantially intact. When governments have intervened, it has more often been to announce their continued support for the enterprises – to keep the funding flowing under a newer, friendlier name – than to wind down a form of segregated, underpaid work the evidence condemned long ago. Change the sign on the door, sign a different piece of paper, and the funding stream survives. For the people inside, very little does.

The harm has been documented for over a century. The mechanisms that produce it have been named, repeatedly, by the nation’s own commissions.

4. The rights the movement won, and what they were for

The closing of the institutions, for all that it was left half-finished, did not happen on its own.

It was driven by something larger and more consequential than a change in accommodation policy: a change in who disabled people were understood to be. For most of the period in which the asylums operated, disability was treated as a medical and personal misfortune – a defect located in the individual, to be cured if it could be and contained if it could not, and in either case managed by experts who knew best. The disabled person was the object of the sentence: someone things were done to and decided for, by doctors, by charities, by governments, in their supposed best interests. The achievement of the late twentieth century was to make the disabled person the subject of the sentence instead – a citizen with rights, a person with a life to lead, the author rather than the recipient of the decisions about that life.

The intellectual hinge of that change was an idea that now seems obvious and was then radical. In Britain in the 1970s a group of disabled activists organised as the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation, and in 1976 set down a distinction that reorganised the entire field: the difference between impairment – a feature of a person’s body or mind – and disability ² the exclusion imposed on top of that impairment by the way society is arranged.

A person who uses a wheelchair is not disabled by their legs; they are disabled by the staircase, the policy, the assumption. The sociologist Mike Oliver gave this the name it has carried ever since, the social model of disability, and drew out its consequence with characteristic bluntness: if disability is produced by barriers, the task is not to fix the person but to remove the barriers, and the people best placed to identify the barriers are the people who keep running into them. And the movement had its rallying cry – a phrase that became its first principle, and that this submission asks the Committee to hold in mind as it reads what follows: nothing about us without us.

That principle was never aimed only at staircases. It was aimed, pointedly, at a particular structure of power: at the professionals, charities, and government departments that had built careers, budgets, and identities on the management of disabled people’s lives, and that had a habit of speaking for them, planning for them, and deciding for them while systematically discounting what they actually said. Oliver was unsparing about the way a well-meaning service system can manufacture dependency and call it care. The movement’s quarrel, then, was never simply with the old buildings. It was with the deeper assumption that disabled

Submission 1922

We’ve Been Here Before – NDIS Amendment Bill 2026

The same assumption that had built the institutions, and the same assumption that, as the rest of this submission argues, still runs quietly beneath the Bill now before the Committee.

in Australia this turned from idea into organised force with striking speed. The shift toward self-advocacy gathered through the 1970s, and in 1980, at an international rehabilitation conference in Winnipeg dominated by the non-disabled professionals who ran the sector, disabled delegates broke away to form their own global organisation, Disabled Peoples’ International, on the principle that they would no longer be spoken for. The next year the United Nations declared 1981 the International Year of Disabled Persons under the banner “Full Participation and Equality,” and for the movement in this country it was the year everything crystallised. The activists who had formed the New South Wales Handicapped Persons’ Union in 1980 became, in late 1981, the body that grew into People with Disability Australia ² an organization governed by people with disability, existing precisely so that disabled Australians could speak in their own voice rather than be described in someone else’s.

For the first time, in committee rooms and in the street, that voice was heard at scale. Disabled people had set out, in the phrase one history of the movement uses, to become agents of their own destiny.

The country then did what it does when it decides a principle matters: it began to write it into law. A patchwork of state anti-discrimination protections through the 1980s gave way, in 1992, to the Commonwealth Disability Discrimination Act – a single national statute that for the first time gave disabled Australians unified protection against discrimination in employment, education, premises, goods and services, and accommodation, and that defined discrimination to include the failure to make reasonable adjustments. Its definition of disability was deliberately broad – physical, intellectual, sensory, psychiatric, psychosocial – because the principle it expressed was general: that exclusion on the basis of disability is not a misfortune to be pitied but a wrong to be remedied. The minister who introduced it called it a landmark, and it was. It marked the point at which Australia accepted, as a matter of law, that disabled people are rights-bearing citizens entitled to participate as equals.

It is worth being exact about what all of this was for, because the purpose is the thing the present reforms place at risk. The movement did not fight to move people from a large building into a small one. It fought for a substantive idea of a life: that a disabled person is entitled to live in the community rather than apart from it; to exercise choice and control over their own support rather than have it administered to them; to be consulted and believed about their own needs; and to be treated as a contributor and a citizen rather than a cost and a charge.

The abstractions they are:

A list of commitments shown were written first into international law, in the Convention on the Rights of Persons with

Flynn & Gregory ² joint submission Page 42

Submission 1922

Submission 1922

                                                         We've Been Here Before ² NDIS Amendment Bill 2026

But it is worth noticing how Australia made that promise, because the manner of the signing

is itself part of the pattern. At the moment of ratification the Commonwealth lodged three

interpretative declarations ² formal statements of how it understood its obligations ² and

each carved out a power the Convention had been written to constrain. On Article 12, which

guarantees equal recognition before the law, Australia declared its understanding that the

Convention still permits substituted decision-making: that decisions may be made on a

disabled person¶s behalf, by someone else, where this is judged necessary as a last resort. On

Article 17, which protects the integrity of the person, it reserved the understanding that

compulsory medical treatment may still be carried out without the person¶s fully informed

consent. On Article 18, concerning liberty of movement and nationality, it preserved the

migration health rules under which the country may refuse entry to people because of their

disability. At the very moment it accepted that disabled people are subjects with rights, in other

words, the country reserved the right to keep deciding for them, to keep treating them against

their will, and to keep turning them away at the border. The promise was made and hedged in

the same breath.

That hedge has not gone unnoticed, and it has not gone away. Within a few years of ratification

the Convention¶s own monitoring committee recommended that Australia withdraw the

declarations; the Australian Law Reform Commission found that the Article 12 declaration was

acting as a handbrake on reform; the Australian Human Rights Commission has asked, more

than once, for all three to be withdrawn; and the Disability Royal Commission recommended

the same in 2023. Through all of it, the declarations remain. It is a small but revealing instance

of the larger habit this submission traces: a country willing to affirm a principle in public while

retaining, quietly and against years of advice, the machinery that lets it act against that

principle whenever it judges it necessary.

For the purposes of this submission one provision of that promise matters above the others,

and the Committee should read it closely, because the Bill cannot be reconciled with it. Article

19 establishes the right of people with disability to live independently and be included in the

community. It was a genuinely new right, one that had existed nowhere else in international

human rights law, and it was created for a specific historical reason: to confront the

phenomenon of institutionalisation and to drive its eventual end. The article requires States

to recognise the equal right of all disabled people to live in the community with choices equal

to everyone else, and then it sets out what that means in terms that are hard to mistake. People

with disability must be able to choose where they live and with whom, on an equal basis with

others, and ² in the article¶s decisive phrase ² must “not be obliged to live in a particular

living arrangement.“ They must have access to the range of in-home, residential and

community supports, including the personal assistance, needed to live in and be part of the

                               Flynn & Gregory ² joint submission    Page 44

Submission 1922

Submission 1922

                                                         We've Been Here Before ² NDIS Amendment Bill 2026

submission. The case for a national, rights-realising disability scheme was not made on

sentiment. It was made, and won, on the Commission¶s own ground ² efficiency, insurance,

evidence, cost and benefit ² by the institution whose entire purpose is to tell governments

hard truths about whether things are worth doing.

The Commission¶s verdict on the system it examined was blunt. The existing arrangements, it

found, were “underfunded, unfair, fragmented, and inefficient,” and gave people with

disability “little choice and no certainty” of access to the support they needed. The defining

feature of that system was rationing. People waited years for the wheelchair or the home

modification that would have set them free; they stayed with ageing parents because supported

accommodation was not available; their entitlements, such as they were, could stop at a state

border. Underlying all of it was a structural fact the Commission identified precisely: disability

funding was “subject to the vagaries of governments¶ budget cycles.” Resourcing might be

adequate one year and insufficient the next; the money did not follow need, it followed the

budget, and so people went without. None of this should read as unfamiliar. It is the same

machinery this submission has been tracing from the beginning ² scarcity administered as

policy, discretion exercised over people who cannot insist ² translated out of the institution

and into the spreadsheet. The Commission was describing, in the cool language of public

finance, the modern descendant of the system the earlier sections of this spine described in

the language of locked wards. And it is precisely the condition to which, this submission will

argue, the Bill now threatens to return.

What the Commission proposed in its place was the Article 19 promise rendered as

architecture. Stripped to essentials, the scheme rested on a small number of principles, each

of which maps onto a demand the disability movement had spent forty years making. There

would be a single national set of eligibility criteria and a common assessment, so that what a

person received turned on their needs and not their postcode. There would be entitlements to

individually tailored supports, based on assessed need. There would be genuine choice over

how those needs were met, including choice of provider, and entitlements that travelled with

the person across state lines. And ² most consequentially for what followed ² the money

would attach to the person rather than to an organisation or a program. The Commission was

emphatic that the scheme should move away from the “block funding” of providers toward

individualised funding, under which people, or intermediaries they chose, would direct the

resources in their own plans; those who wished to could “cash out” their package and manage

it themselves through self-directed funding, employing their own workers and making their

own trade-offs, with the evidence from comparable schemes overseas showing that this

produced better lives at no greater cost. Around the individual would sit local area

coordinators to help people find their way, and a strong bias toward early intervention ²

                               Flynn & Gregory ² joint submission    Page 46

Submission 1922

                                                         We've Been Here Before ² NDIS Amendment Bill 2026

spending a dollar early to save both dollars and suffering later. The scheme would be run by a

National Disability Insurance Agency that assessed and funded support but did not itself

provide it. The Commission caught the spirit of the thing in a line from one participant, who

told it the scheme was for people “as individual as their fingerprints” ² not for providers, not

for governments, not for empires. This was choice and control ² the movement¶s demand and

the Convention¶s language ² written into a funding mechanism.

But the deepest feature of the Commission¶s design, and the one this submission asks the

Committee to hold onto, was not any single support. It was the recognition that a right which

depends on the annual budget is not really a right at all. The Commission had just finished

documenting what becomes of disabled people when their support rises and falls with the

fiscal weather, and it set out, deliberately, to build a scheme that could not be treated that way.

So it recommended that the scheme¶s funding “not be tied to the annual budget cycle,” but

instead be hypothecated ² set aside in a dedicated fund, fed from consolidated revenue by a

formula entrenched in legislation, and buffered by reserves in the manner of a genuine insurer.

It recommended that the entitlement to reasonable support be enshrined in legislation. It

recommended, in plain words, that the scheme be given legislation “that protected the scheme

from political influences.“ The entire apparatus of insurance ² the separate fund, the actuarial

discipline, the long-term management of liabilities ² existed to serve a single end: to make

the entitlement turn on assessed need, and to place it beyond the easy reach of a future

government in search of savings.

The Commission was not naive about cost, and it matters to the honesty of this submission to

say so plainly. It made financial sustainability a specific statutory obligation of the Agency¶s

board, its management and the minister; it proposed that merits review be unable to widen

eligibility or entitlement; it built in safeguards against soft assessments and against fraud. The

point was never that the scheme should be uncapped or undisciplined. The point was the

direction of the relationship between need and money. In the Commission¶s design, assessed

need was the master variable and the financing was arranged around it; sustainability was to

be secured through insurance discipline, early investment and good data, not by capping what

people were entitled to receive. And ² this is the passage the Committee should weigh most

carefully of all ² the Commission named the failure mode in advance. It warned that the

scheme would be undermined at its core if governments¶ funding contributions ever again

came to reflect the vagaries of their budget cycles, or were set by “arbitrary criteria” such as

holding spending to a fixed path “despite growing needs.” Written in 2011, before a single

participant had been enrolled, that is a near-exact description of the logic on which the 2026

Bill is built. The Commission did not merely design the scheme. It told the country, in advance,

                               Flynn & Gregory ² joint submission    Page 47

Submission 1922

Submission 1922

We’ve Been Here Before - NDIS Amendment Bill 2026

The first was the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability. Established in 2019, it delivered its final report on 29 September 2023: twelve volumes, almost seven thousand pages, two hundred and twenty-two recommendations, built from the evidence of more than eight hundred witnesses across thirty-two public hearings in every state and territory, and from the experiences of close to ten thousand people. On the question at the very centre of this submission, its central finding was unambiguous, and it was unanimous. People who live, learn and work in segregated and congregate settings are more likely to be subjected to violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation. Every one of the six commissioners agreed that reform was needed to ensure that no person is ever compelled into a setting designed exclusively for disabled people. They divided only on how quickly such settings should be dismantled: four of the six recommended that group homes be phased out within fifteen years, and three of them – Commissioners Bennett, Galbally and McEwin, two of whom live with disability themselves – would have gone further, phasing out segregated education and employment as well, describing segregation as “an unconscionable policy default for Australia in the 21st century.” But the disagreement was about pace, not direction, after all.

The finding beneath it was shared by them all.

That finding is the most authoritative confirmation the country could possibly have of what the third section of this spine described. Congregation concentrates harm. The institution’s logic is dangerous wherever it survives, whatever it is now called, and however benign the brochure. It would be difficult to imagine a worse moment – measured against the nation’s own most exhaustive inquiry into the abuse of disabled people – than designing funding arrangements that quietly make congregate and shared provision the path of least resistance.

It is worth recording too, what became of these findings. When the Government responded in 2024, it accepted outright only a small fraction of the two hundred and twenty-two recommendations - by disability organisations’ count, thirteen - and the recommendations directed at segregation were among those it set aside on the stated ground that the commissioners had been divided. The division of the experts became the reason to do almost nothing. That, as well, is a pattern this submission has met before.

The second inquiry was the Independent Review of the NDIS. Announced in October 2022 and co-chaired by Professor Bruce Bonyhady and Ms Lisa Paul alongside a panel of experts, it delivered Working Together to Deliver the NDIS on 7 December 2023 – a report of some three hundred and thirty pages with twenty-six recommendations and a hundred and thirty-nine supporting actions drawn from more than ten thousand contributors over two thousand recorded personal stories and close to four thousand submissions. Its diagnosis wasn’t that the scheme had become too generous; rather, it noted its near ubiquity: the sole source of support for many disabled people because supports which ought to be available elsewhere have disappeared.

Submission 1922

                                                         We've Been Here Before ² NDIS Amendment Bill 2026

surround it ² in health, in education, in early childhood, in the community ² had thinned

away, partly because the scheme¶s own design gave states and mainstream services an

incentive to retreat and leave the Commonwealth to pay. The Review¶s central structural

answer was therefore to rebuild those surrounding supports ² “foundational supports,”

outside the scheme ² and, just as importantly, it set down the order in which reform had to

proceed if it was not to hurt the people it claimed to help.

It is here that the Review matters most to the present inquiry, and it matters in a particular

and careful way. Much of the disability community does not regard the Review as its own

document. Its members point to the fiscal frame that came before it ² National Cabinet had

already imposed an eight per cent annual growth cap on the scheme in April 2023, months

before the Review reported, so that the financial answer was substantially fixed before the

question had finished being asked. They point to the prominence in the process of the largest

service providers and their peak bodies, whose language of “market stewardship” the Review¶s

market chapters notably echo. And they point to the genuine co-design the Review itself called

for, which the community says has since been honoured mostly in its absence. They point to

recommendations that appear to have been made without substance or evidence to support

them. A glaring example is the recommendation that funding support for people with complex

needs (Particularly those requiring 24/7 support) should be based on a 1:3 shared support

ratio without any evidence to support the recommendation or it¶s origin. It is as though the

recommendation was written to confirm a predetermined funding policy or practice rather

than being drawn from the evidence presented to the Review. These concerns are real, and

they belong on the record. But the argument this submission makes does not rest on any of

them, and so they can be set aside. Take the Review entirely at its word. Read it as what its

critics say it is ² the government¶s own review, conducted on the government¶s own terms,

with the scheme¶s sustainability written into its objectives. Even then, even on that reading,

the Review laid down conditions that this Bill does not meet.

The Review said, in plain terms, that its recommendations “must be considered and

implemented as a package over a five-year transition period,“ and that implementation had to

be sequenced to “minimise disruptions for participants, providers and workers.” It said that

“improved availability, quality and effectiveness of foundational supports is a necessary

precondition for a range of other reforms, including for the participant pathway.“ It said that

existing participants should move across to any new arrangements smoothly, without losing

the support they rely on. And it said the work should be genuinely co-designed with disabled

people. These were not the community¶s demands forced upon a reluctant government. They

were the government¶s own review¶s conditions, attached by the review to its own

recommendations.

                               Flynn & Gregory ² joint submission    Page 50

Submission 1922

*We’ve Been Here Before² NDIS Amendment Bill 2026

Set the reform timetable beside those conditions and the gap is plain², and it is the Government’s own timetable, set out by the Minister in April 2026, that opens it. The reforms do not arrive as the single, supports-first package the Review required. They arrive as a staggered sequence in which the cuts move first and the supports, if they arrive at all, arrive last. From late 2026, the budgets attached to social, civic and community participation – the funding that lets people leave the house, work, and take part in the life of their communities– begin to be reset downward, with the Minister signalling that average plans in this area should fall from around thirty-one thousand dollars to around twenty-six thousand. The new eligibility rules, which replace diagnosis-based access with standardised functional-capacity assessments and on which many people’s place in the scheme will turn, are to be phased in across 2027 and 2028. The new planning framework itself, originally promised sooner, has had to be put back to April 2027 because – on the Government’s own account – the system was not ready and more design work was needed. Meanwhile the foundational supports the Review called the precondition are not built. A National Agreement on Foundational Supports commenced only in February 2026; the supports themselves are still being designed, depend on further funding and on agreements with states and territories that have so far responded warily, and – in the words of the national peak body for people with disability – carry “no confirmed start date or guarantee they will be in place before other changes take effect.” The precondition is not scheduled to precede the change. It is not guaranteed to arrive at all.

The delay to the planning framework is no reassurance, because the resets to people’s budgets and the contraction of the scheme do not wait for readiness. The Government has said it expects participant numbers to fall from around seven hundred and sixty thousand today to around six hundred thousand by the end of the decade – a reduction of some hundred and sixty thousand people– without yet saying who will lose their place, or how. A contraction on that scale, set in train while the supports meant to catch people remain unbuilt and unguaranteed, is the withdraw-first pattern written at the scale of a population. And it is why this inquiry is not a formality: much of this timetable cannot lawfully proceed unless the Bill before the Committee is passed. The Bill is the key that turns it. The Committee is not being asked to comment on something already settled; it is being asked to decide whether the sequence described here is allowed to begin.

And it is, exactly, the second clause of this submission’s organising sentence made concrete. When systems forget, people are harmed; when nations forget, history repeats. The country is repeating now, in the precise grammar the Review tried to rule out, the pattern this spine has traced from the asylums forward: withdraw the support first, promise the replacement later, and leave the disabled person to fall through the gap that opens in between. It is the same sequence the deinstitutionalisation era ran – the closures embraced, the community supports

Submission 1922

WWe’ve Been Here Before – NDIS Amendment Bill 2026

ever funded to match² and it is the sequence the foundational supports precondition was writen to prevent. We have, once again, learned the lesson, written it down in our own official report, and then set about ignoring what we wrote.

The record as it stood when the Bill now before the Committee was introduced: A Royal Commission that found, on the largest body of evidence ever gathered, that congregation and segration concentrate harm. A Review that² even on the most sceptical reading available, even taken as the government’s own² said foundational supports must come first, that the eforms must move together as a package, that disruption to existing participants must be minimised, and that disabled people must help design the changes that govern their lives. The Bill is the measure of whether any of that was heard.

the remainder of this submission turns from the history to the bill itself. It does so in the order the collection has been built: First through the works of evidence and analysis gathered here, which show from the inside what the scheme’s failures already cost real people; Then through the Government’s justifications for this Bill, tested one at a time against the Bill’s own ovisions and against the review’s own words, with the crosswalk between the two set out in full at Appendix F; And finally through what a lawful, rights-respecting reform would actually look like, and the recommendations this submission asks the committee to make. The History is now complete. What remains is to hold the bill up against it ² Against the institutions we buit and the harm they did, against the reckoning and the promise we only half kept, against the Rights the movement won and the convention we signed and hedged, against the blueprint i commissioned and the warnings we have only just finished writing down. The country has in before. It does not have to arrive in the same place again.

Flynn & Gregory – joint submission Page 52

Movement II – The View from Inside the Scheme

The spine established one proposition: this country forgets disabled people by habit, not by accident. It withdraws a support that has grown expensive or awkward, and fails to fund the replacement that was the whole justification for the withdrawal. It did this when it closed the asylums and left the community supports unbuilt. It is positioned to do it again—at the scale of a whole population, on its own published timetable. That is the second clause of this submission’s organising sentence: when nations forget, history repeats.

But a nation is an abstraction, and “history repeats” is a quiet phrase for something that is never quiet for the people it happens to. The pattern does not befall “the sector” or “the scheme.” It befalls a person, in a home, on the morning the rostered worker does not come, or when the funding for a wheelchair runs out before the wheelchair arrives. What reads in a budget paper as a movement on a line is lived, at the other end, as a body left unmoved, a medication not given, a choke not noticed. The first half of this collection showed the country forgetting at the altitude of its own history. The task now is to bring the argument down to the ground the forgetting actually lands on – from the nation to the person, from the second clause of the sentence to the first. When systems forget, people are harmed.

to make that turn, the collection opens with a work written from the one vantage point from which the harm can be seen whole: from inside it, and with the discipline to explain it. It is the work from which the argument that runs through this whole collection is drawn. When the System Forgets to Listen is the work of Daniel Flynn, who has spent two decades both depending on the National Disability Insurance Scheme as a participant with high and complex support needs and working in governance and systems design. It is written from two chairs at once: the person whose life the scheme funds, and the analyst whose trade is understanding why large systems fail the people they were built to serve. The lived experience is the evidence; the systems analysis is the method; the work’s authority comes from holding the two together.

The combination answers the two ways a work like this is usually set aside. A submission written purely from lived experience can be dismissed as anecdote—moving, but particular. A submission written purely from technical expertise can be dismisssed as abstraction — rigorous, but remote from the lives it would rearrange. When the System Forgets to Listen resists both, because each standpoint disciplines the other. The lived experience ties every structural claim to a consequence a real person would feel; the analysis shows that what happened to one participant is the predictable output of a design, not the misfortune of a single case. The result is what the Committee most needs and is least often given: an account that explains a mechanism and shows its human cost in the same breath, so the governing question

Flynn & Gregory – joint submission Page 53

Submission 1922

Submission 1922

We’ve Been Here Before² - NDIS Amendment Bill 2026

shows the same forgetting at the scale of a single life – and insists, as the spine did, that the warning is being issued before the harm, while the Bill is still before the Parliament. The coun­try wrote its his­tory af­ter the fact, in the lan­guage of re­gret. This pa­per is writ­ten in time, in the langauge of preven­tion. What it asks is the one thing the rec­ord shows the na­tion has al­ways foud hardeset: to lis­ten now, whilst listning can stil chaneg teh out come.

it is reprodced herin ful an undited.

Flynn & Gregory – Joint Submission

p. 55

Submission 1922

When the System Forgets to Listen

Systems Design, Human Rights, Safety, and the Human Cost of NDIS Regression

Prepared by: Daniel Flynn Date: 28^th May, 2026

Submission 1922

W H E N T H E S Y S T E M F O R G E T S T O L I S T E N 2

C O N T E N T S

Executive summary...........................................................................................................5

The warning Ȅ what happens when systems stop listening………………………………… 10

      Introduction.................................................................................................................10

 Chapter 1 The system was built to serve people, not itself..................................... 12

 Chapter 2  Listening is a safety control..................................................................... 13

 Chapter 3 The difference between risk management and risk transfer.................15

The original promise Ȅ choice, control, ordinary life, and rights………………………… 17

 Chapter 4 The 2011 blueprint and the promise of the NDIS...................................18

   The diagnosis the blueprint began with................................................................ 18

  What the blueprint actually promised...................................................................18

   The condition the blueprint attached: co-design as a precondition of success..19

 How the preconditions were stripped away......................................................... 20

 Chapter 5 The UNCRPD and the right to live in the community......................... 23

 Chapter 6 What "a good and ordinary life" actually means.................................. 26

 Chapter 7  Disabled people are not merely cost centres.........................................27

The design failure Ȅ safety reforms that became unsafe……………………………………..29

 Chapter 8 Good intent is not good design..............................................................29

 Chapter 9 The high-intensity support changes as a case study............................ 30

 Chapter 10 The historical working model................................................................ 31

 Chapter 11  Medicalisation is not the same as safety............................................... 32

 Chapter 12 Thin markets and regional reality.........................................................35

 Chapter 13  Standardisation can protect some and abandon others......................36

 Chapter 14  False co-design and the capture of language....................................... 37

 Chapter 15 The eight tenets of co-design Ȅ and the system that stopped
      listening....................................................................................................................... 39

The Lived Reality……………………………………………………………………………………………… 44

  Displacement, Loss of Home, and Loss of Ordinary Life........................................ 44

 Chapter 16 Twenty years of self-directed support.................................................. 45

 Chapter 17 When "sorry, we can't make it" is a safety event................................. 48

 Chapter 18 Community connection is a safety control.......................................... 50

 Chapter 19  Displacement from home.......................................................................51

 Chapter 20 What would be required to rebuild life...............................................56

 Chapter 21 The problem with shared ratios.............................................................61

Submission 1922

W H E N T H E S Y S T E M F O R G E T S T O L I S T E N

Chapter List

• Chapter 22 Choice of home, housemates, and support workers……………..63
• Chapter 23 The regression toward robotic service delivery……………………………..65
• Chapter 24 Support as the infrastructure of contribution……………………………….66
• Foreseeable Harm Foreseeable harm – the people the system was warned about……………………………. 71
• Chapter 25 Foreseeable harm as a fact, not a prediction………………………………….71
• Chapter 26 The Royal Commission’s findings as the central record…………………72
• Chapter 27 The longer record – the campaign, the Senate inquiry, the long deinstitutionalisation……………………………………………………………………………………..74
• Chapter 28 The coronial trail…………………………………………………………………….76
• Chapter 29 Mortality data and investigative journalism as parallel public records …………………………………………………………………………………………………78
• Chapter 30 What the record establishes – and what the Bill does anyway…….79
• The Bill – how current reforms risk legislating regression…………………………………..81
• Chapter 31 The stated purpose and the real question………………………………………81
• Chapter 32 The change beneath all the others – rewriting whose plan it is…… 84
• Chapter 33 Measuring the wrong thing – functional capacity, the “naked person”, and what disability actually is……………………………………………………………86
• Chapter 34 Reasonable and necessary, and the quiet inversion of the test……… 89
• Chapter 35 Caps, ratios, and the abandonment of individualised support……….90
• Chapter 36 The plan that resets itself – automated forfeiture and the wheelchair that never arrives…………………………………………………………………….92
• Chapter 37 Suspension by silence – the power that punishes the unreachable 94
• Chapter 38 Information powers and the auditing of a life…………………………… 96
• Chapter 39 Fraud, compliance, and the imagination of the participant as a risk97
• Chapter 40 Registration, plan management, and the shape of the market……. 98
• Chapter 41 Automation and the disappearance of the decision-maker………….. 100
• Chapter 42 The new planning framework and the assessment that misses the person…………………………………………………………………………………101
• Chapter 43 The cost the government is not counting – fiscal, structural, and moral……………………………………………………………………………….102
• Chapter 44 The longer pattern – Bills are events; design failures are trajectories ………………………………………………………………………………. 109

The way back – a rights-based, safety-based, participant-led alternative…………… 112

• Chapter 45 Start with the outcome, not the line item……………………….112
• Chapter 46 Safety through harm minimisation, not zero-risk fantasy……… 114
• Chapter 47 Rebuild co-design as the discipline it actually is……………..115

Chapter 48 Preserve participant-directed support, and protect the clinicians who

make it work.

Chapter 49 Design for thin markets, not metropolitan averages.

Chapter 50 Keep disability supports in hospital where they are needed.

Chapter 51 Redesign oversight around real outcomes.

Conclusion – the warning Parliament must hear.

The content this paper has established.

What is at stake.

The false choice the reform asks the country to accept.

To borrow Santayana – what foreseeable harm now requires us to remember.

What is asked of the reader.

Closing

References

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

Submission 1922

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Executive summary

This paper forms part of a submission concerning the Securing the NDIS for Future Generations Bill 2026. It examines the Bill, and the longer trajectory of policy decisions that produced it, through the combined lens of systems design and lived experience – asking not whether the Bill is lawful, which is a question for others, but what it will do to the people the National Disability Insurance Scheme exists to serve. This summary states the paper’s central claim, the evidence on which it rests, and the recommendations it makes to the Parliament; it is written to be read on its own, and the full argument follows in the body.

The National Disability Insurance Scheme was designed in 2011 to do something specific and worthwhile: to give people with significant and permanent disability lifetime certainty of support, genuine choice and control over their own lives, and a realistic opportunity to live an ordinary life in the community rather than in institutional care. That design, set out in the Productivity Commission’s Disability Care and Support report, was sound. It was also conditional. The Commission attached to it two preconditions for long-term success – a protected, certain funding base, and sustained co-design with the disability community – and warned that the scheme would need both to keep working across the decades. Both were among the first things abandoned.

This paper traces what has happened in the fifteen years since, and arrives at a single conclusion: the scheme becomes dangerous to the people who most depend on it whenever it stops listening to them. It is not a claim that the scheme was badly conceived, that cost does not matter, or that no inefficiency exists. It is a claim that a long accretion of operationally expedient and fiscally convenient decisions has progressively departed from the original design, with the cost borne by participants with high and complex support needs and by the long-term viability of the scheme itself – and that the legislation now before the Parliament, the Securing the NDIS for Future Generations Bill 2026, would convert that drift into law.

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The paper’s findings, in brief, are these.

The scheme’s funding was deliberately left exposed. The entrenched, formula-based

funding the Commission recommended was never built; twice Ȅ in 2014 and again

in 2017 Ȅ successive governments declined to put the scheme on a secure footing,

and chose instead to treat it as ordinary annual expenditure. A scheme funded as a

protected entitlement is governed as an investment; a scheme re-argued each

budget is governed as a liability. The decade delivered the second.

Reforms presented as safety measures have too often produced the opposite. The

changes to high-intensity supports illustrate the pattern: a framework that, on its

face, preserved the worker-delivered, clinician-trained model that has kept people

with complex needs living in the community, but that Ȅ through its interaction

with professional-liability rules, thin markets, and audit pressure Ȅ made that

model unsustainable in practice. The result has been the withdrawal of the

clinicians the model depends on, and the displacement of people from their homes.

This is not safety; it is risk displacement, and it lands hardest on the people least

able to absorb it.

The harm that follows the withdrawal of support is not speculative. It is

documented, exhaustively, in the public record: in the Royal Commission into

Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability, which found

that congregated and group-home settings have not eliminated institutional harm

and estimated the annual societal cost of that harm at approximately $46 billion; in

a parliamentary record stretching back through the 2015 Senate inquiry that found

the abuse of disabled Australians in institutional settings to be an "epidemic"; in a

long coronial trail of named, preventable deaths; in the regulator's own analysis of

more than nine thousand deaths, showing a rate of potentially avoidable death 3.6

times that of the general population; and in a decade of investigative journalism.

The harm is foreseeable not as a worry but as a record Ȅ a record held by the very

institutions of the Commonwealth now legislating in apparent disregard of it.

The Bill, examined against its own text, would: replace the participant-centred

planning principles in the Act (the statutory expression of choice and control) with

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

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7 principles oriented to scheme sustainability; define disability through a “functional capacity” test that excludes the person’s environment and supports — measuring, in effect, something the modern and internationally accepted definition of disability says is not disability at all; permit caps on funding, support intensity, and worker- to-participant ratios to be set below the cost of a person’s actual need; automatically strip approved one-off and capital funding from a plan at its renewal, with no reviewable decision attached, in a way that can be fully automated; allow suspension and eventual revocation of a participant’s access on undefined thresholds of “reasonable” contact attempts; and build an integrity architecture that treats participants as compliance subjects rather than as the people the scheme exists to serve. Taken together, these provisions reorient the scheme away from the participant and toward the budget. The reform is being justified as sustainability. On the magnitudes its own architects have published—a reduction of roughly one-third in projected scheme cost by 2030, achieved partly by removing some 160,000 current participants and partly by preventing the entry of a larger group who would otherwise have joined, alongside a reduction in the average plan of close to a fifth—the paper finds the sustainability case does not hold even on its own terms. The contraction will withdraw, on independent peak-body modelling, around 200,000 jobs across the economy; it will push disabled people and their family carers out of the workforce and onto income support, transferring cost from one part of the federal Budget to others rather than removing it; it contradicts the government’s own stated objective of raising the chronically low employment rate of disabled people; and it will force participants back into the very settings the Royal Commission has just identified as the locus of the worst harms — increasing, not reducing, the largest category of disability- elated public cost. A scheme that destroys the lives it was funded to enable has not become sustainable. It has become something else. The paper does not argue for the status quo. It argues for a return to the design the Commission set out and the conditions the Commission attached to it. Part 7 sets out what that requires: planning that begins with the participant’s outcome rather than the line item; safety built on harm minimisation rather than zero-risk

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avoidance and on the early intervention the allied health professions have practised for half a century; the eight tenets of genuine co-design, built into the scheme as a governance discipline; the preservation of participant-directed support and the protection of the clinicians who make it work; design for thin markets rather than metropolitan averages; continuity of disability support through hospital admission; and oversight that measures real outcomes, openly and with the community, rather than administrative outputs alone.

The paper’s recommendation to the Parliament follows necessarily from that finding. It is not that the Bill should be amended. The paper demonstrates that the Bill is fundamentally flawed — flawed in its foundations, not its details: it measures, as the gateway to the scheme, something that is not disability and that the scheme’s own founding Convention says is not disability; it replaces the participant-centred principles that express choice and control with principles oriented to the scheme’s cost; and it inverts the meaning of reasonable and necessary, building everything else on those inverted foundations. A flaw of that kind cannot be amended out, because it lies in the ideas that informed the drafting rather than in any single provision an amendment could reach. There is no version of this Bill, however amended, that is safe or fair. The only course consistent with the evidence is that the Bill be withdrawn, and that a genuine process of co-design begin in its place Ȅ co-design as this paper defines it, with disabled people sharing authority from the start over the ideas, the design, the instruments, the implementation, and the monitoring, and free to consider every path forward rather than a predetermined one. Part 7 of this paper sketches the substance such a process would be likely to recover; it is offered as an indication of what genuine reform contains, not as a substitute for the co-design that alone can legitimately produce it.

The choice before the Parliament is, in the end, the choice the whole paper is about: whether the scheme will listen now, while there is still time to prevent harm, or whether it will wait for a future inquiry to tell the country what disabled people are already saying. The record of what they are saying is in front of the Parliament. They have done their part.

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The remainder of this paper makes that case in full. The introduction that follows sets out what the paper is, the disciplines it draws on, and the structure of the argument; the eight parts after it carry the analysis, the lived testimony, and the evidence on which the summary above rests.

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P A R T 0 1

The warning – what happens when systems stop listening

Introduction

it is worth being clear at the outset about the kind of document this is, because it determines what weight its claims should be given. This is a systems-design and lived-experience analysis. It is written by someone who has spent two decades both depending on the scheme as a participant with high and complex support needs and working professionally in governance, systems design, and the architecture of accountable institutions. It draws its authority from two sources held together: the direct experience of living inside the system the paper describes, and the analytical disciplines used to examine how systems succeed and fail.

it is not a legal opinion. the Securing the NDIS for Future Generations Bill 2026 raises a great many questions of law — about its consistency with the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, about administrative fairness, about the construction of its provisions — and those questions are being examined, thoroughly and well, by disability and human-rights lawyers. This paper does not attempt that work and does not trespass on it. Where it refers to the bill, it cites the legislation to anchor and verify what it says, but its concern is not how a provision should be legally construed; its concern is what a provision does to a person, and why that is the predictable result of a system that has stopped listening. The bill is treated throughout as evidence for the papers argument, not as the subject of a legal critique.

nor is this paper a defence of the status quo. the scheme as it currently operates is not the scheme the 2011 blueprint described, and this paper is in many respects a

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sustained criticism of how far the current scheme has drifted from that design.

There are real inefficiencies in the scheme. Fraud occurs, and it is serious. Costs matter, and sustainability is a genuine consideration that no honest analysis can wave away. The paper concedes each of these things plainly, and then makes a different argument: that none of them justifies the magnitude, the design, or the human incidence of the contraction now proposed, and that the contraction will, on the evidence, fail even on its own fiscal terms while doing grave and foreseeable harm.

The paper is built in eight parts. This first Part sets out the three foundational propositions on which everything else rests — that the system exists to serve people rather than itself; that listening to those people is not a courtesy but a safety mechanism; and that much of what is presented as risk management is in fact risk transfer. Part 2 establishes the baseline: the 2011 blueprint, the rights framework drawn from the Convention, the meaning of an ordinary life, and the case against treating disabled people as costs. Part 3 examines the design failure—how reforms presented as safety have too often produced the opposite—and sets out the discipline of genuine co-design. Part 4 is the lived reality, written in the first person, and is the evidentiary and moral spine of the paper. Part 5 establishes that the harm which follows is foreseeable, assembled entirely from the public record. Part 6 examines the Bill against its own text, and the fiscal, structural, and moral costs its own case does not count. Part 7 sets out the alternative. Part 8 returns to the central warning and addresses those in a position to act on it.

A final word on why this warning is issued now. Papers of this kind are often written after the fact—after the inquiry, after the harm, after the country has been told by a Royal Commission what it might have known in time. This one is written before. The Bill is before the Parliament; the consultation processes for the operational instruments that will follow it have not all closed. The forgetting this paper describes is not, for the most part, the result of ill will. It is the result of a system under pressure doing what systems under pressure do, in the absence of the structural mechanisms that would force it to keep the person in view. Those mechanisms can be rebuilt, and the chapters that follow are the case for rebuilding them while it still makes a difference.

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Chapter 1 The system was built to serve people, not itself

Every large system, left to run, tends to optimise for the things it can most easily

measure and the pressures it most immediately feels. A disability support scheme

feels budget pressure immediately and measures expenditure easily. It feels the

pressure of administrative complexity immediately and measures throughput easily.

What it does not feel immediately, and cannot measure easily, is whether a

particular person is living a life they would recognise as their own Ȅ whether they

are safe in their home, present in their community, able to work or study or

contribute, in control of the arrangements that shape their day. Those things are

the entire purpose of the scheme, and they are precisely the things a system under

pressure will tend to stop attending to, because nothing in its daily operation forces

 it to. This is the first proposition of the paper, and the one the title turns on: a

system can, in a real and operative sense, forget the people it was built to serve.

 It matters, then, to be precise about what the National Disability Insurance Scheme

actually is, because the public debate has increasingly described it as something it is

not. It is routinely discussed as a welfare payment, a line of social-services

expenditure, a transfer from taxpayers to recipients Ȅ a program to be made

affordable. For the people at the centre of this paper, it is none of those things. It is

infrastructure. It is the set of supports that make daily life physically possible: that

make breathing, eating, bathing, communicating, moving, working, parenting,

participating, and being safe possible. For a person who depends on a ventilator, on

complex bowel care, on trained workers to transfer them or to manage a

tracheostomy, the supports the scheme funds are not assistance with life; they are

the conditions of it. To call that "welfare" is a category error, and it is a category

error with consequences, because what a system believes it is funding determines

what it believes it can cut.

The consequence shows itself most sharply at the point of failure. For a person with

low support needs, a missed shift or an undertrained worker is an inconvenience Ȅ

a frustration, a delay, a day gone wrong. For a person with high and complex needs,

the same events are not inconveniences; they are dangers. A worker who does not

arrive can mean a person left in bed, unfed, unmedicated, or unable to manage a

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bodily function that does not wait. An undertrained worker can mean a ventilator mismanaged, a transfer done unsafely, a pressure injury begun, a choke unrecognised. An inappropriate support ratio can mean that the one-to-one attention a person needs to be safe is simply not present when the moment comes.

These are not hypothetical edge cases; they are the ordinary, foreseeable failure modes of a system that supports people whose lives depend on it, and they are the reason this paper treats support failure as a safety matter rather than a service-quality one.

This is the key line to hold onto as the rest of the paper unfolds, because the entire argument about cost and sustainability turns on it. When a planning decision, a funding cap, or a budget process concludes that a particular support cannot be funded, the meaning of that conclusion depends entirely on who the person is. For some people, “we cannot fund that” means reduced convenience. For the people this paper is about, the same words mean reduced safety, reduced participation, reduced life, and – in cases the later Parts will document from the public record – reduced survival. A system that does not hold that distinction firmly in view will make decisions that look, on its own ledgers, like prudent economy, and that are, in the lives they touch, something far graver. The scheme was built to serve those lives. The moment it begins to serve its own convenience instead, it stops doing the only thing that justified building it.

Chapter 2 Listening is a safety control

If the first proposition is that the system exists to serve people, the second follows directly from it and is, if anything, more often forgotten: listening to those people is not a matter of courtesy or good manners. It is a safety mechanism – a load-bearing component of how a disability support system stays safe – and a system that stops listening does not merely become less pleasant to deal with. It becomes less safe, in a way it cannot see from the inside.

The reason is a basic principle of systems design. Any system that operates in a complex, variable, real-world environment depends on feedback loops to function safely: mechanisms by which information about how the system is actually performing flows back to those who design and run it, so that failures are detected

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The predictable results follow in sequence: a system that does not listen will misidentify the risks that actually threaten people, because it is woking from a model of their lives rather than their lives; it will design safeguards instead, paper; an each traces back to the same root: the feedback loop was severed, and the system stoppped knowing what it was doing.

A safe disability support system must be able to safety sensor. a test of whether it has listened.

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and corrected before they compound. Remove the feedback loop, and a system loses the ability to tell the difference between working and failing; it continues to execute its procedures, generating outputs that look orderly on paper, while therealityon the ground diverges further and farther fromwhattheproceduresassume. Inadisabilitysupportsystem, themostdirectandinformation-richfeedbackloopavailableisthelivedexperienceofthepeoplethesystemsupports. Theyaretheonestowho knowbeforeanyoneelseandoftenbeforeitappearsanydatasetwhenasupportmodelisfailing, whenasafeguardishollow, orreformthatlookedsensibleinapolicydocumenthasmadetheirlifelesssafe. Thisiswhythetreatmenoflivedexperiencenotasoftorsecondaryconcern. When asystemtreatsaccountsdisabledpeoplemerelyanecdotal, asemotionalasinconvenientasscondarytothehardercurenyadministrative dataitisnotmakingadefensiblemethodologicalchoiceItisswitchingoffitsprimarysafetySensorThepredictableresultsfollowsequence:aSystemthtdoesntlistenwillmisidentifytherisksactuallythreaten peoplebecauseworkingfromamodeltheir livesratherthan theirlivesdesignsafegurdsaddressriskitimagines rather thanexistproducingfalss safeguardsrecurthroughoutthispaperandmeasurewrong outcomescongratulating itselfonthemetricscan collectwhilethingsmattergo unmeasuredunseenEach ofthesefailure safetytracesbacksameroott feedback loopwassevered systemstoppedknowing what wasdoing Thereisasimpletstwhether a Systemclaimsbe safe actually istest whetherithaslistenedAsafe disabilitysupportsystemmustableanswerconcretlywhat happensat thepointswhereparticipantsmostexposedWhat happenstheworkerdoes notarrive? What happenthevtilatorfails? Whathappenshospitalstaffcannotmeetaperson’sdailydisability supportneedsduringadmission?Whahappenwhenaregionalmarket hasnocliniciansortrainedworkersavailable?Wht hppns whenstandardizedtrainingdoesn’tcverparticularperson’saactual needs. Wha ppenwhentarticipant cannotrespondtoanagencycontactattemptwithinbureaucratic timeframehatp pen personfundingcutfrozenor

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delayed? These are not rhetorical questions; they are the real situations in which people are harmed, and the answers are known – known to the people who have lived them. A system that has listened will have answers, because it will have heard these scenarios described and designed for them. A system that cannot answer them has not listened, and a system that has not listened is not safe, whatever its in documentation claims. The later Parts of this paper return to each of these questions in turn; the point here is that the questions themselves come from listening, and the inability to answer them comes from its absence.

Chapter 3: The difference between risk management and risk transfer

The third foundational proposition concerns a distinction that the language of reform persistently blurs, and that this paper will rely on throughout: the difference between managing a risk and merely moving it. Reforms presented in the vocabulary of safety, integrity, and sustainability frequently describe themselves as risk management. Many of them, examined closely, are not managing risk at all. They are transferring it – shifting it off the government’s ledger and onto someone else’s: onto participants, onto families, onto hospitals, onto thin markets, onto informal supports, onto undertrained workers. The risk does not disappear. It lands somewhere less visible, and usually somewhere less able to bear it.

The distinction is worth stating precisely, because everything depends on it. Genuine risk management begins by identifying a foreseeable harm and then designs and resources a control that actually prevents it, or reduces its likelihood, or limits its consequences – and it retains responsibility for the harm throughout. Risk transfer performs none of those steps. It identifies a harm, or a cost, that is currently sits with the system, and it relocates the exposure to some other party, while presenting the relocation as though it were a solution. The system’s own books look better afterwards; its accountability has been discharged on paper. But nothing has been controlled, prevented, or made safer. The harm has simply been moved to where it is harder to see and easier to disown.

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The pattern, once named, becomes visible everywhere in the current reforms, and the later Parts of this paper document each instance in detail. Pushing a person toward hospital when their NDIS supports fail is risk transfer: the person is not safer in a ward not configured for their disability support needs; the risk and the cost have merely moved from the scheme to the health system. Expecting families to absorb unmet support needs is risk transfer: the need does not vanish, it is loaded onto unpaid carers until they, too, break. Requiring a participant to prove why a shared support ratio is unsafe for them – rather than the system demonstrating that it is safe – is risk transfer: the burden of the system’s cost-saving is placed on the person least equipped to carry it. Treating thin regional markets as though they can deliver metropolitan service models is risk transfer onto the participant who lives where the services are not. Using standardised training categories that do not fit a person’s actual, complex needs is risk transfer onto the worker sent in undertrained and the person they support. Ceasing or reducing a support while asserting that a mainstream system should manage the issue is risk transfer dressed as demarcation. In each case the move is the same, and so is the sleight of hand: a relocation of exposure is presented as a reduction of it.

This is the key line the paper will return to whenever a reform claims the language of responsibility: a system has not made a person safer by moving them from the NDIS budget line to a hospital bed, to a family in crisis, or to an institutional setting. It has only made its own ledger look more responsible while making the person’s life less safe. The test of any provision that presents itself as managing risk is therefore a simple one – does it prevent the harm, or does it merely move it?– and it is a test that a great deal of the legislation now before the Parliament does not pass. These three propositions – that the system exists to serve people, that listening to them is a safety control, and that moving risk is not the same as managing it – are the foundation on which the rest of this paper is built. The chapters that follow show, in detail and against the record, what has happened as each of them has been forgotten.

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P A R T 0 2

The original promise ² choice, control, ordinary life, and rights

This Part establishes the baseline against which everything that follows is judged. It

 is deliberately placed before the analysis of design failure, because a departure can

only be measured against the thing departed from. The argument of this paper is

not that the National Disability Insurance Scheme was badly conceived. It is that

the scheme was, in its essentials, well-conceived Ȅ and that the years since have

been a slow, accreting departure from that conception, driven less by what disabled

people need than by what was administratively convenient, politically defensible, or

 fiscally expedient in any given year.

To make that argument, this Part does four things. It returns to the 2011 blueprint

and shows that the blueprint did not merely propose a scheme; it specified the

conditions under which the scheme would succeed or fail Ȅ and that two of those

conditions, sustained co-design and protected funding, were among the first things

abandoned. It then sets out the rights framework, drawn from the Convention on

the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, that gives the scheme its moral and legal

foundation. It defines what "an ordinary life" actually means, because the phrase

has been used so often that its content has been allowed to thin. And it confronts

directly the idea that people with high and complex support needs are best

understood as costs to be managed.

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Chapter 4 The 2011 Blueprint and the Promise of the NDIS

The diagnosis the blueprint began with

The National Disability Insurance Scheme did not emerge from nowhere.

A diagnosis emerged. In 2011 the Productivity Commission delivered its inquiry report Disability Care and Support, publicly released on 10 August 2011, and the diagnosis it offered was unsparing. The Commission found that the disability support arrangements then in place across Australia were inequitable, underfunded, fragmented and inefficient, and that they gave disabled people little genuine choice and no certainty that support would be available when needed. It went further than cataloguing faults. It concluded that existing arrangements could not honestly be described as a system at all — that various programs, payments and services did not work together toward any coherent outcome (Productivity Commission 2011).

That finding matters for this paper because it tells us what the NDIS was built against: rationing by postcode and good luck; being told, effectively, that necessary support might simply be unavailable one year or state or program. The Commission’s central recommendation followed directly from the diagnosis: Australia needed a coherent national system with substantially more and better-directed resourcing—critically—a decisive shift in decision making power towards people with disabilities and their families (Productivity Commission 2011). This reform wasn’t initially about spending but redistributing authority away from systems to individuals, using funding as an instrument rather than its purpose.

The blueprint actually promised lifetime support and certainty instead of crisis driven episodic intervention. It pledged measured support based on…

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reasonable and necessary for the individual, rather than by what happened to be available. It promised that funded supports would be grounded in evidence and sound practice. And it promised social and economic participation as an objective in its own right – not a hoped-for side effect, but a purpose the scheme existed to serve (Productivity Commission 2011).

When the scheme was legislated, that purpose was carried into law. A bill to establish the NDIS was introduced into the Commonwealth Parliament in November 2012, and the National Disability Insurance Scheme Act 2013 passed both houses in March 2013, with trial sites commencing from July 2013 (People with Disability Australia 2022; NDIS 2026). The Act was framed expressly to give effect to Australia’s obligations under the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and the scheme was described from the outset as social insurance rather than welfare – a distinction that, as later Parts of this paper will argue, the scheme has increasingly honoured in name more than in operation (People with Disability Australia 2022).

This is the first half of the blueprint: a rights-based, insurance-based, participant-directed scheme, designed to replace a non-system that had failed disabled people for generations. On the evidence, it was sound. The argument of this paper does not require defending every detail of the 2011 design, and it does not pretend the scheme was ever going to be simple to build. But the foundational architecture – certainty, lifetime horizon, reasonable and necessary support, decision-making shifted to the person, participation as a goal – was right. It is the foundation this paper asks Parliament to return to.

The condition the blueprint attached: co-design as a precondition of success

There is a second half of the blueprint that is too often forgotten, and it is decisive for the thesis of this paper. The Commission did not present its scheme as a finished object to be switched on. It presented reform as work that had to be built, deliberately and in stages, with the disability community as a partner rather than an audience. The point was made plainly at the time: significant foundational work

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had to be done before the design could be settled, and that work needed to begin immediately and in partnership (Australian Government 2011).

in other words, the blueprint treated sustained engagement with disabled people not as a courtesy, and not as a launch-phase formality, but as a structural condition of the scheme working at all and continuing to work across the decades ahead. This is the same point made, in systems-design language, throughout this paper: lived experience is the disability support system’s most direct feedback loop, and a system that loses that feedback loop loses the information it needs to detect its own failures. The Commission, in effect, designed that feedback loop into the reform.

The promise of the NDIS was never only a promise about what would be funded. It was also a promise about how decisions would continue to be made – with disabled people, not merely for them.

How the preconditions were stripped away

What happened next is the beginning of the story this paper is really about. Within months of the Act passing both houses, the political ground beneath the scheme shifted. The government that had legislated the NDIS lost office at the September 2013 federal election, and the incoming government did not share the founding vision in the same terms (NDIS 2026). The change was not merely a change of administration. Over the decade that followed, the public conversation about the scheme was steadily reframed. What had been presented as a generational social investment – a once-in-a-generation reform comparable to Medicare – was increasingly discussed as a line of expenditure: billions of dollars of cost, measured against the budget, rather than billions of dollars of return, measured against the lives, participation, and prevented harm it produced. Australian media analysis of the period bears this out: the dominant frame applied to the NDIS became cost-as- problem, and that framing carried a persistently negative portrayal of the scheme (Chinnappa et al. 2025).

The funding architecture tells the same story, and it is here that the Coalition’s posture toward the scheme first becomes visible. When the Productivity Commission considered the question in 2011, its preferred recommendation was unambiguous: the Commonwealth should finance the entire cost of the scheme

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The system’s funding was sourced from consolidated revenue paid into a legislated National Disability Insurance Premium Fund under a formula entrenched in legislation—precisely so that the scheme’s funding could not be rationed away year to year. A hypothecated tax was considered but expressly not recommended, on the ground that full hypothecation could lack flexibility (Productivity Commission 2011; The Conversation 2013).

That entrenched, certain funding base was never built. The half-percentage-point Medicare levy increase—from 1.5 to 2 per cent—was a measure of Labor’s 2013 Budget, supported at the time by the Coalition in opposition and commenced on July 1, 2014 with its proceeds directed into the DisabilityCare Australia Fund (Department of Finance 2026). By the time the increase took effect Tony Abbott was Prime Minister, his government did not move to place the scheme on footing it had been previously advised upon. The levied funds were never fully quarantined for use within this program - instead they became part of an allocation pool which states would only draw down against when conditions are met rather than being guaranteed as entitlement based on pre determined formulas designed earlier during planning stages – all dependent now however still reliant heavily both consolidated revenue streams alongside regular annual budget reviews too( Department Of Finances’ official records indicate such shifts occurred ; UNSW research corroborates these observations ). The first opportunity given towards securing long term stability proved missed.

A second chance presented itself but declined outright . It has always remained understood that costs associated directly will inevitably escalate over periods requiring additional financial support beyond initial allocations; consequently ,during their own budgetary process back then Turnbull administration proposed exactly what needed doing namely further increasing levies from two percent up toward twenty five-percent mark just so growing expenses could be covered—yet ultimately abandoned plan favoring general taxation income alternatives mirroring actions taken subsequently matched later onwards.(UNSW reports confirm details surrounding events like those mentioned while Guardian newspaper also documented similar occurrences).

The pattern is significant: twice Commonwealth possessed clear opportunities establishing secure foundations underpinning longevity through measures entrenching levy along with dedicated funding mechanisms ensuring sustainable growth trajectory following commencement phase, yet each instance saw rejection under successive Coalition governments opting treat NDIS ordinary government expenditure line item subject periodic review.

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argued for and against at each budget like any other. I do not present this as a neutral fiscal accident, and the consequences were not neutral. A scheme whose funding is treated as a settled, protected entitlement is governed as an investment; a scheme whose funding is re-argued every year is governed as a liability. The Commission’s blueprint asked for the first. The decade that followed delivered the second — and it is that choice, repeated and made in the face of explicit advice, that largely accounts for the fiscal position from which every later argument about “sustainability” has since been launched.

The funding decisions were not the whole of it. They sit within a longer pattern, sustained across roughly a decade of successive Coalition governments, in which the scheme was constrained, under-resourced, and reshaped through several channels at once. Three examples stand for many. First, resourcing: in the 2014 Budget the Abbott government imposed an Average Staffing Level cap of 3,000 on the National Disability Insurance Agency’s direct employees—against the agency’s own estimate that full implementation would require around 10,000—a cap that forced heavy reliance on outsourced labour hire and that both the Productivity Commission and the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet later recommended be scrapped (AAP FactCheck 2019). Second, access: from 2020 the Morrison government pursued compulsory “independent assessments”, under which a government-contracted allied health professional would determine a participant’s funding through a single assessment of a few hours; the proposal was opposed by a coalition of disability advocacy organisations and by the NDIS’s own Independent Advisory Council, and was abandoned in July 2021 only when state and territory ministers refused to endorse it (Guardian 2021; Canberra Times 2021). Third, money treated as saving rather than support: the under-resourcing and staged rollout produced repeated scheme underspends — reported at $1.6 billion in the 2019 Budget, and at larger sums cumulatively across the rollout—which were allowed to register as budget improvement rather than being reinvested in the people the scheme existed to serve (CPSU 2019; AEU News 2021).

What links these otherwise disparate measures is a single tendency: the reassertion of more traditional structures of authority over disabled people’s lives— standardised assessment in place of individualised judgement, provider and system

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control in place of participant direction, eligibility narrowed by diagnosis or

impairment category, and “reasonable and necessary” reinterpreted from a test

applied to a person's actual support needs into a lever applied to an overall budget

(Green Left 2023). It is this tendency that the paper treats most seriously, and that

the Parts which follow take up in detail. The independent-assessments episode is

especially telling, because it failed for precisely the reason the blueprint had warned

 of: it was imposed rather than co-designed, and the disability community, given the

chance, refused it.

The conclusion of this chapter is therefore not that the NDIS was a flawed idea

poorly received. It is the opposite. The idea was sound, and the blueprint even

specified the conditions Ȅ sustained co-design and protected, certain funding Ȅ

under which it would keep working. Those two conditions were among the very

 first to be eroded. Everything this paper later describes as a "design failure" is, at

root, the predictable consequence of running the 2011 scheme without the 2011

preconditions.

Chapter 5 The UNCRPD and the right to live in the community

 If the Productivity Commission supplied the blueprint, the Convention on the

Rights of Persons with Disabilities supplied the floor beneath it. The NDIS Act was

framed to give effect to Australia’s obligations under the Convention, and that is

not decorative drafting (People with Disability Australia 2022). It means that the

scheme's decisions are not only policy choices to be weighed against the budget;

they are, in part, the means by which Australia discharges binding international

human rights commitments. When supports are narrowed, when people are

channelled into congregated settings, when choice over one's own home and

support is removed, the question is not merely whether the scheme has saved

money. The question is whether Australia is still meeting obligations it freely

accepted.

The Convention also settles something more basic, which the rest of this paper

relies on: what disability actually is. On the modern, internationally accepted

understanding, disability is not the same thing as a medical condition, and it is not

the same thing as a functional limitation. It has three distinct elements, and only

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the third is disability itself. There is, first, a medical diagnosis – a condition arising from accident, injury, illness, disease, a congenital condition, a chromosomal variation, or another cause. That diagnosis carries, second, a functional impact: a l limitation in undertaking certain activities. But disability is the third element – the hardship, restriction, and exclusion a person experiences at the interface between that functional limitation and their environment. The Convention puts it precisely when it describes persons with disabilities as those with long-term impairments “which in interaction with various barriers” may hinder their full and effective p participation in society on an equal basis with others (United Nations 2006, art. 1). Disability, in other words, lives in the interaction between the person and the world around them. It does not exist in the impairment considered in isolation, and it cannot be found by examining a person stripped of their environment and supports. This is not a fringe or activist reading; it is the settled understanding in contemporary disability theory and the definition the Convention itself adopts - an d, as a later Part will show, it is the understanding the current Bill quietly abandons. The Convention’s relevance to this paper concentrates in a single, frequently misunderstood right. Article 19 – the right to live independently and be included in the community – is a provision with no exact precedent in international human ights law; it was drafted specifically to combat the segregation and institutionalisation of disabled people and to drive deinstitutionalisation (Lewis & Richardson 2020). It does not state a vague aspiration. It obliges States to ensure that disabled people can choose where and with whom they live, and are not obliged to live in a particular arrangement; that they have access to the range of in- home, residential and other community supports, including the personal assistance necessary to live in and be included in the community and to prevent isolation or secregation; and that mainstream community services and facilities are available to them on an equal basis (United Nations 2006, art. 19). The first limb is about choice, the second about support, and the third about access – and all three must hold at once for the right to be real. That right is not satisfied by the mere fact that a person is no longer housed in an old-style institution. The Convention’s guarantee is not about the address on the

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The building; it is about the conditions of the life lived inside it.

The Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities has been explicit on this point: in its General Comment No. 5 (2017) on Article 19, it warned that deinstitutionalisation requires structural reform that goes beyond closing institutional settings, and that “family-” institution like institutions remain institutions regardless of their size or domestic appearance (UN CRPD Committee 2017). Its 2022 Guidelines on deinstitutionalization, including in emergencies, restate and sharpen the same standard (UN CRPD Committee 2022).

The error the Committee keeps having to correct is the assumption that community living is solely a matter of physical placement in the community (Lewis & Richardson 2020). A person can be physically located in the community and still be denied community living in any meaningful sense, if every decision that shapes their daily life is made by someone else.

This is why a distinction that recurs throughout this paper must be made carefully here at the outset. There is a difference between being kept somewhere, being cared for somewhere, being housed somewhere, and living a life of one’s own choosing in a place that is genuinely one’s home. The first three can all be delivered by a system optimising for cost, supervision, and administrative neatness. Only the fourth is consistent with the promise the Convention contains and the NDIS Act adopts. A group home with adequate staffing and clean records can satisfy the first three completely and still fail the fourth entirely. When later Parts of this paper describe the pressure toward shared support ratios, congregated living, and provider- institution controlled models, the objection is not that those settings are universally unacceptable for everyone. The objection is that defaulting people into them, on grounds of cost or convenience, collapses the fourth condition into the first three and calls the result inclusion.

The Convention’s broader vocabulary – dignity, autonomy, independence, full and effective participation, accessibility, equality and non-discrimination – is sometimes treated as aspirational language to be quoted in preambles. In the context of disability support, it is operational. These are the Convention’s general principles, set out in Article 3, and they are not severable from the funding decisions made under a scheme that exists to give them effect. Autonomy is not abstract when it determines whether a person chooses the worker who enters their

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A bedroom each morning. Participation is not abstract when it determines whether a person’s funding permits them to leave the house for anything other than a medical appointment. Article 12, which recognises disabled people’s equal right to make decisions about their own lives – with support where needed, rather than having decisions made for them – is not abstract either when a planning process treats a person as the object of an assessment rather than the author of their own plan. The rights are specific, and they are testable against the design of the scheme. A system that cannot demonstrate how its decisions preserve choice, autonomy and community participation for the people most exposed to losing them is not, in any honest sense, giving effect to the Convention – whatever its enabling legislation says. Australia ratified the Convention in 2008 and wrote it into the objects of the NDIS Act; the obligation is therefore not borrowed rhetoric but domestic law’s own chosen standard.

Chapter 6 What “a good and ordinary life” actually means

The phrase “an ordinary life” sits at the centre of the NDIS story, and it has been worn smooth by use. It is worth restoring its content, because a great deal turns on it. When a budget process asks whether a particular support is essential, it is implicitly asking what kind of life the scheme exists to make possible. If the answer is a narrow one – survival, hygiene, medication, meals, being kept safe and kept alive – then a wide range of supports will look like extras, and cutting them will look like prudence. If the answer is the one the blueprint and the Convention actually give – a life of participation, relationship, contribution, and self-direction – then those same supports are revealed as the infrastructure of an ordinary life, and cutting them is revealed as something else entirely.

A good and ordinary life is not a life reduced to its clinical minimum. It includes community, work, relationships, culture, creativity, contribution, leisure, identity, and the ability to direct one’s own affairs. These are not luxuries appended to a life once the serious business of care is done. For most people they are the life; care is what makes them reachable. I can speak to this directly – the supports I receive are not the boundary of my life but its enabling condition, and the full account of what that has made possible for me belongs to Part 4. For the purposes of the baseline,

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The conceptual point is what matters: the activities a budget process is most tempted to treat as discretionary are very often the ones through which a person is connected to the world.

The general point this licenses is the one the rest of the paper relies on. Support, properly understood, is not only care. It is the infrastructure of citizenship — the thing that allows a disabled person to be present, skilled, creative, relational, political, and contributing. When a system sees support only as care, it will measure it only against the cost of keeping a person alive and clean, and it will systematically undervalue everything that makes the person a participant rather than a patient.

The argument of this paper is not that the scheme should fund leisure for its own sake. It is that the scheme cannot decide what is “reasonable and necessary” without first being honest about the life it is trying to make possible—and that the honest answer, the one written into both the blueprint and the Convention, is an ordinary life, not a maintained existence.

Chapter 7 Disabled people are not merely cost centres

the reframing traced in Chapter 4 – from social investment to budgetary cost - does its quietest and most corrosive work at the level of how disabled people are imagined by the system. Once the scheme is understood primarily as expenditure, the people it supports are understood primarily as the expenditure’s recipients: line items, cost drivers, liabilities to be contained. This is not usually stated. It does not need to be. It is built into the questions the system asks and the metrics it keeps. It is also false. Disabled people are citizens, voters, taxpayers, workers, volunteers, leaders, creators, family members, friends, and members of their communities. Many pay tax and contribute economically in the ordinary sense. But the deeper error in the cost-centre framing is its impoverished idea of contribution itself. Contribution is not exhausted by paid employment. It includes governance and advocacy, mentoring and peer support, cultural and creative participation, the transmission of knowledge, and the considerable and usually invisible labour of holding families and communities together. A system that values people only by a narrow measure of economic productivity does not merely undervalue disabled people. It misunderstands what a community is made of.

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There is a sharper version of this point that the later Parts of the paper will need, and it belongs here in principle, with the lived demonstration reserved for Part 4. The assumption that high support need implies low contribution is not just unkind; it is empirically wrong, and it is wrong in a way that matters for policy. High and complex support needs do not reduce a person’s capacity to contribute; underfunding and institutionalisation reduce it, by removing the very conditions under which contribution is possible. The line that follows, and that the paper will return to, is simple: high support need is not low human value, and a scheme that quietly treats the two as the same has already lost sight of why it exists.

This is the baseline. A scheme founded on a sound blueprint, attached to binding human rights obligations, directed at an ordinary life rather than a maintained one, and serving people who are contributors rather than costs. The Parts that follow ask how far the scheme has drifted from that baseline, why, at whose expense — and what it would take to return.

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P A R T 0 3

The design failure ² safety reforms that became unsafe

This Part makes the central structural claim of the paper: that the reforms presented as safety, quality, and integrity measures have, for people with high and complex support needs, too often produced the opposite of safety. It does so not by asserting that bad faith was at work – though sometimes it may have been – but by showing how a reform can be legitimate in aim, defensible on its face, and still dangerous in operation, when it is designed without regard to how the people inside the system will actually be affected. Part 4 gives the lived account of that danger. This Part supplies the documented anatomy beneath it: what the relevant reforms actually did, how the regulatory mechanism works, and why the harm was foreseeable rather than freakish.

Chapter 8 Good intent is not good design

it is worth conceding the legitimate problem at the outset, because the argument that follows is stronger for it. No one should defend a system in which untrained workers are sent into the homes of people with complex, high-risk support needs. People have been harmed by poorly trained workers, by unsafe providers, and by inconsistent practice. The case for clear competency expectations, proper training, and accountability is real, and this paper does not dispute it. The author, who has spent two decades building and training his own support teams to a high standard, has every reason to want competence taken seriously.

The argument of this part is therefore not that standards should not exist. It is that a reform can have a legitimate aim and still be badly designed – and that good intent is not a defence against foreseeable harm. A safety standard is not self-justifying. It has to be judged by what it does in the real world, to real people.

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real markets where support is actually delivered. A standard that is sound in a metropolitan teaching hospital may be undeliverable in a regional town with three available workers and one visiting nurse. A standard written for the median case may strand the person at the edge of complexity. A standard that raises documented expectations without considering how the professionals it relies on will respond to their own liability may produce, as its practical effect, the withdrawal of the very people it needs.

The test this Part applies: not whether a reform sounds responsible, but whether it makes the person safer, freer, and more able to live an ordinary life.

Measured against that test — the test Part 4 states in its own terms, and the only test the Convention recognises — several reforms presented as safety measures fail.

The clearest case study is the one the author lived through directly: the changes to how high-intensity supports are governed.

Chapter 9 The high-intensity support changes as a case study

the supports at issue are the highest-risk supports delivered under the scheme. The NDIS Practice Standards group them, in a dedicated module — Supplementary Module 1: High Intensity Daily Personal Activities — and they include complex bowel care, enteral (tube) feeding, severe dysphagia support, ventilator support, tracheostomy management, urinary catheter management, subcutaneous injections, complex wound care, and seizure support (NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission 2023). These are tasks where an error, an omission, or a slow response can cause rapid deterioration, serious injury, or death. It is entirely legitimate for the scheme to care a great deal about how they are delivered.

to deliver these supports, a provider must be registered for the relevant class of support and assessed against Module 1 of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (Provider Registration and Practice Standards) Rules 2018 (NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission 2023). Sitting alongside the Practice Standards are the High Intensity Support Skills Descriptors (HISSD), which set out the skills and knowledge a worker should have to deliver each of these supports. The descriptors

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were revised by the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission, released in December 2022, and came into effect on 1 February 2023 (Team DSC 2023; NDS 2023).

Here is the detail that matters most, and it is easily missed. The Skills Descriptors are explicitly competency-based, and they are written for the case where the support is delivered “by a competent worker who is not a qualified health or allied health practitioner” (NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission 2023). They contemplate, in other words, exactly the model that has kept people with complex needs living in the community for decades: a non-clinician support worker, carefully trained — including, where relevant, by an appropriately qualified health practitioner — to deliver a specific high-intensity support to a specific person. The framework, on its face, did not abolish the worker-delivered, clinician-trained model. It described the competencies that model should meet.

So if the instrument on its face preserved the model, how did the model nonetheless become harder to sustain—to the point that, as Part 4 records, a person who had safely directed his own complex supports for twenty years was displaced from his home? The answer is not found in the text of the Descriptors alone. It is found in how that text interacts with everything around it: with the heightened documented-competency and currency expectations now subject to audit; with the professional-liability framework that governs the clinicians the model depends on; with the thinness of the markets in which it must operate; and with the absence of anyone, at the design stage, asking how those forces would combine. A reform is not only its words. It is its words plus the system they land in.

The next chapter traces that interaction, because it is there that a safety reform became, for some people, a safety risk.

Chapter 10 The historical working model

to see what was disturbed, it helps to state plainly how complex community-based support has actually worked —not as theory, but as the practical mechanism that has kept people out of institutions. Part 4 gives this model from the inside; here it is only necessary to name its structure, because the structure is what the reforms put under strain.

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For decades, many people with complex support needs have lived in the community through a layered model: The person, who knows their own body and risks, directs the support; carefully selected workers are trained in that person’s specific needs; clinicians – nurses, occupational therapists, physiotherapists, and others – train, mentor, review, and remain available for escalation; and training is refreshed and updated as needs change. The clinician does not personally perform every task every day. The clinician makes the task safe to delegate, and stays involved enough to keep it safe. The worker delivers the daily support. The person retains authority over who enters their home and how the support is provided.

This was never a loophole or a gap in regulation. It was, and is, the practical mechanism that makes community living possible for people whose needs are too continuous to be met by visiting clinicians alone and too individual to be met by a generic roster. it depends on one thing above all: a clinician willing to train and stand behind a support worker. Remove that willingness, and the whole model loses its keystone. The next chapter explains why recent settings have made that willingness harder to secure – and why pushing the resulting gap back onto clinical delivery is not the safe substitute it appears to be.

Chapter 11 Medicalisation is not the same as safety

Clinicians are essential. Nothing in this paper suggests otherwise. The question isn’t whether nurses, doctors, and allied health professionals matter – they plainly do – but what role the system asks them to play, and whether that role is deliverable and safe at the scale of real life. There’s a difference between clinical oversight, which makes community living possible, and clinical captivity, which makes it impossible. Clinical oversight supports life. Clinical captivity restricts it.

The mechanism that has been pushing people from the first toward the second isn’t mysterious, is worth setting out precisely because it is the hinge of the whole design failure. When a registered nurse trains or delegates a high-intensity task to a support worker, the nurse does not hand over responsibility along with the task. Under the Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia’s Decision-making framework for nursing and midwifery, accountability cannot be delegated: the delegating nurse remains personally and professionally accountable for the decision

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to delegate, for the appropriateness of that decision, for supervision, and for the

outcome (NMBA 2022). The worker to whom the task is delegated is, in the case of

an NDIS support worker, an unregulated worker Ȅ outside the national registration

scheme entirely (NMBA 2022). In some jurisdictions, the delegation of nursing care

to unregulated workers is restricted or prohibited outright (NMBA 2022). And the

broader nursing literature documents that delegation to unregulated workers is a

complex, risk-laden decision that the professional environment increasingly

scrutinises (Crevacore 2023; ANMJ 2024).

Now combine that liability structure with the rest of the system. The competency,

training, and currency expectations for the highest-risk supports were raised and

made subject to audit. The worker being trained is unregulated and, in a self-

directed or small-provider arrangement, often has no ongoing institutional

relationship to the clinician. The market is frequently thin, so there is no depth of

clinicians to absorb the risk. And no one, at the point of design, appears to have

asked how a clinician would weigh a request to train a support worker in ventilator

management or complex bowel care for a person they may see only occasionally,

knowing that their own registration and legal liability ride on the outcome. Put

those forces together and the result is not surprising. It is the predictable

equilibrium: many clinicians become cautious about what they will train or

authorise, some withdraw from training support workers altogether, and the

model's keystone quietly falls away. This is precisely the collapse Part 4 describes

from the inside Ȅ clinicians becoming unwilling to train workers in person-specific

 skills, and people being pushed toward registered-nurse delivery "not because that

 is the most rights-consistent or life-enabling model," but because the community-

based alternative was made unsustainable.

And here the failure compounds itself, because the substitute is not safer. Pushing

people toward clinically delivered or congregated models increases hospital

dependency, reduces continuity and responsiveness, strips autonomy, and Ȅ in

thin markets Ȅ is frequently undeliverable in any case, because the nurses required

simply are not there. A system that cannot staff the community-based model with

trained workers will not be able to staff the more demanding clinical-delivery

model either. The risk has not been managed. It has been displaced Ȅ onto

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hospitals, onto families, onto the person’s own body – which is the same pattern. Part 4 names in the hospital context: not risk management, but risk displacement.

There is a deep irony at the centre of this, and it is worth naming because it exposes how far the reform drifted from its own stated logic. The retreat into clinical captivity is usually justified as caution – as the safer course. But the professional framework that governs nursing delegation is itself a risk-management framework: The NMBA decision-making framework does not tell nurses to avoid all delegation; it tells them how to delegate safely, by assessing and managing risk (NMBA 2022).

Harm minimisation – the proportionate management of foreseeable risk while preserving the person’s life and autonomy – is the discipline nurses are actually trained and registered to practise. The risk-averse retreat into “only a nurse may do this” is not harm minimization. It is zero-risk avoidance, and zero-risk avoidance is a different and inferior thing: it minimizes the institution’s exposure, not the person’s harm. So the model the system has been drifting toward is not the most rights-consistent model, not the most life-enabling model, and not even the model most consistent with the harm-minimization framework the relevant profession is bound to.

The same point can be made about the professions on the other side of the ledger, and it sharpens the irony further. The expertise needed to do this well is not missing from the system; the system is failing to use the expertise it already funds. Occupational therapists and rehabilitation specialists are the domain experts in exactly the reasoning the scheme claims to lack – early intervention, prevention of secondary complications and functional decline, and the front-loading of support to reduce greater harm and cost later. This is not frontier knowledge. It has been foundational curriculum in those professions for decades. A system serious about safety and sustainability would mobilize that expertise to keep people well and at home. Instead it has too often sidelined the prevention experts while over-relying on direct clinical delivery – getting the role of clinicians wrong at both ends.

None of this was inevitable, and that is the point of calling it a design failure rather than a misfortune. The instruments could have been designed with the clinician–liability interaction in view, with thin-market deliverability in view, and with the people who actually live inside the model in the room. They were not.

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optimised for documented, auditable competence Ȅ a real value Ȅ without

designing for whether the competent worker could still be trained and supported in

the first place. That is what it means for a reform to be defensible on its face and

dangerous in operation. And it is why the chapters that follow turn to the

conditions the design ignored: the thinness of real markets, the limits of

standardisation, and the absence of the genuine co-design that might have caught

the failure before it reached people's homes.

Chapter 12 Thin markets and regional reality

A reform designed as though every participant lives in a deep metropolitan market

will fail the people who do not Ȅ and a great many do not. Regional, rural, and

remote Australia does not have the service depth of a capital city, and even a large

regional centre can lack the specialised clinicians, nurses, trained workers, and

providers that a complex support model requires. This is not a marginal concern

affecting a handful of unusual cases. It is a structural feature of a national scheme

operating across a continent, and it should be treated as a core design constraint

rather than an implementation footnote.

The systems-design principle is simple and unforgiving: a national system is only as

safe as its weakest real-world implementation environment. If a support model

works in inner Sydney but cannot be staffed in regional Queensland, it is not a

national model that happens to have gaps; it is a metropolitan model that has been

declared national. The reforms examined in this Part illustrate the point precisely.

The heightened training and competency expectations for high-intensity supports

are hard enough to satisfy where clinicians are plentiful; where they are scarce, and

where the few available clinicians must each weigh the personal liability of training

an unregulated worker, the model does not merely strain Ȅ it can fail outright. The

design failure and the thin market compound each other, and they compound worst

for the people with the most complex needs, who have the least capacity to absorb a

gap.

There is a particular cruelty in how the system talks about this. It speaks of “choice”

as though choice were always available Ȅ as though a participant dissatisfied with

one provider could simply select another. For people with high and complex needs

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in a thin market, that is often a fiction. There may be no other provider. There may be no provider at all who can safely deliver the support. As Part 4 records from direct experience, paper availability is not the same as a functioning market: a place ay have hospitals, allied health services, and registered providers listed on paper and still be unable to sustain a complex support model in practice, because what mattesrs is not whether services nominally exist but whether enough of the right services, with the right skills, at the right frequency, with enough resilience to survive a resignation or an illness, are actually there. Where they are not, the consequence is not inconvenience. It is displacement — the loss of home, community, and years of life that Part 4 documents, and that no amount of choice- and-control language can disguise.

A scheme serious about safety in thin markets would design for them deliberately: funding that reflects real local cost and availability, crisis pathways established before supports collapse rather than after, relocation support where a local market genuinely cannot meet a person’s needs, and the integration of accommodation, complex-support funding, and clinical oversight as a single problem rather than hree disconnected ones. The alternative — assuming the metropolitan model and treating its failure in the regions as the participant’s misfortune— is not a national disability scheme. It is a postcode lottery with better branding.

Chapter 13 Standardisation can protect some and abandon others

Standardisation is not inherently wrong. A clear, consistent training expectation isnotinherentlywrongcan protect people whose needs fit the categories it was built around, and consistency has real value where it prevents the worst providers from sending the worst workers. The danger lies in forgetting that standardisation distributes its benefits and harms unevenly: the same template that protects the median sameparticipant can abandon the person at the edge of complexity, whose needs were ever contemplated by the people who drew the category.

This is the systems-design point that the reforms repeatedly miss. People do not live inside policy categories. A standardised competency template assumes that the

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The support a person needs is the support the template imagined, delivered in the way the template assumed.

Where that holds, the person may be able to make the model work. Where it does not — where the required support is unusual, or must be delivered in a more individualised way, or arises from the interaction of several disabilities that no single category captures — the person can be left stranded, technically served by a system that has no place for them. A scheme can become safer for the average case and, in the very same reform, more dangerous for the outlier. A safety standard that protects the average and abandons the outlier is not, or the outlier, a safety standard at all.

The current trajectory deepens this risk rather than correcting it. The new planningramework moves toward standardised needs assessment as the gateway to funding, and reporting suggests that the assessors conducting it will not necessarily be allied health professionals, with recruitment said to favour generic “soft skills” over in clinical qualification (Health Services Daily 2026). For people with complex, interacting, fluctuating needs, replacing individualised clinical evidence with a standardised instrument administered by a non-clinician is not a neutral efficiency.

it is a decision about who the system is willing to see accurately—and it predictably sees the standard case and misses the complex one. Part 6 examines this framework in detail; for the purposes of this part, it is enough to note that standardisation, pursued without a deliberate safeguard for the people at the edges, is not a solution to the design failure traced through these chapters. It is the same failure, generalised.

the remedy is not the abolition of standards. It is designing standards with the people most likely to fall outside them — which is to say, it is co-design, done properly. That is the subject of the chapters that close this part, and it is also the point at which the failure stops being a technical matter and becomes a question of who the system is willing to listen to.

Chapter 14 False co-design and the capture of language

The 2011 blueprint, as Part 2 showed, did not treat engagement with disabled people as a courtesy. It treated it as a structural condition of the scheme working – the feedback loop through which the system would learn whether it was succeeding or

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 failing. The reforms traced through this Part are, in a sense, a single story about

what happens when that feedback loop is severed. And the severing has been

disguised, because the language of co-design has been retained even as the practice

has been hollowed out.

"Co-design" has become one of the most used and least honoured words in

disability policy. It appears in strategy documents, consultation frameworks, and

ministerial speeches. It is invoked to confer legitimacy on decisions that have, in

substance, already been made. This is the capture of language: the appropriation of

a term that means something demanding Ȅ shared authority over the design of a

system Ȅ to describe something far weaker, and sometimes its opposite. When a

government announces a reform and then conducts a “consultation” on its

implementation, that is not co-design. When a survey is run after the design is

settled, that is not co-design. When disabled people are invited to comment but not

to decide, that is not co-design. It is consultation theatre, and calling it co-design

corrodes the word for the times it is meant sincerely.

The distinction matters because the difference between genuine and false co-design

 is, very often, the difference between a reform that works and one that harms. Part

4 states this from the inside: where lived experience is not engaged with deeply and

authentically, systems design solutions for disabled people rather than by them, and

the result is a regulatory change that "says one thing on the lid and delivers

something very different inside.“ The high-intensity support changes examined

earlier in this Part are precisely such a reform. Had the people who actually live

inside the worker-delivered, clinician-trained model been genuinely co-designing

the new competency settings, the interaction between heightened audit

expectations and clinician liability Ȅ the interaction that quietly removed the

model's keystone Ȅ would have been obvious before it reached anyone's home. It

was not caught, because the people who could have caught it were not, in any

meaningful sense, in the room.

There is a documented pattern that makes this concrete, and it is the clearest single

illustration in the scheme's recent history. The compulsory independent

assessments proposed from 2020, discussed in Part 2, were presented as reform and

were abandoned in 2021 only because the disability community, the sector, and the

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scheme's own Independent Advisory Council refused to accept them. That episode

 is usually told as a story about a bad policy defeated. It is better understood as a

story about co-design working in the only way the system left available to it Ȅ after

the fact, through refusal, because it had not been allowed to work before the fact,

through design. The community had the knowledge to see the problem. The system

simply had not asked.

And when the system does not ask, it does not merely miss information. It loses the

capacity to understand its own results. This is the deepest cost of severing the

feedback loop, and it is worth stating plainly because it is so rarely admitted: a

system that stops listening to the people it serves will, in time, no longer

understand what it is doing to them.

Chapter 15 The eight tenets of co-design ² and the system

that stopped listening

 If false co-design is the disease, the remedy is not a slogan but a discipline Ȅ and

that discipline has an established structure, taught in co-design practice and

broadly recognised by practitioners as the faithful articulation of what co-design

actually requires. It is not a framework invented for this paper, and it is worth

stressing that point, because it changes what the scheme's conduct amounts to: the

gap examined below is not a gap between the scheme and one author’s ideal, but a

gap between the scheme and the recognised professional standard for the very

thing the scheme claims to be doing. Genuine co-design rests on eight tenets,

bound together by one governing principle. Each tenet marks a distinct point at

which a system can either share power or merely simulate sharing it, and the

manufacture of false co-design works precisely by honouring some while quietly

denying others.

Five of the tenets track the lifecycle of a reform, from first idea to ongoing

operation. Co-ideation is shared authorship of the ideas themselves Ȅ disabled

people involved not at the point of commenting on options but at the point of

generating them, before the solution space has been narrowed. Most "consultation"

 fails here first: by the time the community is asked, the ideas have already been

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The chosen trim is open for discussion. Co-design is shared authority over how the system is actually built — not advice the designers may take or leave, but a genuine share in the design decisions. Co-authorship goes further, to the artefacts: the community’s hand in the actual text of the instruments, policies, and rules that go govern their lives, rather than its perspective being summarised, filtered, and rowritten by others before it reaches the page. A system can run a vibrant ideation workshop and still author the resulting policy entirely behind closed doors; co- a authorship closes that gap. Co-implementation extends the same principle into delivery: the parties who shared authority over the design must carry that authority through to how the policy is actually rolled out, rather than handing a sound design to an implementation function that can quietly undo it. Even the best-laid ideas can come unstuck in poor implementation, and they often do so through the same op operationally expedient choices that this paper has traced throughout — which is p precisely why implementation cannot be treated as a separate, downstream, te technical matter beyond the community’s reach. And co-monitoring completes the c cycle, providing the continual-improvement function without which co-design is a one-off event rather than a living practice — which in practice requires that m monitoring and assessment data be publicly available and open to independent, n third-party scrutiny, so that the system’s own account of how it is performing can tbe tested rather than taken on trust.

Three further tenets are not stages but conditions—they must hold across the h whole lifecycle, or the others are hollow. Co-equal is the principle that every voice in the process carries equal weight, and that no single party holds the power to veto the process or to force through a decision that serves it alone. Where one party - almost always the funder or the administrator - retains a unilateral veto, what is oc occurring is not co-design but consultation conducted at that party’s discretion. Co- ownership is a genuine, continuing stake in the system and its outcomes, so that disabled people are not contributors to someone else’s scheme but owners of their own, with the standing that ownership confers – including the standing to hold tthe system to account when it fails. And co-consent is the recognition that those affected by a system have a continuing right to agree or refuse to how it operates on them, not merely a one-time opportunity to be consulted at its launch. A scheme

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The built on rights cannot treat the people it serves as having consented, once and forever, to whatever it later becomes. Consent to a system is ongoing, and a system that strips away the capacityto withhold it has stopped treating people as rightsholdersand startedtreating them as subjects.

The governing principle ties the eight together: co-design must be awhole-of- process and whole-of-system approach. It cannot be boltedon at the last minute to adjusta decisionthat has already been made and lockedin. Late-stage “co-design” of that kindis not a lesser form of thereal thing;it isa violation of it, becausebythe time the community is admitted, co-ideation, co-authorship, and co-consent havealreadybeen foreclosed. The ideas were generated withoutthem, the instrumentswere authoredwithout them, and their consenttothe fundamental shape ofthedecisionwas neversought. What remainsisthe appearance of participation laid over thesustance of its absence — which ist he most damagingform offalse co-design, preciselybecauseitis the hardest to see.

This is the standard— the practitioners’standard,notaprivate one— againstwhich the scheme’s recent practice mustbemeasured,andi tis also why“co-design” canbe claimedsofreelywhile so littleofi t occurs. A governmentcan inviteideas, conveneaworkshop,even shareadesign decisionortwo, andstill reservetoitself the authorshipoftheinstruments, theofthescheme, aunilateral vetoover everyoutcome, controlofthemontoringdata,andtherighttoalter termsof aperson’slifewithouttheircontinuingconsent—andt hen call theresultco- design. Genuine codesign isn ot anyoneofthese tenets;iti s all eight, held togetheracrossthewhole lifeofth esystem, underaprincipleofe qualstanding. Disability advocacy has long compressed wholeo fthisintoasingledemand— nothingaboutuswith out us— and th eeighttenetsaresimplywhatthatdemand requireswhenit istaken seriouslyasthedesig ndiscipline itis , ratherthanasa slogan. These are not abstractions. Theyarethe practical architecture ofthefeedback loop the 2011 blueprint required, and their absenceisVisibleinthe schemesownmost candidmoments. Considertwoadmissionsfrompeople running thes chememademwithinroughly the same period.

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

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The first concerns evidence. To obtain or change a plan, participants are required – not invited – to supply extensive clinical evidence: occupational therapy reports, functional capacity assessments, specialist assessments, and more. That evidence is extensive, and it is very often paid for out of the participant’s own plan, displacing the supports the plan exists to fund. In February 2025, the then Chief Executive of the National Disability Insurance Agency, Rebecca Falkingham, acknowledged at Senate Estimates that her staff cannot read the lengthy reports they receive – in the widely reported phrasing, that staff “can’t read the 280-page reports that they get” (Conway Consulting Group [2026]; Loving Life Care [2026]). Let that sit beside the requirement that produced it. The system compels people to spend their support funding generating evidence, and the head of the agency concedes the evidence is not read. That is not a minor inefficiency. It is a system extracting from the people it serves a cost it does not itself use – and it is only possible in a system that has stopped imagining the participant as a person on the other end of its requirements.

The second admission concerns outcomes, and it is, in its way, the emblem of this entire paper. The scheme’s actuarial function exists to monitor whether the scheme is working – whether, over time, participants are doing better. Yet after a decade of operation, the people responsible for reading the scheme’s data have expressed genuine bewilderment that participants appear, on the available measures, not to be improving and in some respects to be doing worse the longer they remain in the scheme. The actuarial profession’s own commentary concedes the puzzle directly: it is unclear whether the cause is that the initial assumptions were wrong or that improvements are necessary to the supports provided, in part because outcomes before and after early childhood early intervention have not been measured (Actuaries Institute [2025]). Independent analysis notes the same drift in employment: for participants aged 25 and over, paid employment rates are not rising as participants spend more time on the scheme (HRD 2026).

Here is the point the bewilderment exposes, and it is exactly a failure of co-monitoring as the previous section defined it. A decade of data showed people not improving, and the system reading that data did not understand why – when the answer was available the entire time, from the people living it. Monitoring without the monitored is how a system accumulates a decade of evidence and still cannot

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The disability community has been describing, for years, exactly the mechanisms this paper has traced: support models hollowed out by reforms designed without them, funding that goes backwards as need rises, capacity- building supports withdrawn, people pushed toward congregation and clinical captivity, lives displaced from home. None of this is a mystery to the people it happens to. It is a mystery only to a system that measured what was administratively visible — units of service, plans approved, budgets reduced— rather than asking the people whether their lives were getting better or worse. As Part 4 puts it, the system “measures what is administratively visible and misses what is humanly essential.”

This is what it means for a system to forget to listen. It is not merely impolite; it is epistemically disabling. A system cut off from the experience of the people it serves cannot see its own failures, cannot learn from them, and will—as the next Part documents in the proposed legislation—tend to respond to the evidence of harm by tightening the very mechanisms that caused it. The disability community is not only the party harmed by the severing of the feedback loop. It is also the party that holds the knowledge the system most needs and has most consistently declined to seek. The solutions to many of these problems are not beyond reach. They are simply held by people the system has not been willing to treat as designers of their own lives. That refusal—to listen, to share authority, to treat consent as ongoing—is the design failure beneath all the others. Every specific failure traced in this Part is, finally, a symptom of it.

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P A R T 0 4

The Lived Reality

Displacement, Loss of Home, and Loss of Ordinary Life

There is a danger, when talking about the NDIS, that everything becomes abstract.

People talk about scheme sustainability. They talk about reasonable and necessary supports. They talk about operational guidelines, support lists, ratios, assessments, participant pathways, thin markets, pricing arrangements, fraud control, and intergovernmental responsibilities. All of that language may have its place. Some of it is necessary. But none of it should be allowed to obscure the basic truth at the centre of this system.

The NDIS is not an abstract policy machine. It is the structure that many disabled people rely on to get out of bed, breathe safely, eat, shower, move, communicate, work, participate, and remain alive in the community. It is the difference between being able to live in one’s own home and being displaced into a hospital, a group setting, a congregated care environment, or some other institutionalised arrangement that may not be called an institution, but can still operate with institutional logic when choice, control, privacy, flexibility, and community connection are removed.

For people like me, support is not a lifestyle extra. It is not a discretionary add-on. It is not a convenience. It is the infrastructure of life.

I am an NDIS participant. Before the NDIS, I received state-based disability funding. For most of the last 20-plus years, across both systems, I have self-managed or self-directed my supports. That is not a theoretical preference. It is not something I prefer because I dislike providers or because I have an ideological attachment to one administrative model over another. It is the model that has allowed me to survive, function, contribute, and live with any meaningful degree of dignity.

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My disability profile is complex. I have C5/C6 incomplete spinal cord injury, r esulting in quadriplegia, although in strict medical language it is probably more accurately described as paraplegia with quadriparesis. I also have spina bifida myelomeningocele, hydrocephalus, Autism Level 2, ADHD, bipolar disorder, and a n umber of other diagnoses and functional impacts that interact with each other in rows ys that do not fit neatly into a simple bureaucratic category.

That complexity matters. It matters because systems tend to prefer simple cases. T hey prefer people who can be placed into a box, matched to a standard support c ategory, measured against a narrow functional tool, and funded through a p redictable template. My life does not work that way. Many disabled people’s lives d o not work that way.

For me, disability support has always had to be highly individualised. The right s upport worker matters. The right training matters. The right timing matters. The r ig environment matters. The right escalation pathway matters. The right clinical o versight matters. The right understanding of my routines, risks, equipment, body, communication, fatigue, sensory needs, and functional limits matters.

When those things are in place, I can live. Not perfectly. Not without risk. Not without support. But I can live in a way that is recognisably mine.

When those things are removed, standardised, delayed, shared, rationed, m edicalised, or handed to people who do not understand my needs, the consequences are not minor. They are immediate, practical, and sometimes d angerous.

Chapter 16 Twenty years of self-directed support

For most of the last 20-plus years, I have self-managed or self-directed my supports.

That history is important because it shows that participant-directed support is not a eckless experiment. It is not a loophole. It is not a failure of regulation. In my case, it has been the safer and more effective model.

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Self-direction allowed me to build teams around my actual life, not around a provider’s roster template. It allowed me to select people who were suitable for my home, my body, my risks, my communication style, my working life, and my community participation. It allowed training to be person-specific rather than generic. It allowed support to be responsive to changes in my health, function, workload, environment, fatigue, and routines.

The support workers who were effective in my life were not interchangeable units of labour. They were people who learned how to support me safely and well. They developed knowledge over time. They understood the difference between a normal variation and something that required escalation. They knew what needed to be done immediately and what could wait. They understood how to support my body without causing injury. They understood how to work inside my home without treating it like a workplace that belonged more to the provider than to me.

That last point matters. My home is not a service site first. It is my home. The fact that support work occurs inside it does not make it less mine.

A good self-directed model allowed clinicians to be involved where their expertise was needed. Doctors, nurses, occupational therapists, physiotherapists, speech therapists, and other clinicians could train, mentor, review, advise, and provide oversight. Support workers could be upskilled carefully and appropriately. Training was not a one-off formality. It was part of the structure of the support model. Regular upskilling was normal. Review was normal. Adjusting the model when my needs changed was normal.

That is how complex disability support has worked for many people for decades. Clinicians do not need to be physically present for every task every day in order for care to be safe. They need to be properly involved in training, clinical reasoning, oversight, review, and escalation. The day-to-day delivery can often be done safely by support workers who are carefully selected, properly trained, supervised where necessary, and supported by clear pathways when something changes.

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That model recognises reality. It recognises that clinicians are essential, but finite. It recognises that disabled people live all day, every day, not only during scheduled clinical appointments. It recognises that community living depends on support being available where people live, not only where the health system can reach them.

It also recognises something more fundamental: I am not a passive object of care. I am the person whose life is being supported. I know my body. I know my risks. I know what has worked. I know what has failed. I know what happens when someone does not arrive. I know what happens when the wrong person arrives. I know what happens when a provider decides that its operational convenience matters more than my safety.

That is not sentiment. It is evidence.

the times i have been forced back into traditional provider relationships have, almost without exception, been some of the least safe and least functional periods of the last two decades of my life. I do not say that lightly, and I do not say it because I think every provider or every worker is bad. The problem is structural. I have dealt with poor service quality, unreliable attendance, late arrivals, last-minute cancellations, workers sent without adequate training, and providers unwilling or unable to build teams robust enough for the level of risk involved. For someone with my support needs, that is not merely poor customer service. It is a foreseeable safety failure.

it can be a direct and immediate safety risk. raditional provider systems often assume that if one worker cannot attend, another can be sent. On paper, that may look like continuity. In reality, it may be nothing of the sort. If the replacement worker is not trained in my needs, does not understand my equipment, cannot safely perform required tasks, cannot read early signs of deterioration, cannot assist with complex manual handling, or cannot provide support in a way that is safe for my body and my environment, then the provider has not filled the shift in any meaningful sense. It has placed a person in the room and called the roster complete.

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That is not safety.

For people with low or predictable support needs, a generic replacement worker may be inconvenient but workable. For people with high and complex support needs, it may be unsafe. The system often fails to understand that distinction. It treats attendance as the measure of service delivery, when the real measure should be whether the person was safely and effectively supported.

The reason self-direction matters: it allows the support model to be designed around the actual person, not around the lowest administrative common denominator.

Chapter 17 When “sorry, we can’t make it” is a safety event

A great failure of the current system is its inability to understand the seriousness of ordinary service failure.

A provider saying “sorry, we can’t make it” may sound like a small problem to someone who has never depended on another person for essential support. It may sound like a scheduling issue. It may sound like the sort of thing that can be fixed with an apology, a complaint form, or a promise to do better next time.

For me, and for many people with high and complex support needs, that sentence lands very differently.

It can mean I cannot get out of bed safely. It can mean I cannot attend to personal care. It can mean I cannot eat, drink, reposition, manage equipment, access medication, leave the house, communicate effectively with services, prevent deterioration, or respond to a change in my body. It can mean that a preventable problem becomes a clinical problem. It can mean that a gap in the roster becomes a hospital admission.

The reality is often that hospitals are treated as fallback options: if disability supports fail, go to hospital; if workers cannot meet your needs, go to hospital; if funding is inadequate, go to hospital; if the provider cannot build a reliable team, go to hospital.

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hospital. If the administrative process has not caught up with the reality of your life, go to hospital.

The attitude is not safety planning. It is policy avoidance dressed up as an interface issue.

Hospitals are not a substitute for disability support. They are not a backup home. Hospitals are not a provider of last resort for ordinary daily disability needs. They are not designed to sustain the full baseline needs of people with lifelong, high-complexity disabilities over long periods. Hospitals can be necessary; they can save lives. I am not dismissing the health system or the people who work within it. But a hospital admission does not make disability support needs disappear.

When a person like me enters hospital, my baseline needs do not switch off because a different funding system has become administratively convenient. I still require support with things that keep my body safe: People who understand my routines, communication equipment and risks, manual handling needs, sensory profile, and signs something may be wrong. Support should not neatly limited to the narrow reason for admission.

When hospitals absorb unmet disability supports, risk isn’t removed—it’s transferred. Risk transfers to overworked nurses in wards unsuited for ongoing care. Families transfer this burden along with informal advocates onto disabled persons forced to bear consequences on their own bodies.

That is not risk management - it is displacement.

The same problem shows when safety frameworks/quality standards serve only as evidence supporting delivery of effective quality services – policies don’t ensure personal safety nor complaints processes provide security if shifts aren’t filled by capable personnel.

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The system provides genuine fit for purpose: the right person, with the right training, at the right time, with the right backup, and with enough understanding of my body, my equipment, my risks, and my environment to respond when something changes. Most importantly, it exists only when my voice and my life are centred, rather than treated as secondary to the provider’s framework, roster or risk paperwork.

I do not say this because I think every provider or every worker is bad. Some providers can deliver good support, and some individual workers are excellent. The problem is structural. Where support is organised primarily as a business model, with service provision and the person’s life treated as secondary, there will always be pressure to create efficiencies. In ordinary business settings, efficiency may be desirable. In disability support, when badly designed, it can mean fewer trained workers, less flexibility, more standardisation, reduced continuity, and support models that look compliant on paper while failing the person in practice.

That is why oversight of large traditional registered service providers should focus less on whether abstract quality and assurance frameworks exist, and more on whether actual service delivery complies with and gives effect to the expectations of the UNCRPD. The question should not simply be whether the provider has policies, systems, and records. The question should be whether the person receiving support is safer, freer, more connected, more autonomous, and more able to live an ordinary life because of the way that service is delivered.

The standard that matters is:

Anything less is paperwork pretending to be safety.

Chapter 18 Community connection is a safety control

Policies matter. Frameworks matter. Oversight, standards, safeguards, and quality systems all matter. Essential paid supports also matter. Without the right support, many of us cannot safely eat, drink, bathe, go to the toilet, shower, dress or work.

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leave the house, or access our community. For some of us, those supports are quite literally life-sustaining.

But paid services are not, by themselves, what make disabled people safe. What makes people safe, in the deeper and more durable sense, is being known, valued, noticed, and embedded in the ordinary life of a community. It is the unpaid relationships. The neighbour who notices you have not been seen. The friend who knows when you do not sound right. The person at the community garden, the maker space, the book group, the club, the workshop, or the local café who notices absence, deterioration, distress, or withdrawal before a formal system ever would.

For myself, and for many of the vulnerable and marginalised people I know and work alongside, that kind of community embeddedness is one of the strongest risk mitigations we have. It is not soft, optional, or decorative. It is a practical safety control. My concern is that the current reform direction risks pushing more people with complex needs into congregated, institutionalised, provider-controlled, or highly standardised environments where access to those unpaid relationships is substantially reduced, and in some cases may be almost entirely removed. If I am experiencing that risk as someone who, despite the complexity of my disabilities, can communicate reasonably well and advocate strongly, then we need to stop and think very carefully about what this means for people for whom communication, decision-making, advocacy, or being believed are even greater challenges.

Chapter 19 Displacement from home

The direct impact on me over recent years has been devastating.

I have been displaced from my home. I have been forced through a range of congregate care and institutionalised care model environments over approximately the last three and a half years. That displacement did not happen because my life suddenly became impossible. It happened because the systems around my life stopped making safe community living possible.

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There are many factors involved. My support needs have increased with age and functional decline. That is not surprising. Disabled bodies do not always age in the same way as non-disabled bodies. Where there are multiple disabilities, long-term impairment, chronic health issues, neurological complexity, physical disability, and the accumulated wear of decades of managing a high-support life, decline can happen earlier and more rapidly than in the general population.

A system designed around real life would understand that. It would expect change. It would plan for it. It would recognise that increased need is not a failure by the participant. It is part of the life course. It would ask what is needed to keep the person safely at home, connected to community, and able to continue contributing. Instead, the practical effect of current policy and funding settings is that increased need is too often treated as a cost problem, an administrative problem, or a reason to push people toward more restrictive models.

In my experience, the high-intensity support changes and related regulatory shifts made an already fragile situation far worse. The model that had historically allowed complex support to be delivered safely, through carefully selected and trained support workers with clinical training, oversight, mentoring, and escalation, became much harder to sustain. Clinicians became more cautious about what they could train or authorise. Professional-risk concerns increased. Support workers became harder to train in the specific skills I needed. Providers became more rigid. The practical effect was a system that became more medicalised, more standardised, and less responsive to the reality of individual lives.

to be clear, I do not say this because I oppose training standards. I do not. The changes were, at least on their face, intended to respond to a real problem: people with high and complex support needs being placed at risk by poorly trained workers, unsafe providers, and inconsistent practice. That problem is real. No one should be sent into a person’s home to deliver complex support without proper training, supervision, and accountability.

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The failure is that a reform can be well-intentioned and still be badly designed.

Where lived experience is not engaged with deeply and authentically, systems tend to design solutions for us rather than by us. The result can be a regulatory change that says one thing on the lid and delivers something very different inside. In this case, changes presented as making high-intensity support safer have, for many people with high and complex physical support needs, increased risk by narrowing the pathways through which person-specific workers can be trained and supported.

The same failure can be seen in the training pathways now treated as compliant for high-intensity or complex supports. If a person’s complex needs happen to match the supports imagined by the endorsed training program, and if those supports are needed in the particular way the program assumes, then the person may be able to make the model work. Even then, I have serious doubts about whether some of those programs are deep enough for the level of complexity involved. They are certainly not equivalent to the standard to which I, and many other people in the high-complexity cohort, have historically trained our own workers with clinician involvement.

The bigger problem arises when a person’s support needs do not fit the template. If the required support is not the one imagined by the compliant training program, or if it must be delivered in a more individualised way, the person can be left stranded. At the same time, many clinicians and nurses have become unwilling to train NDIS support workers in those person-specific clinical skills because of concerns about professional standards and regulatory risk. The practical result is that some people are pushed toward environments where supports are delivered by registered nurses, not because that is the most rights-consistent or life-enabling model, but because the system has made the community-based alternative harder to sustain.

That is the failure mode repeated throughout this reform trajectory. At each point where the system could have listened to people with lived experience, and could have designed around the realities of our lives, it instead too often assumes that we all look the same, function the same, need the same, and can be made safe through the same standardised pathway. We cannot. That assumption is one of the major

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Submission 1922

The failures were not only of these earlier regulatory changes but also of the current proposed legislative overhaul as well.

This was not experienced by me as an abstract regulatory update; rather, it felt like the collapse of the practical conditions allowing me to live safely in my own home.

Once this happens, the language used by the system becomes almost unbearable due to its distance from reality. They talk about pathways, reviews, evidence, support categories, reassessments, market constraints, funding decisions and interface issues. Meanwhile, I am not in my home. I’m not living the life I built. I’m not moving through my community in the way I once did. I cannot rely on supports which previously made ordinary life possible.

Displacement from home isn’t merely a change of address—it involves loss: privacy, routine, control over who enters your space, decision-making ability, being surrounded by one’s things (tools, books), projects, garden, community, rhythms – all contributing to that quiet sense of safety derived from belonging somewhere.

For someone with complex disability, ‘home’ is integral to their support architecture - familiar environment where equipment resides, routines are established, risks understood & model centered around them. The local community knows you, notices when something goes wrong.

The displacement disrupts more than just physical location — it destabilizes entire ecosystems for personal wellbeing.

That has been what happened to me.

A return would be straightforward; retrieving at least some semblance of former existence requires agency action.

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inapprove appropriate Specialist Disability Accommodation funding and a substantial increase in support funding so that I could move from regional Queensland to Brisbane, where the support market is deep enough to meet needs of this complexity in a meaningful and sustainable way.

Theat is not about wanting a more exciting postcode. It is not about convenience. It is about the difference between remaining trapped in environments that cannot support an ordinary life and relocating to a place where there is at least a realistic chance of rebuilding one.

Brbrisbane is not magic. It will not remove my disabilities. It will not make support simple. But it does have something my current regional environment does not have: a deeper and more specialised support market. More clinicians. More workers. More providers. More people with experience supporting bodies and lives as complex as mine. More chance of building a support model that is not constantly one resignation, one illness, one cancellation, or one provider failure away from collapse.

That is the reality of thin markets. A large regional centre may look serviceable from a distance. It may have hospitals, allied health services, registered providers, and disability workers on paper. But paper availability is not the same as a functioning support market. The real question is not whether services technically exist. The real question is whether there are enough of the right services, with the right skills, at the right frequency, with enough flexibility and resilience to sustain a person with complex needs safely in the community.

in my case, the answer has been no.

Theat failure has cost me years of my life. Not metaphorical years. Actual years: years away from home, away from community, away from ordinary routines, away from work and contribution, and away from the kind of life the NDIS was supposedly created to make possible.

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Chapter 20 What would be required to rebuild life

The system often behaves as if people like me are asking for something excessive. We are not.

What I need is not a luxury. I need a home that works for my body and my support needs. I need enough funding to build and maintain a trained support team. I need the ability to choose who comes into my home. I need the ability to live with people I choose, not people selected for me because their support needs make a funding model easier. I need support that can respond to the real pattern of my life, including health changes, work demands, community participation, fatigue, crisis, recovery, and opportunity. That is what ordinary life requires for me.

The funding problem in my case is not simple, and it is not just one thing. It is what happens when real life collides with a bureaucratic model of how things ought to work on paper.

The first failure is that, in my case, the scheme did not operate according to any serious version of insurance logic. If the NDIS is genuinely an insurance-based scheme, then early investment should matter. The scheme should be looking at what supports, equipment, therapies, housing, community access, and capacity- building interventions are likely to reduce future need, prevent decline, maintain function, and avoid far more expensive crises later. In my case, that did not happen in any meaningful way. The supports that should have been front-loaded earlier were not provided at the level required, and the foreseeable result is that my needs are now significantly greater than they may otherwise have been.

The second failure is that, as I have aged and my function has declined, my funding has not increased in any real-world sense to match that decline. In practical terms, once inflation, wage increases, service-delivery costs, and NDIS pricing changes are taken into account, my funding has gone backwards while my needs have gone sharply in the other direction. My needs are now roughly four times what they were.

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15 years ago, yet the funding architecture around me has not responded as it should have. That is not a sustainable support model. It is a slow-motion support failure being treated as administrative continuity.

The third failure is the loss, over the last several years, of the regular community access and capacity-building supports that helped slow decline and keep me connected to life. These were never luxuries. They included things like going to the gym with support and an exercise physiologist to do targeted exercises aimed at slowing functional decline; hydrotherapy to stretch muscles in my legs and back that otherwise have very little opportunity to properly move and release; tilt-table work to assist with blood pressure regulation, bone density, and autonomic nervous system stability; and physiotherapy and dry needling, which, given the significant nerve damage in my shoulders, is one of the few interventions that can reduce the neurological pain enough to make me somewhat functional on some days.

those are not indulgences. They are the practical tools that help keep a complex body working for as long as possible. They are also part of what allows me to remain active, connected, and able to contribute. When those supports are removed, sreduced, delayed, or treated as optional, the impact is not merely that I miss out on activities I enjoy. The impact is physical deterioration, reduced function, increased pain, reduced resilience, increased dependence, higher risk of crisis, and greater long-term cost.

A redacted: s47F - personal privacy portion of what has happened to my body is nobody’s fault. Disability, ageing, and functional decline are real. I am not pretending otherwise. But a significant part of where I am now was foreseeable, and some of it was preventable. That is the point.

A system built on insurance principles should understand prevention. A system built on disability rights should understand community living. A system built to support disabled people should not wait until a person’s life has collapsed and then treat the collapse as evidence that they are too complex, too costly, or too difficult to support properly.

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It may be more expensive to fund my support properly than it is to fund some other people’s supports. That is true. But cost alone does not answer the question. The real question is what happens if that support is not provided.

If the support is not provided, I do not become cheaper in any meaningful sense. I become displaced. I become more likely to rely on hospitals. I become less able to work, contribute, advocate, participate, maintain health, prevent deterioration, and remain connected to community. The cost does not vanish. It is shifted elsewhere, often in ways that are more expensive, more harmful, and less visible in the NDIS line item.

This is where the insurance logic of the NDIS should matter.

A scheme that refuses to fund what keeps a person stable, then pays far more after their life collapses, is not fiscally responsible. It is short-sighted.

A scheme that removes the conditions of community living, then points to the cost of crisis, is not sustainable. It is manufacturing the very costs it claims to fear.

For me, rebuilding life requires more than a plan with numbers attached to it. It requires a support model that recognises the reality of my needs. It requires SDA that is fit for purpose. It requires sufficient support funding. It requires a move to a market that can actually deliver the supports. It requires clinical oversight without clinical captivity. It requires workers who can be trained in the person-specific tasks that keep me safe. It requires enough flexibility to allow life to happen.

That last point is crucial.

Lives do not unfold in neat plan categories. Some days are heavier than others. Some weeks require more support. Some activities require two workers. Some tasks require an RN or clinical involvement. Some periods are stable. Some are not. A system that cannot flex with the ebbs and flows of real life will fail people whose lives are complex.

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The flexibility also needs to follow people outside the home. Many people with high and complex support needs work, attend conferences, participate in community events, travel for advocacy, visit friends, attend festivals, go camping, go fishing, or simply need a few days away from their ordinary routine like anyone else. My disability and support needs do not take the weekend off because I am away from home. If I attend a two-day business conference, I still need to be supported at that conference. If I go camping or fishing for a long weekend, I still need the supports hat allow me to eat, drink, shower, dress, use the toilet, manage my body, move safely, and participate.

There are two related but distinct issues here. The first is ordinary participation in life. If I choose to attend a music festival, go camping, go fishing, or take a holiday, I should meet my own ordinary personal costs in the same way anyone else would.

But where my disability means I cannot safely participate unless I take a team of support workers with me, the additional disability-related costs are not ordinary holiday costs. They are support costs. They may include worker travel, worker accommodation, worker meals, additional event access, and roster arrangements that exist only because my disability support needs come with me. Those costs are directly attributable to disability, and they should not simply be shifted onto the disabled person as though they are personal lifestyle expenses.

The second issue is Short Term Accommodation, often described as respite. STA is not a holiday; it’s a disability support. Its purpose isn’t to give people with disabilities a free weekend away, but rather provide short term change in support environment, routine, and care arrangement when necessary due to their disability. it shouldn’t be treated like something which must come out from someoneǯs savings for holidays—because doing so collapses both into one bucket. For many disabled individuals genuine opportunities for vacation time already rare & difficult enough. A person who saves money specifically intended towards an actual holiday might have those funds spent on accommodations/respite services related toward managing any existing impairments or conditions - effectively preventing them ever experiencing what non-disabled folks routinely enjoy.

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The current narrowing of STA is concerning. Respite is often discussed as though it exists solely for informal family/friend-provided supports. Many disabled people lack this kind of structure; many rely on paid teams. A few days in a different setting can serve respite: providing breaks from routine, reducing isolation, supporting community participation, allowing team rest while smaller groups provide at-home care. For someone with needs like mine, a full team may involve 12 to 15 individuals. When three workers assist me away for several days, others gain valuable break time otherwise rarely available.

Treating all of this merely as holiday misunderstands complex disability realities—it applies an ableist lens assuming separation between life & need. The historical framework enabling communal living isn’t just about receiving familiar support within one’s own residence but also requires adaptability alongside rhythms, obligations, disruptions, opportunities, occasional chaos inherent in daily existence. Support systems should facilitate that reality rather than exacerbate challenges.

It’s insufficient simply pointing toward theoretically workable models or administratively complete plans. Supports must be deliverable within the person’s actual lived experience – their market environment and supported by appropriate workforce, housing, clinical oversight, flexibility.

If funding proves inadequate, then said support lacks authenticity. If suitable personnel are unavailable, so too does it fail its purpose. Untrained staff render such supports unrealized. Incorrect ratios compromise safety. Defective accommodation renders planning ineffective; lacking meaningful input regarding who enters my home/provides assistance undermines choice and control - these become mere words not practice.

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In my case, the problem is not simply theoretical delivery failure. I am also massively underfunded for the level of support required. What I need is not a paper model of support, and not a plan that looks complete from a distance. I need the actual practical conditions that allow me to live safely, return home, and rebuild a life.

Chapter 21 The problem with shared ratios

One of the clearest signs of regression in the current system is the increasing push toward shared support ratios, particularly for people with high support needs.

For someone like me, support ratios such as 1:2, 1:3, or 1:4 are not merely inadequate. They can be grossly ineffective and unsafe. They do not reflect what is necessary to meet my needs. They do not reflect the level of responsiveness required. They do not reflect the reality of clinical risk, manual handling, functional decline, community participation, or the fact that support is often needed actively and individually.

There are periods where I require 1:1 active support. There are periods where I require two support workers. There are periods where I may require a support worker and an RN. These are not preferences. They are practical requirements linked to safety, clinical needs, manual handling, and the ability to function.

A shared ratio assumes that support can be divided. Sometimes it can. Often, for people with complex needs, it cannot.

If a person requires active assistance at a particular moment, the fact that a worker is also responsible for two or three other people is not a small adjustment. It changes the nature of the support. It creates delay. It creates divided attention. It creates competition between needs. It creates the possibility that the worker must choose whose risk matters most in that moment.

That is not a safe design for people whose needs are immediate, complex, and sometimes life-critical.

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It also misunderstands what support is for. Support is not only about preventing immediate harm. It is about enabling a person to live. Shared ratios may be designed around the narrowest idea of maintenance. They may keep a person washed, fed, medicated, and somewhere indoors. But that is not the same as an ordinary life.

An ordinary life requires the ability to leave the house. To work. To attend meetings. To participate in community. To pursue interests. To maintain relationships. To be spontaneous sometimes. To respond to opportunities. To be more than a body that has been kept alive at the lowest defensible cost.

The current approach too often appears to reduce the question to this: can the participant prove that a cheaper shared ratio will cause direct and immediate harm?

That is the wrong question.

The correct question is: what support model is necessary for this person to live safely, with dignity, with autonomy, and with real access to an ordinary life?

those are very different questions. The first question starts with cost and asks the participant to prove why they should not be forced into a cheaper model. The second starts with the person and asks what is required to meet the purpose of the scheme.

the first question is bureaucratic. The second is rights-based.

the first question narrows the person to risk. The second recognises the person as a citizen.

p There is also a deeper danger in the shared-ratio logic. It encourages the system to group people together because their support needs appear administratively similar. But people are not compatible housemates because they both require support. People are not community because their rosters can be merged. People should not lose control over who they live with because a spreadsheet says their needs can be funded more cheaply together.

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The text below states: “That is not choice and control. It is containment with nicer language.”

It continues: “For some people, shared supports may be appropriate and chosen. That is not the issue. The issue is when shared support becomes the default assumption, and the person must fight their way back toward individualised support by proving that the cheaper model is unsafe enough to reject.”

A further statement reads: “That flips the entire scheme on its head.”

The document explains: “The NDIS was meant to support people to live ordinary lives. It was not meant to require people with the highest needs to prove, over and over again, that their lives are too dangerous to underfund.

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Who comes into my home matters. Their skill matters. Their temperament matters.

Their reliability matters. Their ability to learn matters. Their respect for boundaries matters. Their ability to work in a person-directed way matters. Their ability to notice change matters. Their willingness to be trained matters. Their understanding that they are entering my home, not that I am living in their workplace, matters.

Choice also means choosing who I live with. That should be obvious, but apparently it still needs to be said.

People with high support needs should not be forced into living arrangements based on administrative convenience. We should not be grouped because our support profiles make a funding model easier. We should not be told that the price of support is the loss of control over our own home life.

The right to live in the community is not satisfied by placing people in a house in the community while stripping away meaningful control over who they live with, who supports them, and how their day is structured. Institutionalisation is not only a building type. It is a relationship of control.

A person can be institutionalised in a setting that looks domestic if the model denies choice, privacy, flexibility, autonomy, and control.

That is why the current direction is so dangerous. It does not always look like a return to the large institutions of the past. It may arrive as shared ratios, provider- controlled housing, limited worker choice, rigid funding categories, reduced fexibility, or a bureaucratic insistence that a person’s life can be made efficient by aligning it with the needs of others.

But the effect can be the same: people lose control over their lives.

For me, that loss is not theoretical. I have lived the difference between support that is built around my life and support that tries to fit my life into someone elseǯs model. I know which one is safer. I know which one allows contribution. I know which one creates dignity. I know which one produces harm.

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The system should know that too, because disabled people have been saying it for decades.

Chapter 23 The regression toward robotic service delivery

Over the last few years, there has been a serious regression toward uniform, rigid, almost robotic service delivery.

The yes and no lists, the tightening of funding periods, the growing suspicion towards flexibility, and the increasing pressure toward standardised support models all point in the same direction. The system is becoming less willing to recognise that disabled people have real lives.

Real lives are not uniform. They do not run on perfect administrative cycles. They do not always align with plan dates, funding categories, support lists, or the assumptions of people who have never had to coordinate survival around a roster.

My life has ebbs and flows. My support needs change with health, fatigue, work, pain, sensory load, functional decline, recovery, opportunity, crisis, community commitments, and the ordinary unpredictability of being alive. A week of heavy governance work may require more support. A period of health instability may require more support. A community activity may require support at a time that does not fit the routine. A piece of equipment may fail. A worker may leave. A clinical issue may change the entire rhythm of the day.

That is not exceptional. That is life.

A flexible support model can respond to that. A rigid model cannot.

The current direction seems increasingly designed around what is easy to administer, easy to audit, easy to price, easy to standardise, and easy for large providers to deliver. That may create the appearance of consistency. But consistency is not the same as quality. Consistency is not the same as safety. Consistency is not the same as a good life.

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A prison is consistent. An institution is constant. A hospital ward is constant. A group home can be constant. Consistency alone tells us nothing about whether a person is free, safe, respected, connected or able to live a life of their own choosing.

Uniform service delivery may suit large providers. It may suit bureaucratic reporting. It may suit a system trying to reduce discretion. But for people whose lives depend on support, uniformity can become a form of erasure.

It erases the person-specific detail that makes support safe. It erases the ordinary variation of life. It erases the difference between keeping someone alive and enabling them to live. It erases the fact that some people need support to attend a board meeting, restore antique furniture, take part in a maker space, engage in astrophotography, participate in a community garden, cook with others or contribute to a policy process.

When the system reduces support to a narrow set of approved tasks, the rest of life is treated as optional.

The rest of life is the point.

The good things of life are not peripheral. They are not decorative. They are not a reward after basic care has been delivered. They are part of what it means to be human.

A system that funds survival while stripping away the conditions of life is not fulfilling the promise of the NDIS.

Chapter 24 Support as the infrastructure of contribution

One of the most offensive assumptions that appears to sit underneath parts of the current reform conversation is that people with high and complex support needs are mainly takers.

That assumption may not always be said openly. It does not need to be. It is present in the way cost is discussed. It is present in the way high support needs are treated.

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as a burden to be minimised. It is present in the idea that some people are too expensive to support into ordinary life. It is present in the pressure toward shared ratios and congregated models. It is present in the narrow framing of safety as the avoidance of immediate harm, rather than the presence of dignity, autonomy, contribution, and community.

The assumption is wrong.

People with high support needs can contribute deeply to their communities when the right supports exist. We may contribute differently. We may require more infrastructure to do so. We may not fit narrow economic measures of productivity. But that does not make our contribution less real.

My own life is evidence of that.

I have worked across co-design and facilitation, policy design, policy research, governance, systems design, and rights advocacy. I have contributed to the governance of not-for-profit organisations and disability-led work. I have participated in spaces where systems are designed, critiqued, improved, and held accountable. I have brought lived experience, technical knowledge, governance understanding, and systems thinking into rooms where those perspectives are often missing.

I have also been an active participant in my community in ways that have nothing to do with formal policy work. I have been involved in rifle shooting, fine woodworking, antique restoration, stargazing, astrophysics, astrophotography, community garden projects, quadcopter flying, growing bromeliads and orchids, book and movie review groups, cooking, hospitality, and fine food service. I have been involved in maker spaces, both as a user of equipment and as someone engaged in the governance of those community and public services.

those things matter.

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The text on this page discusses how current disability service assessment methods fail to account for crucial aspects of quality life.

They are not hobbies in the trivial sense. They are ways of being connected to the world. They are ways of building skill, identity, relationships, contribution, and belonging. They are ways of being known by people for something other than disability. They are ways of participating in community as a whole person.

When support is adequate, skilled, flexible, and participant-directed, those parts of life become possible. When support collapses, they disappear.

That disappearance is not counted properly by the system. The system may count whether a personal care task occurred. It may count whether a plan was approved. It may count whether a provider was registered. It may count whether a budget line was reduced. It may count whether a person was physically housed somewhere.

But does it count the loss of community? Does it count the loss of contribution? Does it count the loss of being known? Does it count the loss of the workshop, the garden, the telescope, the meeting room, the kitchen, the board table, the maker space, the book group, the quiet sense of being part of something?

Usually, it does not.

The text continues explaining that this failure leads to harm while creating an illusion of responsible management because systems measure only what’s easily visible administratively rather than essential human needs.

A false dichotomy exists suggesting individuals with complex care requirements cannot contribute actively or give back; however, such divisions benefit specific agendas but risk harming people’s rights.

A stronger community isn’t built through exclusion—it becomes weaker instead.

Similarly, fairness doesn’t come from cheaper methods for keeping disabled citizens out of sight – it diminishes society.

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An insurance scheme is not sustainable because it has reduced one person’s funding while increasing their likelihood of hospitalisation, institutionalization, deterioration, and exclusion. It is only hiding the cost.

If the NDIS is to be taken seriously as an insurance-based scheme, it should be asking how to optimise for good outcomes over a person’s lifetime. It should ask what investment now prevents greater cost later. It should ask how to support people to remain housed, healthy, connected, skilled, and contributing. It should ask disabled people what actually works, rather than designing systems from a distance and then wondering why they fail.

The answer, in many cases, is not mysterious. Fund the supports that work. Preserve participant direction. Support clinical training and oversight without forcing people into clinical captivity. Recognise thin markets. Fund housing that fits. Allow flexibility. Measure outcomes that matter. Listen when people say the system is making them unsafe.

Most importantly, stop treating the lives of people with high and complex support needs as a problem to be contained.

We are not problems. We are people.

We are citizens. We are workers, advocates, thinkers, makers, friends, colleagues, neighbours, board members, gardeners, cooks, readers, restorers, stargazers, and members of communities that are poorer when we are forced out of them.

The supports I need are substantial. I will not pretend otherwise. But they are not excessive when measured against the purpose they serve. They are what allow me to live, contribute, and remain connected to the world.

That is what the current reform conversation keeps failing to understand.

The question is not simply how much support costs.

The question is what is destroyed when that support is removed.

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A n d i n m y l i f e , t h e a n s w e r i s n o l o n g e r hypothetical . I ha v e alr ea dy lost my home . I h a ve alrea dy lo st ye ar s . I have already been pushed through environments that no o ne sh ou ld pre tend ar e equiva lent to a life of one’s own choosing. I hav e alread y se en wh at happe ns when th e system talks about sustainability while refusing to face the human cost of its choices.

I am still here to say it.

M any others are not .

T hat should matter.

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PART 05

Foreseeable harm ² the people the system was warned about

Chapter 25 Foreseeable harm as a fact, not a prediction

The phrase “foreseeable harm” is often used loosely, as though it described a future risk yet to materialise. In the context of the Australian disability support system, it does not. The harm at issue has been foreseen, documented, formally investigated, and publicly reported for years Ȅ by parliamentary inquiry, by Royal Commission, by coroners, by the scheme’s own regulator, and by investigative journalism. The question this Part asks is not whether harm to disabled people is likely if supports are withdrawn or congregated settings are expanded; the question is what Australia is choosing to do about a body of evidence that already establishes both the harm and its causes. Foreseeability, in this context, is not a hypothesis. It is a record. This matters because the rhetorical structure of “sustainability reform” depends on framing future harm as speculative Ȅ something concerned advocates worry about, but that cannot be confirmed until it occurs. The record assembled in the chapters below removes that frame. The harm has already been confirmed, repeatedly, by every formal mechanism Australia possesses for confirming such things. Parliament has been told. The Royal Commission has been told. Coroners have been told. The regulator has been told. Journalists have shown the country, on prime-time television, what was being told. If a reform proceeds nonetheless Ȅ on magnitudes that, as Part 6 has shown, will predictably push thousands of participants into the

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very settings where the documented harm concentrates Ȅ the question becomes

to what was foreseen, but what was chosen anyway. Those are different moral

categories, and they should not be allowed to blur.

The chapters that follow set out the components of the record in turn. None of them depends on the testimony of any particular individual; all of them are drawn from sources already in the public domain, already paid for by Australian taxpayers, and already presented to the institutions now legislating in apparent disregard of them.

Chapter 26: The Royal Commission’s findings as the central record

The Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability was established on 4 April 2019, sat for four and a half years, received 7,944 submissions, heard from almost ten thousand people through public hearings and private sessions, produced fourteen issues papers and over seven hundred responses to them, and delivered its Final Report Ȅ 6,845 pages across ten volumes plus an introductory volume Ȅ to the Governor-General on 28 September 2023 (Disability Royal Commission 2023). It is, by any measure, the most comprehensive examination of violence against and harm to disabled Australians ever conducted in this country. It produced 222 recommendations. The Commonwealth has acknowledged receipt of those recommendations and tabled progress reports; the Bill now before the Parliament is, on its operative provisions, inconsistent with a substantial number of them.

The Commission’s central evidentiary findings, restated in the simplest possible terms, are these. People with disability experience violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation at significantly higher rates and at significantly greater frequencies than the rest of the community. The settings in which that harm concentrates are settings where decision-making is concentrated in providers and staff and where disabled people lack genuine choice and control Ȅ institutional accommodation, large group residences, and the “family-like” group homes that replaced the larger

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institutions but have not, as the Commission concluded in its own words, “eliminated institutional forms of violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation experienced by people with disability, particularly those with serious intellectual disabilities” (Disability Royal Commission 2023, vol. 7). Seventeen thousand people living in group homes were identified as being at significant risk. The annual societal cost of violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation of disabled Australians was estimated, on the Commission’s analysis, at approximately forty-six billion dollars per year.

The Commission’s analysis was not confined to documenting harm. It traced the mechanisms by which harm is produced and sustained: power imbalances inherent in institutional arrangements; the devaluing of disabled people’s voices in incident reporting and investigation; the treatment of abuse as a “workplace issue” or “service incident” rather than as the criminal or systemic matter it usually is; the under-recognition of restrictive practices as a form of abuse; the inadequacy of self- reporting and provider-led investigation regimes; the structural barriers to people with cognitive or communication disability accessing justice; and the cumulative effect of segregation in producing the conditions under which all of the above can persist. The Commission’s recommendations are correspondingly structural: a proposed Australian Disability Rights Act, reform to supported decision-making and restrictive-practice regimes, the introduction of a national reporting and investigation framework, regulatory and workforce reforms, and directly relevant here` a phasing out of segregated and congregated settings in favour of inclusive community living. Several recommendations specifically address the regulatory architecture of the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission, and others address access to and design of NDIS supports themselves.

What matters for the argument of this paper is not which of the 222 recommendations the Commonwealth ultimately accepts. It is that the Commission’s findings as to where the harm lives, why it happens, and what produces it are now established on the record. A reform proposing to reduce participant numbers, cap individualised support, expand reliance on ratio-based care, and reorient the scheme away from the participant-centred principles that the

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Commission identified as foundational to safety cannot be discussed honestly without acknowledging that it is doing each of these things into the teeth of the

Commission’s findings. The Commission was paid for; it reported; its evidentiary findings have not been displaced by any later inquiry. They stand.

Chapter 27 The longer record ² the campaign, the Senate inquiry, the long deinstitutionalisation

The Royal Commission did not arrive unprompted. It was the culmination of a campaign sustained for decades by disabled people, their families, and the disability advocacy peaks Ȅ and immediately following a formal parliamentary finding that the harm was already an “epidemic.” That immediate prompt was the Senate Community Affairs References Committee’s 2015 inquiry into Violence, abuse and neglect against people with disability in institutional and residential settings, established on 11 February 2015 (Parliament of Australia 2015). The Committee’s report, after extensive evidence-gathering, characterised the violence and abuse of disabled Australians in institutional settings as a national epidemic, found that the existing system of oversight was inadequate to the scale of the problem, and made thirty recommendations Ȅ the first of which was the establishment of a royal commission. The Australian Cross Disability Alliance (Women With Disabilities Australia, People with Disability Australia, the National Ethnic Disability Alliance,and the First Peoples Disability Network) made a joint submission representing, intheir description, “the culmination of more than two decades of people withdisability and their allies campaigning and advocating for a national, independentinquiry” (Australian Cross Disability Alliance 2015).

It is worth dwelling on that sentence. By 2015, the disability community had beencampaigning for a national inquiry into institutional violence and abuse for overtwenty years. The Senate inquiry of 2015 was itself a culmination, not an origin. Bythe time the Royal Commission was established in 2019, the campaign wasapproaching its third decade. By the time the Final Report was delivered in 2023,the documented evidentiary record stretched back further still, encompassingevery previous report, every state-based inquiry, every ombudsman investigation,every

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parliamentary committee, and the long literature on deinstitutionalisation that

informed all of them. The Royal Commission’s findings, in other words, are not a

single moment of recognition. They are the public confirmation of what disabled

people had been saying, in formal submissions to formal inquiries, for a generation.

The deinstitutionalisation literature deserves explicit acknowledgment in this , because the Bill before the Parliament will, on the analysis of Part 6, predictably push participants back into the kinds of settings the deinstitutionalisation movement was specifically designed to close. From the 1970s onward internationally, and in Australia from the 1980s successive policy reforms moved disabled people out of large institutions and into community-based supports, on the basis of accumulated evidence (then) that institutional models produced systemic harm, isolation, and the denial of rights, and that smaller community arrangements produced better outcomes. The accumulated evidence has not weakened in the decades since; it has strengthened, and the Royal Commission’s own findings, examined in Chapter 26, restate it. The institutions closed. The harm patterns survived in the smaller settings that replaced them. The 17,000 group-home residents identified as at significant risk in 2023 are the contemporary face of a record that runs back, in clear-eyed inquiry form, half a century.

This is the longer record into which the current reform is being introduced. To withdraw individualised support funding at the scale Part 6 has documented, and to expect that the supports lost will not result in a reversion to congregated arrangements, is to ignore the entire half-century body of evidence on which the modern disability service system rests. To do so while the ink is still drying on the Royal Commission’s Final Report and while government progress reports on implementing the Commission’s 222 recommendations are still being prepared and tabled is, at minimum, to require an account of how the Bill’s drafters understand themselves to be responding to the record. No such account has yet been offered. The body of evidence is treated, in the public framing of the reform, as if it did not exist.

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Chapter 28 The coronial trail

Where the Royal Commission and the Senate inquiry gather evidence at scale, the coronal system records it one death at a time. Each finding is granular, named, and made on the basis of the formal evidentiary standards of a court. Taken individually, each is the record of a single tragedy. Taken cumulatively, they are an unanswerable demonstration that the harm the larger inquiries described in aggregate terms manifests in specific, identified, and preventable deaths. The trail is long, and the chapters that follow do not attempt to reproduce it in full; the purpose here is to establish the type of evidence available, with reference to representative findings.

The Victorian State Coroner has, on multiple occasions, made formal recommendations to the Commonwealth and Victorian governments in respect of deaths of people with disability, including in the finding into the death of William Heddergott, in which the coroner observed that neither the NDIS providers nor the mental health professionals responsible for his care were adequately trained to respond to reports of family violence, and recommended the prescription of the NDIA and the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission under the relevant information-sharing scheme (Coroners Court of Victoria 2023). The same coroner has called formally for the establishment of an adult safeguarding agency, citing the absence of an effective mechanism to assess, investigate, and respond to allegations of abuse, neglect, and exploitation of at-risk adults. The NSW State Coroner, in the inquest into the death of Carney Schultz at a group home in the Illawarra in April 2015, recommended that the findings be provided to the NDIA so that it could consider “the identified shortcomings in the supported living services” provided to Ms Schultz and “the adoption of a multidisciplinary team approach to the drafting and implementation of appropriate Epilepsy Management Plans by supported living (group accommodation) disability service providers” (NSW Coroners Court 2018).

And the death of Ann-Marie Smith Ȅ an NDIS participant who died in April 2020 in what the NDIS Commission’s own subsequent description has characterised as appalling circumstances Ȅ prompted the independent Robertson Review of the NDIS Commission’s regulation of the relevant provider, the findings of which sit

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alongside other recent coronial and regulatory examinations of the same pattern

(NDIS Commission 2020; Robertson 2020).

Two structural features of the coronial record bear emphasis. The first is that, although the coronial system records preventable deaths in detail, it captures only the deaths formally reported to it. Multiple inquiries — including the Queensland Office of the Public Advocate and the NSW Ombudsman — have documented chronic under-reporting of disability-related deaths, with health and disability staff often unaware of, or non-compliant with, reporting obligations. The deaths visible in the coronial record are, on the available evidence, a subset of the deaths that should be visible. The second is that the recommendations attached to coronial findings — directed at the NDIA, the NDIS Commission, providers, and governments — represent specific, formal, on-the-record requests for systemic change, made by the institution Australia uses for exactly this purpose. The compliance of recipients with those recommendations is, by all evidence, uneven. The findings do not vanish; they remain on the record, and they remain available as evidence that the harm was foreseen and that the institutions in receipt of the formal notice did not act.

A separate but related body of evidence is the academic and clinical literature drawing on coronial findings to identify patterns. Research led at the University of Technology Sydney into coronial findings on the deaths of people in residential care from choking and aspiration pneumonia — published in the Journal of Law and Medicine — examined four inquest findings and concluded that in every case the coroner had found the death preventable (McCarthy et al. 2022). The study estimated that as many as two million Australians live with dysphagia, the swallowing difficulty implicated in such deaths, including many people with intellectual disability, cerebral palsy, traumatic brain injury, and other conditions over-represented in disability services. The preventability finding is what matters here. The pattern is documented; the mechanisms by which it can be addressed are documented; the deaths nonetheless continue. That is foreseeability operating at the level of pattern, not just at the level of the individual case.

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Chapter 29 Mortality data and investigative journalism as parallel public records

Two further sources complete the record this Part has been building. The first is the regulator’s own mortality data. In a study undertaken by the NDIS Commission and the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 9,062 deaths among 526,515 people accessing disability support services under the National Disability Agreement between 2013 and 2018 were analysed (AIHW / NDIS Commission). The findings were unambiguous: compared with the general population, people using disability support services had higher rates of mortality; the leading causes of death varied across the cohort; and people with disability had higher rates of potentially avoidable deaths than the general population.

This is the regulator’s own evidence not the disability community’s claim, not an advocacy report, but the Commonwealth’s own analysis of its own administrative data that disabled Australians using the support system die at higher rates and from causes that are, in significant part, avoidable. The Commission’s subsequent recommendations for improved data collection, stratification, and reporting of disability-related deaths are themselves an acknowledgment that what is currently captured is inadequate to the scale of the problem.

The second parallel record is investigative journalism, and one program above all has carried it. The ABC’s Four Corners has produced a series of investigations into violence, abuse, and exploitation in disability and supported accommodation settings over the past decade. The November 2014 investigation into Yooralla which prompted the 2015 Senate inquiry was a watershed. The September 2023 episode, “Careless,” aired in the same week as the Royal Commission’s Final Report, exposed registered NDIS providers and opportunists exploiting the scheme and abusing participants (ABC Four Corners 2023). Among the practices it brought to national attention were the abusive restraint practices at Irabina Autism Services in Melbourne, which drew formal statements of concern from the Acting Disability Discrimination Commissioner and the National Children’s Commissioner (Australian Human Rights Commission 2024). Four Corners has continued to

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expose violence, abuse, neglect, and exploitation within NDIS provider settings in

episodes since. The investigative journalism is not the primary record Ȅ the Royal Commission, the coronial findings, and the regulator’s data are. But it has functioned as a parallel public record, repeatedly and in prime time, of the same patterns the formal inquiries have documented.

What is the cumulative weight of these records together? Two decades of community advocacy. A 2015 Senate inquiry finding an epidemic. A four-and-a-half- year Royal Commission with 7,944 submissions and 222 recommendations. A coronial trail of named, preventable deaths with formal recommendations directed at the responsible Commonwealth agencies. A regulator’s own analysis of 9,062 deaths showing elevated potentially-avoidable mortality. A decade of investigative journalism, prompting and following each of the above. Every one of these is in the public domain, paid for by the Commonwealth or by independent journalism, and accessible to anyone who wishes to consult it Ȅ including, demonstrably, the drafters of the Bill now before the Parliament.

Chapter 30 What the record establishes ² and what the Bill does anyway

The argument this Part has built can now be stated simply. The harm that will follow the contraction proposed by the Bill Ȅ for participants forced out of individualised support and into congregated settings; for participants who lose access to early intervention and capacity-building supports; for participants whose plans are cut below the threshold at which their lives can be sustained safely in the community; for participants whose family carers can no longer remain in paid work; for the prospective participants who will never enter the scheme at all Ȅ is not a speculative future risk. It is the predictable continuation of patterns that are, on the public record, exhaustively documented. The institutions that produced that record are the institutions of the Commonwealth. The institutions enacting the contraction are the same institutions. They have one another’s records, and the records of inquiries they have themselves established, and the recommendations made directly to them. They are not in the position of acting in ignorance.

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The structure of foreseeability matters for what comes next, because it changes how

the Bill should be read. A reform proceeding in genuine ignorance of likely harm is

the result of failure; a reform proceeding in the face of formally established and acknowledged harm is the result of choice. The choice may still be defended on

grounds of priority Ȅ sustainability, fiscal discipline, broader social objectives Ȅ

but it cannot be defended on grounds of not having known. The chapters above

remove the not-having-known defence as a coherent position. The 2015 Senate Committee said the country had only seen the tip of the iceberg. The Royal Commission, eight years later and across thousands of pages, said the iceberg was real, large, and structural. The coronial record showed it surfaces in individual deaths the system was warned about. The regulator’s own data showed potentially- avoidable mortality elevated above the general population. The journalism showed Australia what the records described. None of this is contested in any formal forum. None of it has been withdrawn. And none of it appears, except as background colour, in the public framing of the reform now before the Parliament.

This Part therefore closes with the proposition the next Part will take up directly. Where Part 6 examined what the Bill does, this Part has established what was known when it was written. The two together compose a single argument: the harm is foreseeable not as a worry but as a record; the reform is proceeding not in ignorance of the record but alongside it; and what that requires of the people drafting and passing the legislation is, at minimum, an account of how they understand themselves to be responding to it. No such account has been provided. The reform is being defended as sustainability, as integrity, as future-securing Ȅ never as a considered response to the public evidentiary record assembled by the Commonwealth’s own inquiries. The omission is conspicuous, and it is the omission that this paper, in its conclusion, will name.

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PART 06

The Bill — how current reforms risk legislating regression

This Part connects everything that has come before to the legislation now in front of the Parliament. It is written with two disciplines firmly in mind. The first is that it is not a legal analysis. The forensic work of statutory construction, of testing the Bill against the Convention and against administrative-law principle, is being done thoroughly and well by disability and human-rights lawyers, and this paper leaves that work to them. The second is that this Part is judged, like every other, against the question at the centre of the paper: what happens when a system forgets the people it was built to serve? The Bill is read here as evidence for that argument, not as a defendant in a legal case. Where a provision matters, what matters about it is what it does to a person — and why that is the design failure of Parts 2 through 5 completing itself in law.

Chapter 31 The stated purpose and the real question

The Bill has a name that is also an argument: the Securing the NDIS for Future Generations Bill. It was introduced to the Commonwealth Parliament on 14 May 2026, two days after a federal Budget that booked, in advance of the legislation, a reduction of approximately thirty-seven billion dollars in projected NDIS expenditure over four years — taking the scheme’s projected 2030 cost from around seventy billion dollars to around fifty-six and a half billion. That figure represents roughly one-third of the scheme’s projected expenditure. It is supported by a participant-side target of reducing the scheme’s population from approximately seven hundred and sixty thousand people to six hundred thousand by 2030, and by

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the Minister’s own description of how the average plan will change Ȅ from around

tirty-one thousand dollars today back to around twenty-six thousand within two

years. These are not adjustments at the margin. They describe a structural

contraction in what the scheme is going to deliver, to whom, and for how much, and the Bill is the legislative mechanism by which that contraction is to be enforced.

It is important to read the participant-side figure carefully, because the way it has been described in public underplays what it actually means. The headline number Ȅ a fall from seven hundred and sixty thousand current participants to six hundred thousand by 2030 Ȅ is a net figure, and the government has been explicit that it is composed of two distinct cohorts. The first is the cohort of people currently on the scheme who will be removed from it, on the basis of the new functional-capacity- based assessment, with the figure most commonly cited at around one hundred and sixty thousand. The second is the much larger group of people who would have joined the scheme over the same period under the current growth trajectory and will not now do so, because scheme growth is being cut from a projected twenty- two per cent a year to two per cent a year for four years. Net, the population falls by one hundred and sixty thousand. Gross, the number of people affected by the contraction Ȅ current participants losing access plus prospective participants who will never receive it Ȅ is materially larger; estimates in the sector place the total cohort affected in the order of three hundred thousand people. The Minister has said, accurately, that the reforms target growth in new entrants more than existing participants. What that frames as a softening of the impact on current participants is, in fact, the disclosure that most of the contraction will be borne by people the system has not yet met Ȅ people whose disability is no less real for the fact that the scheme will now decline to recognise it.

It is important to hold those numbers steady in view when reading the rest of this Part, because the government’s public framing has tended to present these changes as ordinary cost discipline of the kind any large scheme requires. The numbers describe something different. Removing around one hundred and sixty thousand current participants while preventing the entry of a further cohort estimated at

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around one hundred and forty thousand, and reducing the average plan by close to

a fifth, simultaneously, is not the management of growth. It is the removal of

supports Ȅ at scale, at speed, and in a population that is, by the scheme’s own

access criteria, the population least able to absorb the loss. The Bill’s provisions, examined chapter by chapter below, are the machinery through which that removal is to be administered.

The government frames the legislation around a set of aims that are, on their face, totally legitimate Ȅ protecting the scheme, clarifying who is eligible and what it funds, addressing fraud, modernising governance, and placing the scheme on a financially sustainable footing. None of these aims is illegitimate in principle, and this paper does not pretend otherwise. A scheme that is defrauded, or that grows without any regard to cost, will not survive to help anyone. Sustainability genuinely matters. The question is what kind of sustainability Ȅ and at whose expense.

But the name encodes an assumption that the rest of this paper has already called into question. It presents the interests of “future generations” and the interests of the current generation of participants as aligned Ȅ as though securing the scheme for the people who will need it tomorrow simply requires disciplining the scheme as it serves the people who need it today. The argument of this paper is that, for people with high and complex support needs, the Bill drives a wedge between those two things. It proposes to secure the scheme’s future in part by reducing what it guarantees to the people most dependent on it now. And that is not a sustainable bargain even on its own terms, because Ȅ as Parts 3 through 5 have shown Ȅ withdrawing support from people with complex needs does not remove the cost; it displaces it into hospitals, into families, into crisis, and into lives that deteriorate in ways that are far more expensive than the support that was withdrawn.

So the real question is not whether the government’s stated aims are worthy. It is whether those aims are being pursued in a way that protects, or endangers, the people the scheme exists for. A scheme is not secured for future generations if the current generation of people with the highest needs is made unsafe in order to secure it. That is the test this Part applies to the Bill Ȅ the same test the whole

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paper applies to the system: not what it says it is for, but what it does to the people

it is for.

Chapter 32 The change beneath all the others ² rewriting

whose plan it is

Most of the public discussion of the Bill has focused on its visible mechanisms: the new powers to suspend plans, the changes to reassessment, the fraud and enforcement provisions. Those matter, and this Part comes to them. But the most consequential change in the Bill is also one of the least visible, because it is not a new power at all. It is a deletion.

The current Act contains, in section 31, a set of principles that govern how a participant’s plan is prepared, reviewed, replaced, and funded. Those principles require that the process should, so far as reasonably practicable, be individualised and directed by the participant; consider the role of family, carers, and informal and community supports; be underpinned by the participant’s right to exercise control over their own life; advance the participant’s inclusion and participation in the community with the aim of achieving their aspirations; maximise their choice and independence; and facilitate tailored, flexible responses to their individual goals and needs. Whatever the gap between these principles and the scheme’s daily practice – and Parts 3 and 4 have shown the gap is wide – section 31 has stood as the statutory statement that the plan belongs, in principle, to the participant. It is the legislative expression of choice and control.

The Bill repeals it. Not amends it; repeals the entire Division in which it sits. In its place, the Bill inserts a new set of principles headed, with unusual candour, “Principles relating to scheme sustainability.” Where the repealed principles directed decision-makers toward the participant’s choice, control, goals, and inclusion, the new principles direct the CEO toward the scheme’s financial sustainability (by reference to the scheme actuary’s reports), toward funding only needs that arise directly from impairment, toward the participant being “responsible for their day-to-day living costs,” and toward efficiency and equity

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cross participants as a whole. Some softer language about respecting families and

carers is added elsewhere, but the operative reorientation is unmistakable. The

principles a decision-maker must weigh when shaping a person’s plan shift from the

person to the scheme Ȅ from “what does this participant need to live the life that is

theirs?“ to “what is sustainable, efficient, and equitable across the participant population?”

This is the change beneath all the others, and it is the thesis of this paper rendered in legislative form. A planning system that was statutorily oriented Ȅ however imperfectly Ȅ toward the participant’s ordinary life would become statutorily oriented toward the scheme’s cost. It is, in the most literal sense available, the law being rewritten so that the participant is no longer the centre of their own plan. Everything else the Bill does Ȅ the caps, the cost-shifting, the suspensions, the forfeitures Ȅ is the machinery through which that reorientation reaches a human being. The mechanisms are how. This is why. A system forgets the people it was built to serve in many small ways over many years; this is the moment it is asked to forget them in law.

The point is not that sustainability principles have no place. It is that they have been made to replace the participant-centred principles rather than to sit alongside them Ȅ and that a rights-based scheme cannot coherently delete the participant from the principles governing the participant’s own plan and still call itself rights- based. The supports may still, in practice, be delivered with care by individuals inside the system who have not forgotten anything. But the law’s centre of gravity will have moved, and over time, systems drift toward the centre of gravity their governing principles establish. That is precisely the lesson of the fifteen-year trajectory traced in Part 2: the scheme tends, under pressure, toward whatever its settings reward. The Bill changes the settings.

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Chapter 33 Measuring the wrong thing ² functional capacity,

the “naked person”, and what disability actually is

The Bill’s access and planning measures share a common method: they narrow the aperture through which a person, and a person’s needs, are allowed to be seen.

Functional capacity is introduced as a central organising concept for access. Reassessment becomes harder to obtain. The link between a funded support and an access impairment is tightened, so that supports must arise “directly” from the impairment in respect of which the person qualified. Permanence is tightened, so that an impairment is not treated as permanent unless the person has undertaken all appropriate treatment for it. And eligibility can be narrowed where another service system is said to be more appropriate.

Each of these can be defended in isolation, and each will be. But there is a deeper problem than narrowness, and it goes to the conceptual foundation on which the Bill’s access system is built. To see it, one has to look at how the Bill actually defines functional capacity – and then to set that definition against what disability, on the modern and internationally accepted understanding, actually is.

The Bill defines a person’s functional capacity, in relation to an activity, as their ability to undertake that activity “without assistance from other people, assistive technology or modifications” and “in a context that excludes, as far as possible, the impact of the person’s environmental and personal circumstances.” This is, in plain terms, a definition of the person stripped bare: the person without their supports, without their equipment, without the modifications that make their home usable, and abstracted from the actual circumstances of their actual life. Call it the naked person. The Bill makes the naked person’s functional deficit the gateway concept for access to the scheme.

The trouble is that the naked person’s functional deficit is not disability. On the contemporary understanding of disability – the understanding embodied in the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which, as Part 2 set out, the NDIS Act exists to give effect to – disability has three distinct elements, and only

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the third is disability itself. First, there is a medical diagnosis: a condition arising from accident, injury, illness, disease, a congenital condition, a chromosomal variation, or some other cause. Second, that diagnosis carries a functional impact functional limitation in doing certain things. But neither the diagnosis nor the functional limitation is disability. Disability is the third thing: the hardship, restriction, and exclusion a person experiences at the interface between their functional limitation and their environment. The Convention says exactly this when it describes persons with disabilities as those with long-term impairments “which in interaction with various barriers” may hinder full and effective participation. Disability lives in the interaction. It does not exist in the impairment considered alone, and it does not exist in the naked person.

This is what makes the Bill’s definition not merely narrow but incoherent on its own foundational terms. Section 9B does not measure disability and measure it stingily; it deliberately excludes the one ingredient the interaction with environment, supports, and circumstances without which, by the accepted definition, there is no disability to measure. It isolates the functional limitation, which the modern definition expressly says is not disability, and uses it as the proxy for disability. To assess a person’s disability by excluding “as far as possible” the impact of their environmental and personal circumstances is to assess disability by removing the very thing disability is made of. It is not a hard look at disability. It is a look at something else, given disability’s name. And it is being written into the enabling Act of a scheme that was created to honour a Convention whose definition it contradicts The scheme defining disability in the way the instrument it implements specifically rejects.

The practical consequences follow directly, and they compound the abstraction’s logical error. Functional capacity, even understood properly, is not a fixed property of a body. It varies with environment, support, fatigue, health, equipment, communication, sensory load, and the presence or absence of safety. A person assessed on a good day, in a supportive setting, with their equipment to hand, may present a very different functional picture from the same person on a bad day in an unfamiliar room an assessment that captures only one such snapshot will

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systematically understate what it takes to keep that person safe across all the other

days. The Bill’s definition does not merely risk catching the wrong snapshot; it

instructs the assessor to remove the context that gives any snapshot meaning. A

person whose life works because of a carefully built environment and support model

will, assessed naked, appear either far more or far less capable than they are in the

only context that exists — the real one — and in neither case will the assessment

describe their actual disability.

The “directly from impairment” test carries a related danger, and it is one Part 4

anticipated from the inside. People with multiple, interacting disabilities do not

experience their needs as a set of separable streams, each traceable to a single

qualifying impairment. The support that keeps such a person safe often arises from

the interaction of impairments, or from the way a physical disability, a neurological

condition, and a psychosocial disability compound one another. A test that asks

which single impairment a support arises “directly” from may have no honest

answer for the people whose lives are most complex — and the predictable result is

under-recognition of need precisely where need is greatest. The same is true of the

tightened permanence test: requiring that a person have undertaken “all

appropriate treatment“ before an impairment counts as permanent imports a

clinical-improvement logic that fits poorly with disabilities that are stable, lifelong,

and not awaiting a cure, and risks turning access into a moving target that recedes

as fast as a person approaches it.

None of this is to say that assessment should be unstructured, or that access should

be unbounded. It is to say that an access system built around what a person cannot

do, measured in standardised categories, on the assumption that needs trace cleanly

to single impairments, will see some people accurately and others not at all — and

the others are disproportionately the people this paper is about. A doorway and a ence are built from the same material; the difference is who is let through and who

is kept out. The concern is not that the Bill builds an assessment system. It is that it

builds one whose categories are narrowest exactly where lives are most complex.

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Chapter 34 Reasonable and necessary, and the quiet inversion of the test

The phrase “reasonable and necessary” has always been the heart of the scheme $ the test that decides what a participant actually receives. The Bill changes what that phrase means, and it does so in a way that completes an inversion this paper first named in Part 2: the conversion of “reasonable and necessary” from a test applied to a person’s actual needs into a lever applied to an overall budget.

The change operates through several provisions working together. The scheme’s own objects are reworded so that the provision of reasonable and necessary supports is qualified $ to be delivered “so far as is consistent with the financial sustainability of the scheme.” New determination powers allow maximum amounts of funding, maximum intensity of support, and maximum worker-to-participant ratios to be set for supports or classes of supports, applied to participants generally or to classes of participants. The legislation is explicit that these caps may be set without regard to whether the capped amount actually meets the cost of the supports in question. A value-for-money requirement directs the decision-maker to consider whether a lower-cost comparable support is available. And the new sustainability principles, examined in Chapter 32, instruct the decision-maker to weigh efficiency and equity across the participant population.

Taken individually, none of these is indefensible. Taken together, they shift the centre of the reasonable-and-necessary decision away from the individual in front of the decision-maker and toward the aggregate the decision-maker is trying to manage. The question slowly changes from “what does this person reasonably and necessarily need?” to “what is the standard, efficient, equitable allocation for someone in this category, given the scheme’s cost position?” And that change is most dangerous for exactly the people whose needs are least standard. The Bill leans heavily on the language of equity $ equity across participants, similar support for similar needs. But equity is not sameness, and this is the point on which the whole chapter turns. There is nothing equitable about giving two people the same support ratio when their bodies, risks, homes, communities, and support

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requirements are not the same. Formal equality of inputs, applied to unequal needs, produces deeply unequal safety. For the person at the edge of complexity, “the same as everyone with broadly similar needs” can mean a support model that is, for them specifically, unsafe.

This is where the cost-shifting principle of new section 17B does concrete work, and it is worth connecting to the lived account in Part 4. The principle that participants “should be responsible for their day-to-day living costs” sounds unobjectionable until it meets the reality that, for a person with high support needs, the line between a “day-to-day living cost” and a “disability support cost” is precisely what is dispute. Part 4 draws the distinction exactly: when a person attends a conference, t travels, or takes a holiday, they should meet their own ordinary personal costs as anyone would Ȅ but the additional costs that exist only because their disability support must travel with them (worker travel, accommodation, meals, rostering) are not lifestyle costs; they are support costs, attributable directly to disability. A value-for-money lens and a day-to-day-living-costs principle, applied without that distinction, will tend to reclassify disability-related cost as personal cost and shift it onto the participant. The same logic threatens short-term accommodation, which is a disability support and not, as Part 4 insists, a holiday Ȅ and which, if pushed onto the person’s own resources, may mean that many disabled people never get a genuine holiday at all. The inversion of reasonable and necessary is not an abstract drafting matter. It is the mechanism by which the costs of disability are quietly moved from the scheme back onto the disabled person, one reclassified line item at a time.

Chapter 35 Caps, Ratios, And The Abandonment Of Individualised Support

A small phrase, tucked deep inside the Bill’s new determination powers, deserves to be read carefully. New section 33(2EA) allows the CEO to determine maximum amounts of funding, maximum intensity of support, and maximum worker-to- participant ratios for supports or classes of supports Ȅ and these caps may be applied to participants generally or to classes of participants. So far, so

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administratively familiar. But the provision also makes clear that such a cap may be

set “regardless of whether a funding component amount meets the cost of the

supports.“ The legislation expressly contemplates that a maximum may be set below

what the support actually costs to deliver.

It is worth pausing on that, because it is the most concise admission in the Bill of

what the inversion of reasonable and necessary means in practice. A cap that can be

set without regard to whether it meets the cost of the support is not a limit on

excess; it is permission to fund supports at less than what they cost. For people with

high and complex needs, this is the same move that has been quietly happening in

plans for years Ȅ funding component amounts that do not match the actual market

price of the support Ȅ but now with statutory authority. The Bill does not merely

allow individual budgets to fall below need. It declares that allowing them to fall

below need is a legitimate exercise of the power.

Support ratios are the same move in another guise. A worker-to-participant ratio

that is set at the class level Ȅ one worker to four participants, say, or one to two Ȅ

is not a description of what is safe for any individual. It is a description of what the

scheme is willing to fund as the standard for a category of people. For the

participant whose actual needs require one-to-one support to be safe, a one-to-four

ratio is not a budgetary constraint; it is a structural reassignment of risk from the

scheme onto the person, the family, and the support worker. The same point

applies to maximum intensity. A cap on the intensity of support Ȅ measured, for

instance, in hours per day or the number of skilled supports per shift Ȅ that is set

without regard to whether it meets the person’s actual need is not a ceiling on

extravagance; it is a permission for the person to be supported less than they need

to be safe.

The Bill’s defenders will say, with some force, that flexibility remains and that

exceptions can be made. That may be true on the page. But systems are governed by

their defaults, not by their exceptions, and the default these provisions create is that

complex support needs are first compared against a generic category, then capped

by a generic amount and a generic ratio, and only then Ȅ through an exception

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The process the participant must drive and document restored to something closer to what their life actually requires. For people whose communication, cognition, or capacity makes exception-driving difficult, The default is the experience. The exception is theoretical.

This is what the abandonment of individualised support looks like in legislation. It does not arrive announced; it arrives as a small phrase saying that a cap can be set without regard to cost, as a determination power that travels in classes, and as a value-for-money lens trained on the question of whether a cheaper alternative will do. Each provision is administratively reasonable in isolation. Together, they replace the question the scheme was built to ask what does this person reasonably and necessarily need? with the question a budget asks: what is the standard allocation for this class? The first question is the one that protects an outlier. The second is the one that abandons them.

Chapter 36 The plan that resets itself automated forfeiture and the wheelchair that never arrives

Some provisions are dangerous because they are written ambiguously. Others are dangerous because they are written with complete clarity. New section 50A is the second kind. It provides that when a participant’s plan reaches its end date, a renewed plan automatically comes into force, and that the renewed plan is identical to the previous one except that “the new plan does not include any one-off funding for a support that was included under the old plan.” Subsection 50A(4)(b) adds that the renewal “does not involve the making of any reviewable decision.” Taken together: at midnight on the right date, the system rolls over a person’s plan and silently removes any one-off, capital, or otherwise time-limited funding from it. No officer makes a decision. No notice is given. There is nothing to review.

The Explanatory Memorandum suggests the drafters had in mind unused, expired, time-limited items temporary variations, one-off allowances that were never spent. That is a reasonable thing to clean up between plans. But the section does not say “unused”; it says “one-off funding for a support that was included under the

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old plan.“ And the systems-design point is that legislation does not get to be defended by what its drafters had in mind. Once enacted, the section will do what its words allow it to do, in every case its words cover, regardless of intent. And what its words allow is the automatic removal of approved one-off funding for any support that has not yet been paid for by the time the plan ticks over even if it has been assessed, quoted, prescribed, ordered, manufactured, and shipped.

Consider the consequence for a single, ordinary, foreseeable case. A participant is approved for a new wheelchair. They are measured. Quotes are obtained. The script is lodged with the manufacturer. The chair is built typically overseas and shipped. Several weeks pass between approval and arrival, because that is how the supply chain for complex custom equipment works. During that time, The participant’s plan reaches its end date. The plan resets. The one-off funding for the wheelchair is automatically removed from the renewed plan, because section 50A(2)(b) requires its removal. The wheelchair arrives. The participant is presented with the invoice. The funding to pay it no longer exists in their plan, and no decision has been made that can be reviewed, because the renewal “does not involve the making of any reviewable decision.” The Bill’s Schedule 3 automation powers which authorise designated administrative actions, including plan- related actions, to be taken by the operation of a computer program mean this entire sequence can occur without a single human officer touching the file. The participant’s circumstances did not change. The CEO did not make a decision. A computer applied a statutory rule.

The participant who is most likely to be caught by this is also the one least able to manage the consequence: a person with high and complex support needs, dependent on custom equipment, with the slowest supply chains, the largest invoices, and the least capacity to absorb a forty- or fifty-thousand-dollar bill that has just become their personal debt. Many legal commentators have suggested, plausibly, that the drafters did not intend this consequence that they were thinking about housekeeping, not about people whose lives are organised around equipment that takes months to arrive. The point, for the systems argument of this paper, is that intent is no answer once the law is enacted. A statutory provision that

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automatically strips approved funding from a plan, without a reviewable decision, will cause exactly this harm in exactly this case. It is the design failure of this Part rendered as a single transaction: a system so far from the person that it can take away their wheelchair while it is being delivered, and no one inside the system will have done it.

The proper remedy is the one any system actually built around its participants would have built in by default: one-off funding that has been approved should follow the support it was approved for until the support is delivered or formally cancelled, regardless of whether a plan boundary intervenes. That is not a complicated proposition. It is what a system that had the participant in view at the time of drafting would have written. The fact that this Bill did not write it is not, in itself, evidence of malice. It is evidence of the same forgetting that runs through every other failure in this Part.

Chapter 37 Suspension by silence – the power that punishes

the unreachable

Some of the Bill’s powers are made dangerous by their breadth. Others are made dangerous by the words they leave out. New section 40A allows the CEO to suspend a participant’s plan where the CEO has “made reasonable attempts to contact” the participant about a matter and the participant “is not contactable.” Neither phrase reasonable attempts, not contactable is defined anywhere in the section. There is no minimum number of attempts. There is no required interval. There is no specified channel. There is no protected timeframe. The Bill leaves to the CEO’s judgement what counts as having tried hard enough to reach a participant before that participant’s support is switched off.

The suspension is reviewable; that is a feature, not a defect, and the Bill includes it. But two things make the review limited as a real protection. The first is the queue. Administrative review of NDIA decisions through the relevant tribunal has, in recent years, sat at backlogs measured not in weeks but in months eighteen months and longer for many participants, depending on the state of the queue at

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the time the application is lodged. A participant whose plan has been suspended

will, on the current evidence, be without support for very nearly the time it takes

the tribunal to look at the suspension. The second is who the power is used on. The

participants most likely to be unreachable by ordinary contact methods are not

generally the ones who are choosing not to engage. They are the participants with

cognitive impairment, intellectual disability, mental ill-health, communication

disability, those who depend on supported decision-making or augmentative and

alternative communication, those whose informal supports are thin, those who

have lost a phone or a worker or a home, and those whose lives are precisely the

lives the suspension power will most damage. The capacity to navigate a tribunal

review, when supports have just been suspended, is most absent in exactly the

people from whom supports have just been removed.

Section 30(1A) compounds the problem by allowing revocation – not suspension but the termination of a person’s status as a participant – after a plan has been suspended for ninety days, or, on its own terms, where reasonable attempts have been made and the participant is not contactable. There is no stated minimum period for the second limb. And a transitional provision goes one step further: it allows contact attempts made before the Bill commences to count toward the threshold for suspension or revocation after commencement. A participant who was hard to reach in the period before the Bill became law can be measured against that record after it does.

The architecture, as a whole, is consistent with the rest of this Part. The risk created by the system’s complexity, by the participant’s vulnerability, by the thinness of supports, and by the breakdown of contact that often accompanies a worsening situation – that risk is displaced onto the participant. The unreachable participant is treated as a person declining to engage rather than as a person whose engagement has been disabled by the very circumstances the scheme exists to support. That is not a procedural defect; it is a category error about who is on the other end of the system’s letters and phone calls. A scheme that imagines its participants as ordinarily contactable, and that treats failure to be ordinarily contactable as grounds to remove support, has stopped imagining the participants

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it most needs to imagine. And in the time it takes the tribunal to notice, the harm

redacted to health, to housing, to relationships, to staffing redacted is already done.

Chapter 38 Information powers and the auditing of a life

If the suspension power treats the difficult-to-reach participant as a problem to be

solved by withdrawal, the information powers treat the contactable participant as a

subject to be examined. New section 53 allows the CEO to require a person, by

written notice, to give information, produce documents, or appear before an

Agency officer to answer questions, in connection with the Act. Section 54 sets out

how the notice must be given, what it must contain, and the protections that apply.

Refusing or failing to comply attracts a civil penalty of sixty penalty units redacted at the

current Commonwealth penalty unit value, just under twenty thousand dollars.

The legal analysis of these powers belongs to lawyers, and they are doing it well.

The point this paper is built to make is narrower and is about what the powers

reveal. The breadth of what can be demanded redacted information, documents, an in- person appearance to answer questions redacted and the financial weight of refusal say

something about how the scheme is being asked to imagine the person it serves. A .scheme that primarily imagines its participants as people in need of support will

design its information practices around what is necessary to make supports work. A .scheme that primarily imagines its participants as potential sources of fraud, leakage, or compliance risk will design its information practices around what is necessary to interrogate them. The Bill is, on its face, the second kind of design. It .treats the participant as a person whose life may need to be audited, on pain of a penalty, in order for the scheme to be safe from them redacted rather than as a person the scheme exists to keep safe.

There is, to be fair, a self-incrimination protection: a person is not required to give information that might tend to incriminate them or expose them to a penalty. That .is appropriate, and the criticism here is not that the privilege has been removed.

The criticism is the scope of what can otherwise be required, and what that scope says about the relationship the Bill is constructing. A participant can be required to

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produce sensitive personal information ` about their relationships, their

t household, their medical history ` in support of an Agency function. A participant

can be required to appear before an officer and answer questions. The threat of

nearly twenty thousand dollars in civil penalty sits behind the demand. That

penalty is not extraordinary in regulatory terms; what is extraordinary is the suite of

people on the receiving end. The scheme’s participants are, by definition, the

people the scheme has accepted as eligible for support because their disability is

significant and lasting. They are not regulated entities. They are the people the nscheme exists for. Designing the information regime as though they were the

regulated entities, rather than the beneficiaries, is the cleanest statement available

of what has been forgotten.

Chapter 39 Fraud, compliance, and the imagination of the

participant as a risk

The Bill devotes considerable architecture to integrity. Civil penalty provisions are

added throughout. The Regulatory Powers Act is triggered, with its standard toolkit

of monitoring and investigation powers. Records-retention obligations are spread

across providers, participants, and others claiming amounts under the scheme ` seven years for providers, with substantial penalties for non-compliance; three years for participants in respect of their claims. Debts owing to the Agency are extended

to cover failures to keep records. New offences address obtaining payments by

deception or false statements.

Fraud in the NDIS is a real problem. No serious participant or advocate would deny

it. The scheme has been exploited by bad actors ` providers and others who have

taken money meant for disabled people. Pursuing those actors is legitimate. The

criticism here is not that the scheme should be indifferent to fraud. It is that the integrity architecture, taken as a whole, is built around an imagination of who the

participant is ` and that imagination has steadily widened from “the bad providers

we need to catch“ to include the participants themselves.

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A useful way to see this is to ask, of any compliance provision: what mistake by an

ordinary participant Ȅ not a bad actor, not a fraudster, but a participant doing

their best Ȅ would this provision punish? Records-retention obligations applied to

participants will catch the participant who, in the course of a complex life, loses or

misplaces a record several years after it was generated. Information-demand

penalties will catch the participant who is unable or unwilling to provide a piece of

information the CEO has requested. Suspension powers will catch the participant

whom the Agency cannot reach. Renewal-forfeiture provisions will catch the

participant whose equipment has not yet arrived. None of these provisions targets

only bad actors. Each of them, by its terms, also catches ordinary participants in

ordinary difficulty. The Bill responds to a problem of integrity by widening the net

far enough to include the people whose disability already makes ordinary

compliance hard.

A scheme that imagined its participants accurately would build its integrity

architecture in two layers Ȅ one focused, with real force, on the actors who are

actually defrauding the scheme; the other focused, with real care, on the

participants who are doing their best in difficult circumstances and need to be

supported through compliance rather than punished by it. The Bill does not draw

that distinction. Its integrity architecture lands on both populations together, and

predictably lands harder on the second, because the second is more numerous,

more visible, and easier to reach. The participant becomes, in the eye of the

integrity provisions, a compliance subject rather than the person the scheme exists

to serve. That is the forgetting of this Part, applied to enforcement.

Chapter 40 Registration, plan management, and the shape of

the market

The provider-facing parts of the Bill make a series of changes that are technical on the page and consequential in practice. Registered plan management providers are placed under a new, dedicated registration regime, with conditions that include separating key personnel from those of other NDIS providers and restricting plan management providers and their related parties from delivering other NDIS

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supports. The Minister gains an explicit power to determine, by legislative instrument, maximum amounts and methods for the acquisition or provision of NDIS supports Ȅ a structured ministerial pricing power that the Agency advises into rather than sets.

These changes have a coherent purpose. Plan management is a financial- admination function, and there is a defensible argument for keeping it separate from support delivery to limit conflicts of interest. Ministerial price-setting, advised by the Agency, gives Parliament a clearer line of accountability than a price guide that floats. But the same provisions, read through the question this paper asks, raise concerns the explanatory case does not fully meet.

Heavily separated and tightly conditioned registration regimes tend to favour large, generic providers over small, specialised ones Ȅ including the small, specialised providers who do the careful, person-specific work that complex participants depend on. A market dominated by a handful of large, compliant providers is administratively easier for the scheme, and predictably worse for participants whose needs are unusual or whose lives sit at the edge of standard provision. Ministerial pricing centralises a decision that has, until now, been made through more visible market processes. Centralised pricing is not in itself wrong; what matters is whether the prices set reflect the true cost of delivering quality support, particularly in thin markets, and whether the structure of those prices allows specialist providers to remain viable. A pricing regime that systematically underprices high-skill, low- volume, complex supports will, over time, remove the providers who deliver them Ȅ not by banning them, but by making the work uneconomic.

This is the market consequence of the design choices traced elsewhere in this Part. The Bill builds a market that is easier to administer and likely to be safer in average cases. It risks building a market that has nowhere safe for the participants for whom average is not enough. The structural question is the same one this whole Part has been asking. Who is the market for, in the end? If it is for participants whose needs fit the standard pricing and the standard provider, the Bill’s market design will work for them. If it is also Ȅ and crucially Ȅ for participants whose needs require small,

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specialised, high-skill, person-specific provision, the Bill’s market design carries a risk it does not appear to have priced.

Chapter 41 Automation and the disappearance of the

decision-maker

New section 59B authorises the CEO to arrange for an administrative action under a designated provision of the Act to be taken by the operation of a computer program. The Bill specifies the provisions to which this can apply, and the Minister can, by legislative instrument, add further provisions. A standard-operating-procedure instrument can govern how automated decisions are made. The CEO must take all reasonable steps to ensure that an action taken by computer is one the CEO could validly have taken. Each of these is a sensible safeguard in isolation, and automation has legitimate uses in any scheme of the NDIS’s size.

The concern is the interaction with the other provisions in this Part. The plan-renewal forfeiture of section 50A is precisely the kind of provision that can be carried out by a computer; it is, by design, not a reviewable decision, so automating it removes nothing from the participant that a human officer was otherwise going to give. The suspension power of section 40A turns on whether reasonable attempts have been made and the participant is not contactable; these are exactly the kinds of judgements that can be reduced to rules – three contact attempts over fourteen days, say – and then automated. The information-demand notices of section 54 are amenable to template generation and automated dispatch. Each automation, taken on its own, is administrative housekeeping. Taken together, they describe a system in which a participant’s plan can be renewed, their funding stripped, their plan suspended, their information demanded, and their participant status threatened with revocation, without a single human officer ever picking up the file.

That is not a science-fiction concern. It is the operational logic of a scheme that has been told to do more with less, given automation powers to do it, and given a body of decisions that have been carefully drafted out of reviewability. The disappearance of the decision-maker is not announced; it occurs as the cumulative consequence of

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provisions that, individually, look like efficiency. And it lands on the participant in a

particular way: the things that happen to them happen with no person on the other

end of the action. When the wheelchair is denied, there is no officer who decided.

When the plan is suspended, there is no officer who weighed the circumstances.

When the information demand arrives, it arrives from the system. The system has,

in the most literal sense, forgotten the person — not because anyone inside it

wished to, but because the architecture no longer requires anyone to remember.

Chapter 42 The new planning framework and the assessment that misses the person

Threaded through the Bill is a new planning architecture that depends on a needs assessment to drive funding. Public reporting and committee evidence have indicated that the assessors carrying out this assessment will not necessarily be allied health professionals, with recruitment said to favour generic interpersonal skills over clinical qualifications, and that the assessment instrument under consideration is a generic functional-capacity tool rather than a clinically grounded individualised assessment. The Minister has framed widespread under-funding of participants — described publicly as in the order of twenty per cent — as evidence that the NDIA’s current accuracy needs to improve.

Read against the architecture of this Part, the framework completes the design failure rather than correcting it. The new planning system replaces individualised clical evidence — produced by the allied health professionals who actually know the participant — with a standardised instrument administered by a non-clinician, applied to the conceptually incoherent “naked person” defined in section 9B, weighted by the sustainability principles of section 17B, run through caps and ratios that may sit below cost, and applied by a process that can be automated and that yields decisions a participant will struggle to review. Every step in the assessment pipeline narrows what can be seen of the person, until the person who emerges from the other end of the process is a thin schematic of the participant who entered it — and the plan they receive is shaped to that schematic, not to them.

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The Minister’s twenty-per-cent framing is worth a moment, because it inverts the

right question. The under-funding it describes is, on this paper’s reading, not

principally an accuracy problem at the Agency. It is the predictable result of the

structural choices the Bill makes more permanent: a definition of disability that

excludes the environment, a planning principle that prioritises sustainability over

choice and control, caps that may be set below cost, supports reclassified as

personal expenses, and an assessment instrument that cannot see complex needs. If

twenty per cent of participants are under-funded, this Part predicts that the new

framework will not reduce the figure. It will hide it Ȅ by routing the under-funding

through processes too standardised, too automated, and too unreviewable to be

visible as under-funding from the outside. The accuracy problem is real, but the

cure is not a sharper instrument applied to a poorer definition. The cure is to define

disability accurately, design planning around the person, and let the assessment

instrument come last.

Chapter 43 The Cost The Government Is Not Counting ² Fiscal,

Structural, And Moral

The case the government has put for this Bill rests on a single proposition: that the scheme is unaffordable in its current form, and that the contraction now proposed

is the responsible response. The chapters above have shown what the contraction does inside the scheme Ȅ to planning principles, to access criteria, to the definition of disability, to the meaning of reasonable and necessary, to the participant’s relationship with the system that funds their life. This chapter looks outward, at three costs the government’s case does not count: the cost the contraction will impose on the Australian economy, the cost it will impose on people who will be pushed into living arrangements that the country has already, formally, found to be unsafe, and the cost of doing again what we know does not work.

The first cost is fiscal, and the irony of it is worth holding still. The scheme that is being cut to save money is, on the only published independent modelling, one of the most economically productive expenditures of public funds the Commonwealth makes. The False Economy analysis, produced by the Per Capita think-tank in

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in conjunction with National Disability Services Ȅ the disability service providers’ peak body Ȅ estimates that the NDIS returns approximately $2.25 to the Australian economy for every dollar spent. The same modelling establishes a precise rule of thumb for the consequences of contraction: every billion dollars cut from the scheme produces, across the economy, the loss of approximately ten thousand two hundred jobs. Applied to the four-year, $37.8 billion reduction the Budget has already booked, that is a total-economy job loss in the order of two hundred thousand positions Ȅ direct disability-sector roles plus the supplier, transport, retail, and other indirect roles that depend on the disability sector’s spending. Independent labour-market modelling published immediately after the Press Club announcement (McIntyre, April 2026) reaches the same conclusion from the other direction, estimating around one hundred and forty thousand direct disability- sector jobs at risk from the proposed twenty per cent workforce reduction Ȅ the disability-sector figure inside the broader two-hundred-thousand whole-of- economy figure.

These figures should be presented with their honest caveats. The contraction is phased, not a single-year shock; some affected workers will transition into adjacent care-economy sectors Ȅ aged care, mental health, the new state-commissioned foundational supports Ȅ particularly where their skills are transferable; and macro- modelling at this scale carries error bars in either direction. Even with those caveats, the direction and the magnitude are not in serious dispute. The fiscal “saving” the government cites is calculated on one side of the ledger only. Counted on both sides Ȅ direct workforce losses, indirect job losses across the broader economy, the multiplier-adjusted reduction in economic activity in the order of eighty to ninety billion dollars over the four years, and the regionally concentrated nature of the contraction in communities that often have no comparable replacement employer Ȅ the proposition is no longer that the contraction “saves” thirty-seven billion dollars. It is that the contraction removes the larger figure from the wider economy in order to reduce a smaller figure in the federal Budget. That is not a fiscal benefit. It is a transfer Ȅ from the disability services workforce, from

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regional economies, and from disabled people, to the Treasury line item that has

been declared unsustainable.

It must be said, in fairness, that there is a coherent macroeconomic case for some of

this contraction. Treasury officials, and Labor more broadly, would argue Ȅ not

unreasonably on their own terms Ȅ that withdrawing eighty to ninety billion

dollars of economic activity over the forward estimates is, at least in part, the point:

a contraction of that scale acts as a brake on inflationary pressure at a moment

when monetary policy alone is doing the work. As macroeconomic theory, that is

defensible. The problem is who pays for it. Australia is already a heavily two-speed

economy, in which the gains of recent decades have accrued unevenly to capital, to

property holders, to high-income earners, and to the metropolitan centres Ȅ while

wage earners, casualised workers, regional communities, and people reliant on

income support have absorbed the costs of inflation, housing unaffordability, and

labour-market precarity disproportionately. A contractionary measure of this size,

delivered through the disability services sector, lands on the worse-performing half

of that two-speed economy almost in its entirety. The disability workforce is

disproportionately female, disproportionately part-time, disproportionately lower-

paid, and disproportionately regional; the disabled participants whose plans are

being cut have, by definition, restricted access to alternative income and limited

capacity to absorb cost-shifting; the regional communities in which both

populations are concentrated have, in many cases, no comparable replacement

employer or service. Inflation-dampening achieved by contracting the disability

sector is, in functional terms, asking the people the economy is already failing to

subsidise the cost of stabilising it for everyone else. It is regressive policy described

in technocratic language. And it is reggressive in a sector that the government has, in

the same breath, framed as a moral obligation. That contradiction is not resolved by

the policy being macroeconomically coherent; it is sharpened by it.

There is one further dimension of the fiscal argument that should be made, because

it exposes the gross-savings framing more starkly than any of the others. The

contraction will not merely remove disability-sector workers and indirect supplier-

economy jobs. It will, predictably, remove substantial numbers of disabled

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Australians and their family members from the workforce, by removing the supports on which their workforce participation depends. The NDIS was designed, on the explicit reasoning of the Productivity Commission’s 2011 report, to deliver an employment dividend — individualised funding “would build capacity, reduce dependence on carers, and create pathways to paid work.” The scheme’s own data shows that this design has worked, however imperfectly: by the NDIA’s December 2023 reporting, half of all parents and carers of participants now report paid employment, meeting the 2023Ȃ24 target of 50 per cent — a relative ten per cent increase. Reducing the supports that made that increase possible will reverse it. The family member who could work because their child’s school-and-after-school supports were funded; the spouse who could keep their job because in-home support and personal care were available during their working hours; the parent of an adult son or daughter with complex needs who could remain employed because Short Term Accommodation gave them a few days of respite each quarter — each of these workforce participants is, very predictably, removed from the labour market when the supports underneath them are cut.

On the participant side, the same logic applies more directly. The Australian Human Rights Commission’s figure — that the labour-force participation rate for the 4.4 million Australians with disability sits at 53 per cent, against around 83 per cent for those without — has been unchanged, in the social services minister’s own words on the public record, “for almost twenty years.” The government’s stated objective, codified in its own Participant Employment Strategy and reaffirmed across multiple ministerial statements, is to raise that figure. The reform in front of the Parliament will do the opposite. Capacity-building supports, employment- related supports, transport, personal care during working hours, workplace modifications, and the predictable continuity of all of those — these are the supports that determine, for a substantial share of disabled people, whether participation in the open labour market is realistic or impossible. Reducing them does not improve the employment rate; it lowers it. The government complains, accurately, that the employment rate of disabled people is too low, and then designs

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a reform that will make it lower. There is no honest reconciliation between those

two positions.

Now follow the money. Workforce participants who are removed from the labour

market do not vanish from the federal Budget; they migrate to other lines on it.

Disability Support Pension, Carer Payment, and related social-security expenditure

will rise as a direct consequence of the workforce exits the contraction produces redacted a transfer from one Commonwealth expenditure line to others, not a reduction of

Commonwealth expenditure overall. The full DSP rate is in the order of twenty- eight thousand dollars per recipient per year; Carer Payment is broadly comparable.

Even a modest fraction of the affected population landing on these payments

produces a substantial offsetting cost redacted likely in the order of billions of dollars per

year redacted against the headline saving, before the additional health-system costs of

withdrawn support, the foregone income-tax revenue from departing workers, and

the long-tail age-pension cost of decades of foregone superannuation contributions

by family members forced to leave paid work to become full-time carers are added.

None of these costs appears on the side of the ledger from which the thirty-seven- billion-dollar saving is being calculated. They all appear on the side from which it

isnt. The headline number is not the net saving the government is claiming. It is

the gross figure on one line of the Budget, with the offsetting increases on other

lines simply uncounted.

This is the fiscal indictment in its complete form. The contraction is regressive in its

incidence, overstated in its saving, contradictory of the governments own stated

design objective, and redacted once the workforce-exit transfers to DSP, Carer Payment, health, foregone tax, and lost superannuation are reckoned with redacted substantially smaller in genuine net fiscal effect than the headline number suggests.

None of which is to say there are no inefficiencies in the scheme; there are, and they

should be addressed. It is to say that the way the contraction has been designed, and the population it has been designed to fall upon, do not reflect a careful accounting of the real fiscal picture. They reflect a choice about which Australians are visible in the calculation, and which are not.

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The second cost is structural, and it is the one this paper has been most concerned to name. Australia has very recently, and at considerable public expense, completed the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability, after four years of hearings, almost ten thousand submissions, and the production of two hundred and twenty-two recommendations. Among the Commission’s central findings was that congregated and segregated living settings institutional accommodation, large group residences, and “family-like” group homes alike do not eliminate institutional violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation. The Commission’s own words were unambiguous: the closure of large institutions and the substitution of group homes “has not eliminated institutional forms of violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation experienced by people with disability, particularly those with serious intellectual disabilities.” Seventeen thousand people living in group homes were identified as being at significant risk. And the annual societal cost of violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation of disabled Australians was estimated at approximately forty-six billion dollars a figure larger than the entire annual cost of the NDIS.

Hold those two numbers next to each other for a moment. The NDIS is being cut by approximately thirty-seven billion dollars over four years on the ground that it is unaffordable. The annual cost of violence and abuse against disabled people in Australia is approximately forty-six billion dollars in one year. The country is deciding to remove the larger sum from the smaller harm, and to accept the smaller saving against the larger harm, by reducing the supports that, for many participants, are the only thing standing between them and the very settings the Royal Commission has just told us are unsafe. The contraction now proposed through caps on funding intensity and worker-to-participant ratios, the reclassification of disability supports as personal costs, the structural underfunding of complex needs will force a substantial number of participants out of the individualised, community-based support arrangements that have, until now, made an ordinary life possible, and into the congregated, ratio-based settings the Royal Commission has just identified as the locus of the worst harms in the system. There is no other place for those participants to go. The fiscal arithmetic does not become

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moral arithmetic by being labelled sustainability. Forcing people back into the

elements we have just spent four years documenting as unsafe is not an unintended

consequence of the reform. It is the predictable structural consequence of the

reform’s design.

The third cost is moral, and it is the simplest of the three to state. The disability

community has spent fifty years building, defending, and slowly enlarging the

conditions under which a disabled person can live an ordinary life — in their own home, with workers they choose, embedded in community, with the supports that make presence and participation possible. The history is well known: the closure of the large institutions, the establishment of independent living, the social model of disability, the long advocacy that produced the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, the campaign that produced the NDIS itself. None of that came easily. Almost none of it came from government initiative; almost all of it came from the disability community insisting, against considerable resistance, that disabled people are not patients to be managed but citizens to be enabled. The reform now proposed reverses much of that progress in legislative form. Funding intensities and ratios set below cost; a definition of disability that excludes environment and support; a planning system reoriented from the participant to the scheme; an enforcement architecture that treats participants as compliance subjects — these are not the next step in the long arc of disability inclusion. They are, in their cumulative effect, the unmaking of it.

A small statistical detail makes the cruelty exact. Approximately five per cent of NDIS participants account for around one-third of the scheme’s total cost. These are the participants with the highest and most complex support needs — and they are, on the Royal Commission’s findings, the participants most exposed to violence, able, neglect and exploitation when supports fail or are insufficient. The reform’s response to that concentration of cost is to apply caps and ratios that will fall hardest on exactly those participants. The same five per cent will receive less of the support they need; the predictable consequence is that more of them will be pushed into the congregated settings where the Royal Commission has told us the harm concentrates; and the harm itself will then be folded into the forty-six billion dollar

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figure the country already pays, on the other side of the ledger that the

sustainability case does not consult. The system’s response to evidence that it is

failing the people at the centre of its mission is to fail them more thoroughly, more

cheaply, and with statutory authority.

There is an old observation about repeating the thing that does not work and

expecting a different result, and it has been used so often that it has lost some of its

force. It is, however, an exact description of what is being proposed here.

Congregated, ratio-based, institutionally controlled care has been tried, at length, #across the developed world. It has been examined, formally and at length, by an Australian Royal Commission. The finding was unambiguous: it does not eliminate harm; it concentrates it. Returning to it is not a saving. It is a choice to repeat a known failure. And it is a choice the Bill, on the magnitudes its own architects have published, will make for tens of thousands of people who have no say in it Ȅ over the objections of a community that, having spent fifty years getting out, knows precisely what it costs to be sent back.

Chapter 44 The Longer Pattern $ Bills Are Events; Design Failures Are Trajectories

It is tempting to treat the Securing the NDIS for Future Generations Bill as a

discrete event Ȅ a single piece of legislation to be debated, amended, passed or rejected. That is the conventional way to discuss legislation, and there is nothing wrong with it. But it understates what is actually happening. As Part 2 set out, the structural under-protection of the scheme began very early, when the funding architecture the Productivity Commission recommended was left incomplete and the scheme was returned to the annual budget contest as ordinary expenditure. Part 3 traced how a decade of operationally expedient policy choices steadily departed from the 2011 blueprint, and how reforms presented as safety produced harm. Part 4 supplied the lived account. Part 5 will show that the harm those choices produced was foreseeable, and was foreseen by the people most exposed to it, well before it occurred.

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This Bill is the next move in that trajectory. It is not the worst version of itself that

could have been written, and it is not the first move that has caused harm. But it is

the move that converts much of what was previously administrative drift into

legislative settlement. The reframing of “reasonable and necessary” as a function of

sustainability, the deletion of the participant-centred planning principles, the

abstraction of disability away from the person’s environment, the structural — underfunding of complex needs through caps and ratios, the reclassification of

disability costs as personal costs, the powers to suspend and revoke without a — meaningful human moment, the integrity architecture that treats participants as — compliance subjects, and the automation that removes the decision-maker from — view – none of these is, by itself, a sharp break from the trajectory of the past

fifteen years. Each, in isolation, could be defended as a continuation. Taken

together and elevated into the Act, they make the trajectory the law.

This is why the question that opens this Part is the right one. The government’s

stated aim – securing the scheme for future generations – is legitimate. The — means matter. A scheme that legislates its way to sustainability by removing the

participant from the centre of their own plan, abstracting disability from the

conditions that constitute it, and stripping support from the people whose lives — most depend on it will not, in fact, have secured anything worth securing. It will

have preserved a structure whose meaning has been hollowed out. The 2011

blueprint promised something specific: lifetime certainty, reasonable and necessary

support, choice and control, an ordinary life. The Bill should be judged not by — whether it makes the scheme cheaper, but by whether it brings the scheme closer to

those promises or further from them.

The conclusion of this Part is therefore the same conclusion that the entire paper

has been building toward, and it can be stated plainly. The Bill, in its present form,

will move the scheme further from the people it was built to serve. None of the

proposed changes is offered as an arbitrary cruelty; each is offered, in the

government’s own framing, as sustainability. But the magnitudes now in front of

the Parliament – a reduction of roughly one-third in the scheme’s projected cost — by 2030, the removal of around one hundred and sixty thousand current

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participants alongside the prevented entry of an estimated further one hundred and forty thousand who would otherwise have joined, and a real per-plan reduction in the order of one-sixth redacted cannot be reconciled with the prevention of foreseeable harm to the people whose supports are being cut or denied. The two-cohort structure is itself revealing. The cuts to existing participants are the visible part of the contraction; the prevented entry of a much larger group is the structural one redacted the narrowing of who Australia is willing to recognise as having disability at all, achieved by replacing diagnosis-based access with the conceptually incoherent functional-capacity test examined in Chapter 33. That is not a matter on which reasonable people merely differ at the margin. It is a structural choice about who the scheme is for, and it is being made against, not with, the people it most affects.

It would be tempting to respond to all this by proposing a list of amendments redacted to restore the participant-centred principles, to repair the definition of disability, to remove the auto-forfeiture and the undefined suspension thresholds, to redirect the integrity architecture. Each of those individual defects could, in isolation, be drafted differently. But the analysis of this Part points to a harder conclusion, and the paper doest not shrink from it: the Bill’s flaws are not a collection of separable drafting errors that amendment could correct one by one. They are the coherent expression of a single underlying conception redacted that the scheme’s problem is its cost, that disability can be assessed in the abstract and away from the person’s life, and that sustainability is to be achieved by contracting what the scheme provides to the people who most need it. That conception is wrong at the root, and every major provision of the Bill flows from it. A measure built throughout on a flawed foundation cannot be made sound by amending its surface, because the foundation is the problem. What the conclusion of this paper draws from this Part, accordingly, is not that the Bill should be improved, but that it should be withdrawn, and that the reform the scheme genuinely needs should be designed redacted, and from the beginning redacted with the people it concerns. That is the case the whole of this paper has been making: that a system is only worth what it does for the people it was built to protect, and that a system which forgets them, however efficiently, has lost the only justification it ever had.

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PART 7

The way back: a rights-based, safety-based, participant-led alternative

Chapter 45 Start with the outcome, not the line item

A system is told what to do by the question it asks first. The scheme as currently configured begins, increasingly, with the question of what something costs — whether at the level of an individual plan, a class determination, a price benchmark, or the aggregate budget. A scheme oriented this way will, over time, produce decisions optimised for cost. The reform this Part proposes starts somewhere else. It asks, of every decision the scheme makes, a different opening question: what does this person need in order to live safely, freely, and with dignity in the community, with genuine choice and control over their own life?

The objection that this is naive about cost should be met directly, because it is the objection on which the entire public debate has been organised. The current reform is being justified by the proposition that the scheme is “unaffordable” — and the policy that follows that proposition is a reduction of roughly one-third in the scheme’s projected cost by 2030, achieved partly by removing some one hundred and sixty thousand people from the scheme and partly by reducing the average participant’s plan from around thirty-one thousand dollars to around twenty-six thousand. A change of that magnitude is not a refinement at the margin; it is a structural contraction, and it cannot be reconciled with the prevention of foreseeable harm to the people who depend on the supports being removed. The objection that a participant-centred reform is naive about cost mistakes the question. Cost is real. The question is what kind of cost analysis is being applied — and to whom the costs are being shifted.

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Insurance schemes, including the one the Productivity Commission designed in

2011, manage cost by managing total cost of care across the lifetime of the

participant. They invest early, prevent deterioration, and avoid the much larger

costs that accumulate when prevention fails — hospital admissions, institutional placements, family carer breakdown, and the cascading clinical complications that follow withdrawn support. By that measure — the measure the blueprint actually used — the case for participant-centred reform is not the case against cost discipline. It is the case for genuine cost discipline as opposed to the front-loaded cost reductions that displace, rather than reduce, total cost. A scheme that strips one-third of its projected expenditure from the support side will not, on the evidence Parts 3 through 5 of this paper supply, have reduced the total cost of disability in Australia. It will have moved the cost out of the scheme and into the hospital system, the family, the prison and child-protection systems, and the lives of the people whose deterioration the scheme was funded to prevent. That is not sustainability. It is cost externalisation, with a sustainability label attached.

The reform this Part proposes accepts the insurance discipline that the blueprint built into the scheme, and rejects the contraction discipline that has been imposed on it in the name of sustainability. Cost is one of the constraints inside which the outcome question is answered. It is not the question itself. Treating it as the question is what has produced both the failures Parts 3 and 4 describe and the magnitudes of cut now being proposed — and it is the first thing the alternative has to refuse.

That reorientation has practical content. A planning process built around the outcome question asks, for each participant, what is needed for them to live safely, in their own home, with workers they choose, in a community they participate in, and to contribute as they wish to. It asks what is needed to prevent foreseeable deterioration, hospitalisation, institutionalisation, or death — and treats prevention as central, not residual. It treats the participant as the author of their own plan, in the literal sense the repealed section 31 of the current Act required and that this Part would restore. And it treats the assessment instrument — whatever instrument is used — as a servant of those questions, not as a substitute for asking them.

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instrument’s job is to help the system understand the person; it does not get to define the person it is helping to understand.

This is the change that makes everything else in this Part possible. Without it, every other reform is bolted onto the wrong question. With it, the rest of the alternative falls into place.

Chapter 46 Safety through harm minimisation, not zero-risk fantasy

The scheme’s regulatory trajectory in recent years has, as Part 3 showed, drifted toward something that resembles zero-risk avoidance more than genuine safety. The two are not the same. Zero-risk avoidance minimises an institution’s exposure; harm minimisation manages a person’s actual risk while preserving the conditions of their life. They look similar from a distance. They diverge sharply at the point where preserving a person’s life requires the system to tolerate the ordinary risk that life involves.

Harm minimisation is not a soft alternative to safety. It is, on the contrary, the discipline most rigorously trained into the professions the scheme already relies on. Nurses are taught to manage risk proportionately under the NMBA’s decision-making framework, which contemplates delegation, supervision, and risk-managed practice — not zero-risk withdrawal. Occupational therapists and rehabilitation specialists have been trained for half a century in front-loading, early intervention, and the prevention of secondary complications and functional decline. These are not aspirational philosophies; they are foundational curricula, taught in the first and second years of clinical training, supported by decades of evidence that timely and appropriate intervention reduces long-term harm and cost. The expertise the scheme has been treating as missing has been present in the system the whole time, in the clinicians the scheme already funds. The failure has been not to mobilise it.

A reformed safety architecture would do three things. It would name harm minimisation, not risk avoidance, as the operating principle of the scheme’s safety regime, and would design its standards and audits around the question of whether a person is actually safer rather than whether an institution is more insulated.

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would invest in front-loading and early intervention as the scheme’s primary safety mechanism — not as a phase confined to childhood or first diagnosis, but as the discipline that prevents foreseeable deterioration across the lifespan. And it would resolve, openly, the contradiction that currently runs through the scheme’s actuarial assumptions: the simultaneous belief that prevention works (so that funding should taper as capacity is built) and that prevention does not work for established participants (so that investment in them is good money after bad).

Those two beliefs are mutually destructive. The honest position, supported by the evidence the clinical professions have been generating for decades, is that prevention works across the lifespan — and that, for many participants, need does not decline with time but rises, as ageing, deconditioning, secondary complications, and the accumulated cost of withdrawn support take their toll. A scheme designed around that honest position would invest in keeping people well, at home, and out of hospital — and would do so because preventing deterioration is what genuine safety, and genuine sustainability, both require.

The key line, when the system finds it has produced more harm than it prevented: a system that eliminates risk by eliminating life has failed. The point of safety is the life. When the safety regime begins to consume the life it was built to protect, the regime has lost its way.

Chapter 47 Rebuild co-design as the discipline it actually is

If the eight tenets set out in Part 3 describe what co-design is, this chapter is about what it would take to build the scheme around them. The point is not to add more “consultation” to existing processes. It is to redesign the processes so that the eight tenets, and the whole-of-process governing principle that binds them, become the way decisions are actually made.

Concretely, that requires several shifts that are administratively difficult but conceptually simple. Disabled people, including people with high and complex needs, would be involved in co-ideation — present at the point where reform options are generated, not only at the point where they are presented. Co-design would be a real share in design decisions, not a comment opportunity after the design is locked. Co-authorship would mean the community’s hand in the text of

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the instruments Ȅ policies, rules, guidelines, assessment tools Ȅ rather than its

e perspective filtered through officials who then write the document. Co- implementation would carry that authority through into rollout, so that designs

cannot be quietly undone at the operational layer. Co-monitoring would commit the scheme to publicly available, third-party-scrutable performance data Ȅ including the outcome measures Chapter 51 will set out Ȅ so that the system’s account of itself can be tested rather than taken on trust. Co-equal would replace the unilateral veto that the funder currently retains, by reserving genuine decision- making authority to mixed bodies in which the community is not merely advisory. Co-ownership would give disabled people a continuing stake in the scheme as their scheme, not someone else’s. And co-consent would treat the participants’ ageement to how the system operates as ongoing, not deemed at the point of access and then assumed forever.

Two further conditions deserve emphasis because they are the conditions most often quietly omitted. The first is the deliberate inclusion of people with high and complex needs in every co-design process Ȅ not a separate “complex needs” working group consulted at the margin, but full presence in the main rooms where the main decisions are made. The reforms traced through Part 3 failed in large part because the people most exposed to their consequences were not present when they were designed. A reformed scheme would treat such presence as a structural requirement, not as an option to be ticked or omitted depending on time and budget. The second is the deliberate inclusion of regional, rural, remote, culturally and linguistically diverse, First Nations, and low-socioeconomic perspectives Ȅ without which the system designs for metropolitan and well-resourced lives and then notices, years later, that the rest of Australia does not fit the model. Both inclusions cost something to do properly; both cost much more to omit.

True co-design, built this way, is not a procedural overlay on existing governance. It is a governance discipline in its own right. And it is the single change most likely to prevent the kind of failure this paper has described from recurring. The actuary’s bewilderment in Part 3 Ȅ a decade of data, and the system unable to read it Ȅ is, in the end, what happens to a system that runs without genuine co-monitoring. Restore the loop, and the system can see itself again.

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Chapter 48 Preserve participant-directed support, and protect

the clinicians who make it work

The collapse traced in Part 3 Ȅ the worker-delivered, clinician-trained model rendered unsustainable by reforms that, on their face, preserved it Ȅ was not inevitable. It can be reversed, and it can be made durable. The reform direction is straightforward to describe, even where the implementation is administratively detailed.

Self-management, self-direction, direct employment, and participant-led team design should be preserved as legitimate, properly funded, and properly supported delivery models for participants who choose them. For people with high and complex needs in particular, participant direction is often safer than provider control, because the participant knows the body, the risks, the history, and the failure modes in ways a roster-driven provider cannot. People must be able to choose the workers who enter their home; training should be person-specific where the support is person-specific; and the bureaucratic and audit settings around self- management and self-direction should be designed to enable safe individualised practice, not to discourage it through risk-aversion theatre.

The other half of this Ȅ and Part 3 showed it is the half that has most quietly failed Ȅ is to protect and enable the clinicians on whom the model depends. A nurse, occupational therapist, physiotherapist, or other practitioner who trains a support worker in a person-specific high-intensity task should be supported by clear, workable settings: documented competency expectations that match real practice, clical-governance pathways the practitioner can rely on, indemnification arrangements that do not place the entire professional risk on the individual practitioner, and quality and safeguards rules that recognise and accommodate the clinician-trained, worker-delivered model rather than treating it as a regulatory residual. None of this is exotic. It is the kind of detailed regulatory work that any scheme genuinely committed to participant-directed support has to do, and that the current settings have left undone.

Regulation should target unsafe practice without destroying safe individualised models. The two are distinguishable, and the discipline of distinguishing them is

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Exactly the work that co-design, properly done, would let the scheme do. The bad- actor problem and the participant-direction problem are not the same problem, and conflating them designing standards and audits as though the worst actor were the typical case produces the displacement Part 3 described: drive out the careful, person-specific practice that keeps people safe at home, and what remains is the institutional default the scheme was meant to replace.

Chapter 49 Design for thin markets, not metropolitan averages

A national scheme is only as safe as its weakest real-world implementation environment. The reforms traced through this paper have, repeatedly, been built around an implicit assumption that the market the depth of providers, the availability of clinicians, the supply of trained workers, the alternatives when one option fails is deeper than it actually is across most of Australia. The reform direction is to abandon that assumption and design for the country as it is.

Regional, rural, and remote participants need market-specific safeguards built into the schemes design, not added by exception. Funding component amounts must reflect actual local costs and the realities of thin-market availability, rather than national price benchmarks that assume metropolitan supply chains. Crisis pathways must be designed before supports collapse, so that a participant whose provider exits, whose worker resigns, or whose clinician withdraws is not left to navigate a vacuum during the time when navigation is least possible. Relocation support practical, funded, and dignified may be necessary where a local market genuinely cannot meet a participants needs, and the integration of Specialist Disability Accommodation, complex support funding, and clinical oversight should be treated as a single problem rather than three disconnected ones. The participant whose life depends on the combination of those three streams should not be left to assemble it from disconnected programs.

The deeper shift is one of framing. Thin markets are not a residual category of difficult cases. They are a structural feature of an Australia-wide scheme, and they affect a significant minority of participants. A scheme that treats them as residual

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will systematically design for the participants it can most easily reach, and will

systematically fail the ones it cannot. A scheme designed for thin markets at the outset can still work in deep ones; the reverse is not true.

Chapter 50 Keep disability supports in hospital where they are needed

The pattern Part 4 names in the hospital context Ȅ the automatic withdrawal of NDIS supports at admission, on the basis that the hospital will provide everything

Ȅ produces, in many real cases, the opposite of safety. Hospitals are configured to deliver clinical care; they are not configured, and in most cases are not staffed, to deliver the high-intensity, person-specific disability support that some participants need around the clock to remain safe, comfortable, and communicating. Removing that support at the door of the医院 is not a saving. It is a displacement of risk onto the very service system least equipped to absorb it, and the resulting deterioration Ȅ pressure injuries, respiratory complications, communication breakdowns, behavioural escalations interpreted as clinical decline Ȅ is foreseeable, expensive, and avoidable.

The reform here is operationally simple. A continuity-of-support test would replace the current automatic withdrawal. Where disability supports are necessary for safety, communication, daily living, continuity, or the prevention of deterioration, and the hospital cannot deliver them at the required standard, the supports continue. Support workers, where clinically and practically appropriate, remain involved Ȅ not as visitors, but as part of the safe-care arrangement around the participant. The decision to withdraw a support at hospital admission is treated as what it is Ȅ a safety decision requiring risk assessment Ȅ rather than an administrative default. And the scheme and the relevant health systems jointly own the responsibility for ensuring that no participant is rendered unsafe by the transition between them.

The current settings invert this. The default is withdrawal, the exception is continuity, and the participant carries the risk of the gap. The reform makes continuity the default where it is needed and places the burden of justification on

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withdrawal. That single inversion of the default would prevent a class of foreseeable

harms that this paper, and Part 5 in particular, will document.

Chapter 51 Redesign Oversight Around Real Outcomes

The actuary’s bewilderment in Part 3 — a decade of data, and a system that could

not read it — is, finally, a failure of what was being measured. The scheme has been

thorough in measuring units of service delivered, plans approved, budgets adjusted,

and compliance events recorded. It has been far less thorough in measuring what

those administrative outputs actually amount to in the life of a participant. A

reformed oversight regime would measure the things that matter, and would let the

things that do not matter fall back into their proper place as inputs rather than

ends.

The outcome measures a participant-centred scheme should track are not

mysterious, and they follow directly from the rights framing established in Part 2

and the outcome question of Chapter 45. They include: whether participants are

safe; whether they are living in their own home or have been displaced from it;

whether they have continuity of support and continuity of workers; whether they

have unmet support need, and if so for what; whether they retain control over the

workers who enter their home and the arrangements that shape their daily life;

whether they are able to participate in community life; whether they are able to

contribute as they wish to; whether they are experiencing foreseeable, preventable

harm — pressure injuries, hospital admissions, mental health crises, social

isolation, deterioration on standard clinical indicators — that the system should

have prevented; and whether the scheme is, on its own measures, achieving the

purposes set out in its objects.

Two design features make outcome measurement honest rather than ceremonial.

The first is the co-monitoring principle from Chapter 47: the data is collected with

the community, interpreted with the community, and made publicly available for

third-party scrutiny. A system that owns the only copy of its own performance data,

and decides for itself how to read it, will not in the end read it accurately. The

second is that outcome measurement must be capable of seeing the participants the

system most easily misses — the regionally remote, the culturally and linguistically

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diverse, First Nations participants, the people with cognitive or communication

disability, the participants in thin markets, the participants with high and complex

needs. An outcome regime that reports comfortably encouraging averages while the

people at the edges are losing ground is exactly the regime this paper has been

describing throughout Ȅ and exactly the regime the alternative described in this

Part exists to replace.

This is the structure of the way back. It is not a return to a perfect past; the scheme

was never perfect, and the Productivity Commission did not claim it would be. It is

a return to the discipline the Commission attached to the design Ȅ sustained co-

design, certain funding, lifetime support, an ordinary life Ȅ and an honest

reckoning with the conditions under which that discipline produces good outcomes

for the people the scheme exists to serve. The reform is not, in the end, technically

difficult. The technical work is well within the competence of the people who run

the scheme and the disability community that depends on it. What it requires is the

choice to make the participant the centre of the system again Ȅ in the principles, in

the planning, in the safety regime, in the regulatory settings, in the market design,

in the relationship with hospitals, and in what the system measures and reports.

The rest is detail. The detail can be worked. The choice to make it has been the

missing ingredient, and it is the one this Part asks the scheme, and the Parliament,

to make. None of what this Part describes, however, is offered as a set of edits to be

bolted onto the Bill now before the Parliament. It is offered as an indication of what

a genuine, participant-led co-design process would be likely to recover once the

present Bill is set aside Ȅ the substance such a process would tend toward, not a

substitute for the process itself. How the conclusion that follows draws those two

threads together Ȅ the case against the Bill and the case for this alternative Ȅ is

the final task of this paper.

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PART 08

Conclusion: the warning

Parliament must hear

What this paper has established

This paper opened with a claim that has now been carried by seven parts of analysis and lived testimony, and it can finally be stated as a finding rather than a proposition: the National Disability Insurance Scheme is becoming dangerous to a substantial minority of the people who depend on it, and it is becoming dangerous in a way that is neither accidental nor foreseeable. The scheme that was designed in 2011 to give effect to choice, control, and a participant-directed ordinary life is, under the legislation now before the Parliament, being reoriented around scheme sustainability as the controlling principle, with participants reduced from the authors of their plans to the subjects of an assessment that excludes the very environment in which their disability actually lives. The path to that reorientation has been traced. The blueprint was sound; the funding architecture the Commission designed to protect it was never built; a decade of policy choices steadily departed from the design; the safety reforms that were supposed to protect participants too often removed the conditions of their safety; the lived consequences for people with high and complex support needs have been displacement, deterioration, hospital admission, and the slow withdrawal of the supports on which an ordinary life was being built; the harm that follows is, on the entire weight of the public record, not unforeseen but documented; and the Bill that would lock the trajectory into law has been written in apparent disregard of that record.

Each of those propositions is the work of a separate Part of this paper, and none is offered loosely. The argument is, taken as a whole, an indictment built from the institutions’ own evidence Ȅ the Productivity Commission’s original design, the

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Convention to which the Act gives effect, the Royal Commission’s findings, the coronial trail, the regulator’s mortality data, the modelling produced by independent peak bodies, and the Bill’s own operative provisions. The paper has, throughout, conceded what should be conceded Ȅ that inefficiencies exist, that fraud occurs, that cost matters, that sustainability is a real consideration Ȅ and has then shown that none of those concessions justifies the reform’s actual magnitude, design, or incidence. The fiscal saving is overstated once the workforce-exit transfers are reckoned with. The macroeconomic intent is regressive in its incidence. The structural choice forces participants back into the settings the country has just spent four and a half years documenting as unsafe. The conceptual foundation of the access regime contradicts the definition of disability the scheme exists to honour. And the planning principles that placed the participant at the centre of their own plan are being removed from the law altogether. These are not separable critiques; they are facets of a single failure, named in the title of this paper and now earned by the analysis it has assembled: a system that has, in the most concrete and operative sense, stopped listening to the people it was built to serve.

What Is At Stake

It is important to say plainly what is at stake, because the public framing of the reform has trained the country’s attention on a single set of numbers Ȅ the cost of the scheme, its rate of growth, its share of the federal Budget Ȅ and almost no attention on a different set of numbers, which are the human costs the reform will produce. The numbers that matter for what follows are not measured in billions of dollars. They are measured in people whose plans will be cut below the threshold at which their lives can be sustained safely in the community. People who will be pushed, against their preference and against the country’s own settled view of best practice, into congregated arrangements where harm has been formally documented as concentrating. People who will lose, in the renewal of a plan, the capital funding for a wheelchair or a piece of equipment that has already been approved, ordered, and is in transit. People who will have their supports suspended because the system could not reach them, in circumstances where reachability is itself a function of the supports being suspended. People who will leave the

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workforce because the supports their participation depended on have been

withdrawn. People who will be prevented from ever joining the scheme because the

conceptually incoherent definition of disability the Bill installs cannot see them.

Family members who will leave paid work to become full-time carers, and whose

superannuation, income tax, and long-term security will be eroded in proportion to

the years they spend doing so.

What is at stake, in other words, is not an administrative arrangement but a

generation’s worth of ordinary lives. Home. Safety. Breathing ` for the participants

whose supports keep them out of acute care. Participation. Dignity. The capacity to

choose the person who enters one’s bedroom each morning. The capacity to leave

one’s house for something other than a medical appointment. The capacity to work, study, parent, contribute, and be present in community as one chooses to be present. These are not abstractions, and they are not luxuries. They are the conditions of citizenship for the people the scheme exists to enable into citizenship.

They will not survive the contraction in its present form, and the people who lose them will not be returned to them by any later inquiry or any future reform. The losses, once accepted, are durable.

The false choice the reform asks the country to accept

The reform is being defended through a particular framing, and that framing should be named and refused. Australia is being asked, repeatedly, to accept that there is a choice between sustainability and rights ` that the scheme cannot be both fiscally responsible and faithful to its founding promise, and that fiscal responsibility must therefore take priority. This is presented as if it were a hard-headed adult acknowledgment of constraint, and the people who object to it are presented as if they were refusing to engage with the realities of public finance. The framing should be refused, and the analysis of this paper has supplied the grounds on which to refuse it.

A scheme that destroys the lives it was funded to enable has not become sustainable. It has become something else, given the scheme’s name. Sustainability, properly understood, is the capacity of a system to continue delivering on its purpose into the future. A scheme whose contraction predictably forces participants

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into congregated settings that increase the country’s largest single category of disability-related cost redacted the $46 billion annual societal cost of violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation of disabled Australians documented by the Royal Commission redacted is not a sustainable scheme; it is a scheme whose contraction will increase, not reduce, total public cost over time. A scheme that pushes its workforce onto the welfare ledger and its participants’ family members out of paid work has not saved money; it has moved cost from one Budget line to others. A scheme that abandons the participant-centred principles that made its measurable workforce- participation gains possible will not preserve those gains; it will reverse them, by removing the supports that made them possible. The choice the reform asks the country to accept is not a real choice; it is a presentation of one as if it were.

Genuine sustainability and faithful rights-delivery are not opposed in this scheme. They are the same set of choices made well, and the same set of choices made poorly is what produces both fiscal waste and human harm.

To borrow Santayana ² what foreseeable harm now requires us to remember

Part 5 of this paper assembled the public record of foreseeable harm: the Royal Commission, the longer parliamentary record going back through the 2015 Senate inquiry, the coronial findings, the regulator’s mortality data, the decade of investigative journalism. The cumulative weight of that record is the central evidentiary anchor of the argument, and it must be honoured in the conclusion too.

The institutional logic that produced the harms documented in those records did not vanish when the institutions closed. It has resurfaced, repeatedly, in the smaller and apparently more humane settings that succeeded them, and the Bill now before the Parliament will, on the analysis of Part 6, push further participants back into the kinds of arrangements where that institutional logic operates most reliably.

To borrow and slightly adapt Santayana’s rather stark warning: whether we are speaking of people, systems, institutions, governments, or countries, the lesson remains the same. When the lessons of history are forgotten, the mistakes of the past do not stay buried. They return, often dressed in newer language, newer

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systems, and newer justifications. In disability policy, that should trouble us deeply,

because we already know where institutional logic leads. We have been here before.

And if we forget the harms that came before us, society may one day be forced to

relearn those lessons the hard way. But many of the people harmed by that failure

will not be here to see that lesson relearned.

That is the line on which the whole conclusion turns. The argument of this paper

has not been that harm to disabled people is a worrying possibility, or a foreseeable

risk, or an unintended consequence that might follow from the reform if its drafters

are unlucky. The argument has been that the harm is documented, the record is

sitting in the institutions of the Commonwealth, and the people who will bear the

cost of any future re-confirmation of what is already known will not, in many cases,

survive to see it confirmed.

What is asked of the reader

A conclusion, finally, must address the people who read it directly. The paper’s

analysis is done; the body of evidence has been assembled; the structural choices

being made by the Parliament have been laid out and named. What remains is the

question every reader is now in a position to answer for themselves: what does it

require of you to have read this?

For Parliamentarians, the question is the most direct, because the legislation is in

your hands. The case the paper has made is not that the Bill is malicious; it is that

the Bill is fundamentally and irreparably flawed Ȅ that it is built on a definition of

disability the scheme’s own Convention rejects, on principles that invert the

participant-centred purpose of the Act, and on a conception of sustainability that

this paper has shown to be false even on its own fiscal terms. A Bill flawed in its

foundations cannot be repaired by amendment, because the flaw is not in any

provision an amendment could reach; it is in the ideas that produced it. The course

this paper urges is therefore not amendment but withdrawal Ȅ and, in the Bill’s

place, the beginning of a genuine co-design process with disabled people,

conducted across all eight tenets this paper has set out and free to consider every

path forward rather than a predetermined one. That process is the only legitimate

way to design the reform the scheme genuinely needs, and Part 7 indicates the

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substance it would be likely to recover. The alternative to this Bill is not the status

quo, which this paper has also criticised at length; it is the path that real co-design

would produce, and which no Bill drafted without it can substitute for.

For the senior officers of the National Disability Insurance Agency, the Quality and

Safeguards Commission, and the Department, the question is whether the

institutions you lead are still in a position to hear the people they serve, and to read

accurately the data they themselves are producing. The actuary’s bewilderment

named in Part 3 – a decade of data, and a system that could not understand why

participants were not improving – is not a flattering portrait of the system’s

relationship to its own evidence. It can be repaired. The mechanism is the one the

2011 blueprint specified and that successive policy choices abandoned: sustained, structural, whole-of-process co-design, with disabled people as authors of the system rather than its subjects. The institutions can choose to rebuild that mechanism. No one outside them can choose it for them.

For the disability service providers, peak bodies, and clinicians who deliver the supports the scheme funds, the question is whether the next several years are spent absorbing the contraction or contesting it. The contraction is not yet inevitable. The legislation is before the Parliament; the consultation processes for the operational instruments that follow it have not all closed; the community has been, here, doing what it has always done – gathering the record, presenting it, asking to be heard. The professions the scheme depends on have, in the analysis of this paper, both a stake and a standing in what comes next. Whether the worker-delivered, clinician- taught, person-specific model that has kept people with complex needs in community living continues to exist after the next round of regulatory tightening will be determined, in large part, by whether the professions speak now or accept what is being designed for them.

And for the reader who is not in any of those positions – for the disabled Australians who have lived this paper without needing to read it, for their families and friends, for the workers whose jobs are at stake, for the citizens whose taxes fund the scheme they have been told is unaffordable – the question is the oldest one in democratic life. The country is making a choice in the name of its citizens. The choice’s magnitude and its consequences are now, in this paper and in the

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much larger body of work the disability community has produced, in front of you.

The disability community has done, and is doing, the work of bearing the record.

What the rest of the country chooses to do with the record is what will, in the end, determine whether the people most exposed to its consequences are still here when the next inquiry is convened.

Closing

This paper began with an observation that has, by its end, become a finding. The National Disability Insurance Scheme works well — and it works safely, sustainably, and in fidelity to its founding promise — when it listens to the people whose lives depend on it. It fails, often spectacularly, when it does not. The choice the Parliament is being asked to make in the Securing the NDIS for Future Generations Bill 2026 is, in its operative effect, the choice to legislate a system that listens less.

The recommendation of this paper is therefore singular, and it follows necessarily from everything the paper has assembled. It is not that the Bill should be amended. The paper has demonstrated, at length, that the Bill is not a sound instrument in need of refinement but a fundamentally flawed one — flawed in its foundations, not merely its details. It measures, as the central concept of its access regime, something that is not disability and that the scheme’s own founding Convention says is not disability. It replaces the participant-centred principles that are the statutory expression of choice and control with principles oriented to the scheme’s cost. It inverts the meaning of reasonable and necessary. It builds its planning, its caps, its suspensions, its forfeitures, and its enforcement on those inverted foundations. A flaw of that kind cannot be amended out, because it is not located in any single provision that an amendment could reach; it is located in the ideas that informed the drafting. One cannot amend a measure into soundness when the thing it sets out to measure, the principles it sets out to apply, and the purpose it sets out to serve are each, at the root, the wrong ones. There is no version of this Bill, however amended, that is safe; there is no version, however amended, that is fair.

The only course consistent with the evidence of this paper is the one the paper’s own argument about co-design compels. The Bill must be seen for what it is, and it

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must be withdrawn. In its place, a genuine process of co-design must begin Ȅ co-

design as this paper has defined it, across all eight tenets and under the whole-of- process principle that binds them: disabled people, including those with high and complex needs, present not at the end to comment on a settled plan but at the beginning, sharing authority over the ideas, the design, the instruments, the implementation, and the monitoring; with the standing of co-owners rather than consultees; and with their consent treated as ongoing rather than presumed. That process must be free to consider all options and all paths forward, including those the present Bill never contemplated, rather than being handed a predetermined destination and asked only to assist with the route. Part 7 of this paper sketches the substance such a process would be likely to recover Ȅ outcome-first planning, harm minimisation, participant-directed support, design for the country as it actually is, continuity of support through hospital, and oversight that measures what matters. But Part 7 is offered as an indication of what genuine reform contains, not as a substitute for the co-design that alone can legitimately produce it.

The path forward is not for this paper, or this Bill, or this government, to settle in advance. It is to be designed with the people whose lives it will govern.

The system can choose, even now, to begin listening again. The cost of that choice is small. The cost of failing to make it has already been documented, exhaustively, in records the country itself commissioned and paid for. What that cost is about to become is, on the evidence of this paper, a matter for the next Parliament to decide.

What disabled Australians have to say about that decision is already in front of them. They have done their part. The rest is a question of whether, this time, anone will read what has been written.

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References

References follow the author-date (Harvard) convention. Where a source is a web-based commentary or media item published in 2026 in the period immediately surrounding the Bill’s introduction, the full URL and date of access are marked for confirmation at final proofing; all bibliographic details that could be verified have been included.

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131

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Conversation, The 2013, ‘Increasing income tax the right choice for a sustainable NDIS’, viewed 1 June 2026, <https://theconversation.com/increasing-income-tax- The-right-choice-for-a-sustainable-ndis-13578>.

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Coroners Court of Victoria 2023, Finding into the death of William Heddergott and related recommendations concerning at-risk adults, Coroners Court of Victoria, Melbourne.

Crevacore, C, Jacob, E, Coventry, LL & Duffield, C 2023, ‘Integrative review: factors impacting effective delegation practices by registered nurses to assistants in nursing’, Journal of Advanced Nursing, vol. 79, no. 3, pp. 885Ȃ895, doI:10.1111/jan.15430.

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Grattan Institute 2026, Reform must make the NDIS work better for the people who need it most, Grattan Institute, Melbourne, viewed 1 June 2026, https://grattan.edu.au/news/reform-must-make-the-ndis-work-better-for-the-people-who-need-it-most/

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Green Left 2023, ‘NDIS Review: is Labor adopting the Coalition’s cuts?’, viewed 1 June 2026, <https://www.greenleft.org.au/2023/1396/analysis/ndis-review-labor- adopting-coalitions-cuts>.

Guardian, The (Australia) 2018, reporting on the abandonment of the proposed Medicare levy increase to fully fund the NDIS, viewed 1 June 2026, <https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/apr/26/labor-to-match- collection-in-dumping-medicare-levy-rise-as-tax-battle-lines-redrawn>.

Guardian, The (Australia) 2021, reporting on the independent-assessments proposal and the disability sector’s opposition, viewed 1 June 2026, <https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/jul/08/ndis-independent- asassment-should-not-proceed-in-current-form-coalition-s-own-advisory-council- says>.

Human Resources Director 2026a, ‘Is the NDIS making it harder to hire?’, HRD Australia, viewed 1 June 2026, <https://www.hcamag.com.au/specialisation/recruitment/is-the-ndis-making-it- harder-to-hire/571460>.

Human Resources Director 2026b, ‘Up to 140,000 disability jobs at risk as NDIS overhaul begins to bite’, HRD Australia, 24 April (citing McIntyre modelling), viewed 1 June 2026, <https://www.hcamag.com.au/specialisation/recruitment/up- to-140000-disability-jobs-at-risk-as-ndis-overhaul-begins-to-bite/572943>.

Inclusion Australia 2023, community response to the Four Corners ‘Careless’ episode and the Royal Commission Final Report, Inclusion Australia, viewed 1 June 2026, <https://www.inclusionaustralia.org.au/shocking-abuse-highlights-urgent-need- for-government-action-to-implement-disability-royal-commission- recommendations/>.

Lemma Hub 2026, ‘NDIS federal Budget analysis: $37.8b cuts and the scheme reset’, viewed 1 June 2026, <https://www.lemmahub.com/blog/ndis-federal-budget- analysis-2026>.

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Lewis, O & Richardson, G 2020, ‘The right to live independently and be included in the community’, International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, vol. 69, art. 101499, doI:10.1016/j.ijlp.2019.101499.

Loving Life Care 2026, Securing the NDIS for Future Generations Bill 2026: I read it, viewed 1 June 2026, <https://www.lovinglife.care/post/ndis-securing-the-ndis-for- future-generations-bill-2026>.

McCarthy, S, Hemsley, B, Given, F, Williams, H & Balandin, S 2022, ‘Death by ochoking or dysphagia: a review of coronial findings (Australia and Canada)’, Journal of Law and Medicine, vol. 29, no. 2, pp. 400Ȃ405.

MinterEllison 2026, Client briefing on the Regulatory Powers Act triggers and the civil penalty regime under the Securing the NDIS for Future Generations Bill 2026, MinterEllison, viewed 1 June 2026, <https://www.minterellison.com/articles/ndis- legislative-amendments>.

National Disability Insurance Agency 2024, More NDIS participants and families and carers in work Ȅ new data reveals, NDIA, viewed 1 June 2026, https://www.ndis.gov.au/news.

National Disability Insurance Agency n.d., Participant Employment Strategy, NDIA, viewed 1 June 2026, <https://www.ndis.gov.au/about-us/strategies/participant- employment-strategy>.

National Disability Insurance Agency 2026, History of the NDIS, NDIA, viewed 1 June 2026, https://www.ndis.gov.au/about-us/history-ndis.

National Disability Insurance Scheme Act 2013 (Cth).

National Disability Insurance Scheme (Provider Registration and Practice Standards) Rules 2018 (Cth), Supplementary Module 1: High Intensity Daily Personal Activities.

National Disability Services 2021Ȃ2026, reporting and campaign materials in support of False Economy and on the economy-wide impact of NDIS cuts, NDS, viewed 1

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June 2026, <https://nds.org.au/news/new-modelling-shows-52-billion-benefit-of- ndis-sector-launches-election-campaign-to-warn-of-impact-o>.

National Disability Services 2023, Revised high intensity support skills descriptors now in effect, NDS, viewed 1 June 2026, https://www.nds.org.au/.

NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission 2020, Report on the death of Ms Ann-Marie Smith and the related Robertson Review, NDIS Commission, viewed 1 June 2026, https://www.ndiscommission.gov.au/resources/reports-policies-and-frameworks/inquiries-and-reviews/independent-review-circumstances.

NDIS Quality and Safegards Commission 2022, High Intensity Support Skills Descriptors and Supplementary Module: High Intensity Daily Personal Activities, revised, in effect 1 February 2023, NDIS Commission, viewed 1 June 2026, https://www.ndiscommission.gov.au/.

New England Times 2026, ‘NDIS overhaul to kick 160,000 people off, hit regions hardest’, 22 April, viewed 1 June 2026, https://www.netimes.com.au/2026/04/22/ndis-overhaul-to-kick-160000-people-off-hit-regions-hardest/

NSW State Coroner’s Court 2018, Inquest into the death of Carney Schultz, finding of 16 February 2018, State Coroner’s Court of New South Wales, Sydney.

Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia 2022, Decision-making framework for nursing and midwifery, NMBA, viewed 1 June 2026, https://www.nursingmidwiferyboard.gov.au/.

Parliament of Australia 2015, Violence, abuse and neglect against people with disability in institutional and residential settings, Senate Community Affairs References Committee, Commonwealth of Australia, Canberra.

People with Disability Australia 2022, Australia’s National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) Act, PWDA, viewed 1 June 2026, https://pwd.org.au/.

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Per Capita & National Disability Services 2021, False economy: the economic benefits of the National Disability Insurance Scheme and the consequences of government cost-cutting, Per Capita, Melbourne, viewed 1 June 2026, <https://percapita.org.au/our_work/false-economy-the-economic-benefits-of-the- ndis-and-the-consequences-of-government-cost-cutting/>.

Productivity Commission 2011, Disability care and support, Inquiry Report no. 54, Productivity Commission, Canberra.

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Queensland Coroners Court n.d., Guidance on the reporting of deaths of people with a disability under the Coroners Act 2003 (Qld), Coroners Court of Queensland, Brisbane.

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Rishworth, A 2022, statement on disability employment, reported in The Guardian (Australia), ‘Labor to launch trial to help NDIS participants who want to work’, 3 November, viewed 1 June 2026, https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/nov/02/labor-to-launch-trial-to-help-ndis-participants-who-want-to-work.

Robertson, A 2020, Independent review into the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission’s regulation of the provider of supports and services to Ms Ann-Marie Smith, NDIS Commission, Canberra.

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Reflection

A reader emerging from When the System Forgets to Listen has been given a great deal at once: a life, a method, a fifteen-year history of administrative drift, a chapter-by-chapter reading of the Bill, an alternative, and a conclusion. It carries its own executive summary and needs no second one. What this reflection does instead is draw out the four threads the rest of the collection depends on.

The first is a claim about design, not motive. The work does not argue that the Bill is cruel, or that anyone who drafted it wished harm on a disabled person. It argues something harder to answer: that the Bill is the predictable output of a system that has stopped asking the right question. A scheme that begins every decision with what a support costs — at the level of a plan, a class, a benchmark, or the aggregate budget — will, under pressure, produce decisions optimised for cost, whatever the intentions of the people inside it. Flynn’s word for the result is forgetting: not a moral lapse but a structural one, in which the person disappears from the centre of a system that still, on its letterhead, exists to serve them. Read that way, the provisions are not a list of separate problems but one mechanism with many parts. Each provision is the machinery; the reorientation away from the participant and toward the budget is what the machinery delivers. It is the root from which every later theme grows — shared support, community participation, the rebuttal of the Government’s case.

This discipline is easily mistaken for its opposite, so it is worth being plain. To say the Bill is the output of a system asking the wrong question is not to allege bad faith, and the collection does not. It assumes the contrary: that the people who designed these measures are competent public servants and ministers acting on a sincere belief that the scheme’s trajectory must change. The argument is about effect, not intent — what a set of provisions will do once they are law and operating at scale. This is both fairer and more damning. Fairer, because a submission that hopes to be believed cannot overreach on motive. More damned, because a harm that flows from cruelty can be cured by replacing the cruel, while a harm that flows from the questions a system is required to ask will recur no matter who administers it, until the questions change. That is why the collection presses on design rather than persons, and why the rebuttal tests the Government’s stated reasons rather than impugning its good faith.

The second thread is the record of foreseeable harm. Flynn is careful with the phrase: here it does not mean a future risk that worried people are predicting. It means a harm already foreseen — documented, formally investigated, publicly reported, by parliamentary inquiry, by Royal Commission, by coroners, by the scheme’s own regulator, and by a decade of investigative journalism. The work assembles that record from sources already public and

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already paid for by the Commonwealth. A 2015 Senate committee called the abuse of disabled people in institutional settings an epidemic. Eight years later, a Royal Commission confirmed across thousands of pages that congregated and group-home settings have not eliminated institutional harm, and put its annual societal cost at about forty-six billion dollars. A coronial c trail records named, preventable deaths. The regulator’s own analysis of more than nine thousand deaths shows potentially-avoidable mortality well above the general population’s. And investigative journalism showed the country, in prime time, what the inquiries described. The point is moral as much as evidentiary. A reform that proceeds in genuine ignorance of likely harm is a failure; a reform that proceeds alongside an established and acknowledged record of harm is a choice — and cannot later be defended on the ground of not having known. That is the hinge of the next movement, and the reflection hands it forward deliberately.

The third thread is the participant’s-eye reading of the provisions, and it is the engine of the later rebuttal. What the work offers, that a purely legal analysis cannot, is an account of what each provision does at the point where it meets a person. It reads the repeal of the participant-centred planning principles not as a doctrinal change but as the moment the participant stops being the author of their own plan. It reads the new functional-capacity test not as a tightening of access but as the measurement of something that, on the Convention’s own definition, is not disability at all — the person stripped of the supports, equipment, and environment in which their disability actually lives. It reads caps and ratios set “regardless of whether a funding component amount meets the cost of the supports” as permission to fund people below what their safety requires. And it reads automatic plan renewal that strips one- of funding, suspension on undefined thresholds of contact, and an integrity architecture that treats participants as compliance subjects, each as a small transfer of risk from the scheme onto the person least able to carry it. This is the reading the Government’s justifications must survive — and the reading the rebuttal at Movement IV holds each of them against, provision by provision, claim by claim.

The fourth thread is the alternative, and the work is emphatic about what it is and is not. Its Part 7 is not a set of amendments to bolt onto the Bill. It is an indication of what a genuine, participant-led co-design would be likely to recover once the present Bill is set aside — the substance such a process would tend toward, not a substitute for the process itself. The recommendation is not that the Bill be improved but that it be withdrawn, on the ground that its flaws are foundational: they flow from a single conception — that the scheme’s problem is its cost, that disability can be assessed away from the person’s life, and that sustainability means contracting what the scheme provides to the people who need it most — and a measure built throughout on that conception cannot be repaired at the surface. The alternative starts from a different first question: not what does this cost, but what does this person need to live

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safely, freely, and with dignity in the community. Everything else follows from that

reorientation ² investment in prevention rather than front-loaded contraction; safety built

on harm minimisation rather than zero-risk withdrawal; co-design rebuilt as a governance

discipline; participant-directed support preserved and the clinicians who sustain it protected;

design for thin markets rather than metropolitan averages; continuity of disability support

through hospital admission; and oversight that measures whether people are safe, housed, and

included rather than whether forms were processed. The collection carries that alternative

forward to the movement on risk and the way back. Here the task is only to mark that it exists,

that it is rights-based and costed in the insurance terms the scheme was built on, and that it

answers the question the public debate keeps treating as unanswerable: if not this, then what?

What the work leaves the collection to do next follows from its second thread. It has shown,

from the inside, that the harm following withdrawn support is foreseeable, and it has named

the record that makes it so. The collection now turns to that record directly: to what our most

exhaustive inquiry into the abuse of disabled people actually found about the settings the Bill

makes the path of least resistance, and to the discomfort of holding a reform up against the

evidence the nation gathered, at its own expense, about where harm concentrates. Flynn read

the Bill against the question of what it does to a person. The next movement reads it against

the question the country has already answered and is now preparing to act against: what

happens to disabled people in the settings the Bill, by design, makes it cheapest to send them

to.

                               Flynn & Gregory ² joint submission    Page 195

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Movement III ² The Forgetting in Motion

The record is now before the Committee, and it is unambiguous about direction. Our most exhaustive inquiry into the abuse of disabled people found that harm concentrates where decision-making is concentrated ² in segregated and congregate settings, in shared arrangements where the person lacks genuine choice and control. It found this not as a contested opinion but as the settled conclusion of the largest body of evidence the country has ever gathered on the subject. The uncomfortable corollary is that the system is not moving away from those settings in response to what it learned. It is moving back toward them. And the movement is not a future risk contained in a Bill not yet passed. It is already happening, in the decisions the National Disability Insurance Agency is making now, before the Bill is law.

That is the claim the next work documents.

Considerations for Preparing a Plan Review Report is a practitioner¶s guide, written by Peter Gregory for the people who prepare evidence for participants with complex needs ² report writers, families, advocates, support teams. It was not written as a submission to this Committee. It was written as working guidance for a changed environment, and that is precisely what gives it its evidentiary force. It is not an argument about what the NDIA might do if the Bill passes. It is a field account of what the NDIA is doing already, set down by someone who has to help participants survive the decisions as they are being made. The strongest evidence that a legislative logic is not hypothetical is not a prediction; it is a document, produced for a practical purpose, that has had to internalise the logic in order to be useful. This is such a document.

What the guide records is a shift in the threshold question. A report for a Home and Living plan could once focus on establishing need ² the participant¶s disability, the complexity of their behaviour, their functional impairment, the risks they face ² and a sufficiently serious picture of need could be expected to attract the support that matched it. That is no longer how the decisions are made. On the guide¶s account, the NDIA is no longer primarily asking whether a participant requires continuous support. It is asking whether that support can be delivered within a shared arrangement, and only where the answer is a clear, evidence-based no does continuous one-to-one support now tend to be approved. Need alone is no longer treated as sufficient. The participant with the most serious disability imaginable may still be told that shared support will do, unless their report explains why a shared model would fail to meet their needs safely in their particular circumstances.

The guide is precise about the mechanism, and the precision matters, because it shows the logic already operating with administrative teeth. Continuous one-to-one support, it records, is being treated as appropriate only in what the Agency calls “exceptional circumstances” ² a

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phrase that appears in neither legislation nor published policy, but that recent decisions suggest is read to mean situations where a shared arrangement would foreseeably produce an extreme risk of harm. Decisions are framed comparatively: individual support against shared, higher-cost against lower, with the lower-cost alternative understood in practice to mean shared support. And the guide records, as a now-common experience, participants told after a plan review that their funding has been cut and reallocated on a step-down basis: six months at the previous level, then Home and Living funding dropped to a reduced ratio such as one worker to three participants. None of that requires the Bill. It is happening under the discretion the Agency already has, and it is happening to people now.

This is the decision logic the next movement shows the Bill does not invent but entrenches. The reform¶s defenders present its provisions as new rules for a new system. The guide is evidence that the system has already adopted the rules, informally and without transparent criteria, and that the Bill¶s effect is to give that informal practice the force and permanence of statute. The timetable confirms the trajectory. The new framework planning the Bill underpins is to commence on 1 April 2027 ² delayed, on the Government¶s own account, because the system was not ready ² even as the plan-renewal and reasonable-and-necessary provisions come into force in law from 1 February 2027, and the transitional rules provide for existing participants to be moved onto that framework as it is rolled out. But the logic those dates will formalise is not waiting for them. It is in the plan reviews being conducted today, in the funding being stepped down today, in the reports practitioners are being advised today they must now write differently to protect the people they serve. The Bill is the destination. The guide is the evidence that the journey is well underway.

It is reproduced here in full, and unedited.

Flynn & Gregory ² joint submission Page 197

Submission 1922

Considerations for Preparing a Plan Review Report

Participants with Complex Needs

Prepared by: Peter Gregory Date: 22.05.2026

Considerations for Preparing a Plan Review Report Guide for Participants with Complex Needs (Ver 2.0_31.05.2026) Page 1

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Purpose of Writing This Document

The purpose of writing this document is to provide guidance for practitioners, families, advocates, and support teams preparing reports for participants with complex needs within the evolving decision-making environment of the National Disability Insurance Agency. The document has been developed in response to emerging patterns in NDIA planning and Home and Living decisions, especially those involving attempts to reduce 24/7 1:1 supports, increase reliance on shared support arrangements, and reduce funding for community participation and individualised supports.

This document seeks to assist report writers to understand the practical and strategic realities shaping current NDIA decision-making. It recognises that recent reforms, proposed legislative amendments, and public statements made by Mark Butler suggest a significant shift toward funding models increasingly influenced by cost containment, standardisation, benchmarking, and assumptions that shared or lower-cost supports should be treated as the default position unless proven otherwise.

The document therefore aims to help practitioners move beyond traditional report writing approaches that focus primarily on diagnosis, impairment, or broad descriptions of need. Instead, it encourages the development of reports that provide detailed functional, operational, and safeguarding analysis explaining why particular supports are required, how those supports function in practice, and why lower-cost or shared alternatives may fail to safely and effectively meet the participant͛ s needs.

A central purpose of this document is to ensure that participants with complex needs are not unintentionally disadvantaged by report-writing approaches that fail to engage with the actual logic currently shaping NDIA decisions. The document acknowledges that many participants are now effectively being required to demonstrate not only that they have significant support needs, but that those needs cannot safely, consistently, or effectively be met within shared support models.

The document also seeks to support a shift away from deficit-based narratives that position the participant as the problem. Instead, it encourages report writers to focus on support design, safeguarding obligations, relational support requirements, environmental compatibility, and the

Submission 1922

The operational realities of service delivery. In doing so, the document aims to preserve the dignity, autonomy, and citizenship of participants while still addressing the increasingly restrictive evidentiary environment emerging within the NDIS.

Importantly, this document is also intended to protect against the risk that stability, progress, or successful community participation may be misinterpreted as evidence that supports can be reduced. It emphasises that, for many participants with complex needs, positive outcomes exist because of intensive and carefully structured supports, not because those supports are no longer required.

Finally, the document is intended to reinforce the foundational principles upon which the NDIS was originally established. That people with disability should be supported to live ordinary lives within the community, exercise meaningful choice and control, maintain relationships and participation, and avoid segregation, institutionalisation, and unsafe service models. The guidance within this document therefore seeks to assist practitioners to prepare reports that are not only clinically and operationally robust, but also grounded in contemporary safeguarding practice, human rights principles, and the lived realities of people with complex support needs.

This document does not:

• provide information about how to undertake an S100 Review should you receive a plan you do not agree with.

• provide information about how to engage with the Administrative Review Tribunal process if you want to challenge a decision made by the NDIA through that system.

Submission 1922

Introduction

Recent decision-making patterns within the National Disability Insurance Agency demonstrate that

to access 24/7 1:1 support is no longer being assessed solely on the basis of the presence of

disability, complex support needs, behavioural complexity, or functional impairment. Increasingly,

decisions appear to be shaped by a narrower and more restrictive threshold question. That is,

whether the participant’s support needs can be delivered within a shared support arrangement.

Current decisions suggest that continuous 1:1 support is being treated as appropriate only in what

the NDIA describes as exceptional circumstances. Although this term is not defined within

legislation or publicly available policy, recent decisions indicate that the NDIA interprets exceptional

circumstances to mean situations where shared support arrangements are not viable because they

would foreseeably result in an extreme level of risk of harm to the participant or others.

This represents a significant shift in the type of evidence now required in reports prepared for Plan Reviews, particularly for participants seeking continuation or approval of intensive Home and Living supports.

Historically, reports may have focused primarily on describing:

• the participant’s diagnosis,
• the presence of disability,
• behavioural complexity,
• psychosocial vulnerabilities,
• or the general benefits of increased support.

However, current decision-making patterns demonstrate that this is no longer sufficient on its own. Instead, reports now need to directly and explicitly address a central operational question:

Why can’t this Participant share their support and accommodation with another NDIS Participant?

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The evidence presented must clearly explain why shared support arrangements are not viable in

this specific case. Reports should identify the precise risks, failures, limitations, or safeguarding

concerns that arise when support is shared and explain why those risks cannot be adequately

mitigated through staffing ratios, environmental modifications, behavioural strategies, or other

interventions.

Reports must also clearly articulate the level, intensity, continuity, and immediacy of support

required, including why continuous 1:1 support is functionally necessary.

This represents a movement away from broad clinical description toward highly detailed functional, operational, and context-specific analysis. Increasingly, participants appear to be required to

demonstrate not merely that they have high support needs, but that shared support arrangements are fundamentally incompatible with the nature of those needs.

The emerging policy environment surrounding the proposed 2026 NDIS amendments, together with public statements made by Mark Butler, further reinforces this direction. Government rhetoric centred on sustainability, consistency, and value for money strongly suggests that shared support models will be formally enshrined in public policy, through Amendments to the Legislation, as the preferred or presumed default service model unless evidence can establish that such arrangements are unsafe or ineffective, using secret criteria only known to the NDIA.

Although the term exceptional circumstances does not appear within the legislation itself, current decision-making patterns indicate that it is operating as an implied threshold requirement. Importantly, the parameters defining what constitutes exceptional circumstances have not been publicly disclosed.

For this reason, avoiding the issue of shared support entirely is unlikely to benefit participants seeking continuation of 24/7 1:1 support. Current NDIA decision-making patterns indicate that the question of whether support can be shared has become the central issue around which Home and Living decisions are now being organised.

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The Hard Reality: The NDIA’s Emerging Decision Logic

Current evidence suggests that the NDIA is no longer primarily asking whether a participant requires 24/7 support. Instead, the key question appears to be whether that support can be delivered within a shared support model.

Only where the answer is a clear and evidence-based no does it appear likely that continuous 1:1 support will be approved.

This distinction is critically important. Reports may successfully demonstrate:

• significant disability,
• complex behavioural support needs,
• emotional dysregulation,
• communication difficulties,
• trauma-related vulnerabilities,
• or substantial risks.

However, if those reports do not specifically explain why shared support arrangements fail to safely and effectively meet those needs, the NDIA may nevertheless conclude that shared support remains sufficient.

Need alone is no longer being treated as sufficient justification for individualised support delivery.

Why Avoiding the Shared Support Question Is Likely to Fail

Current decision-making patterns indicate that the NDIA approaches Home and Living decisions through a comparative framework. Rather than assessing support needs in isolation, decision- makers appear to compare:

• individual support against shared support,
• higher-cost supports against lower-cost alternatives,
• and individualised models against congregate or shared service arrangements.

If this comparison is not directly addressed within reports, the NDIA is likely to undertake that comparison independently, without the participant or practitioner shaping how the comparison is framed.

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This is particularly significant in light of Section 34(1)(c) of the NDIS Act, which requires consideration of whether there is a lower-cost support option capable of achieving similar outcomes. In practice, the lower-cost alternative is interpreted as shared support. It is also now very common for Participants to be informed, following their Plan Review Meeting, that their funding has been cut and has been allocated on a step-down model, where six months of the plan funding is allocated at the previous plan level and the following six months of Home and Living funding is allocated at the reduced level such as 1:3 shared support.

As a result, reports must now do more than establish need. They must demonstrate why lower-cost shared arrangements are incapable of safely and effectively achieving comparable outcomes in the participant’s specific circumstances.

Reframing the Argument

Although reports must engage directly with the issue of shared support, this does not mean the participant should be framed as the problem.

The strongest reports avoid deficit-based language and instead shift the focus toward:

• the operational realities of support delivery,
• safeguarding obligations,
• support design limitations,
• and the incompatibility between shared models and the participant’s actual support requirements.

Three particularly important reframing approaches are emerging:

Reframing Support as Non-Substitutable

Rather than arguing that the participant cannot share support, reports should explain that the support itself is functionally non-shareable.

Some support tasks require:

• immediate response,
• uninterrupted monitoring,
• relational continuity,
• line-of-sight supervision,
• rapid behavioural intervention,
• continuous emotional co-regulation,
• or highly individualised communication responses.

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These supports are not divisible between multiple participants without fundamentally compromising their effectiveness.

In this framing, the issue is not the participant’s deficits but the operational nature of the support required.

Reframing Shared Support as a Service Model Mismatch

Reports should also explain that shared support arrangements may be fundamentally incompatible with the participant’s support environment.

Shared support models often introduce:

• competing staff demands,
• delayed response times,
• increased sensory input,
• environmental unpredictability,
• relational inconsistency,
• and reduced capacity for continuous attunement and regulation.

Where these conditions create escalation, dysregulation, distress, or increased risk, the issue is not that the participant has failed shared support. Rather, the service model itself is incapable of safely meeting the participant’s support requirements.

Reframing the Issue as Safeguarding Incompatibility

One of the strongest approaches is to frame continuous 1:1 support as a safeguarding requirement.

Reports should explain that shared support arrangements create foreseeable safeguarding risks, including:

• escalation,
• emotional dysregulation,
• trauma responses

Submission 1922

• behavioural deterioration,

• exposure to harm,

• increased use of restrictive practices,

• withdrawal from community participation,

• and breakdowns in functional stability.

Importantly, the report should demonstrate that the support itself functions as the safeguard.

The argument does not attempt to enter into a philosophical debate about the efficacy of shared support. Rather, the evidence demonstrates that, in this particular case, shared arrangements are incompatible with safe and effective support delivery.

The Impact of the 2026 NDIS Amendments and Reform Narrative

The proposed 2026 NDIS amendments and recent government statements suggest an increasing emphasis on cost containment, standardisation, benchmarking, and reducing what government representatives describe as over-support.͟

This creates a significant risk that:

• stability will be interpreted as evidence that support can be reduced,

• intensive supports will be characterised as excessive,

• and independence will be incorrectly equated with reduced funded support.

Reports must actively challenge these assumptions.

Where participants are stable, regulated, safe, connected to community, or avoiding crisis, reports should clearly explain that these outcomes exist because of the support structure, not in the absence of it.

The reduction of visible crisis does not mean the participant no longer requires support. Often, it demonstrates that the support is functioning effectively.

Submission 1922

Similarly, reports should clearly explain that independence is not measured by the absence of

support. For many participants with complex needs, independence is only achievable through

intensive, individualised, and continuous support arrangements.

The existence of extensive support does not diminish autonomy. In many cases, it is the mechanism

through which autonomy, participation, communication, and self-determination become possible.

Moving Beyond Diagnostic Description

Current reform directions also suggest that diagnostic labels alone may carry diminishing weight in

future decision-making processes.

For this reason, reports should move beyond broad descriptions of disability and instead provide

highly detailed operational analysis describing:

• what support tasks are required,
• how frequently they occur,
• how rapidly staff must respond,
• what occurs if support is delayed,
• why support cannot be interrupted,
• why support cannot be divided between multiple participants,
• and why continuous 1:1 delivery is functionally necessary.

The strongest reports clearly demonstrate:

• support intensity,
• support frequency,
• support immediacy,
• support continuity,
• and support indivisibility.

This shifts the focus away from abstract descriptions of need and toward the concrete realities of

support delivery.

Submission 1922

Community Participation:

Addressing Proposed Reductions to Social and Community Access Supports

Recent public statements by Mark Butler, together with emerging reform discussions surrounding the proposed 2026 NDIS amendments, indicate increasing scrutiny of supports associated with community participation, social access, and activities that decision-makers may characterise as non-essential, lifestyle-based, or insufficiently connected to functional outcomes.

There appears to be a growing policy narrative suggesting that some forms of community participation support are being viewed as excessive, insufficiently therapeutic, or not aligned with what government representatives describe as the original intent of the NDIS. This creates a substantial risk that supports enabling social connection, community engagement, emotional regulation, relationship development, recreational participation, and ordinary citizenship may increasingly be reframed as discretionary rather than essential.

For participants with complex needs, this distinction is deeply problematic because community participation is often not separate from functional capacity, behavioural stability, safeguarding, emotional regulation, communication development, or mental health maintenance. In many cases, participation in community life is itself a core support mechanism that prevents deterioration, isolation, institutionalisation, trauma escalation, behavioural crisis, and loss of functional capacity.

Submission 1922

Reports prepared for Plan Reviews should therefore explicitly challenge any artificial separation between community participation͟ and functional support.͟ The evidence should clearly demonstrate that community access supports are not simply recreational or social activities layered on top of a participant͛ s life. Rather, they are frequently the primary mechanism through which the participant:

• maintains emotional and behavioural regulation,
• develops and sustains communication skills,
• builds tolerance for environments and social interaction,
• prevents social isolation,
• maintains psychological wellbeing,
• develops identity and self-worth,
• sustains relationships and informal support networks,
• practices daily living and decision-making skills,
• and experiences inclusion as a citizen within ordinary community life.

For many participants with complex needs, community participation cannot be disentangled from safeguarding. Isolation, confinement to the home environment, lack of stimulation, social exclusion, and withdrawal from meaningful activity frequently result in deterioration in mental health, increased distress, behavioural escalation, increased vulnerability to abuse or restrictive practices, and loss of functional capacity.

Reports should therefore clearly explain the foreseeable consequences of reducing community participation funding. This analysis should move beyond broad statements about quality of life͟ and instead identify the specific functional, psychological, behavioural, and safeguarding impacts likely to occur if these supports are reduced.

Submission 1922

Where relevant, reports should explain that reduced community participation may reasonably be expected to result in:

• increased dysregulation,
• escalation in behaviours of distress or protest,
• deterioration in communication,
• increased social withdrawal,
• loss of confidence and routine,
• increased mental health vulnerability,
• reduced resilience,
• increased dependence on restrictive or crisis-based interventions,
• breakdown in community relationships,
• and overall decline in functional stability.

Importantly, reports should also challenge any suggestion that community participation can simply occur without funded support. For many participants with complex needs, meaningful access to community life is only possible because trained support workers provide:

• behavioural support,
• emotional co-regulation,
• environmental monitoring,
• communication assistance,
• sensory regulation,
• transport assistance,
• risk management,
• and continuous relational support.

Without these supports, participation may become unsafe, inaccessible, overwhelming, or impossible.

Reports should further emphasise that community participation is not an optional extra within the philosophy of the NDIS. The Scheme was originally established to support people with disability to live ordinary lives within the community rather than being segregated, isolated, or confined to

Submission 1922

to service systems. Participation in community life is therefore directly connected to the foundational

principles of social inclusion, citizenship, autonomy, dignity, and self-determination underpinning

both the NDIS and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, particularly Article 19.

Where participants require 1:1 support in order to safely access community environments, reports should clearly explain why these supports are functionally indivisible and cannot be diluted through shared staffing models. Community participation often requires rapid, individualised, and highly responsive support that cannot safely be divided across multiple participants without compromising regulation, safety, communication, or access itself.

The strongest reports will therefore position community participation not as a discretionary lifestyle enhancement, but as an essential safeguarding, functional, relational, and citizenship support that is fundamental to maintaining the participant͛ s overall stability, wellbeing, and inclusion within society.

The Most Effective Strategic Position

The strongest reports avoid framing the participant as incapable, problematic, or resistant to sharing support.

Instead, they demonstrate that the support required cannot safely, effectively, consistently, or sustainably be delivered within a shared support model. Using NDIA logic: This is 24/7 1:1 support the lowest cost option for this Participant.͟

The most strategically effective formulation may therefore be:͞

This is not a question of whether the participant prefers individual support over shared support. It

is a question of whether the support required can be delivered safely, effectively, consistently, and

in a manner compatible with safeguarding obligations within a shared model. The evidence

demonstrates that it cannot.͟

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Concluding Statement

Despite the increasing complexity, restrictions, and uncertainty currently emerging within the NDIS, the importance of thoughtful, evidence-based, person-centred review reports has never been greater. While many practitioners, families, advocates, and disabled people themselves may feel discouraged by shifting funding frameworks, tighter interpretation of supports, and growing administrative barriers, it is important to remember that these reports continue to play a critical role in protecting the rights, safety, wellbeing, and autonomy of people with disability. Every carefully documented description of a person͛ s lived experience, every explanation of why individualised support matters, and every effort to preserve dignity, inclusion, and self-direction contributes to maintaining the original human rights foundations upon which the NDIS was built.

Importantly, even within restrictive systems, strong advocacy and high-quality evidence continue to matter. Clear, compassionate, and well-reasoned reports can help decision-makers better understand the real-world consequences of funding reductions, standardised assumptions, and inappropriate support models. They can ensure that the voices, needs, aspirations, and vulnerabilities of disabled people are not lost beneath administrative language or budgetary pressures. They can also create an important historical and professional record demonstrating that many practitioners, families, and disabled people themselves continued to advocate for ethical, individualised, community-based support even during periods of significant systemic change.

The current environment may require greater persistence, creativity, collaboration, and strategic thinking than ever before, particularly for people with complex support needs. However, the core principles that gave rise to the NDIS remain deeply important and worth defending. Dignity, autonomy, inclusion, self-determination, and the right of disabled people to live ordinary lives as equal citizens within their communities. The challenges may be significant, but so too is the collective knowledge, commitment, and humanity of those continuing to advocate for a more just and inclusive system. In that sense, every well-prepared review report is more than an administrative document. It is also an act of safeguarding, solidarity, and hope. It is a political act of defiance, opposing those forces seeking to corrupt the scheme disabled people built.

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing. Arundhati Roy

Considerations for Preparing a Plan Review Report Guide for Participants with Complex Needs (Ver 2.0_31.05.2026) Page 15

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We’ve Been Here Before ² NDIS Amendment Bill 2026

Reflection

The guide just read is, on its face, a modest document ² practical advice for report writers in

a difficult environment. But read against the Bill, it carries an argument the rest of this

collection needs: the most important provisions in the Bill are not creating a new decision

logic. They are giving statutory force to a logic that is already operating, and operating without

transparent criteria. That changes how the Bill should be assessed. A reform that proposed a

genuinely new way of making decisions could at least be debated on its merits before anyone

had lived under it. This reform cannot. The Committee can see the logic at work now, in the

plan reviews being conducted today, and can assess the Bill not against a promise of how the

system will behave but against documented evidence of how it already behaves when given

the discretion the Bill would entrench.

The guide makes four things visible, and each connects to a provision the Bill would lock in.

• The first is the inversion of the threshold question, from “what does this person need?” to “can this person¶s support be shared?” That inversion is not an accident of practice. It is the operational face of the change Flynn¶s account identified as the deepest in the Bill: the reorientation of the planning principles from the participant to the scheme. When the principles that govern how a plan is made are repealed and replaced with principles directed at sustainability, the threshold question necessarily shifts, because a decision-maker instructed to weigh the scheme¶s cost across the whole participant population will, rationally, begin by asking whether a cheaper arrangement can be made to fit. The guide shows decision-makers already asking that question. The Bill would make it the question the law requires, repealing the participant-centred planning principles and replacing them with a scheme-sustainability principle (Schedule 1, Part 6, s 17B).

• The second is the comparative framework: individual against shared, higher-cost against lower, with the lower-cost alternative read as shared support. This is the value-for-money lens Flynn’s analysis traced, applied to the most intimate decision in a person²s life ² where and with whom they live, and who supports them. The current Act already directs attention to whether a lower-cost option could achieve similar outcomes. The guide records that, in practice, this is being read to mean shared support, and that the comparison, where a report doest not address it head-on, is conducted by the Agency without the participant shaping how it is framed. The Bill hardens that comparison into the structure of the reasonable-and- necessary test itself (Schedule 1, Part 6, s 33). What is now a matter of administrative interpretation becomes a matter of statutory instruction.

• The third is the step-down: funding held at the old level for six months, then reduced to a shared ratio. This is the practical shape of the determination powers When the System Forgets

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We’ve Been Here Before ² NDIS Amendment Bill 2026

to Listen examined ² the power to set maximum amounts, maximum support intensity, and maximum worker-to-participant ratios for a class of participants, expressly without regard to whether the capped amount meets the cost of the support. The step-down a participant experiences after a plan review is what that power looks like from the receiving end: a budget that falls not because the person’s needs have fallen, but because the system has decided what it will fund as the standard for a category. The Bill provides the authority for exactly this (Schedule 1, Part 6, s 33(2EA), s 33(2EB)). The guide shows the authority being exercised before it has formally been granted.

The fourth is the evidentiary burden, and it is the most quietly consequential. The guide’s central counsel is that a report must now do more than establish need; it must demonstrate why a lower-cost shared arrangement is incapable of safely meeting the participant’s needs in their specific circumstances. Read plainly, that is a reversal of onus. The system no longer Carries the burden of showing that a shared arrangement is safe for a particular person; the person carries the burden of proving it is not. Flynn’s analysis named this reversal directly: The wrong question is whether the participant can prove that a cheaper shared model will cause direct and immediate harm; the right question is what support model is necessary for this person to live safely, with dignity, with autonomy, and with real access to an ordinary life. The guide is evidence that the wrong question has become the operative one. And the burden falls hardest where it can least be carried ² on participants whose needs are relational, pyschsocial, behavioural, or sensory rather than physically obvious, and on participants whose communication or cognition makes the work of proving the exception hardest. The Bill do not correct this reversal. It builds the architecture within which the reversal becomes outine rather than exceptional: the access and eligibility provisions (Schedule 1, Parts 1 and 9; s 9B), the new needs-assessment and budget method (Schedule 4, ss 32K±32L), the reassessment and plan-variation power (Schedule 1, Part 2), and the repeal and replacement of the planning principles (Schedule 1, Part 6).

Because the burden has shifted, the guide is driven to set out how a report can hope to discharge it, and the three strategies it offers are themselves a measure of how far the ground has moved. The first is to show that the support a participant needs is non-substitutable: not a quantity of help that a worker shared among three people could supply, but a specific continuity a shared roster cannot reproduce ² the same worker who reads the early signs of a seizure, the same routine that holds a person’s regulation together, the consistency that is itself the support. The second is to show a service-model mismatch: that this person’s needs and a shared arrangement are structurally incompatible, so that a group setting would not dilute their support but defeat it. The third is to show safeguarding incompatibility: that a shared model would, for this person, foreseeably produce the very harms ² the co-tenant conflict, Flynn & Gregory ² joint submission Page 214

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We’ve Been Here Before ² NDIS Amendment Bill 2026

the loss of the trusted relationship, the escalation ² that intensive individual support exists to prevent. Each is sound advice. But that any of it is now necessary is itself the proof of the inversion: a report writer must argue, in advance and against a presumption, that a particular human being cannot safely be averaged into a group ² a proposition the Scheme was built to take as its starting point, not to demand as a burden of proof.

There is an accountability cost here too, and it is where the practice collides with the ordinary expectations of administrative justice. The threshold the Agency applies ² the “exceptional circumstances” in which one-to-one support survives ² appears in neither the legislation nor any published policy. It governs life-shaping decisions, yet cannot be read, cited, or tested by the people it governs, because it has never been written down where they can find it. A participant cannot satisfy a standard that is not published; an advocate cannot hold the Agency to a rule it has not stated; a tribunal cannot readily review a decision against a benchmark that exists only in internal practice. This is the quiet erosion the Bill would complete: not merely that support becomes harder to obtain, but that the basis on which it is granted or refused migrates out of public, reviewable law and into discretion exercised behind undisclosed criteria. By entrenching the discretion while leaving its content to instruments and internal guidance, the Bill hardens that migration ² and a discretion whose criteria the public cannot see is the hardest kind of power to hold to account.

One further point the guide makes almost in passing deserves drawing out, because the collection returns to it twice more. In the emerging environment, a participant¶s stability is at risk of being read as evidence that their support can be reduced ² that because a person is regulated, safe, and connected, the supports producing that stability must no longer be required. Flynn¶s account made the same observation about the scheme¶s actuarial assumptions, and it is one of the most dangerous misreadings in the whole reform, because it inverts the meaning of success. For a person with complex needs, the absence of visible crisis is not evidence that support is unnecessary; it is evidence that support is working. A reform that treats the achievement of stability as a signal to withdraw the supports that produced it has built a mechanism that punishes its own successes ² and all but guarantees the return of the crises it claims to have prevented. This is the design failure of the Bill restated at the level of a single plan review: a system that cannot tell the difference between a problem solved and a problem about to be re-created.

So the Bill should not be read as a proposal to be judged on its drafting alone. It should be read as the formalisation of a practice the Committee can already observe ² the withdrawal of individualised support from people whose needs have not changed, justified by a comparison the system conducts on its own terms, enforced by an onus the participant cannot discharge, and triggered, perversely, by the very stability that intensive support makes possible.

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We’ve Been Here Before ² NDIS Amendment Bill 2026

question the next movement takes up follows directly: if individualised support is being

withdrawn this way ² quietly, comparatively, at scale ² where do people go when it fails? The

guide answers only at its edges, in its warnings about crisis and deterioration. When the

support that holds a life together in the community is removed, the life does not simply

continue with less. It is displaced ² into hospitals not configured for it, into families pushed

past breaking, into crisis systems, and, for some, into the congregate settings the record has

already condemned. That displacement, and the cost it carries that the reform¶s arithmetic

does not count, is the subject of what follows.

Flynn & Gregory ² joint submission Page 216

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We’ve Been Here Before ² NDIS Amendment Bill 2026

Movement IV ² Shared Support and Reinstitutionalisation

The collection has now followed the person out of the planning meeting and watched where the system sends them when individual support is withdrawn ² toward the hospital ward, the family stretched past breaking, the crisis service, and, at the end of that road, the congregate setting.

The pull toward congregation is not incidental to the reform; it is the gravitational field the reform creates. When individualised support becomes harder to obtain and cheaper to deny, the path of least resistance leads, as it always has, back to people being grouped together for the convenience of the systems that support them. The next document examines the place that pull leads to most directly ² the home in which support is shared ² and asks the question the whole reform has been arranged to avoid: on what evidence is shared support being made the default for people who need round-the-clock care?

Commissioning “SIL” and the Risk of Reinstitutionalisation takes its subject from the Government¶s own reform timetable. Among the announced changes is a move to commission Supported Independent Living ² the funding mechanism for daily support in a person¶s home for those who need high levels of assistance, supervision, overnight care, or round-the-clock support. Consultation on a commissioning approach for home and living supports is to begin in the middle of 2026, the commissioning of support coordination is to follow on 1 July 2028, and mandatory registration for SIL providers is brought in from 1 July 2026. Commissioning, in the language of social policy, means the central planning of a market: government decides which providers may operate, builds approved provider panels, sets standardised conditions, and steers the shape of what is delivered.

The paper asks what that would mean for the people who must live inside the arrangements it produces.

Its central claim must be stated with care, because it is the hinge on which the reinstitutionalisation argument turns. Shared support is being made the presumed default for people who need continuous support, and the strongest publicly available rationale for that default is not evidence that shared arrangements are safer or more appropriate for the people placed in them. It is provider viability and workforce economics.

The Government¶s own framing makes the connection unusually explicit: the consultation on commissioning home and living supports is described, in the reform materials, as intended both to ensure participants receive the best supports and to address “provider viability challenges” ² the two placed side by side, as though what is good for the provider¶s balance sheet and what is good for the disabled person¶s life were the same thing. The paper traces why they are not.

The SIL model, from its inception, accommodated provider requirements inherited from the block-funded systems the Scheme was meant to replace: the efficient use of staff across shared

Submission 1922

                                                         We've Been Here Before ² NDIS Amendment Bill 2026

rosters, predictable revenue from long-term placements, stable occupancy, simple rostering,

economies of scale from pooled overnight and active support, vertically integrated control of

housing and support together, and reduced operational risk through centralised supervision.

Each is a reason a provider prefers shared arrangements. None is a reason a participant is safer

in one.

The reform now under way intensifies exactly these provider-centred dynamics, under a

modern vocabulary of sustainability and market stewardship, and it does so at the precise

moment the country has finished documenting where congregate logic leads. This is the

second clause of the collection¶s couplet ² we have been here before ² appearing not as

history but as live policy. The institutions were defended in their day as efficient, manageable,

and scalable; the group homes that succeeded them were justified in the same terms; and the

paper shows the commissioning of SIL being justified in those terms again, now. The buildings

have changed and the language has softened, but the structural move ² concentrate disabled

people together because it suits the operational and financial needs of the systems that support

them ² is the one the disability movement spent fifty years trying to end.

The paper does not argue that no one should ever share a home, or that shared support is

always wrong. Some people choose it, and choice is the point. It argues that there is a decisive

difference between shared support offered as an option a participant freely takes and shared

support imposed as a funding assumption the participant must fight to escape ² and that the

reform is building the second while speaking the language of the first. The document that

follows sets out, from the evidence, why that distinction matters and what is at stake in getting

it wrong.

                               Flynn & Gregory ² joint submission    Page 218

Submission 1922

Commissioning SIL and the Risk of Reinstitutionalisation

A C r i t i c a l A n a l y s i s o f S u p p o r t e d I n d e p e n d e n t L i v i n g R e f o r m , S h a r e d S u p p o r t M o d e l s , a n d t h e F u t u r e o f I n d i v i d u a l i s e d D i s a b i l i t y S u p p o r t U n d e r t h e N D I S

Prepared by: Peter Gregory Date: 25th May, 2026

An institution is not created by the shape of the building. It’s created by who holds the power, and what kind of power they hold. Dave Hingsberger

Commissioning SIL and the Risk of Reinstitutionalisation (Ver 1.0_25.05.2026) Page 1

Submission 1922

Abstract:

This document critically examines the proposed commissioning of Supported Independent Living

redacted

Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS).

The analysis argues that the proposed commissioning framework represents far more than a

technical funding or market reform. Rather, it signals a potentially profound structural and

philosophical shift away from the original principles of individualisation, participant autonomy, self- direction, and choice and control that underpinned the creation of the NDIS. The document

explores how the emerging emphasis on provider viability,“ market stewardship,“ sustainability,“ standardised support models, and shared support assumptions may increasingly

reposition disability support around the operational needs of governments, providers, and

workforce systems rather than around the rights and aspirations of disabled people themselves.

The document traces the historical development of Supported Independent Living and

demonstrates how SIL inherited many structural assumptions from earlier block-funded

accommodation systems, including reliance on shared staffing, occupancy efficiency, economies of

scale, centralised supervision, and provider-controlled service models. It argues that many

contemporary reform proposals risk intensifying these historical dynamics through the expansion of

commissioning structures, preferred provider arrangements, mandatory registration systems, and

default shared support assumptions such as the proposed 1:3 staffing ratio framework.

A central focus of the analysis is the tension between economic efficiency and human rights. The

document critically examines the evidentiary basis underpinning the proposed 1:3 shared support unding assumptions and argues that there is little publicly available evidence demonstrating that

such arrangements are universally safe, clinically appropriate, safeguarding-oriented, or compatible with Article 19 of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Instead, the strongest

ational emerging from current policy discussions appears to relate to workforce efficiency, provider sustainability, and long-term cost containment.

   Commissioning SIL and the Risk of Reinstitutionalisation" (Ver 1.0_25.05.2026)                              Page   `redacted`

Submission 1922

The document also draws extensively upon the findings and testimonies presented to the Disability

Royal Commission. It outlines how the Commission heard sustained evidence linking congregate

and shared accommodation environments to violence, abuse, neglect, restrictive practices, loss of

autonomy, social isolation, co-tenant conflict, and institutional forms of control. Importantly, the

analysis argues that many of these harms were structurally connected to congregate systems

themselves rather than simply arising from isolated service failures.

Against this backdrop, the document argues that the proposed commissioning framework risks

functioning as a contemporary form of reinstitutionalisation. Although the language of reform

elevates best supports, market stewardship, and sustainability, the underlying structural

dynamics may increasingly pressure disabled people into standardised, shared, provider-managed

arrangements organised around administrative efficiency and economic rationalisation.

Finally, the document explores an alternative approach grounded in genuinely individualised, participant-governed, and rights-based support systems. It proposes strengthening self-direction, protecting participant-led and Service for One models, separating housing from support provision, and reconceptualising safeguarding around trusted relationships, continuity, autonomy, and community inclusion rather than congregate oversight systems.

Ultimately, the document argues that the debate over SIL commissioning is fundamentally about the future character of disability support in Australia. Whether the NDIS will continue evolving toward individually governed, community-based support arrangements grounded in autonomy and human rights, or whether it risks returning, under modernised policy language, to centrally managed systems shaped primarily around the needs of organisations rather than the lives of disabled people.

Submission 1922

Introduction:

The future direction of Supported Independent Living (SIL) within the National Disability Insurance

Scheme (NDIS) has emerged as one of the most significant and contested disability policy debates

in Australia since the creation of the Scheme itself.

At the centre of this debate is the Federal Government’s proposed move toward commissioning

/ŶĚĞƉĞŶĚĞŶƚ >ŝǀŝŶŐ ƐĞƌǀŝĐĞƐ ĂƐ ƉĂƌƚ ŽĨ ƚŚĞ ďƌŽĂĚĞƌ EĂƚŝŽŶĂů

ŵĞŶĚŵĞŶƚ $^ĞĐƵƌŝŶŐ ƚŚĞ E /^ ĨŽƌ &ƵƚƵƌĞ ’ĞŶĞƌĂƚŝŽŶƐͿ$

ϮϬϮϲ ĂŶĚ ĂƐƐŽĐŝĂƚĞĚ ƌĞĨŽƌŵ ĂŐĞŶĚĂ͘

Although much of the detailed operational framework has not yet been publicly released, existing

government announcements, reform timelines, legislative amendments, and policy language

strongly suggest a major structural shift in the way home and living supports may be organised,

funded, and controlled under the NDIS.

The language surrounding these reforms repeatedly emphasises concepts such as provider

viability,“ market stewardship,“ sustainability,“ quality,“ and best supports.“ However, for

many disabled people, advocates, families, and researchers, these developments raise profound

concerns about whether the Scheme is gradually shifting away from its original commitment to

individualisation, self-direction, participant autonomy, and community inclusion toward more

centralised, standardised, and provider-managed models of support.

This concern does not emerge in a historical vacuum. Disability accommodation systems in

Australia have long been shaped by tensions between the needs and rights of disabled people on

one hand, and the operational, financial, workforce, and administrative requirements of

governments and service providers on the other. Historically, large institutions, group homes, and

congregate care arrangements were repeatedly justified as efficient, manageable, scalable, and

economically sustainable systems of support. Yet the lived experiences of many disabled people

revealed environments characterised by segregation, loss of autonomy, behavioural control,

violence, abuse, restrictive practices, and institutional dependency.

The Disability Royal Commission fundamentally intensified these concerns. Across hearings,

submissions, research reports, and the Final Report, disabled people repeatedly described

congregate accommodation environments as places where organisational priorities often overrode

Submission 1922

human needs, where shared living arrangements created heightened safeguarding risks, and where͞ home͟ frequently felt more like a workplace for staff than a place of autonomy, belonging, and personal identity. Importantly, the Commission heard evidence suggesting that many of these harms were not simply isolated failures of individual providers, but were structurally connected to the underlying logic of congregate systems themselves.

This document critically examines the emerging commissioning proposals for Supported Independent Living within this broader historical, structural, and human rights context. It explores how SIL developed under the NDIS, the extent to which SIL inherited assumptions from earlier provider-centred accommodation systems, and how current reform proposals may risk reproducing historical patterns of congregate care under new policy language centred on sustainability and efficiency.

Particular attention is given to the proposed expansion of shared support assumptions, including the emerging 1:3 support ratio framework recommended through the NDIS Review. The document critically examines the evidentiary basis for these assumptions and questions whether they are genuinely grounded in participant wellbeing, safeguarding, autonomy, and human rights, or whether they primarily reflect economic modelling, workforce management concerns, and provider sustainability objectives.

The document also examines the broader philosophical conflict now emerging within the NDIS itself. Under the original logic of the Scheme, funding was intended to follow the individual person, with supports designed around their unique needs, goals, relationships, communication styles, and preferred way of living. By contrast, the emerging commissioning logic increasingly appears to ask whether individuals can be fitted into predefined support structures organised around standardisation, staffing efficiency, and market management.

Ultimately, this document argues that the debate surrounding SIL commissioning is not merely a technical or administrative discussion about housing models or funding arrangements. Rather, it is a profound debate about the future character of disability support in Australia itself. It asks whether the NDIS will continue evolving toward genuinely individualised, participant-governed, community-based support systems grounded in Article 19 of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, or whether the Scheme risks returning, in modernised form, to centrally

Submission 1922

designed systems that prioritise organisational efficiency over the autonomy, dignity, safety, and

self-determination of disabled people.

Commissioning SIL and the Risk of Reinstitutionalisation̷ (Ver 1.0_25.05.2026)

Page 6̽

Submission 1922

Discussion:

There is no way out. It is so confined and foolishly conceived and conscientiously carried out as a duty of care

DŝĐŚĂĞů ZƵƐƐĞůů͕ dŚĞ ’ůĂƐƐ ĂŐĞ

Proposals for Commissioning SIL

At present, the proposed commissioning of Supported Independent Living (SIL) does not appear to Ɛŝƚ ǁŝƚŚŝŶ ŽŶĞ ƐŝŶŐůĞ ƐƚĂŶĚĂůŽŶĞ ƐĞĐƚŝŽŶ ŽĨ ƚŚĞ ƉƌŽƉŽƐĞĚ EĂƚŝŽŶĂů ŝƐĂďŝůŝƚLJ /ŶƐƵƌĂŶĐĞ ^ĐŚĞŵĞ Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026. Instead, the commissioning proposal appears to emerge from a combination of new planning powers, market stewardship provisions, support funding controls, and expanded Ministerial rule-making powers.

The Government has publicly confirmed that SIL is one of the support types intended to move toward a commissioning model. (Department of Health)

The relevant parts of the Bill appear to relate primarily to several interconnected areas.

1. Schedule 1 Ͷ Planning and Funding Powers

   The commissioning of SIL is most closely connected to the Bill͛ s amendments relating to participant planning, funding allocation, and support determination powers.

   Public summaries of the Bill state that Schedule 1 clarif[ies] and strengthen[s] the requirement for support needs to be directly related to eligible impairments͟ and expands powers relating to reassessment and funding decisions.

   This matters because SIL commissioning would require the NDIA to have broader capacity to shape what kinds of home and living supports are considered fundable, define acceptable support models, and potentially determine when shared or commissioned arrangements are preferred.

Commissioning SIL and the Risk of Reinstitutionalisation͟ (Ver 1.0_25.05.2026) Page 7

Submission 1922

The commissioning model, therefore appears linked to the new planning framework,

support categorisation powers, and broader NDIA control over support funding structures.

The New Funding Limitation Powers

One of the most significant changes in the Bill is the proposed power allowing funding

amounts to be reduced or limited even where a support may still otherwise satisfy

reasonable and necessary principles.

ABC reporting summarised this as a new power will allow the minister to cut funding

amounts across the board for some supports.

This appears highly relevant to SIL commissioning because commissioning models typically

depend upon governments controlling funding structures centrally, determining preferred

service configurations, and steering participants toward particular support arrangements.

Without broader funding limitation powers, it would be difficult for the NDIA to move away

from the choice and control that has been at the core of the NDIS, to operationalise

preferred SIL models, standardised support structures, or commissioned provider systems.

Ministerial Rule-Making Powers

A major feature of the 2026 reforms is the increasing reliance on subordinate legislation,

NDIA operational rules, and Ministerial rule-making powers.

This is especially important because the Government has not yet publicly released detailed

legislative wording specifically describing how SIL commissioning will operate, what

participant rights will remain, whether participants may refuse commissioned

arrangements, or how providers will be selected.

Instead, current Government documents suggest much of the operational detail will be implemented through future rules, commissioning frameworks, regulatory instruments, and policy settings developed after passage of the Bill.

Submission 1922

This means the Bill appears designed to create enabling powers rather than fully detailed SIL commissioning legislation itself.

Market Stewardship and Provider Regulation Reforms

The commissioning proposal is also closely tied to mandatory registration reforms, SIL Practice Standards, and expanded NDIS Commission regulatory powers.

The Government has already announced mandatory registration for SIL providers from 1 July 2026, new SIL Practice Standards, and stronger provider oversight arrangements.

These reforms are significant because commissioning systems generally require governments to control which providers may operate, establish approved provider panels, impose standardised conditions, and centrally monitor service delivery.

The Bill’s broader regulatory reforms therefore appear to create the infrastructure necessary for commissioned SIL markets, preferred provider arrangements, and centralised market management.

The Commissioning Section Itself

The clearest public Government statement specifically naming SIL commissioning appears in the official Government explanation of the reforms, which states:

We are transitioning to commissioning smaller numbers of providers to deliver some supports.

The same document explicitly lists Plan Management, Support Coordination, and Supported Independent Living (SIL) as supports intended to move toward commissioning arrangements.

Submission 1922

Importantly, however, the public materials do not yet identify a single explicit section number in the Bill titled Commissioning of SIL.

Instead, the commissioning proposal appears to rely upon interconnected planning, funding, regulatory, and rule-making amendments throughout the legislation.

6. Likely Legislative Architecture

Based on the available information, the SIL commissioning model appears to depend on five interacting legislative mechanisms.

The planning framework amendments would allow the NDIA to shape support models and funding structures. Funding limitation powers would enable central control of SIL funding levels. Ministerial rules are likely to be where commissioning details will eventually sit.

Registration reforms would limit who may deliver SIL, while market stewardship powers would enable provider panels and commissioning structures.

7. Why This Is Significant

This structure is important because it means the major practical impacts of SIL commissioning may occur through rules, operational guidelines, provider contracts, pricing structures, and NDIA policy implementation rather than through highly visible primary legislation.

This has become a major concern for many advocates because significant structural changes to participant choice, self-direction, co-tenancy expectations, and provider selection may potentially occur without detailed parliamentary scrutiny of the operational model itself.

Commissioning SIL and the Risk of Reinstitutionalisation (Ver 1.0_25.05.2026) Page 10

Submission 1922

The Central Concern Emerging

Many disability advocates are therefore arguing that the Bill creates the legal architecture necessary for centralised management of home and living supports without yet fully disclosing how participant rights and autonomy will be protected within that system.

That concern is amplified because the Government has explicitly linked SIL commissioning to provider viability challenges͟ and ensuring participants receive the best supports.͟ Critics argue this language may signal a shift away from participant-directed individualised funding toward centrally designed support systems shaped around workforce efficiency, provider sustainability, and standardised support models.

At present, relatively little detailed operational information has been publicly released about the proposed commissioning approach͟ for Supported Independent Living (SIL).

However, based on government announcements, timelines, consultation documents, and public statements by the Albanese Government and NDIS Minister Mark Butler, several core features and likely policy directions can already be identified.

The clearest public reference appears in the Federal Government͛ s Securing the NDIS for Future Generations͟ reform timeline, which states that consultation will begin on:͞

• Design of a commissioning approach for home and living supports for SIL
• participants who need 24/7 support to ensure participants receive the best supports
• and address provider viability challenges.͟

This single sentence is highly significant because it signals a major potential structural shift in how SIL supports may be organised, funded, and controlled under the NDIS. Supports that will be decided by politicians, bureaucrats and a handpicked group of corporate service delivery managers.

Commissioning SIL and the Risk of Reinstitutionalisation͟ (Ver 1.0_25.05.2026) Page 11͞

Submission 1922

What Commissioning Means in Social Policy Contexts

Historically, the NDIS was designed around an individualised market model. Under the

original NDIS philosophy, participants received individual budgets, exercised choice and

control, and theoretically chose their own providers and support arrangements.

A commissioning model is fundamentally different.

In social policy systems internationally, commissioning generally refers to governments or

central agencies designing service systems, determining preferred service models, selecting

or contracting providers, shaping market behaviour, and purchasing service outcomes at a

system level.

Commissioning approaches are commonly associated with block funding, regional service

contracts, preferred provider panels, demand aggregation, standardised models of support,

and coordinated purchasing arrangements.

This matters because commissioning fundamentally shifts power away from participants

individually directing supports and toward governments and agencies designing and

purchasing support structures.

Why the Government Appears to Be Pursuing a SIL Commissioning Model

Public statements strongly suggest the Government views current SIL arrangements as

financially unsustainable and operationally unstable.

Government messaging repeatedly refers to provider viability, market stewardship,

sustainability, quality and safeguarding, and reducing long-term NDIS cost growth.

The commissioning proposal specifically targets SIL participants who need 24/7 support.

This is important because 24/7 SIL arrangements, particularly 1:1 individualised support models, are assumed to be among the most expensive forms of funded support within the NDIS, even though no publicly available modelling of the cost/benefit of highly individualised supports has been released.

Commissioning SIL and the Risk of Reinstitutionalisation (Ver 1.0_25.05.2026) Page 12

Submission 1922

The government appears concerned about escalating SIL costs, workforce shortages,

provider instability, vacant shifts, thin regional markets, and the expense of highly

dividualised support arrangements.

The provider viability͟ language strongly suggests the reforms are partly intended to

stabilise providers financially by increasing occupancy certainty, encouraging shared staffing

structures, reducing unused staffing time, and making support arrangements more

predictable and scalable.

11. Likely Features of the Proposed Commissioning Model

Although the final design has not yet been released, existing reform language strongly

suggests several likely features.

a. Greater Central Planning of SIL Arrangements

The NDIA may increasingly shape what kinds of SIL models are considered acceptable,

determine preferred staffing ratios, influence housing configurations, and steer

participants toward standardised support structures.

This could reduce the flexibility currently available in highly individualised arrangements.

b. Expansion of Shared Supports

A major concern raised throughout disability advocacy discussions is that commissioning

could formalise shared staffing, co-tenancy expectations, and efficient͟ roster

structures.

This concern is reinforced by earlier NDIS Review recommendations encouraging greater

use of shared supports and 1:3 staffing models in some contexts, even though this

recommendation was made without any supporting evidence.

The commissioning language about provider viability challenges͟ strongly implies the

Government sees economies of scale as central to the solution.

Commissioning SIL and the Risk of Reinstitutionalisation͟ (Ver 1.0_25.05.2026) Page 13͞

Submission 1922

c. Preferred or Commissioned Provider Networks

A commissioning system may involve preferred provider panels, regional contracting arrangements, or NDIA-directed service ecosystems.

Rather than participants freely assembling individualised teams, the NDIA may increasingly purchase services from approved providers, contract providers for regions, or channel participants toward designated service models.

This would represent a substantial philosophical shift away from the original NDIS market-based approach.

d. Increased Registration and Regulatory Control

The commissioning proposal is occurring simultaneously with mandatory registration reforms for SIL providers beginning from 1 July 2026.

These reforms include mandatory registration, stronger SIL practice standards, increased audits, worker screening, governance requirements, and tighter oversight mechanisms.

Combined together, the reforms suggest movement toward a more regulated, centrally managed, and standardised SIL system.

12. The Tension at the Centre of the Proposal

The proposed commissioning approach appears to sit at the centre of a major philosophical conflict about the future direction of the NDIS.

a. The Original NDIS Logic

The original Scheme was built around individualisation, participant-directed funding, personalised supports, and choice and control.

Under this logic, funding followed the individual rather than the service system.

Commissioning SIL and the Risk of Reinstitutionalisation (Ver 1.0_25.05.2026) Page 14

Submission 1922

b. The Emerging Commissioning Logic

The proposed reforms suggest increasing emphasis on system efficiency, provider

sustainability, standardised support models, and centralised market management.

Under this logic, participants may increasingly be expected to fit within predefined

service structures.

This is why many disabled people and their advocates are deeply concerned about the

commissioning language.

13. Why Disabled People and Advocates Are Concerned

Many concerns arise because disability accommodation history in Australia has repeatedly shown that when governments prioritise efficiency, staffing consolidation, and provider

viability, the result often becomes congregate models, reduced autonomy, shared supports, and institutional dynamics.

Critics fear the commissioning approach could reduce genuine choice and control, pressure participants into shared arrangements, undermine self-direction, weaken Service for One͟ models, and make individualised supports harder to secure.

There are also concerns that participants may be required to justify why they cannot share supports, that individual risk and safeguarding factors may be discounted, and that economic considerations may override human rights principles.

These concerns are amplified by findings from the Disability Royal Commission regarding harms in congregate and shared living environments.

14. What Is Still Unknown

Despite growing concern, many critical details remain unknown.

Commissioning SIL and the Risk of Reinstitutionalisation͟ (Ver 1.0_25.05.2026) Page 15͞

Submission 1922

There is currently no publicly released detailed model explaining how commissioning would operate, whether participants could refuse commissioned arrangements, how individualised self-directed models would be protected, whether participants would retain provider choice, how SIL pricing structures would change, or how safeguards for autonomy and Article 19 rights would be maintained.

There is also no detailed explanation yet of whether commissioning applies only to new entrants, whether existing SIL participants may be transitioned, or whether 1:1 models will remain realistically fundable.

The Broader Significance

The proposed commissioning approach may represent one of the most consequential structural shifts in the history of the NDIS.

At its core, the debate is not simply about housing or staffing models.

It is about whether the future of disability support in Australia will continue moving toward individually governed, self-directed, community-based support arrangements, or whether the system will increasingly return to centrally designed, economically rationalised, provider-managed models of accommodation and support.

That is why the apparently technical language of commissioning approach and provider viability has generated such profound concern within sections of the disability community.

“Commissioning SIL and the Risk of Reinstitutionalisation” (Ver 1.0_25.05.2026) Page 16

Submission 1922

The Development of SIL Under the NDIS

When the NDIS began, accommodation support was funded through Assistance with Daily Living funding.

Supported Independent Living (SIL) emerged as the NDIS funding mechanism for daily support assistance provided in a person’s home, particularly for people requiring high levels of support, regular supervision, overnight assistance, or 24/7 care.

The Supported Independent Living (SIL) funding model was not designed solely around the needs and rights of disabled participants. From its inception, SIL also accommodated a range of structural, operational, financial, and workforce requirements of disability service providers.

Understanding this is critical because many of the tensions and criticisms surrounding SIL arise from the fact that the model has always attempted to balance two competing priorities. Individualised participant-directed support and the operational/income generation priorities of large-scale disability service systems.

As a result, SIL evolved as a hybrid system that was partly rights-based and individualised, but also heavily shaped by provider requirements inherited from earlier block-funded accommodation systems.

Several major provider requirements were effectively built into the SIL framework.

1. Workforce Efficiency and Shared Staffing

   One of the most significant provider requirements accommodated through SIL was the need to efficiently utilise staffing resources.

   Disability support work operates continuously across mornings, evenings, overnight periods, weekends, public holidays, and often 24 hours per day.

   For providers, staffing isolated individual participants on fully separate rosters is expensive because it creates idle staffing time, duplicated shifts, travel inefficiencies, and higher labour costs.

Submission 1922

The SIL model therefore strongly accommodated shared staffing arrangements, overlapping

support rosters, and multiple participants supported by the same workers.

This allowed providers to spread staffing costs across several participants, improve staff

utilisation rates, reduce downtime, and increase financial profitability.

This is one reason SIL became strongly associated with group homes, co-tenancy, and

roster-sharing arrangements.

Predictable Revenue Streams

Service providers historically depended on relatively stable funding structures.

Before the NDIS, providers often received block funding, recurrent grants, or long-term

government contracts.

The NDIS disrupted this by introducing participant-controlled purchasing, market

competition, and potentially unstable service demand.

SIL partially accommodated provider concerns by creating large ongoing support packages,

predictable staffing structures, and long-term participant placements.

For providers, SIL arrangements often functioned as stable revenue anchors, especially

where several participants shared a house with pooled staffing supports.

This predictability assisted providers with payroll management, workforce planning,

property leasing, and organisational sustainability. It did not however, encourage

traditional providers to explore more individualised, personalised support models.

The SIL model perpetuated the status quo. It did not foster innovation and creativity.

Occupancy Stability

Providers operating accommodation services face a reduction in income when houses are

not fully occupied.

Commissioning SIL and the Risk of Reinstitutionalisation͟ (Ver 1.0_25.05.2026) Page 18͞

Submission 1922

Vacancies can create unfunded staffing costs, unused housing capacity, and financial instability.

The SIL framework accommodated provider needs by structurally encouraging co-tenancy, shared living, and full occupancy models.

Many SIL systems effectively assumed a certain number of participants per house, with staffing costs distributed across residents.

This helped providers maintain occupancy stability, cost efficiency, and predictable operational models.

It also reduced financial exposure when individual participants exited services.

While these features may have met provider agendas, they also resulted in increasingly depersonalised services, forced co-tenancies and significantly reduced support flexibility.

Rostering Simplicity and Operational Management

Group home providers require staffing systems that are administratively manageable.

Highly individualised supports can create significant operational complexity through custom staffing schedules, highly specialised workers, unique routines, participant-specific governance structures, and variable support arrangements.

SIL often accommodated provider operational requirements by favouring standardised rostering, fixed staffing models, central coordination, and repeatable service structures.

This made it easier for providers to recruit staff, train workers, supervise teams, and administer supports at scale.

In many cases, participants were effectively integrated into existing organisational staffing systems rather than staffing systems being built uniquely around the participant.

Submission 1922

5. Economies of Scale

The SIL structure strongly reflected the provider need for economies of scale.

Congregate living arrangements reduce per-person support costs by allowing providers to share overnight staff, pool active support, combine transport, centralise supervision, and reduce staffing duplication.

The SIL pricing framework frequently rewarded efficiency through aggregation rather than maximum individualisation.

This is one reason why 1:1 individualised support arrangements have often faced greater scrutiny from the NDIA.

Such arrangements reduce traditional group home providersʹ ability to distribute costs, optimise staffing, and maximise operational efficiency.

6. Provider-Controlled Service Ecosystems

Many SIL providers historically combined housing, staffing, care coordination, behavioural support implementation, and daily living assistance.

The SIL system often accommodated provider preferences for vertically integrated service models.

This created organisational advantages through simplified coordination, internal communication, workforce continuity, and stronger organisational control.

However, critics argue this weakened participant autonomy, separation of powers, and independent safeguarding.

Where providers controlled both housing and supports, participants could become highly dependent on single organisations.

Commissioning SIL and the Risk of Reinstitutionalisation͟ (Ver 1.0_25.05.2026) Page 20͞

Submission 1922

7. Risk Management and Liability Reduction

Providers also required systems that reduced legal risk, workforce risk, behavioural risk, and

tooperational unpredictability.

Shared accommodation models often allowed providers to centralise supervision, monitor

participants more easily, implement behavioural controls consistently, and manage

incidents within structured environments.

From a provider perspective, standardised SIL environments often appeared safer, easier to

supervise, and more administratively defensible.

However, disabled people argue that institutional convenience was frequently mistaken for

genuine safeguarding.

The Disability Royal Commission repeatedly demonstrated that congregate settings can

themselves create substantial risks of violence, abuse, neglect, restrictive practices, and loss

of autonomy generated from the very systems used to created profits and administrative

efficiences.

8. Market Sustainability and Organisational Survival

As the NDIS market matured, providers increasingly argued that highly fragmented, fully

individualised supports could undermine organisational viability.

Provider concerns included workforce shortages, inability to fill shifts, thin markets, travel

inefficiencies, rising labour costs, and unstable participant demand.

The SIL structure accommodated these concerns by allowing providers to consolidate

support delivery, standardise staffing models, and maintain larger operational footprints.

This tension is now re-emerging explicitly through current government discussions about

provider viability,͑ market stewardship,͑ and commissioning approaches to SIL.

Commissioning SIL and the Risk of Reinstitutionalisation͑ (Ver 1.0_25.05.2026) Page 21͑

Submission 1922

Rather than rise to the challenge of exploring, in collaboration with the disability community, alternative approaches to these traditional institutionalised models, this current Government, bureaucrats and services providers are creating a push back to the approaches to support that were to be eradicated with the implementation of the NDIS.

Why This Matters Historically

The key historical issue is that SIL inherited many assumptions from pre-NDIS accommodation systems.

Although the NDIS introduced individualised funding, choice and control, and rights-based language, the underlying SIL operational structure still largely reflected provider-centred service economics.

This created an ongoing structural contradiction.

Participants were promised individualisation, while providers still depended on shared supports, roster efficiency, occupancy stability, and economies of scale.

The Central Critique Emerging Today

Much contemporary criticism of SIL reform arises because many disabled people and advocates argue that provider requirements have increasingly begun to dominate decision-making again.

Critics argue that shared support expectations, co-tenancy pressure, commissioning proposals, and sustainability rhetoric risk prioritising provider economics over individual autonomy and human rights.

This is why debates about SIL are often so intense.

Commissioning SIL and the Risk of Reinstitutionalisation͟ (Ver 1.0_25.05.2026) Page 22͞

Submission 1922

At their core, they are debates about whether disability accommodation systems exist

primarily to support disabled people to direct their own lives, or to create administrively

manageable and financially sustainable and increasingly institutionalised service systems.

Commissioning SIL and the Risk of Reinstitutionalisation͟ (Ver 1.0_25.05.2026) Page 23͞

Submission 1922

A Critique of Congregate Care Models from the Disability Royal

Commission

In principle, SIL was meant to support independent living, community participation, individual choice, and personalised support arrangements.

The original NDIS philosophy suggested that people should have greater control over where they lived, who supported them, who they lived with, and how supports were organised.

This represented a major departure from earlier block-funded systems.

For some participants, SIL enabled highly individualised arrangements, self-directed teams, Service for One models, and participant-governed support structures.

These arrangements often emerged because some individuals had experienced harm in group settings, shared support environments were unsafe, or highly personalised supports were necessary for safeguarding and quality of life.

The stories heard throughout the Disability Royal Commission revealed a sustained and systemic critique of congregate care models, particularly group homes and shared disability accommodation arrangements.

These criticisms were not presented merely as isolated service failures. Rather, the Commission repeatedly heard evidence suggesting that many harms arose from the underlying structure and logic of congregate care itself.

Across hearings, submissions, research reports, and the Final Report, several major criticisms consistently emerged.

1. Congregate Care Increased Exposure to Violence, Abuse and Neglect

 One of the strongest findings emerging from the Royal Commission was that people living in

   congregate settings were often exposed to significantly higher risks of violence, abuse,
   neglect, exploitation, and restrictive practices.

Submission 1922

The Commission heard extensive evidence from residents who experienced assaults from

co-tenants, sexual violence, intimidation, verbal abuse, neglect of medical needs, overmedication, and failures of basic care.

The Royal Commission explicitly investigated whether living in a group home creates a greater risk of violence and abuse.

Many stories suggested that harm was not accidental, but structurally enabled by shared living arrangements, unequal power relationships, poor oversight, and dependence on providers.

2. Lack of Choice and Control

A recurring criticism throughout the evidence was the profound lack of autonomy experienced by many residents in congregate settings.

People described having little meaningful control over who they lived with, who supported them, daily routines, food, activities, visitors, privacy, or how their homes operated.

Many participants described group homes as places where organisational routines dominated daily life, staff convenience shaped decision-making, and residents were expected to adapt to the system rather than the system adapting to them.

The stories repeatedly challenged the idea that group homes automatically constituted independent living.

3. Congregate Settings Reproduced Institutional Dynamics

A major criticism emerging from the Royal Commission was that many modern group homes reproduced the same institutional dynamics that deinstitutionalisation was supposed to end.

Although physically smaller than older institutions, many residents described environments characterised by surveillance, behavioural control, rigid routines, collective management, dependency, and social segregation.

Submission 192

This led many contributors to argue that group homes represented institutions dispersed into the community.

The Commission heard evidence that the problem was not simply building size, but the concentration of disabled people into service-controlled environments.

Restrictive Practices Were Embedded Within Congregate Models

The Royal Commission heard extensive evidence linking congregate settings to the use of chemical restraint, physical restraint, seclusion, environmental restrictions, and coercive behavioural management.

Research commissioned by the Royal Commission identified congregate environments as important drivers of restrictive practices because staff were managing multiple residents simultaneously, collective routines required behavioural conformity, and environmental pressures increased conflict and stress.

The evidence suggested that restrictive practices were often used not because they benefited the individual, but because they made congregate systems easier to manage operationally.

Co-Tenant Violence Was Systemic

Many stories described serious violence between residents within group homes.

Evidence presented to the Commission included assaults, intimidation, ongoing fear, trauma, and sexual violence perpetrated by co-tenants. (Disability Royal Commission)

Some residents described violence as having become normal within their living environments. (The Guardian)

Critically, many people reported being unable to escape these environments because providers controlled placements, housing options were limited, and funding structures favoured congregate arrangements.

Commissioning SIL and the Risk of Reinstitutionalisation (Ver 1.0_25.05.2026) Page 26

Submission 1922

Segregation Itself Was Viewed as Harmful

The Royal Commission repeatedly heard that segregation contributes to abuse.

The Final Report and associated commentary highlighted concerns that segregated

disability-specific environments reduce community visibility, social accountability, informal

safeguarding, and genuine inclusion.

Several commissioners ultimately recommended phasing out group homes entirely over

time because they were viewed as structurally segregating environments.

This reflected a broader human rights argument grounded in the UN Convention on the

Rights of Persons with Disabilities, particularly Article 19, which recognises the right to

choose where and with whom one lives.

Organisational Priorities Often Overrode Human Needs

Many stories revealed systems where staffing efficiency, provider economics, rostering

convenience, and operational management appeared to take priority over relationships,

safety, identity, autonomy, and emotional wellbeing.

Residents described high staff turnover, unfamiliar workers, lack of continuity, and

environments shaped around organisational systems rather than human connection.

The Royal Commission heard repeated concerns that economic efficiency and shared

supports frequently displaced individualised support.

Reporting Abuse Was Extremely Difficult

Many residents in congregate settings described enormous barriers to reporting abuse.

Commissioning SIL and the Risk of Reinstitutionalisation (Ver 1.0_25.05.2026) Page 27

Submission 192

These barriers included dependence on the provider, fear of retaliation, communication

barriers, lack of advocacy, staff controlling information, and absence of independent

safeguards.

Some residents effectively lived within closed systems where the people responsible for

support, complaint management, daily living, and behavioural responses were all part of the

same organisational structure.

This concentration of power created profound safeguarding concerns.

9. The Home Often Did Not Feel Like Home

Many people described group homes as workplaces for staff rather than homes for

residents.

Residents spoke about lack of privacy, constant staff presence, roster-driven routines,

institutional atmospheres, and feeling like guests within their own homes.

This challenged dominant policy language describing congregate arrangements as home

and living supports.

The Royal Commission repeatedly heard that physical location alone does not create

belonging, autonomy, or home.

10. The Royal Commission Ultimately Linked Inclusion With Safety

One of the most important themes emerging from the Royal Commission was the idea that

genuine inclusion itself functions as a safeguard.

The evidence repeatedly suggested that people are safer where they have strong

relationships, community connection, autonomy, self-direction, visibility, and meaningful

control over their lives.

Conversely, risks increased where people were segregated, dependent, socially isolated, or

subject to provider-controlled systems.

Submission 1922

This is why the Royal Commission’s findings have become central to contemporary debates

about shared supports, SIL commissioning, co-tenancy expectations, and congregate

disability accommodation more broadly.

The Central Criticism Emerging From the Stories

Taken together, the stories presented to the Disability Royal Commission amounted to a

profound challenge to the historical assumptions underpinning congregate care.

The criticism was not simply that some group homes are poorly run.

Rather, the evidence increasingly suggested that many harms were connected to the

structural characteristics of congregate systems themselves, including concentration of

power, shared control, economic efficiency models, segregation, and reduced autonomy.

This is why the Royal Commission generated such strong debates about individualised living,

self-direction, and the future of group homes in Australia.

Commissioning SIL and the Risk of Reinstitutionalisation (Ver 1.0_25.05.2026) Page 29

Submission 1922

1:3 Shared Support Ratios

There is currently no publicly available evidence demonstrating that a universal default 1:3 shared support funding allocation is grounded in strong independent scientific, clinical, psychosocial, safeguarding, or human rights evidence.

Instead, the available material suggests the proposed 1:3 ratio primarily emerges from economic modelling, workforce efficiency assumptions, provider sustainability concerns, and system-level market management objectives rather than from evidence that 1:3 arrangements are inherently safer, better, or more appropriate for all participants requiring 24/7 support.

The strongest public reference to the proposal comes from the NDIS Review, which stated: “Participants who need 24/7 living supports would generally be funded at a 1:3 support ratio.” The same document acknowledges that there will be exceptions to the 1:3 support ratio. However, the Review provides no evidence to justification why one worker to three participants should become the generalised funding assumption. Yet shared support has become the default funding approach for people requiring 24/7 support.

1. The 1:3 Ratio Appears Primarily Linked to Shared Staffing Economics

The practical logic of 1:3 appears closely connected to roster efficiency, workforce utilisation, and provider viability.

Shared staffing arrangements reduce support costs because one worker’s labour cost is distributed across several participants, overnight staffing can be pooled, idle staffing time is reduced, and providers can achieve economies of scale.

This is consistent with broader Government language around provider viability, market stewardship, and sustainability.

In effect, the 1:3 framework appears to function as a funding efficiency benchmark

Submission 1922

There Is No Clear Evidence That 1:3 Is Universally Clinically Appropriate

No publicly released evidence has demonstrated that three participants with differing disabilities, communication styles, trauma histories, sensory needs, behavioural support needs, and safeguarding risks can generally and safely share support in a way that preserves autonomy, safety, quality of life, and human rights.

This is important because support needs are highly individualised.

A participant may require constant prompting, trauma-informed co-regulation, behavioural monitoring, seizure observation, communication interpretation, emotional regulation support, or active safeguarding even if they do not require constant physical assistance.

A numerical staffing ratio alone cannot adequately capture relational complexity, pyschosocial vulnerability, co-tenant compatibility, or safeguarding intensity.

The Disability Royal Commission Raises Serious Questions About Shared Support Assumptions

The Disability Royal Commission heard extensive evidence about harms occurring in congregate and shared support environments.

The Commission explicitly investigated whether living in a group home creates a greater risk͟ of violence, abuse and neglect.

The Royal Commission repeatedly heard evidence of co-tenant violence, abuse, restrictive practices, lack of choice and control, trauma, and provider-driven routines in shared living environments

Several commissioners ultimately recommended phasing out group homes entirely over time because they believed congregate models will never realise the rights of people with disability.͟

This creates a major tension.

Commissioning SIL and the Risk of Reinstitutionalisation͟ (Ver 1.0_25.05.2026) Page 31͞

Submission 1922

The same policy environment that acknowledges systemic harms in congregate settings is

currently proposing broader shared support assumptions through the 1:3 funding model.

4. The 1:3 Ratio Appears to Reverse the Original Logic of Individualised Funding

Originally, the NDIS was designed around individualised assessment, personalised support, and participant-specific funding.

Under that philosophy, funding should arise from the individual’s actual support needs rather than from standardised staffing assumptions.

Critics argue the 1:3 model reverses this logic by effectively beginning with the question:“How can supports be shared efficiently?” rather than: “What supports does this individual require to live safely and autonomously?”

This is why many advocates argue the proposal risks becoming a budgeting mechanism disguised as an assessment framework.

5. The NDIS Review Itself Admits the Model Requires Exceptions

The NDIS Review acknowledges that some participants cannot safely or appropriately share supports.

However, critics argue this creates a dangerous inversion of burden.

Instead of supports being built around the person, participants may increasingly be required to prove why they cannot share.

This is especially concerning for people whose support needs are relational, psychosocial, trauma-related, behavioural, sensory, or safeguarding-based rather than purely physical.

Commissioning SIL and the Risk of Reinstitutionalisation (Ver 1.0_25.05.2026) Page 32

Submission 1922

These needs are often less visible, harder to quantify, and more easily discounted within standardised funding models.

There Is Little Public Transparency About the Modelling Behind 1:3

A major criticism is the absence of publicly available psychometric validation, risk modelling, safeguarding analysis, outcome studies, or human rights impact assessments supporting the universal application of 1:3 assumptions.

No publicly available evidence has clearly demonstrated why 1:3 is the correct ratio. This has led many disabled people and their advocates to conclude that the ratio is fundamentally economically derived rather than empirically validated around participant wellbeing.

The Royal Commission Evidence Suggests Shared Supports Can Increase Risk

Many stories presented to the Disability Royal Commission directly challenge the assumption that shared supports are inherently beneficial. Evidence included severe co-tenant violence, incompatible placements, trauma, restrictive practices, staff neglect, and institutional dynamics becoming normalised.

Some residents described group homes as environments where abuse became routine, staff convenience drove decision-making, and people lacked meaningful control over their lives.

This raises an important question. If congregate environments are associated with elevated safeguarding risks, what evidentiary basis exists for making shared support the default assumption?

The Strongest Existing Basis Is Financial and Workforce Sustainability

Based on the publicly available material, the clearest rationale for 1:3 appears to be financial sustainability, workforce management, provider viability, and scalability.

Submission 1922

This does not automatically mean shared supports are inappropriate in every circumstance.

Some people choose shared living, enjoy co-tenancy, and see personal benefits in shared support arrangements.

The critical issue is whether shared support becomes an available option chosen by the participant, or a default funding assumption imposed by the system.

That distinction sits at the centre of the current debate.

9. Summation of the 1:3 Analysis

The point is this, the NDIS Review recommended a 1:3 shared support funding assumption, but it did not publicly demonstrate why 1:3 is the correct, safe, rights-compatible, or evidence-based ratio.

The Review says that people needing 24/7 living supports would generally͟ or typically͟be funded on the basis of shared supports, with an average ratio of one worker to three participants. It also says there would be exceptions where people have higher individual needs or complex circumstances.

The problem is that the Review appears to move from a cost and consistency concern to a default funding rule without showing the evidentiary bridge between the two.

It does not appear to provide public evidence showing whether 1:3 is safe for people with complex behavioural, trauma, psychosocial, communication, medical, sensory, or safeguarding needs.

Nor does it explain why 1:3 is preferable to 1:2, 1:4, mixed ratios, or fully individualised support strategies.

There is no detailed explanation of how co-tenant compatibility, relational safety, environmental triggers, behavioural escalation, communication support, or trauma histories would be assessed.

Submission 1922

Similarly, the Review does not publicly demonstrate whether shared support improves outcomes, autonomy, community inclusion, or quality of life.

Nor does it adequately explain whether the model complies with Article 19 of the UNCRPD, especially the right not to be forced into particular living arrangements.

The Review also does not clearly demonstrate how the Disability Royal Commission evidence about abuse, neglect, violence, restrictive practices, and loss of autonomy in group homes was reconciled with the recommendation.

As a consequence, the recommendation looks less like a conclusion drawn from participant-centred evidence and more like a budget-setting assumption.

The Review’s own language supports this concern. Action 8.1 is about changing the housing and living budget-setting process so budgets are consistent and sustainable.

Overall, the evidentiary problem is that the Review treats sharing as the default, then places the burden on participants to prove why they need an exception.

That reverses the original NDIS logic.

Instead of asking: “What support does this person require to live safely, freely, and well?” The NDIS framework asks: “Can this person be made to fit within an average shared support ratio?”

Therefore, it can be clearly asserted that the 1:3 ratio appears to be administratively and financially convenient, but not transparently justified as clinically, ethically, or human-rights sound.

Commissioning SIL and the Risk of Reinstitutionalisation (Ver 1.0_25.05.2026) Page 35

Submission 1922

Drawing the Threads Together

This document presents a powerful historical and structural critique of group homes and

congregate disability accommodation in Australia.

Taken as a whole, the material argues that group homes emerged and persisted not primarily

because they reflected what disabled people wanted, but because they conveniently

accommodated the operational, financial, workforce, and administrative requirements of

governments, funders, providers, and disability service systems.

At the same time, the document demonstrates that disabled people themselves have repeatedly

described these arrangements as unsafe, restrictive, institutional, and incompatible with genuine

autonomy and inclusion.

Historically, the document argues that congregate accommodation models evolved out of earlier

institutional systems.

Although large institutions were progressively closed through deinstitutionalisation, many of the

underlying assumptions remained intact.

Instead of ending institutional logic, governments and providers frequently reproduced it in smaller

community-based settings such as group homes.

These environments continued to concentrate disabled people together within provider-controlled

systems organised around staffing efficiency, supervision, behavioural management, and

operational convenience.

This document repeatedly demonstrates that Supported Independent Living (SIL), while framed

under the NDIS as an individualised support mechanism, inherited many assumptions from these

earlier service systems.

The SIL funding structure accommodated a range of provider needs including workforce efficiency

through shared staffing, occupancy stability, predictable revenue streams, rostering simplicity,

economies of scale, centralised supervision, and organisational risk management.

Submission 1922

Group homes and shared support arrangements allowed providers to spread staffing costs across

multiple residents, reduce labour inefficiencies, centralise overnight support, and create scalable

service models.

The document argues that these arrangements suited the financial and operational requirements

of disability organisations because they reduced staffing duplication, improved worker utilisation, nsupported organisational sustainability, and simplified administration.

Similarly, governments and funders benefited because congregate models created systems that

were easier to budget, regulate, standardise, monitor, and scale across large populations.

The emerging commissioning proposals described in this document continue this historical pattern.

The proposed shift toward centrally commissioned SIL models is repeatedly linked to provider viability, market stewardship, workforce efficiency, sustainability, and standardised support structures.

The document argues that these priorities risk reproducing the same structural dynamics that historically shaped congregate disability care, including shared staffing, co-tenancy pressure, centralised control, and reduced individual autonomy.

Importantly, however, the document contrasts these system priorities with the actual experiences and testimonies of disabled people themselves.

The strongest evidence presented comes from the Disability Royal Commission.

The document outlines how the stories heard by the Commission amounted to a sustained and systemic critique of congregate care.

Disabled people repeatedly described group homes as environments associated with violence, able, neglect, restrictive practices, trauma, lack of privacy, social isolation, behavioural control, and loss of autonomy.

The evidence presented to the Royal Commission suggested that these harms were not simply isolated failures of individual services. Rather, many contributors argued that the harms were

Submission 1922

structurally connected to the congregate model itself through concentration of power, shared living

imposed for economic reasons, provider-controlled routines, and organisational priorities

overriding individual needs.

Residents described environments where staff convenience dictated daily life, people had little

count over who they lived with, abuse from co-tenants became normalised, and home͟ often felt

more like a workplace for staff than a genuine home for residents.

The document also highlights how many disabled people experienced congregate settings as

continuations of institutional life under a different name.

Despite smaller houses and community locations, residents described ongoing experiences of

surveillance, dependency, segregation, behavioural management, and collective control.

The Royal Commission evidence further challenged the assumption that shared supports inherently

promote wellbeing or safety.

Instead, the Commission repeatedly heard evidence that congregate arrangements could increase

co-tenant violence, safeguarding risks, restrictive practices, emotional distress, and vulnerability to

abuse.

The document argues that these testimonies fundamentally undermine contemporary policy

proposals promoting default shared support assumptions such as 1:3 funding ratios.

It notes that no publicly available evidence demonstrates that shared support arrangements are

universally safe, appropriate, or rights-compatible for people with complex needs.

Instead, the strongest rationale emerging from policy discussions appears to relate to economic

efficiency, provider sustainability, workforce management, and cost containment.

Taken together, the document presents a clear historical argument.

Group homes and congregate support arrangements have consistently functioned as systems that

effectively accommodated the needs of governments, funders, providers, and workforce structures.

   Commissioning SIL and the Risk of Reinstitutionalisation͟ (Ver 1.0_25.05.2026)                              Page 38͞

Submission 1922

However, the lived experiences of many disabled people, particularlly those with complex support

eeds, trauma histories, psyc hosocail disabillity, behavioura lsupport nee ds, or saf eguard ing

vul ner abil ities, reve al th at t hes e mod els fr equ ent ly fai le d to m et th ei r ac tu al n ee ds fo r au ton omy,

sa fe ty, s ta bi li ty, se lf -d ir ec ti on , be lo ng in g, an d ge nu i ne h om e .

Th e ab un da nc e of te st imo ny pr es en ted thr ou gh th e D is a b ili ty Ro ya l Co mmis si on ther ef ore

re pre sen ts no tm er el y cr iti ci sm of poor ly op era ted ser vi ce s, bu t a mu ch de ep er c ha ll eng e to th e

un der lyin g as su mp tion s of co ng re ga te di sa bl ici ty ca re its elf.

   Comm iss ioning SIL and the Risk of Reinstitu tionalisation͟  (Ver 1.0_25.05.2026)                              Page 39͞

Submission 1922

Commissioning SIL and the Risk of Reinstitutionalisation

The proposed commissioning of Supported Independent Living (SIL) represents far more than an administrative or funding reform.

Historically, disability accommodation systems in Australia have repeatedly demonstrated that when governments prioritise provider viability, workforce efficiency, staffing consolidation, economies of scale, and administrative standardisation, the result has consistently been the expansion of congregate models of care and support.

The proposed commissioning framework risks reproducing precisely these historical dynamics under a new policy language of sustainability, market stewardship, and best supports.

At the centre of the concern is the fact that commissioning fundamentally shifts the focus of disability support away from the individual and back toward the service system itself.

Under the original philosophy of the NDIS, funding was intended to follow the individual person. Supports were theoretically meant to be designed around the person’s goals, relationships, identity, communication style, trauma history, safeguarding needs, and preferred way of living.

Commissioning reverses this logic.

Instead of designing support around the individual, the system increasingly begins with questions such as:

• What staffing models are financially viable?
• What arrangements maximise workforce efficiency?
• What configurations reduce provider instability? and
• How can support hours be shared across multiple participants?

Submission 1922

This creates a profound structural danger.

Disabled people may increasingly be expected to fit within predefined service models designed around provider and system requirements rather than supports being built around the person themselves.

Historically, this is precisely how institutional and congregate systems developed.

Large institutions and later group homes were not primarily created because disabled people demanded to live together in shared, provider-controlled environments.

They emerged because such models efficiently accommodated the operational needs of governments and service systems.

Congregate arrangements allowed staffing costs to be shared, supervision to be centralised, worker utilisation to be maximised, organisational administration to be simplified, and service delivery to become scalable and financially predictable.

The SIL system inherited many of these same assumptions.

Even under the NDIS, group homes and shared staffing arrangements continued to function as economically efficient mechanisms for providers and funders.

The proposed commissioning reforms risk intensifying these dynamics by embedding them more deeply into the structure of the Scheme itself.

This is particularly concerning given the overwhelming body of testimony presented to the Disability Royal Commission.

Disabled people repeatedly described group homes and congregate environments as places associated with violence, abuse, neglect, restrictive practices, lack of autonomy, co-tenant conflict, social isolation, and institutional control.

Importantly, the Royal Commission evidence did not simply describe isolated service failures.

Submission 1922

Rather, many testimonies suggested that these harms were structurally connected to congregate

models themselves through concentration of power, shared control over daily life, organisational

convenience overriding personal autonomy, and economic efficiency being prioritised over human

relationships and safety.

The proposed commissioning approach risks reproducing these same structural conditions.

The increasing emphasis on shared support ratios, provider panels, occupancy efficiency, standardised support models, and workforce sustainability creates strong incentives for the expansion and normalisation of shared living arrangements regardless of whether they are appropriate for the individual person.

This is especially dangerous for people with complex trauma histories, psychosocial disability, behavioural support needs, autism, sensory sensitivities, communication differences, or histories of abuse within congregate settings.

For many such individuals, safety and wellbeing are not determined simply by the physical presence of support workers, but by trusted relationships, environmental predictability, autonomy, control over social interactions, and the ability to regulate exposure to others.

Shared support models can fundamentally undermine these safeguards.

The proposed 1:3 funding assumptions further intensify this concern.

The available evidence suggests these ratios are primarily driven by provider viability, workforce utilisation, and economic sustainability rather than by demonstrated evidence that shared arrangements are inherently safer, more effective, or more rights-compatible for people with complex needs.

As a consequence, disabled people may increasingly find themselves required to justify why they cannot safely share supports rather than the system being required to demonstrate why shared arrangements are appropriate in the first place.

This effectively reverses the original intent of individualised funding.

Submission 1922

The historical irony is profound.

For decades, disability service systems maintained and expanded group home models because they

were operationally and financially advantageous to providers and governments.

Disabled people repeatedly reported that these systems often failed to provide genuine autonomy, making inclusion, safety, privacy, self-determination, or a true sense of home.

Now, at the very moment when the Disability Royal Commission has exposed the harms associated with congregate care, the proposed commissioning reforms risk rewarding the very systems that preserved these models for their own organisational benefit.

Rather than moving further toward individually governed supports, self-direction, personalised safeguarding, and Article 19 rights, the reforms risk consolidating provider-controlled service systems through central commissioning, preferred provider arrangements, shared staffing assumptions, and standardised accommodation models.

In this sense, commissioning SIL risks functioning as a modern form of reinstitutionalisation.

The buildings may be smaller. The language may be softer. The policy rhetoric may emphasise sustainability͟ and provider viability.͟

But structurally, the risk remains the same. Disabled people being grouped together within systems designed primarily around the needs of organisations rather than the rights, autonomy, and individuality of the people who must live within them.

Submission 1922

An Alternative to Commissioning

An alternative to commissioning would be the development of a genuinely individualised, participant-governed, and rights-based model of home and living support that strengthens self- direction, safeguarding, community inclusion, and personalised support design rather than centralising control within provider-managed systems.

Rather than beginning with questions about workforce efficiency, provider viability, occupancy management, or shared staffing structures, such an alternative would begin with the individual person themselves, their identity, relationships, communication style, trauma history, aspirations, safeguarding needs, sensory profile, cultural context, and preferred way of living.

Under this approach, the role of the NDIS would not be to commission standardised accommodation systems or steer people into predefined support models. Instead, the Scheme would function as an enabling framework that assists people to build highly individualised and flexible supports around their own lives.

Several key principles would distinguish such an alternative from a commissioning model.

First, funding would remain genuinely individualised rather than based on default staffing assumptions or standardised ratios. Supports would arise from the actual needs, vulnerabilities, goals, and safeguarding requirements of the individual person rather than from assumptions about what can be efficiently shared across multiple participants.

Second, the system would strengthen self-direction and participant governance. This would include explicit protection for participant-led and Service for One͟ models, recognition of self-managed and participant-directed teams, and implementation of a dedicated Self-Direction Registration Category to ensure that participants requiring complex supports are not forced into provider- controlled arrangements simply because of regulatory changes.

Third, safeguarding would be reconceptualised away from institutional supervision and toward relational and community-based safeguards. The Disability Royal Commission repeatedly demonstrated that people are often safest where they have strong relationships, trusted

• Submission 1922

supporters, continuity, autonomy, visibility within community life, and genuine control over who

terminates their home and daily life. Under this alternative approach, safeguarding would therefore

focus on stability of relationships, participant authority, independent advocacy, separation of

powers, continuity of workers, and community inclusion rather than congregate oversight systems.

Fourth, housing and support would be structurally separated wherever possible. One of the major

risks identified throughout disability history is the concentration of power that occurs when the

same organisation controls housing, staffing, behavioural support implementation, and daily living

arrangements. An alternative model would intentionally reduce this concentration of power by

strengthening participant control over tenancy, staffing, and support coordination.

Fifth, the system would support flexible micro-service ecosystems rather than large-scale

commissioned provider panels. Small participant-led organisations, independent support teams,

cooperative support structures, circles of support, host arrangements, and community-based

micro-enterprises could all play important roles in supporting genuinely individualised living

arrangements. This would allow supports to emerge organically around people’s actual lives rather

than forcing people to fit within industrial service structures.

Sixth, co-tenancy and shared supports would remain an option rather than becoming a default

assumption. Some people may genuinely choose shared living because it aligns with their

preferences, relationships, culture, or social goals. However, under a rights-based model, shared

supports would only occur where freely chosen by the participant and demonstrably compatible

with their safety, autonomy, and wellbeing. The burden would not be placed on individuals to

prove why they cannot share.

Importantly, such an alternative is not simply about rejecting all forms of coordination or planning.

Governments still retain legitimate responsibilities regarding quality, safeguarding, workforce

development, accountability, and stewardship of public resources. However, the critical distinction

is whether these functions are exercised in ways that preserve participant autonomy and self- direction, or whether they gradually reconstruct centralised systems organised primarily around

provider and bureaucratic needs.

Submission 1922

At its core, the alternative to commissioning is therefore not administrative chaos or absence of

structure. It is the deliberate design of a disability support system in which the structure exists to serve the person, rather than the person being required to adapt themselves to the structure.

       Commissioning SIL and the Risk of Reinstitutionalisation͟  (Ver 1.0_25.05.2026)                              Page 46͞

Submission 1922

Conclusion

The proposed commissioning of Supported Independent Living (SIL) represents one of the most consequential structural shifts in the history of the National Disability Insurance Scheme. Although framed through policy language centred on sustainability, provider viability, market stewardship, and best supports, the reforms raise profound questions about the future direction, philosophy, and moral foundations of disability support in Australia.

This document has argued that the proposed commissioning framework cannot be understood simply as an administrative or technical funding reform. Rather, it reflects a much deeper tension between two fundamentally different visions of disability support.

The first vision is the original rights-based philosophy underpinning the NDIS itself. Under this approach, funding follows the individual person, supports are built around the person’s unique needs and aspirations, and disabled people retain genuine authority over where they live, who supports them, and how their lives are organised. This vision is grounded in principles of autonomy, self-direction, inclusion, safeguarding through relationships and community connection, and the recognition of disabled people as citizens with equal rights to control their own lives.

The second vision is the emerging commissioning logic reflected throughout current reform discussions. Under this approach, disability support increasingly becomes organised around system-wide management objectives such as workforce efficiency, occupancy stability, provider sustainability, standardised service configurations, and centrally coordinated support structures. Within this framework, disabled people risk being increasingly required to fit within predefined systems designed around organisational requirements rather than supports being individually constructed around the person themselves.

The historical significance of this shift cannot be understated. Disability accommodation systems in Australia have repeatedly demonstrated that when governments and providers prioritise efficiency, staffing consolidation, economies of scale, and administrative manageability, the result has consistently been the growth of congregate and institutional forms of care. Large institutions, group homes, and shared support arrangements did not emerge primarily because disabled people

Submission 1922

freely chose them. They emerged because they efficiently accommodated the operational needs of

tservice systems.

The Disability Royal Commission exposed the consequences of these historical arrangements in

devastating detail. The testimonies heard by the Commission revealed that many congregate nenvironments exposed disabled people to violence, abuse, neglect, restrictive practices, trauma, social isolation, behavioural control, and profound loss of autonomy. Importantly, the evidence suggested that these harms were often structurally embedded within congregate systems themselves through concentration of power, provider-controlled routines, shared staffing assumptions, and organisational priorities overriding human needs.

Against this backdrop, the proposed expansion of commissioning models and default shared support assumptions such as 1:3 funding ratios creates a profound contradiction. The same policy environment that publicly acknowledges the harms associated with congregate care now appears to be constructing financial, regulatory, and operational frameworks that risk reproducing many of the same structural dynamics under modernised policy language.

This document has also argued that there remains little publicly available evidence demonstrating that default shared support assumptions are clinically, ethically, safeguarding-wise, or human-rights sound for people with complex support needs. Instead, the strongest rationale emerging from current reform discussions appears to be economic efficiency, workforce utilisation, provider viability, and long-term cost containment. As a consequence, there is growing concern that the burden may increasingly shift onto disabled people to justify why they cannot safely share supports, rather than the system being required to demonstrate why shared arrangements are appropriate in the first place.

However, this document has also demonstrated that alternatives exist. A genuinely rights-based alternative to commissioning would preserve individualised funding, strengthen self-direction, protect participant-governed and Service for One͟ models, separate housing from support provision, and build safeguarding around trusted relationships, continuity, community connection, and participant authority rather than congregate oversight systems. Such an approach would recognise that disability support systems should exist to serve the person, rather than requiring the person to adapt themselves to the needs of the system.

Submission 1922

Ultimately, the debate surrounding SIL commissioning is not simply about staffing ratios, provider

panels, or accommodation models. It is about the kind of society Australia wishes to become. It is

about whether disabled people will continue moving toward lives characterised by autonomy,

belonging, self-determination, and genuine inclusion, or whether disability support systems will

once again drift toward forms of institutional logic organised primarily around efficiency,

predictability, and administrative control.

The buildings may look different from the institutions of the past. The language may sound more

modern. The systems may be framed through concepts such as market stewardship͟ and

sustainability.͟ But the central question remains unchanged:

• Who is the system ultimately designed to serve?

Commissioning SIL and the Risk of Reinstitutionalisation͟ (Ver 1.0_25.05.2026)Page 49͞

Submission 1922

We’ve Been Here Before ² NDIS Amendment Bill 2026

Reflection

The SIL paper makes one demand of the reader above all others, and the whole of its argument

hangs on it: ask for the evidence. A default shared-support ratio of one worker to three

participants is, on the public record, the figure toward which people who need round-the-clock

living support are to be funded. The paper goes looking for the basis of that figure and finds,

as the most important fact in the entire debate, an absence. There is no publicly available

evidence that a universal one-to-three default is grounded in clinical, psychosocial,

safeguarding, or human-rights research. There is no published validation, risk modelling, or

outcome study explaining why three is the right number rather than two, or four, or a figure

built around the individual. There is no public demonstration that three participants with

different disabilities, communication styles, trauma histories, and safeguarding risks can

generally share support safely while preserving autonomy and quality of life. The strongest

rationale the paper can find is financial: roster efficiency, the spreading of one worker¶s cost

across several participants, the pooling of overnight staff, the economies of scale that

congregation has always produced. The ratio, the paper concludes, is administratively and

financially convenient and not transparently justified as clinically or ethically sound. It

functions as a funding-efficiency benchmark dressed as an assessment framework.

It matters to be exact about how this argument is made, because the temptation is to

overclaim, and the overclaim would be wrong. The collection does not say the Bill contains a clause mandating a one-to-three ratio. It does not, and the figure is a matter of policy and rule rather than primary legislation. What the collection says is sharper. The power to make shared support the funded standard sits squarely in the Bill ² in the determination power that allows a maximum support intensity and a maximum worker-to-participant ratio to be set for whole classes of participants, and to be set, on the legislation¶s own terms, regardless of whether the resulting funding meets the cost of the support a person actually needs (Schedule 1, Part 6, s 33(2EA), with the s 33(2EB) note). The one-to-three figure is the policy content the Government proposes to pour into that power. So the argument is not that a clause is missing; it is that the Bill supplies the legal vessel for a default whose evidentiary basis is itself missing. Parliament is being asked to authorise class-wide support ratios set below cost, while the specific ratio the Government intends to set rests, on the public record, on workforce economics rather than on any published evidence of safety. The same point reaches the funding the Agency itself manages, where the Bill caps the maximum amounts payable for supports not managed by the participant (Schedule 3, Part 1, s 45C), and it operates inside the new framework planning the Bill builds, whose needs-assessment-and-budget method is the machinery through which a class-wide ratio becomes a particular person¶s allocation (Schedule 4, ss 32K±32L). The mechanism is lawful authority to fund below need at the level

Submission 1922

                                                         We've Been Here Before ² NDIS Amendment Bill 2026

of a category; the one-to-three ratio is what that authority is being readied to deliver; and the

bridge between them ² the evidence that three is safe ² is the thing no one has produced.

What makes the absence not merely a gap but a contradiction is the body of evidence that does exist, and that points the other way. The Royal Commission heard sustained evidence linking congregate and shared accommodation to violence, abuse, neglect, restrictive practices, co- tenant conflict, loss of autonomy, and social isolation, and it found that those harms were not simply the failures of individual services but were structurally connected to the logic of congregate provision itself. It found that the closure of the large institutions and their replacement with group homes had not eliminated institutional violence and abuse, identified many thousands of group-home residents as being at significant risk, and concluded that no person should be compelled into a setting designed exclusively for disabled people. The country has just spent four and a half years and a great deal of public money establishing that grouping disabled people together for the convenience of service systems concentrates harm ² and is now proposing to make a grouped, ratio-based arrangement the funded default for the people with the highest needs, on the strength of a number whose safety it has never published evidence to support. Flynn¶s analysis makes the same point from the participant¶s side: a class-level ratio is not a description of what is safe for any individual but of what the Scheme is willing to fund as standard, and formal equality of inputs applied to unequal needs produces deeply unequal safety. The documentary critique, the lived one, and the Royal Commission¶s finding reach the same conclusion from three directions: the evidence runs against shared-by-default, and the policy is moving toward it regardless.

There is a rights dimension to this, and it is the lesson the history said the country had written down. Article 19 of the Convention does not merely require that disabled people be physically present in the community; it requires genuine choice over where and with whom they live, and that they not be obliged to live in a particular arrangement as a condition of receiving support. A funding default that makes shared living the standard, and places on the individual the burden of proving they cannot share, is in direct tension with that right: it conditions support on accepting an arrangement the person has not chosen, and reverses the Convention¶s order by asking the person to justify their autonomy rather than asking the system to justify its imposition. The point is not that shared living is incompatible with rights, but that imposed shared living ² defaulted by funding, unsupported by published safety evidence ² is. The reform¶s own architecture, with its commissioning, preferred-provider panels, occupancy efficiency, and consolidation of housing and support in the same provider¶s hands, builds the conditions in which that imposition becomes the norm. The paper¶s word for the result is the one the history earned: reinstitutionalisation. Not a return to the old buildings, but the re-emergence of institutional logic inside modern, dispersed, softly named Flynn & Gregory ² joint submission Page 269

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We’ve Been Here Before ² NDIS Amendment Bill 2026

settings ² power concentrated within organisations, daily life organised around staffing efficiency, and the disabled person, once again, fitted to the service rather than the service built around the person.

It is worth making concrete how a provider-shaped default reaches the individual, because the paper’s force lies in the specificity. Each efficiency that recommends shared support to a provider has a corresponding cost to the person inside the arrangement; the two are the same fact seen from opposite ends of a ledger. Workforce efficiency ² one worker’s time spread across several residents ² is, from the resident’s side, the moment no one is free when help is needed. Predictable, occupancy-based revenue is, from the resident’s side, a pressure to keep beds filled regardless of whether the people in them are well matched, and an inertia that makes leaving a poor placement hard. Vertically integrated control, where one organisation owns the housing and supplies the support, is a concentration of power over a resident who cannot change their support without putting their home at risk. Economies of scale are, from the resident’s side, simply larger groupings of people with high needs supported by fewer staff.

None of this requires bad actors; it requires only a system that rewards the arrangements cheapest to run, and then lets the rewards do the work. And across much of the country there is no genuine alternative to choose instead: in thin markets, in regional and remote areas, and for people with the most complex needs, the choice the Scheme promised contracts to whatever a viable provider is willing to deliver ² which is to say, to shared support. A default justified by provider viability and imposed where no real alternative exists is not a choice a participant makes; it is a destination the market arranges for them.

The paper closes on the question to which all of this comes, and the collection adopts it without alteration: when shared support is made the funded standard, justified by provider economics, and imposed where no alternative exists, who is the system ultimately being designed to serve ² the disabled person whose life it organises, or the structures that find that person cheaper to support in groups? The move by which that happens is the one the next movement is built to examine. The reform does not abolish the individual entitlement and announce a return to congregate care; nothing so visible. It converts the question. The original logic of the Scheme asked what a particular person needs to live safely and well, and built the funding around the answer. The commissioning logic asks instead how supports can be efficiently shared, what staffing models are viable, and how a person can be fitted within an average ratio ² and treats the individual’s need as a variable to be managed against those system questions. That conversion, from a support built around the person to a person fitted to a category, is the engine beneath the whole reform. The SIL paper shows it operating on home and living; the next movement traces the engine itself ² the mechanism by which an individual entitlement, assessed and funded for the person, becomes a managed category, capped and steered at the

Submission 1922

We’ve Been Here Before ² NDIS Amendment Bill 2026

level of a group. And once the engine is understood, the final document shows it turned on the

part of a disabled person’s life the Scheme was most distinctively created to protect: their

ticipation in the ordinary life of the community.

Flynn & Gregory ² joint submission Page 271

Submission 1922

We’ve Been Here Before ² NDIS Amendment Bill 2026

Movement V ² Community Participation and the Pathway to Block Funding

The collection has now named the engine. An individual entitlement ² funding assessed for a particular person, attached to that person, and directed by them ² is being converted, measure by measure, into a managed category: a budget line that can be capped, standardised, and reduced at the level of a group, without any individual plan being reassessed and without any participant being able to point to the decision that lowered their support.

Standardisation, benchmark assumptions, and category-level funding powers are the gears of that conversion, and the removal of the participant-centred planning principles is what lets the gears turn freely. The previous movements showed the engine being built and operating on home and living. The final document shows it turned on the support that was, more than any other, the point of the whole Scheme: the funding that lets a disabled person leave the house, keep their relationships, take part in the civic and social life of their community, and be present in the world as a citizen rather than a client.

Social, Economic and Community Participation Changes examines what the Government has announced for that funding, and it is placed last among the four for a deliberate reason: it describes the earliest concrete cut. While the new planning framework, the new eligibility tests, and the foundational supports are still to come ² announced for 2027 and beyond, or not guaranteed at all ² the participation budgets are to be reset downward from 1 October 2026, with the average plan in this area moving from around thirty-one thousand dollars to around twenty-six thousand.

That is the first participant-facing reduction on the timetable, and its position in the sequence is itself an argument. The collection has called this the “cuts move first” pattern, and here it is provable not merely from the policy calendar but from the face of the statute. The determination power that allows funding amounts, intensities, and ratios to be capped, and the plan-suspension regime, are both timed to commence in law on 1 October 2026 ² the same season the participation budgets reset (Schedule 1, Part 4, support determinations; Part 7, plan suspension).

The supports the Review called the necessary precondition are not scheduled to precede the change. The cuts are scheduled to lead it. The history said the nation¶s habit is to withdraw first and replace later, if at all; the timetable writes that habit into law, and this document describes its leading edge.

The paper¶s argument is that the reset is not an isolated budget adjustment but the first step on a structural pathway back to block-funded group services ² the model the Scheme was created to dismantle. Two moves, made at once, open that pathway. The first is the reduction of the individualised funding that currently lets participants purchase their own one-to-one community support, their own social participation, their own ordinary involvement in

Submission 1922

                                                         We've Been Here Before ² NDIS Amendment Bill 2026

community life; once that funding is cut, individualised participation becomes financially

unviable for many people, which is the first precondition for a drift toward group-based

provision. The second is the legal power the Bill creates to reduce funding categories across

whole groups of participants without reassessing any individual plan ² a power that, in the

paper¶s words, transforms participation from an individual entitlement into a controllable

budget category, allowing the Government to suppress its growth centrally and progressively

reduce the viability of participant-directed support. Set those two moves beside the alternative

funding systems the Government is building at the same moment ² foundational supports,

and a proposed Inclusive Communities Fund that would direct money to organisations to run

participation programs rather than to participants to direct their own ² and the concern

comes into focus. Reduce the money that follows the person, build up the money that goes to

the provider, and you have reconstructed, piece by piece, the architecture of block funding:

governments fund services, organisations design programs, and disabled people attend what

is on offer. The document that follows traces that pathway in full, and it is the last of the four

works the reader is asked to take in whole.

                               Flynn & Gregory ² joint submission    Page 273

Submission 1922

Social, Economic and Community Participation Changes͞ From Citizenship to Containment͟ Shut Out Again: Dismembering Inclusion through Community Participation Cuts

througH CoMMunitY ParticIpatIon CutS

prepared By: peter greGory date: 31St may, 2026͞

Institutions Are Not Defined BY Their Size, But By The Extent To Which people Lose Control Over Their Own Lives.͟ John o’brien

social, economic And community participation changes͟ (ver 2.0_31.05.2026) page 1͞

Submission 1922

Abstract:

This document critically examines the proposed reductions to Social, Economic and Community Participation (SECP) funding within the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) and explores the broader structural implications these reforms may have for disabled people, particularly those with high and complex support needs. The proposed amendments, introduced as part of the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026,ҏ would significantly reduce participant-controlled funding for community participation while simultaneously expanding mechanisms that support greater centralised control over funding categories, shared supports, and externally commissioned disability programs.

The document argues that Social, Economic and Community Participation funding is not merely discretionary lifestyleҏ expenditure, but a foundational mechanism through which many disabled people maintain emotional regulation, communication capacity, psychological wellbeing, relationships, safety, autonomy, and connection to ordinary community life. For people with complex support needs in particular, community participation often functions as an essential safeguard against isolation, deterioration, institutionalisation, and crisis escalation. The reduction or removal of these supports therefore carries consequences that extend far beyond recreation or social activity.

ĂǁŝŶŐ ŽŶ ƚŚĞ ŚŝƐƚŽƌŝĐĂů ĞdžƉĞƌŝĞŶĐĞƐ ĚŽĐƵŵĞŶƚĞĚ ŝŶ the Shut Out Report, the findings of the

Disability Royal Commission, and the original philosophical foundations of the NDIS, this document argues that the proposed SECP reforms risk recreating many of the structural dynamics that existed prior to the Scheme’s introduction. As individualised community participation funding is reduced, participants may increasingly become reliant upon provider-controlled group programs, externally commissioned participation initiatives, and congregate support arrangements shaped by administrative efficiency rather than personal choice or inclusion.

The document further argues that the interaction between reduced SECP funding and increasing reliance on provider-controlled Supported Independent Living (SIL) models creates the conditions for modern forms of reinstitutionalisation. While contemporary systems may not resemble historical institutions physically, they may nevertheless reproduce institutional logic by concentrating power within service providers that control where people live, how they spend their time, who supports them, and the extent to which they are able to participate in ordinary community life. Under these arrangements, disabled people risk becoming increasingly separated from broader society and absorbed into closed disability service ecosystems governed primarily by operational and financial considerations.

This document contends that the current reforms represent not simply a budgetary adjustment,ҏ but a fundamental ideological shift away from the original transformational vision of the NDIS. The central issue is whether Australia will continue supporting disabled people to live individually governed, self-directed lives as equal citizens within their communities, or whether economic pressures and structural reforms will progressively re-establish provider-centred and congregate models of care.

Submission 1922

Finally, the document outlines an alternative approach grounded in human rights, Article 19 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, safeguarding through community inclusion, and the preservation of participant-controlled funding. It argues that genuine sustainability should not be measured solely through expenditure reduction, but through the extent to which the NDIS continues to uphold autonomy, dignity, citizenship, and meaningful participation in ordinary community life for disabled people, including those with the highest and most complex support needs.

• Social, Economic and Community Participation Changes͟ (Ver 2.0_31.05.2026)
• Page 3͞

Submission 1922

Introduction:

The proposed changes to Social, Economic and Community Participation within the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) represent far more than a simple adjustment to funding categories or an attempt to improve administrative efficiency. They raise fundamental questions about the future direction of disability policy in Australia, the meaning of inclusion and citizenship for disabled people, and whether the original vision of the NDIS is now being fundamentally reshaped.

At the centre of the current debate is a profound tension between two competing approaches to disability support. One approach understands disability support as a human rights issue grounded in autonomy, individualisation, community inclusion, and self-determination. The other increasingly frames disability support through the language of sustainability, efficiency, standardisation, shared supports, and budget containment. While governments have presented the proposed reforms as necessary measures to secure the NDIS for future generations, many disabled people, advocates, families, and researchers fear the changes may instead mark the beginning of a return to older service models that the disability rights movement fought for decades to dismantle.

The significance of these reforms cannot be understood without recognising the historical context from which the NDIS emerged. Prior to the Scheme, disability support in Australia was largely organised through block-funded, provider-controlled systems that frequently segregated disabled people from ordinary community life. Many people were expected to fit within pre-designed programs, group homes, sheltered workshops, and centre-based day services structured primarily around organisational convenience rather than individual aspirations or rights. The establishment of the NDIS represented an attempt to reverse this history by placing funding and decision-making power directly in the hands of disabled people themselves. Individualised funding was intended to support ordinary lives within ordinary communities rather than reinforce dependence on disability service systems.

The proposed reductions to Social, Economic and Community Participation funding, together with broader reforms favouring shared support arrangements, provider-controlled participation models, and increased Ministerial control over funding categories, have therefore generated significant concern across the disability community. Critics argue that while the reforms do not explicitly advocate a return to institutionalisation, they may nevertheless recreate many of the structural conditions that historically produced segregation, dependency, and congregate care. In particular, there are growing fears that people with the highest and most complex support needs may increasingly become concentrated within provider-controlled environments that govern not only where they live, but also how they participate in community life, who supports them, and the extent to which they are able to exercise genuine choice and control over their lives.

Submission 1922

This document examines the proposed changes to Social, Economic and Community Participation within the broader context of the NDIS reforms currently being advanced by the Australian Government. It analyses how these reforms may interact to reshape disability support structures, explores the risks of reinstitutionalisation and modern forms of congregate care, and considers the potential consequences for people with complex support needs. Drawing on the historical lessons redacted the findings of the Disability Royal Commission, and the original philosophical foundations of the NDIS, this document argues that the current reforms represent not merely a budgetary adjustment, but a critical turning point in the future direction of disability rights, inclusion, and citizenship in Australia.

    Social, Economic and Community Participation Changes͟  (Ver 2.0_31.05.2026)                              Page   5͞

Submission 1922

What is proposed:

The proposed changes to Social, Economic and Community Participation within the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) represent one of the most significant shifts in the Scheme since its creation. The changes form part of the Federal Governments broader package of reforms contained within the proposed National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 and associated policy announcements by Mark Butler. The Government is justifying the reforms as necessary to slow the growth of the NDIS and improve what it describes as the Schemes long-term sustainability.

At the centre of these changes is a major reduction in funding for supports categorised as Social, Economic and Community Participation (SECP). These are the supports that currently fund assistance for disabled people to participate in community life, develop relationships, attend social activities, engage in recreation, participate in cultural activities, build independence, and avoid isolation. They are commonly used to fund support workers who assist participants in leaving their homes, maintaining social connections, participating in ordinary community activities, and developing practical life skills.

Under the proposed reforms, the Government intends to reset these budgets to align more closely with what it claims were 2023 levels. The reforms propose reducing Social, Economic and Community Participation funding allocations by an average of 50 per cent from 1 October 2026. In addition, Capacity Building Daily Activities budgets are proposed to be reduced by 10 per cent.

The Government argues that spending on social and community participation has grown substantially and is no longer financially sustainable. Minister Butler has publicly stated that these supports are projected to cost more than $12 billion annually and could increase further without intervention. The reforms are therefore being presented as a mechanism to reduce expenditure growth across the Scheme.

Importantly, the proposed legislation would also give the Minister broad powers to reduce funding categories across groups of participants without needing to individually reassess each participant’s plan. This means reductions to Social, Economic and Community Participation supports could occur systematically through funding rules rather than through individualised planning processes.

The reforms also appear connected to a broader philosophical shift in how disability support is being conceptualised within the NDIS. The Government has indicated that Social, Economic and Community Participation supports should become more consistent with other systems, implying that some activities currently funded by the NDIS may instead be expected to be provided through mainstream community organisations, unpaid family support, volunteer systems, or future Foundational Supports arrangements.

Submission 1922

The proposed changes are also occurring alongside broader reforms including:

• tighter eligibility criteria for access to the NDIS,
• new standardised assessment tools,
• expanded provider registration requirements,
• restrictions on reassessment requests,
• increased emphasis on sustainability and value for money in funding decisions,
• and greater Ministerial powers over pricing and funding categories.

As a result, many disability advocates view the proposed Social and Community Participation changes not as an isolated budget adjustment, but as part of a much larger restructuring of the philosophy and operation of the NDIS itself.

A Pathway to Eliminating Social, Economic and Community Participation Funding

While proposed NDIS amendments do not explicitly state that Social, Economic and Community Participation (SECP) funding will be abolished and replaced with block-funded day services, when the reforms are examined together as a system, they create a clear structural pathway through which this could occur.

The significance lies not in a single announcement, but in how several reforms interact with one another.

The first step is reducing individualised SECP funding

The Government has already announced that SECP budgets will be substantially reduced, with average funding being reset back toward 2023 levels. This matters because SECP funding is currently the mechanism that allows participants to individually purchase:

• one-to-one support workers,
• personalised community access,
• tailored social participation,
• relationship building,
• recreation,
• and ordinary community involvement.

Once this funding is reduced, many participants will no longer have sufficient resources to organise individualised participation supports. This creates the first precondition for a transition toward group-based services and individualised participation becomes financially unviable.

Submission 1922

The amendments give the government the power to cut these budgets systemically

The proposed legislation creates powers enabling the Minister to reduce funding categories across groups of participants without individually reassessing plans. This is critically important. Historically, under the original NDIS model:

• funding was meant to be individualised,
• participant circumstances assessed individually,
• and supports determined case-by-case.

The new powers allow:

• systemic reductions,
• category-wide budget caps,
• and centralised control over funding allocations.

This transforms SECP from an individual entitlement into a controllable budget category. Once the Government can centrally suppress SECP funding growth, it can progressively reduce the viability of participant-directed participation supports across the Scheme.

Simultaneously, the government is creating alternative external funding systems

At exactly the same time SECP budgets are being reduced, the government is establishing:

• Foundational Supports,
• the Inclusive Communities Fund,
• and externally commissioned community participation initiatives.

This is one of the clearest indicators of the likely direction of reform. Instead of participants receiving funds directly, Governments can instead:

• allocate grants to organisations,
• commission programs,
• fund community hubs,͟
• subsidise disability organisations,
• or contract providers to deliver participation activities.

This is effectively the architecture of block funding. Under block funding:

• governments fund services,
• organisations design programs,
• participants attend what is available.

Submission 1922

This is fundamentally different from the original NDIS principle where:

• participants controlled the funding,
• participants chose the supports,
• and supports were built around the individual person.

4. Ministerial statements already frame this shift ideologically

One of the most revealing statements from Mark Butler is his claim that the current NDIS approach caused older community participation programs to wither away. This statement is extremely important because it reframes the problem.

The original NDIS philosophy assumed individuals should control funding directly, but Butler’s framing suggests organisations and community programs should again become the centrepiece of participation. This represents a major philosophical shift away from:

• self-direction,
• individualisation,
• and participant-controlled support.

Toward:

• externally organised participation opportunities,
• commissioned community programs,
• and provider-run models.

5. “Inclusive Communities” funding creates the infrastructure for day services

The proposed $200 million Inclusive Communities Fund is especially significant. Officially, the fund is described as supporting:

• local organisations,
• sporting groups,
• arts organisations,
• and social inclusion programs.

However, structurally, this funding mechanism could easily evolve into:

• provider-run group programs,
• centre-based activities,
• structured disability participation programs,
• and modernised day services.“

Submission 1922

Historically, this is precisely how disability day programs operated before the NDIS:

• governments funded organisations directly,
• organisations developed activities,
• disabled people attended pre-designed programs.

The critical distinction is that the money no longer belongs to the participant.

6. The reforms encourage economies of scale and shared supports

The amendments also sit alongside:

• increased emphasis on efficiency,
• shared supports,
• and reducing runaway spending.

From an economic perspective, individually tailored one-to-one participation supports are more expensive than:

• transporting groups together,
• staffing activities collectively,
• or running centre-based programs.

Once SECP budgets are reduced, providers may increasingly respond by offering:

• group outings,
• structured programs,
• disability hubs,
• shared staffing models,
• and centre-based activities.

Participants with insufficient individual budgets may then have little practical alternative. This creates what critics describe as economic coercion into congregate participation models.

7. The reasonable and necessary changes strengthen this trajectory

The amendments also change how reasonable and necessary supports are interpreted.

The NDIA will increasingly assess supports according to:

• consistency across participants,
• sustainability,
• and standardised planning approaches.

Submission 1922

This creates the potential for the NDIA to argue:

• one-to-one participation is not cost effective,
• generic programs are available elsewhere,
• group participation is reasonable,
• or externally funded programs satisfy participation needs.

Historically, this logic has repeatedly been used to justify:

• segregated day services,
• congregate support models,
• and institutional forms of participation.

8. The likely long-term pathway

When these reforms are viewed together, a plausible long-term policy pathway emerges:

Stage 1

Reduce individual SECP budgets.

Stage 2

Cap growth in participant-controlled participation funding.

Stage 3

Create externally funded community participation systems outside participant plans.

Stage 4

Commission organisations to deliver inclusive participation programs.

Stage 5

Participants increasingly rely on provider-run group programs because individual budgets no longer sustain personalised supports.

Stage 6

Over time, individualised community participation becomes exceptional rather than standard.

Social, Economic and Community Participation Changes (Ver 2.0_31.05.2026) Page 11

Submission 1922

Why this is a return to pre-NDIS disability service models

Before the NDIS, disability participation was commonly delivered through:

• block-funded day programs,
• centre-based services,
• sheltered workshops,
• provider-controlled activities.

The NDIS deliberately attempted to dismantle this system by:

• transferring control of funding to disabled people,
• supporting individualised lifestyles,
• funding ordinary community inclusion.

The current amendments risk reversing this shift by rebuilding:

• provider-centred participation systems,
• economies-of-scale service models,
• externally controlled participation pathways.

This is why many disability advocates describe the reforms not simply as budget cuts, but as a structural reconfiguration of disability support away from individualised citizenship and back toward commissioned service systems.

The Creation of Segregated Disability Ghettos

The combination of proposed reductions to individualised Social, Economic and Community Participation funding and the increasing movement toward provider-controlled Supported Independent Living (SIL) models creates the conditions for a profound restructuring of disability support in Australia. When viewed together, these reforms risk recreating a system in which people with the highest and most complex support needs become concentrated within provider-controlled environments that govern not only where they live, but how they spend their days, who supports them, who they spend time with, and ultimately the extent to which they are able to participate in ordinary community life.

Under the original vision of the NDIS, a person’s funding was intended to follow the individual rather than the service. The purpose of this model was to dismantle the historical power imbalance that existed when governments funded disability organisations directly and disabled people were expected to fit into whatever programs or placements were available. Individualised funding was designed to support personalised lives rather than service-based placements. It recognised that disabled people are citizens first, not simply clients of a disability service system.

The current reform trajectory risks reversing that philosophy.

Submission 1922

If Social, Economic and Community Participation funding is significantly reduced or eventually replaced by externally commissioned community programs, many people with complex support needs may lose the practical ability to organise individualised participation in the community.

Simultaneously, if Home and Living reforms increasingly favour shared SIL arrangements based on staffing efficiencies and shared support ratios, participants may find themselves pressured into congregate living environments because alternative models become financially or administratively inaccessible.

The critical issue is what happens when the same provider controls both the person’s home and their daytime activities.

In that situation, the provider no longer simply delivers support. The provider effectively controls the person’s entire social world. The organisation may determine where the person lives, who they live with, who supports them, what activities they participate in, where they go during the day, how they spend their time, and which relationships are maintained or lost. What emerges is not genuine community inclusion, but a closed disability service ecosystem in which the person’s life becomes organised around the operational needs of the provider.

Historically, this is precisely how institutional and congregate systems operated.

Large institutions once controlled every aspect of a disabled person’s existence. Modern group homes and day programs were later presented as more humane alternatives, but the underlying structure often remained remarkably similar. People lived together because it was operationally efficient. They attended segregated day programs because providers could deliver supports collectively. They travelled together, undertook activities together, and spent most of their lives surrounded primarily by paid staff and other disabled people within disability-specific environments.

The Disability Royal Commission documented extensive evidence about the consequences of these systems. Many participants described lives characterised by loneliness, lack of autonomy, social segregation, rigid routines, surveillance, neglect, abuse, boredom, and profound disconnection from ordinary community life. The Commission heard repeated testimony that congregate environments often prioritised organisational efficiency and risk management over human relationships, self-determination, and personal identity.

The danger within the current reforms is that these outcomes may be recreated, not necessarily through explicit policy statements advocating institutionalisation, but through economic and structural incentives that make congregate models the default option for people with high support needs.

If an individual’s funding is insufficient to sustain one-to-one support in the community, and if providers are simultaneously encouraged to operate shared staffing arrangements across housing and community participation programs, then the system naturally gravitates toward consolidation. Participants may increasingly be grouped together within provider-controlled homes and then transported together into provider-controlled day activities. Over time, the distinction between supported accommodation and day service begins to collapse into a continuous managed environment.

Submission 1922

This creates what could be readily described as reinstitutionalisation. Reininstitutionalisation does not necessarily involve a return to large old-style institutions. Instead, it refers to the re-emergence of institutional logic within modern service systems. The physical buildings may be smaller and more dispersed, but the underlying dynamics remain the same. Control becomes centralised within organisations, disabled people lose authority over the conditions of their lives, and service systems begin to organise people around efficiency rather than individuality.

For people with the highest and most complex support needs, the consequences can be particularly severe.

These individuals are often the most vulnerable to having their choices overridden in the name of safety, efficiency, or sustainability. They are also the people most likely to require intensive advocacy and highly individualised support arrangements to maintain genuine community inclusion. If the system increasingly assumes that complex support needs are best managed through shared settings and provider-run programs, then people with the greatest support requirements may become the most segregated members of society.

The risk is not simply physical segregation. It is existential segregation.

A person may technically live in the community while remaining socially and structurally separated from ordinary life. They may spend nearly all of their time within disability-specific environments, surrounded primarily by paid staff and other disabled people, with limited capacity to develop freely chosen relationships, pursue spontaneous interests, or participate as an equal citizen within the broader community.

The concentration of power within providers also creates significant safeguarding risks. When the same organisation controls multiple domains of a person’s life, opportunities for independent oversight diminish. Staff from the same organisation may become the person’s carers, transport providers, activity coordinators, behaviour support implementers, and gatekeepers to community access. Complaints become harder to raise. Dependency deepens. Family members and independent advocates may have reduced visibility into what is occurring. The person’s entire support ecosystem can become internally self-reinforcing.

They can become trapped in a disability ghetto from which it is impossible to escape.

This is one of the reasons why disability rights advocates and the Disability Royal Commission have repeatedly emphasised the importance of separation between housing, daily living supports, community participation, and safeguarding mechanisms. Genuine choice and control require structural diversity. They require the ability to change providers, build independent relationships, direct one’s own supports, and participate in ordinary community life outside disability service systems.

The deeper concern is that these reforms risk redefining what society believes disabled people are entitled to expect from life itself.

Submission 1922

The original promise of the NDIS was not merely care or supervision. It was the promise that disabled people could live ordinary, self-directed lives as equal citizens within their communities. If the combined effect of these reforms is to move people back into provider-controlled ecosystems organised around group living and group participation, then the system risks abandoning that foundational vision and replacing it with a modernised form of congregate care shaped less by human rights principles than by administrative efficiency and cost containment.

Shut Out: Not Included

The risks posed by the current proposed reforms to Social, Economic and Community Participation funding and provider-controlled disability service models cannot be understood in isolation from Australia’s recent disability history. Long before the creation of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), disabled people, families, and advocates repeatedly described lives shaped by segregation, social exclusion, institutionalisation, and profound disconnection from ordinary community life. These experiences were documented powerfully in the 2009 National Disability ^ƚƌĂƚĞŐLJ ĐŽŶƐƵůƚĂƚŝŽŶ ƌĞƉŽƌƚ Shut Out: The Experience of People with Disabilities and their Families in Australia, commissioned by the Australian Government.

dŚĞ Shut Out ƌĞƉŽƌƚ ĞdžƉŽƐĞĚ Ă ĚŝƐĂďŝůŝƚLJ ƐƵƉƉŽƌƚ ƐLJƐƚĞŵ ƚŚĂƚ ĨƌĞƋƵĞŶƚůLJ ŝƐŽůĂƚĞĚ ƉĞŽƉůĞ ĨƌŽŵ ƚŚĞŝƌ communities, denied them meaningful participation in society, and confined many to lives controlled by service systems rather than directed by their own choices and aspirations. Participants described experiences of loneliness, institutional thinking, social invisibility, dependency, and exclusion from ordinary citizenship. The report helped lay the foundation for the Productivity Commission inquiry that ultimately led to the establishment of the NDIS. Central to this reform movement was the recognition that disabled people should not be forced to fit into inflexible, provider-driven programs and congregate care systems designed primarily around administrative convenience and cost efficiency. Instead, the NDIS was intended to support individualised, self-directed lives grounded in inclusion, autonomy, dignity, and genuine participation within ordinary community life.

It is within this historical context that the current proposed reforms must be understood. The combination of reducing individualised Social, Economic and Community Participation funding while simultaneously increasing reliance on provider-controlled Supported Independent Living (SIL) models has been identified as deeply harmful. For people with complex support needs in particular, the erosion of individually controlled community participation supports may progressively confine people to provider-controlled environments where housing, social participation, daily activities, and support relationships are increasingly organised around the operational needs of disability service systems rather than the rights, choices, and individuality of the person themselves.

The proposed reductions to Social, Economic and Community Participation funding, when combined with the increasing movement toward provider-controlled Supported Independent Living (SIL) models, have the potential to fundamentally reshape the lives of people with complex support needs. The consequences extend far beyond the loss of recreational outings or reduced social activities. For many people with complex disabilities, community participation is not separate from health, functional capacity, emotional regulation, safeguarding, communication, identity, or

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Submission 1922

Citizenship itself. Community participation is frequently the primary mechanism through which the participant maintains emotional and behavioural regulation, develops communication skills, prevents social isolation, sustains psychological wellbeing, and experiences inclusion as a citizen within ordinary community life.

The danger within the proposed reforms is that they increasingly frame community participation as discretionary, excessive, or merely lifestyle-based, rather than recognising it as an essential support structure that prevents deterioration and institutionalisation. For people with complex support needs, this distinction is profoundly dangerous because participation in community life is often inseparable from behavioural stability, mental health, communication, and safety. Removing or significantly reducing these supports risks destabilising the very foundations that allow many people to remain connected to ordinary life.

If these reductions occur simultaneously with reforms that increasingly favour shared SIL arrangements and provider-controlled support systems, the consequences become even more serious. A person may find themselves living in a shared disability accommodation setting operated by a provider that also controls their daytime activities, transport, staffing arrangements, behavioural supports, and social participation opportunities. Under this structure, the individual no longer exercises meaningful authority over how they live. Instead, their daily existence risks becoming organised around the operational requirements and financial efficiencies of the service system itself.

This creates the conditions for modern forms of congregate care. While the buildings may no longer resemble large historical institutions, the structural dynamics begin to replicate them. People may live together because staffing ratios make it economically efficient. They may attend group programs because individual community access is no longer adequately funded. They may travel together, undertake activities together, and spend most of their lives within disability-specific environments organised by the same provider. Over time, the person’s home, social life, relationships, daily routines, and community access become integrated into a closed provider-controlled ecosystem.

The attached material highlights that for many people with complex needs, meaningful community participation is only possible because trained support workers provide behavioural support, emotional co-regulation, communication assistance, sensory regulation, environmental monitoring, transport assistance, and continuous relational support. Without these supports, community access may become unsafe, overwhelming, inaccessible, or impossible. The consequence is not simply reduced social activity. The consequence may be confinement.

As people lose the supports that enable them to safely engage with the broader community, they may become increasingly restricted to the environments controlled by service providers. This isolation can trigger a cascade of negative outcomes. Reductions in community participation can reasonably be expected to result in increased dysregulation, escalation in behaviours of distress or protest, deterioration in communication, increased social withdrawal, reduced resilience, increased vulnerability to restrictive practices, and overall decline in functional stability.

Submission 1922

These consequences are particularly severe for people whose disabilities already place them at heightened risk of segregation and control. Isolation and lack of meaningful engagement often intensify distress, frustration, trauma responses, and behavioural escalation. In turn, these reactions may then be used to justify further restrictions, increased surveillance, greater use of restrictive practices, or even more congregate forms of care. A self-reinforcing cycle can emerge in which the very deterioration caused by social exclusion is then cited as evidence that the individual requires more intensive management and supervision.

The safeguarding implications are equally profound. Community participation is frequently inseparable from safeguarding itself. Ordinary community participation creates visibility, social connection, informal monitoring, relationship development, and opportunities for disabled people to exist beyond the control of service systems. When individuals are instead concentrated within provider-controlled homes and provider-controlled day programs, independent oversight diminishes. Opportunities for abuse, neglect, coercion, and overuse of restrictive practices increase because the person’s entire life may occur within the same organisational environment.

Historically, this is precisely why disability rights advocates fought against institutional and congregate models of care. The central problem was never simply the size of the building. The problem was the concentration of power. When organisations control where people live, how they spend their time, who supports them, and how they access the community, disabled people become vulnerable to systems that prioritise efficiency, compliance, and risk management over autonomy, identity, and citizenship.

The deeper consequence is therefore not merely service redesign. It is the gradual erosion of the original philosophical foundations of the NDIS itself. The Scheme was created to move Australia away from segregated service systems and toward individualised, community-based support that recognised disabled people as citizens with the right to direct their own lives. Participation in community life is directly connected to social inclusion, citizenship, autonomy, dignity, and self-determination under both the NDIS and Article 19 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

If individualised participation supports are progressively dismantled while provider-controlled housing and group participation models expand, the risk is that people with the highest and most complex support needs may once again become separated from ordinary community life and absorbed into modernised congregate care systems. The language may be different from the past. The buildings may be smaller. The rhetoric may emphasise efficiency, sustainability, and shared supports. But the lived reality for many disabled people could increasingly resemble the very forms of segregation and institutional control that the disability rights movement spent decades attempting to dismantle.

Submission 1922

An Alternative

An alternative approach to the proposed changes to Social, Economic and Community Participation funding would begin from an entirely different philosophical assumption about disability, citizenship, and the purpose of the NDIS itself. Rather than treating community participation as a discretionary expense that must be contained through efficiency measures, shared supports, or externally commissioned programs, an alternative model would recognise participation in community life as a foundational safeguard against isolation, institutionalisation, trauma,deterioration, and exclusion.

Under this alternative approach, Social, Economic and Community Participation would not be viewed as a peripheral lifestyle support sitting outside a participant’s functional needs. Instead, it would be understood as a core mechanism through which people with complex disabilities maintain emotional regulation, psychological wellbeing, communication skills, relationships, identity, autonomy, and connection to ordinary community life. Participation itself would be recognised as functionally therapeutic, relationally protective, and essential to maintaining stability and safety.

Rather than reducing individualised funding and replacing it with provider-controlled group programs, the NDIS would strengthen participant-directed community participation supports. Funding would remain attached to the individual rather than transferred back into block-funded service systems. Participants would continue to determine how they engage with their communities, who supports them, what relationships they pursue, and what activities give meaning and structure to their lives.

This alternative model would reject the assumption that people with complex support needs should automatically be grouped together for reasons of efficiency. Instead, it would acknowledge that many people require highly individualised and responsive support arrangements precisely because their needs cannot safely or ethically be met through shared models. Community participation would therefore be designed around the individual person rather than around provider convenience or staffing economies of scale.

Within this framework, the role of support workers would also be reconceptualised. Support workers would not simply supervise attendance at programs or transport groups of people between service environments. Their role would be to facilitate genuine citizenship, relationship development, communication, autonomy, emotional co-regulation, and meaningful participation within ordinary community settings. Support would become relational and enabling rather than custodial or program-driven.

Submission 1922

An alternative approach would also recognise that safeguarding is strongest when disabled people have broad, diverse, and freely chosen relationships outside disability service systems. Instead of concentrating people within provider-controlled homes and provider-controlled day activities, the system would intentionally promote:

• independent community connections,
• informal relationship networks,
• local participation,
• self-directed routines,
• and separation between housing, support coordination, daily activities, and community participation.

This separation of powers is critical. When a single provider controls where a person lives, how they spend their days, who supports them, and how they access the community, the risk of dependency, able, overreach, and institutionalisation increases significantly. An alternative model would therefore actively discourage excessive consolidation of support arrangements and instead courage distributed, person-governed support structures that maximise autonomy and accountability.

Importantly, this alternative approach would not ignore concerns about sustainability. Rather, it would redefine what sustainability means. Instead of measuring sustainability solely through short- term budget containment, the system would recognise the long-term human and economic costs of segregation, crisis escalation, restrictive practices, mental health deterioration, carer burnout, hospitalisation, homelessness, and institutional dependence. It would acknowledge that genuine community inclusion often prevents far more costly interventions later.

This model would also align far more closely with the original intent of the NDIS and with Australia’s obligations under Article 19 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which recognises the right of disabled people to live independently and participate fully within the community. Article 19 does not merely require that people be physically present in community settings. It requires that people have genuine choice and control over where and with whom they live, and that they are not obligated to live in particular arrangements as a condition of receiving support.

Under an alternative vision, the NDIS would therefore continue moving away from congregate care and provider-centred systems rather than inadvertently rebuilding them through economic pressure and structural reform. The focus would remain on supporting individually governed lives, especially for people with the highest and most complex support needs. Instead of asking how disabled people can be efficiently fitted into services, the system would ask how supports can be flexibly organised around the rights, aspirations, relationships, and humanity of each individual person.

Submission 1922

Ultimately, the difference between these two approaches is profound. One approach risks recreating modern forms of congregate care through reduced individual funding, shared supports, and provider-controlled participation systems. The other seeks to preserve and strengthen the original transformational promise of the NDIS: That disabled people, including those with the most complex support needs, have the right to live ordinary, self-directed lives as equal citizens within their communities rather than being managed within segregated service systems.

• Social, Economic and Community Participation Changes͟ (Ver 2.0_31.05.2026)
• Page 20͞

Submission 1922

Conclusion

The proposed changes to Social, Economic and Community Participation funding within the National Disability Insurance Scheme represent a defining moment in the future direction of disability policy in Australia. While presented publicly as necessary reforms to improve the sustainability of the Scheme, the combined effect of these amendments has the potential to fundamentally reshape the philosophical foundations upon which the NDIS was originally built.

At the heart of this debate is a critical question about what disabled people are entitled to expect from society itself. The original vision of the NDIS was not simply the provision of care, supervision, or basic service delivery. It was the recognition that disabled people are citizens with the right to direct their own lives, participate fully within their communities, develop meaningful relationships, exercise autonomy, and live free from segregation and institutional control. Individualised funding was deliberately designed to move power away from governments and service providers and place it into the hands of disabled people themselves.

The proposed reforms risk reversing that transformation.

When reductions to individualised community participation funding are combined with increasing reliance on provider-controlled Supported Independent Living models, shared supports, externally commissioned participation programs, and broader Ministerial powers over funding categories, the system begins to recreate many of the structural dynamics that existed before the NDIS. People with the highest and most complex support needs may increasingly find themselves drawn into provider-controlled ecosystems where housing, daily activities, transport, relationships, and community access are organised around administrative efficiency rather than individual aspiration or human rights principles.

This is why the concerns raised by disabled people, advocates, families, and researchers extend far beyond questions of budget reduction alone. The deeper fear is the gradual re-emergence of institutional logic within modern disability services. Reinstitutionalisation does not require the return of large historical institutions. It can emerge through smaller, dispersed systems that nevertheless centralise control within organisations, restrict individual autonomy, separate disabled people from ordinary community life, and normalise congregate forms of support as the default solution for people with complex needs.

dŚĞ ŚŝƐƚŽƌŝĐĂů ǁĂƌŶŝŶŐƐ ĂƌĞ ĂůƌĞĂĚLJ ǁĞůů ĚŽĐƵŵĞŶƚĞĚ͘ ZĞƉŽƌƚƐ ƐƵĐŚ ĂƐ Shut Out, the findings of the Productivity Commission, and the extensive testimony presented to the Disability Royal Commission all described the profound harms caused when disabled people become isolated within provider-controlled systems that prioritise efficiency, risk management, and organisational convenience over identity, autonomy, dignity, and belonging. The NDIS was created precisely because Australia recognised that these systems had failed.

The central issue therefore is not whether governments should pursue sustainability within the NDIS. Sustainability is important. The question is what kind of system Australia is attempting to sustain.

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A disability support system built around individual rights, self-direction, and community inclusion may require investment, flexibility, and trust in disabled people themselves. However, a system that gradually replaces individualised supports with provider-controlled participation programs, congregate living arrangements, and centrally managed funding categories risks producing far greater long-term human, social, and economic costs through segregation, crisis escalation, restrictive practices, loss of autonomy, and institutional dependence.

Ultimately, the proposed reforms force Australia to confront a profound moral and political choice. The nation can continue moving toward the original transformational promise of the NDIS: a society in which disabled people, including those with the highest and most complex support needs, are supported to live ordinary, self-directed lives as equal citizens within their communities. Or it can move back toward modernised forms of congregate care shaped increasingly by economic efficiency, provider control, and administrative containment.

The language surrounding the reforms may emphasise efficiency, consistency, and sustainability. But the true measure of the NDIS will not be found in budget papers or expenditure forecasts. It will be found in the lived realities of disabled people themselves: whether they remain free to direct their own lives, maintain meaningful relationships, participate in ordinary community life, and exist as full and equal citizens rather than becoming absorbed once again into segregated systems designed primarily around the needs of institutions rather than the humanity of the people within them.

Submission 1922

We’ve Been Here Before ² NDIS Amendment Bill 2026

Reflection

The SECP paper’s deepest contribution is to make visible a move that is almost invisible by design. The Bill does not abolish individualised community participation and announce a return to day centres. It creates the power to reduce participation funding at the level of a category, across a whole group of participants, without reassessing a single plan. The cut announced for 1 October 2026 is only the visible edge of this: The paper records that participation budgets are to be reduced by an average of fifty per cent, “reset” toward what the Government describes as 2023 levels, for a category of support the Government itself puts at a cost of more than twelve billion dollars a year. But a one-off reset, however deep, is a number that can be argued about. The more consequential change is not the size of the cut but the machinery the Bill builds around it ■ the standing power that opens the road back to block funding (Schedule 1, Part 4, s 34A).

The distinction matters because of what it does to a participant’s ability to defend their support. A reduction made through an individual plan is, in principle, a decision about a person: assessed, attributable, and contestable. A reduction made at the level of a category is none of those things. There is no individual decision to point to, nothing assessed about the particular person, and so, in practical terms, nothing for them to test or correct. The entitlement does not have to be removed; it only has to be converted into a managed line, and the participant’s capacity to insist on what they need is hollowed out from within. This is the engine the previous movement named, reaching the part of life the Scheme was most distinctively built to protect. it operates inside the new framework planning the Bill constructs, whose standardised assessment and package-budget method turn a category-level decision into an individual’s reduced allocation (Schedule 4, ss 32K–32L). The reworded reasonable-and-necessary test does its part too, supplying the reasons a category-level reduction will be justified: than one-to-one participation is not value for money, that generic programs are available elsewhere, that group participation is reasonable, that another system can meet the need (Schedule 1, Part 6, s 33; with comparison to mainstream and other services at Part 9).

What that pathway leads back to is not a hypothesis. It is the pre-NDIS model, recovered in detail. Before the Scheme, participation for disabled people was commonly delivered through block-funded day programs, centre-based services, and provider-controlled activities: governments funded organisations directly, organisations designed the activities, and disabled people attended whatever was available. The Scheme was created to dismantle precisely that arrangement ■ to take the money out of the organisation’s hands and put it in the person’s, so that supports were built around the individual rather than the individual fitted to a program. The paper’s argument is that the reforms, taken together, rebuild the arrangement the Scheme was meant to end: reduce the individual budget, cap its growth centrally, stand up externally

Submission 1922

We’ve Been Here Before ² NDIS Amendment Bill 2026

funded participation systems outside participants¶ plans, commission organisations to run

“inclusive participation” programs, and watch as participants, their own budgets no longer

sufficient, are drawn into the provider-run group programs that are once again the only thing

on offer. The critical difference from the world the Scheme created is the one that matters

most: the money no longer belongs to the participant. The paper records the ideological frame

already being placed around the shift ² the Minister¶s own observation that the Scheme¶s

individualised approach caused older community programs to “wither away,” a framing that

quietly reinstalls organisations and commissioned programs, rather than the disabled person,

as the centre of participation. The history this collection opened with is exact on this point:

the country¶s settled habit, across a century, has been to change the sign on the door and

preserve the model behind it. Block funding rebuilt under the language of “inclusive

communities“ and “foundational supports” is that habit, performed once more.

The paper does not leave the pathway as an assertion; it sets out the steps by which it would

be travelled, and laying them in sequence shows how little of the journey depends on any single

visible decision. It begins with the reduction of individualised participation funding ² the cut

announced first, from 1 October 2026 ² which makes participant-directed community nsupport financially marginal for many people. It proceeds to the legal power to reduce

participation as a funding category across whole groups, suppressing its growth without reassessing any individual plan. Alongside that suppression, the Government stands up funding systems that sit outside participants¶ plans: foundational supports, and a proposed Inclusive Communities Fund that would direct money to organisations rather than individuals. Organisations are then commissioned to run group “inclusive participation” programs with that money, rebuilding a supply of provider-designed activity. Participants whose individual budgets can no longer sustain one-to-one support are drawn, by simple financial gravity, into those programs as the only thing their funding will reach. And the end state is participation delivered once again as block-funded, provider-controlled group activity ² with the decisive difference being the one the paper keeps returning to: the money no longer belongs to the person. Each step is individually defensible in the language of efficiency and inclusion; only set end to end does the destination become visible. The Inclusive Communities Fund is the clearest tell. A fund that pays organisations to deliver participation, standing beside a participation budget being cut at the level of the individual, is not a complement to participant-directed support; it is its replacement, assembled in plain sight under a name chosen to suggest the opposite.

The risk at the end of this pathway is the one the disability movement spent fifty years escaping. The paper calls it the creation of segregated disability settings ² a return to lives lived, in effect, inside a closed service ecosystem. Its mechanism is the convergence of the two

Submission 1922

                                                         We've Been Here Before ² NDIS Amendment Bill 2026

reforms this collection has examined. Reduce individualised participation funding, and a

person loses the means to take part in ordinary community life on their own terms; default

the same person’s home into a shared, provider-managed arrangement, and the same

organisation that runs their accommodation comes to run their days as well ² housing,

support workers, transport, behaviour support, activities, and access to the community, all

inside one provider’s control. The paper is precise about why this is dangerous, and its

reasoning is the Royal Commission’s: the harm of the institution was never principally about

the size of the building; it was about the concentration of power that occurs when a single

organisation controls where a person lives, how they spend their time, who supports them,

and how they reach the world. When that concentration recurs ² and the reforms, by reducing

individual control and rewarding shared, consolidated provision, create strong incentives for

it to recur ² the ordinary safeguards of an open life recede: the independent eyes, the freely

chosen relationships outside the service system, the visibility that comes from being present

in the community, the simple ability to leave. The paper’s phrase for this is existential

segregation: a person who may live, on paper, “in the community,” yet spends nearly all of

their life within disability-specific settings, surrounded by paid staff and other disabled people,

structurally separated from the ordinary life the Scheme was built to make possible. For its

measure it reaches back to the 2009 Shut Out report, whose account of lives shaped by

segregation, dependency, and exclusion from ordinary citizenship was part of what moved the

country to build something better. The danger is that the reforms would lead, by economic

and structural pressure rather than open declaration, back toward the world Shut Out

described ² the world the Scheme was the country’s answer to.

It is worth holding, against that danger, what community participation actually is for the

people this collection is about, because the reform’s framing depends on misdescribing it. The

Government’s case treats participation support as discretionary ² lifestyle, recreation, an

optional extra on top of a person’s real needs. For participants with complex needs it is nothing

of the kind. Participation is frequently the primary mechanism through which a person

maintains emotional and behavioural regulation, sustains communication, prevents the

isolation that triggers deterioration, and stays connected to the relationships that keep them

safe. It is functionally therapeutic and relationally protective, and inseparable from

safeguarding itself, because an ordinary life in the community is what creates the visibility and

connections that an institutional life removes. To reclassify that support as discretionary, and

to reduce it first, ahead of every other change, is to misunderstand ² or to decline to

understand ² what it does. This is Flynn’s risk-transfer point in its final form: the cost of a

person’s participation is not removed by cutting the funding for it; it is displaced into the

deterioration, the crisis, the restrictive practice, and the eventual congregate placement that

Submission 1922

                                                         We've Been Here Before ² NDIS Amendment Bill 2026

the participation was preventing, and it reappears, larger, on a ledger the sustainability case

does not consult.

The four works are now before the Committee, and it is worth saying what, together, they have

done. From four vantage points they describe a single movement. Flynn¶s analysis read the Bill from the participant¶s chair and showed, provision by provision, what each measure does to a person. The Plan Review paper showed the Agency already reasoning in the Bill¶s direction, before the law has changed, through an undisclosed shared-support threshold. The SIL paper showed shared support becoming the funded default in home and living, on the strength of provider economics rather than published evidence of safety. And this paper has shown individualised funding for community life giving way to control exercised at the level of a category, opening the road back to block-funded group services. Different authors, different subjects, one finding: a Scheme built to place the person at the centre of their own support is being re-engineered to place the budget there instead. The Government does not, in the main, dispute that these are the mechanisms of its Bill. It defends them ² all of them ² with a small, recurring set of justifications, repeated across its press conferences, its second-reading speeches, and its explanatory materials. Those justifications are the last thing standing between the evidence this collection has assembled and the conclusion that evidence compels, and they are what the next movement takes up. The four works have made the case for what the Bill does. The collection now turns to test, one claim at a time, the case the Government makes for being allowed to do it.

                               Flynn & Gregory ² joint submission    Page 299

Submission 1922

We’ve Been Here Before ² NDIS Amendment Bill 2026

Movement VI ² The Government’s Case Dismantled

† ² The method, and the test

There are seven such justifications, and they recur in the same form wherever the Government makes its case: that the scheme must be made sustainable; that integrity must be restored; that the Bill brings consistency and fairness; that it merely clarifies what is reasonable and necessary; that it returns the scheme to its original intent; that it secures the scheme for future generations; that it strengthens safeguarding and quality. This Movement takes them one at a time and tests each of them.

The test is the same for every claim, and it is set out here once so that it need not be restated. We state the Government’s proposition as fairly and as strongly as it can be put. We concede the genuine intuition that gives it force, because each of these claims contains one. We then set out what the legislation actually does ² the mechanism, not the slogan. We measure that mechanism against the documented record: the Productivity Commission that designed the scheme, the Royal Commission that examined what happens when support fails, and the longer history this submission has already traced. We measure it against the scheme’s present decision logic, which the four works have shown is already moving in the Bill’s direction. And we measure it against the lived account the four works contain ² not by adding to that account, which is closed, but by asking what it reveals about the claim. Then we ask the only question that matters: does the claim survive being tested this way? Each sub-section ends with a finding the Committee could adopt, and those findings are written so that the recommendations later in this submission can answer the claims by number.

One discipline runs through all of it. We test each claim first on its own terms, taking the Government’s stated purpose at face value and asking whether the Bill serves it. And where it bites hardest, we test the claim against the terms of the Government’s own Review. We do not need to reject that Review to make the argument. We take it at its word, on the reading its sharpest critics give it ² the Government’s own review, conducted on the Government’s own terms, with sustainability written into its objects ² and we ask whether the Bill does what that Review said must be done, in the way the Review said it must be done. A measure that even the Government’s own review would not sanction cannot be defended as the faithful delivery of it. That is the cross-cutting weapon, and it is anchored in the crosswalk at Appendix F.

What follows is not a complete account of every provision; the per-Part sweep that guarantees that completeness comes later in this Movement. It is the test applied to the justifications on which the Government’s public case actually rests ² taken broadly in the order in which that case is made, beginning with the widest claim of all: that the scheme cannot continue as it is.

Submission 1922

We’ve Been Here Before ² NDIS Amendment Bill 2026

Sustainability

The first and broadest claim is that the scheme’s growth is unsustainable, and that the Bill is the responsible answer. On this account, a scheme whose costs rise without restraint will not survive to help anyone; slowing long-term growth to around five to six per cent, with a tighter two per cent target each year to the end of the decade, and bringing the participant population down from roughly seven hundred and sixty thousand today to about six hundred thousand by 2030, is the discipline required to secure the scheme for the people who will need it tomorrow.

The intuition is sound, and it should be said so plainly. Sustainability genuinely matters. A scheme that is defrauded, or that grows with no regard to cost, endangers itself and everyone who depends on it. No serious participant or advocate argues that public funds are limitless or that stewardship is illegitimate. The question, as Flynn’s analysis puts it, is not whether sustainability matters but what kind of sustainability, and at whose expense.

What the legislation does is pursue that aim by withdrawal at population scale. The mechanism is a set of powers to cap the amount, the intensity, and the worker-to-participant ratio of supports, set for classes of participants and capable of being fixed below what the support actually costs (Sch 1 Pt 6, s 33(2EA)(a)±(c); applies regardless of whether the funding meets the cost of the support, s 33(2EB) note); a power to reduce a funding category across a whole group of participants without reassessing any individual plan (Sch 1 Pt 4, s 34A); community-participation budgets reset downward, with the average plan in that area moving from around thirty-one thousand dollars to around twenty-six thousand from 1 October 2026 (the Government’s announced timetable; the reduction is effected through the new budget method, Sch 1 Pt 4 and Sch 4 s 32K); and a narrowing of access that decides who keeps a place at all. The headline reduction is a net figure, and the Government has given no account of which people lose their place, or how. That silence is itself significant. A reduction of roughly a hundred and sixty thousand places, expressed only as a movement in a population total, conceals every individual decision that must be made to reach it: who is reassessed out, who fails to re-establish eligibility under a narrower test, who simply falls away when a plan rolls over with less in it than before. A target set at the level of a population, with no transparent account of how it falls across real people, is a decision to reduce the scheme without owning the consequences for those reduced out of it.

The documented record shows why this externalises cost rather than removing it. The Royal Commission estimated the annual societal cost of violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation of disabled Australians at around forty-six billion dollars - a figure larger, in a single year, than the entire annual cost of the scheme being cut - and found that congregated settings

Submission 1922

We’ve Been Here Before ² NDIS Amendment Bill 2026

concentrate that harm. The supports now being withdrawn are, for many participants,

precisely what keeps them out of those settings. As Flynn’s analysis sets out, the cost of

complex disability does not disappear when support is cut; it migrates into hospitals, into

families, into crisis, and onto other lines of the Commonwealth’s own budget through the

Disability Support Pension and Carer Payment when participants and their carers are forced

out of paid work.

Present practice already confirms the direction. The four works show that funding components

below the real cost of support are not a future risk but a current reality; the Bill’s contribution

gives that practice statutory authority. And the lived account, which we do not extend here, (records what withdrawal at this scale produces: on Flynn’s reading of the only published independent modelling, the scheme returns in the order of two dollars and twenty-five cents (to the economy for every dollar spent, and every billion dollars cut removes around ten thousand jobs across the economy - a contraction estimated at roughly two hundred thousand positions in total, around a hundred and forty thousand of them directly in the (disability workforce. The same logic reverses the scheme’s employment dividend, lowering rather than raising a disability labour-force participation rate that has sat near fifty-three per cent, against eighty-three for other Australians, for close to two decades.

The claim therefore fails on its own terms. A saving that reappears as a larger cost elsewhere is not a saving; it is a transfer from disabled people, from a low-paid and regional workforce, and from other Budget lines, to the one line declared unsustainable. And it fails on the Government’s own terms too. Even the Review tied sustainability to insurance discipline and to building the surrounding supports first, in careful sequence; it did not contemplate withdrawing supports ahead of the system meant to replace them. The growth cap, moreover, was set by National Cabinet in April 2023, months before the Review reported - the financial answer was fixed before the question was fully asked. On the timetable as scheduled, the reductions precede the supports. Even on the Review’s own terms, the sustainability claim is not made out.

Recommended finding (6.1): The Committee should find that the Bill externalises rather than reduces disability-related public cost, and that population-scale withdrawal of supports ahead of the foundational supports meant to replace them is not “sustainability” in any sense the scheme’s own Review would recognise, but the displacement of cost and risk onto participants, families, the workforce, and other parts of government.

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Integrity

The second claim is that the scheme has been exploited and that the Bill restores its integrity.

Civil penalty provisions, the standard monitoring and investigation toolkit of the Regulatory Powers Act, records-retention obligations, expanded debt recovery, and new offences for obtaining payments by deception are presented as the means of protecting participants and the public purse from those who have stolen money meant for disabled people.

Here too the intuition is real and should be granted without qualification. Fraud in the scheme is a genuine problem; the scheme has been exploited by bad actors, and pursuing them is legitimate. As Flynn¶s account states without hedging, no serious participant or advocate would deny it. A scheme indifferent to fraud would not survive, and would not deserve to.

What the legislation does, however, is build an integrity architecture that lands on the ordinary participant as heavily as on the wrongdoer. Records-retention duties now reach participants in respect of their own claims (Sch 2 Pt 4); information demands carry penalties (Sch 2 Pt 3); a plan can be suspended where the Agency simply cannot reach the participant (Sch 1 Pt 7, s 40A); and a plan can roll over and silently shed approved one-off funding with no decision that anyone can review (Sch 1 Pt 5, s 50A; the renewal is stated not to involve a reviewable decision, note to s 103A). Flynn¶s worked example makes the mechanism vivid: a one-off allocation for something like a wheelchair, approved once, can simply fail to carry forward at renewal ² not refused, not reviewed, merely absent ² so that the loss arrives without any decision a person could point to and contest. Flynn¶s analysis offers the right diagnostic: ask of each provision what mistake by an ordinary participant ² not a fraudster, but a person doing their best in a complicated life ² it would punish. Each of these answers the question.

And at the very moment decision-making is being remade, the central safeguard against a wrong decision is left in doubt: the Government has not confirmed that participants will retain full access to independent merits review (the mechanism is examined at 6.7±6.8).

The documented design of the scheme shows what is actually being targeted. The Productivity Commission built the Agency as assessor and funder, with self-directed funding and the direct engagement of one¶s own workers as core features of choice and control. Powers that constrain self-management and direct employment are not, in their nature, anti-fraud measures; they are constraints on autonomy. The distinction matters because it tracks where the misconduct actually sits. Serious fraud in schemes of this kind is overwhelmingly the work of organised actors and providers operating at scale ² false invoicing, phantom services, billing for supports never delivered ² rather than the self-managing participant arranging their own care. An architecture whose heaviest obligations fall on participants is therefore aimed away from the conduct it names: it multiplies the points at which an honest person can fail a

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paperwork test, while the deliberate fraudster, who keeps meticulous records precisely because the fraud is planned, is comparatively untouched. The present trajectory already treats the participant as a risk to be audited rather than a person to be served, and the Bill consolidates that posture.

The lived account, which we only point to, makes the cost concrete: a twenty-year record of self-directed support, and the ordinary participant who misplaces a document years after it was generated, or who cannot be reached during a health crisis, caught by provisions written in the name of integrity. The claim fails because it conflates the rare bad actor with the ordinary participant. A scheme that imagined its participants accurately would build integrity in two layers ² focused force against those genuinely defrauding it, and real care for the many doing their best, supported through compliance rather than punished by it. The Bill draws no such line, and so it lands hardest on the larger, more reachable population. The timing sharpens the concern. Independent merits review matters most precisely when the rules are changing and decisions are being remade at volume ² which is exactly the moment the Bill chooses to leave that right unconfirmed. The ability to challenge a wrong decision is least dispensable in the period when wrong decisions are most likely; to remake the whole apparatus of assessment and planning while the avenue of appeal sits in doubt is to withdraw the safeguard at the very point of greatest need for it. Even the Review framed integrity as something owed to participants and tied it to the preservation of independent review; on its terms, an architecture that burdens participants while leaving their appeal rights uncertain is not the integrity the Review had in mind.

Recommended finding (6.2):

The Committee should find that genuine fraud warrants focused enforcement directed at wrongdoers, and recommend that the Bill¶s integrity provisions be confined to bad actors, that self-management and the direct employment of support workers be expressly protected, and that full access to independent merits review be guaranteed in the primary legislation.

† ² Consistency and fairness

The third claim is that like cases should be treated alike, and that the Bill delivers consistency and fairness: similar supports for similar needs, an end to the postcode lottery and to variation that looks arbitrary from the outside. It is among the most attractive of the Government¶s propositions, because consistency is a real virtue and the scheme has had real inconsistency.

The intuition deserves a fair hearing. Two people with materially similar needs should not receive wildly different supports for reasons that have nothing to do with their needs; arbitrary variation is itself a kind of unfairness, and standard categories sound like the cure for it.

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What the legislation does is recast consistency as standardisation. Caps on amount, intensity, and ratio are set at the level of a class of participants rather than the individual (Sch 1 Pt 6, s 33(2EA)); access and planning run through a standardised functional-capacity instrument, which public reporting indicates will be administered by assessors chosen for generic interpersonal skills rather than clinical qualification (Sch 4, s 32L ² the needs-assessment instrument and who may undertake it, s 32L(4A); new framework, ss 32B±32K); and a participant’s budget is first compared against the generic allocation for their category, and restored toward their actual need only through an exception they must themselves identify, drive, and document.

Flynn’s point about defaults is decisive here: systems are governed by their defaults, not their exceptions, and for the person whose communication or cognition makes exception-driving hard, the default is the experience and the exception is theoretical.

The documented record explains why this is not fairness. The Productivity Commission’s blueprint was individualisation ² supports based on each person’s assessed need, delivered through individualised rather than block funding. Standardisation flattens exactly the differences the scheme exists to recognise ² and the instrument through which it does so compounds the problem. As Flynn’s reading of the functional-capacity test shows, an assessment that measures the person in the abstract, stripped of the actual environment they live in, cannot see the barriers that make two people with the same diagnosis lead very different lives; it produces a figure that looks objective while describing no one’s real circumstances. A standardised score, generated by an instrument blind to context, then becomes the gateway to a standardised allocation ² the appearance of fairness resting on a measurement that has already discarded what makes each person’s need particular. Put plainly, the gateway measures the one thing the scheme’s own founding Convention says disability is not ² the impairment abstracted from the world in which it is lived ² and gives that measure disability’s name. That is not a high threshold rigorously applied; it is the wrong object measured precisely.

As When the System Forgets to Listen puts it, there is nothing equitable about giving two people the same support ratio when their bodies, their risks, their homes, their communities, and their support requirements are not the same. Equity is not sameness; formal equality of inputs, applied to unequal needs, produces deeply unequal safety.

Present practice shows the standardising logic already at work. The four works record a planning culture that has begun to start from cost rather than need ² asking, in effect, whether a cheaper shared model can be shown to cause harm, rather than what model the person actually requires to be safe. The lived account, which we do not add to, traces the difference between support built around a life and support that forces a life into someone else’s model, and records which of the two is safe. The claim fails because it confuses sameness with equity.

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Consistency-as-standardisation produces unequal safety, and it falls hardest on the people whose needs are least standard — the very people the scheme was designed to protect. There is a further irony in the consistency framing. The promise is to end the postcode lottery, yet a standard allocation does not produce a standard outcome where the market is thin: in regional and remote areas, and in the specialised corners of metropolitan markets, a uniform price secures a real service only where a provider actually operates at that price, and a cap pitched at a notional average can leave the person in an under-served area with a number on paper and nothing to spend it on. Standardising the allocation does not standardise access; it can widen the very gap it claims to close. Even the Review pointed toward planning centred on the person’s needs and goals, not toward a standardised allocation; measured against its own direction, the consistency claim describes a flattening the Review did not endorse.

Recommended finding (6.3): The Committee should find that fairness in a disability scheme is delivered through individualisation, not standardisation, and that class-level caps and standardised allocations applied to unequal needs are inconsistent with the scheme’s own equity objective and with the individualised design the Productivity Commission established.

† $ — Reasonable and necessary, family contribution, and other- scheme displacement

A related cluster of changes is presented not as cuts but as clarification. On this account the Bill simply tidies a “reasonable and necessary” test that has been criticised as unclear, confirms that families bear their own ordinary costs, and ensures the NDIS funds disability supports rather than the services other systems should be providing.

Each of these has a genuine premise. The reasonable-and-necessary test has drawn real criticism for vagueness. Families do meet ordinary living costs, as every household does. And the Review’s own diagnosis was that the scheme had become the only support available because the systems around it had withered, so the aspiration to rebuild those surrounding systems is legitimate.

What the legislation does, though, is narrow the entitlement in substance while describing the change as a clarification. The scheme’s objects are reworded so that reasonable and necessary supports are to be provided only so far as is consistent with the scheme’s financial sustainability (objects, Sch 1 Pt 6 s 3(1)(d) and s 4; and the new scheme-sustainability principles, s 17B); a new principle declares the participant responsible for their day-to-day living costs (Sch 1 Pt 6 — new s 17A planning principles and the reasonable-and-necessary criteria, s 34); a value-for-money requirement directs the decision-maker toward a cheaper comparable support (Sch 1 Pt 6, s 34 — value-for-money criterion within reasonable and

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necessary); funded supports must arise directly from the impairment that gave access (Sch 1 Pt 3, s 34(1)(aa)); and eligibility can be narrowed where another service system is said to be more appropriate (Sch 1 Pt 9, s 25B). Taken together, as Flynn’s analysis shows, these convert reasonable and necessary from a test applied to a person’s actual needs into a lever applied to a budget. The documented record identifies the manoeuvre for what it is: cost-shifting onto families and other systems, which is the very thing the scheme was built to end. The Productivity Commission’s diagnosis of the old arrangements was that they left disabled people with little choice and no certainty, precisely because support depended on what some other program would or would not provide. “More appropriate elsewhere” is a sound principle only where the “elsewhere” exists, is funded, and is available; absent that, it is the withdraw-first, replace-later pattern that produced the worst failures this submission has documented. Present practice already reclassifies disability-related cost as personal cost one line item at a time, and the Social and Community Participation paper records the same move at the level of policy language, with participation supports recast as something other systems, families, or volunteers should carry. The lived account, which we only reference, draws the distinction the Bill blurs: the additional costs that exist only because a person’s disability support must travel with them — a worker’s travel, accommodation, and rostering — are support costs, not lifestyle costs, and short-term accommodation is a disability support, not a holiday. The claim fails because a clarification that changes outcomes is not a clarification. The amendments move the costs of disability back onto disabled people, and onto systems that are neither built nor funded to carry them. Two features of the drafting deserve particular notice. The requirement that a funded support arise directly from the impairment that gave access misdescribes how disability is actually lived: many participants have more than one condition, and their needs arise from the interaction of those conditions with each other and with the world, not from a single impairment that can be isolated on a form. A test that funds only what can be traced to the access impairment will leave the compounded needs of people with multiple disabilities unmet by design. And the displacement to “other systems” rests on a promise that remains unkept: the foundational supports meant to catch what the scheme sheds have, as disability representative organisations have observed, no confirmed start date and no guarantee attached to them. The narrowing of the entitlement is legislated now, while the systems meant to receive the displaced need are still notional; to shift need onto an ecosystem that does not yet exist is not to clarify a boundary but to open a gap. Even the Review’s substantive direction was toward needs-based, individualised support, with the surrounding ecosystem rebuilt first; the Bill

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narrows the entitlement while the systems meant to receive the displaced need remain

undesigned.

Recommended finding (6.3A): The Committee should find that the reasonable-and- necessary amendments effect a substantive narrowing rather than a clarification, and recommend that no displacement of cost to families or to other service systems take effect unless and until those systems are demonstrably available, adequately funded, and able to provide the displaced supports.

† ² Return to original intent

The fourth claim is the one the Government invokes most readily: that the Bill returns the scheme to its original intent. The NDIS, on this telling, was never meant to fund everything for everyone; it has drifted from the disciplined, targeted scheme the Productivity Commission designed, and the Bill restores it.

The appeal of the claim is obvious. Arguments from origins are powerful, the scheme has indeed grown beyond its early projections, and “return to intent” sounds like fidelity rather than retreat. Many who use the phrase mean it sincerely.

But the intent the Bill invokes points the opposite way to the Bill. The 2011 design was an individualised, needs-based, choice-driven entitlement whose defining move was the redistribution of authority away from systems and toward people ² with funding as the instrument, not the purpose. And its defining structural feature was insulation: the Commission designed the scheme’s funding to be entrenched in legislation and protected from the ordinary annual contest of the budget, with financial sustainability a statutory obligation rather than a rationing rule. What the legislation now does is reverse that. It repeals the participant-centred planning principles and replaces them with principles headed by the scheme’s sustainability (Sch 1 Pt 6 item 66 repeals the s 31 participant-centred principles; ew ss 17A±17B substitute, headed by scheme sustainability, s 17B); it rewords the scheme’s promise of reasonable and necessary support as a function of sustainability (objects qualified by financial sustainability, Sch 1 Pt 6 s 3(1)(d) and s 4; cf. s 209(3)); and it ties the scheme’s obligations to the actuary’s reports and the fiscal envelope. Flynn’s analysis names the moment precisely: this is the law being rewritten so that the participant is no longer the centre of their own plan.

The documented record turns the claim against itself, and this is where the cross-cutting weapon bites hardest. The Productivity Commission’s crux was that the scheme’s funding should not be tied to the annual budget cycle. It warned, in terms that read as a description of this Bill, that the scheme would be undermined if its funding came to reflect the “vagaries of” Flynn & Gregory ² joint submission Page 308

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The original intent was insulation from exactly the logic the Bill installs. And the second document the Government leans on ² its own Review ² points the same way. Even read at its word, the Review¶s direction was needs-based, individualised, community-based support; it made improved foundational supports “a necessary precondition” of participant-pathway reform; it required its recommendations to move as a single package over a five-year transition, sequenced to protect existing participants, and built through genuine co-design.

The Bill departs from each of these. On the Government¶s own documents, read against one another, “return to original intent” is self-refuting: the very authorities invoked to support it ² the Productivity Commission that defined the intent, and the Review the Government commissioned ² both describe a scheme moving in the opposite direction to this one.

Present practice and the lived account complete the picture. The scheme¶s decision logic already subordinates need to budget; the Bill, as Flynn¶s account observes, converts that administrative drift into legislative settlement. And the historical record this submission has traced shows the deeper truth of it: the blueprint attached two preconditions ² sustained co- design and protected, certain funding ² and both were among the first things stripped away, leaving the scheme to run the 2011 design without the 2011 conditions. The pattern is not new, and this submission has named it before. When the Agency last attempted to impose a standardised assessment ² the independent-assessments proposal ² it was advanced without genuine co-design and refused by the community precisely because it placed an administrative instrument ahead of the person. The same instinct, to settle the funding question first and design the person¶s role around the answer, runs through this Bill; what was once resisted as a proposal is now being enacted as a structure. The claim fails because the Bill does not return to the original intent; it completes the departure from it. It is worth being precise about the structure of the failure. The claim does not merely lack support in the documents it cites; it is contradicted by them. The Productivity Commission that defined the intent, and the Review the Government itself commissioned, both describe insulation, individualisation and careful sequencing ² and the Bill delivers the reverse of each. A claim refuted by its own authorities is not weakly supported; it is self-defeating. Restoring the scheme¶s name while inverting its founding logic is not fidelity to that logic.

Recommended finding (6.4):

The Committee should find that the Bill departs from, rather than returns to, the scheme¶s original intent ² defined by the Productivity Commission in 2011 as an individualised, needs-based, choice-driven entitlement insulated from the budget cycle, and reaffirmed in substance by the Government¶s own Review ² and should treat “return to original intent” as unsupported, indeed contradicted, by the documents on which it relies.

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† ² Future generations

The fifth claim is encoded in the Bill’s own name: that the measures secure the NDIS for future

generations, so that restraint now guarantees the scheme will still exist for those who will need

it. It is offered as an act of stewardship across time.

The obligation it appeals to is real. Stewardship across generations is a genuine duty; no one

wishes the scheme to collapse under its own cost; and “securing it for the future” sounds like

care rather than contraction.

But the means by which the Bill proposes to secure the future reproduce the conditions of the

past. Shared support becomes the path of least resistance; class-level ratios may be set below

cost; home and living provision is steered toward configurations organised around provider

viability and workforce economics (shared-support economics: Sch 1 Pt 6 s 33(2EA) maximum

amount, intensity and worker-to-participant ratio with s 33(2EB) note; pricing, Sch 3 Pt 1 s

45C; new framework, Sch 4 s 32K); and individualised funding for community life gives way

to control at the level of a category (Sch 1 Pt 4, s 34A). Securing the name of the scheme is not

the same as securing the thing the scheme exists to provide.

The documented record is, on this claim, at its most damning. The Royal Commission ²

established in 2019, reporting in 2023 after four years, twelve volumes, two hundred and

twenty-two recommendations and some six hundred million dollars ² found unanimously

that segregated and congregate settings are where violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation

concentrate, and that no one should be compelled into disability-only settings; it identified

around seventeen thousand people in group homes as being at significant risk. The

Government’s response accepted outright only around thirteen of the two hundred and

twenty-two recommendations, and deferred the recommendations on segregation on the

ground that the commissioners had differed ² so that the experts’ division became, in effect,

the reason to do almost nothing. There is a structural reason this matters more than the

headline figures suggest. On Flynn’s analysis, a small share of participants ² in the order of

five per cent ² accounts for roughly a third of the scheme’s cost, because their needs are the

most complex and the most expensive to meet safely. These are precisely the people for whom

shared, capped and congregate models are least appropriate and most dangerous; yet they are

exactly the people a cost-driven default will push hardest toward those models. Securing the

scheme by reducing what it spends on its highest-need participants does not secure those

participants; it exposes them. A scheme that now drives people toward the settings that inquiry

condemned does not secure their future; it reproduces the harm the country has just spent

four years and that sum documenting.

Flynn & Gregory ² joint submission Page 310

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Present practice confirms the drift. The SIL paper documents shared support becoming the

default in home and living, driven by provider sustainability and workforce management

ather than by any published safety evidence, and shows that the proposed one-to-three staffing ratio rests on little public evidence that it is safe, clinically appropriate, or compatible with the Convention’s guarantee of the right to live in the community. The lived account, which we only reference, states the consequence directly: as Flynn’s analysis puts it, institutionalisation is not only a building type but a relationship of control, a person can be institutionalisied in a setting that looks domestic, and shared ratios imposed by default are containment with nicer language. The claim fails because a scheme that entrenches segregation and congregate logic now cannot secure its purpose later; the thing to be secured is an ordinary life in the community, and the Bill makes that harder. The country has run this experiment before. The long, hard-won movement out of institutions was driven by the recognition that congregate care produces harm no amount of regulation inside it can cure; to rebuild the conditions of congregation now, under fiscal pressure, is to walk back a reform the nation spent decades achieving. A scheme that quietly re-creates the settings deinstitutiohalisation was meant to end cannot claim to be securing anything for the generations who will inherit it. Even the Review’s direction was to reduce reliance on segregated and congregate settings and to protect existing participants. Even on the Review’s own terms, a contraction that pushes people back toward condemned settings does not secure the scheme - it endangers the people it is for.

Recommended finding (6.5):

The Committee should find that measures which increase reliance on congregate and shared-by-default settings cannot “secure” the scheme’s purpose for future generations, and recommend that no shared-support ratio be adopted as a default without a published safety and evidence base, that housing be kept separable from support, and that the Royal Commission’s findings on segregation be treated as a binding constraint on the design of home and living supports.

Safeguarding and quality

The last claim taken up in this part is that the Bill strengthens safeguarding and quality. Mandatory registration, new practice standards, expanded powers for the Commission, and the separation of plan management from support delivery are presented as protections that make participants safer.

After the Royal Commission’s record of abuse, this is not merely defensible but, on its face, odue. Stronger oversight reads as protection; quality regulation reads as safety; and everyone wants disabled people to be safe. The premise is granted in full.

Flynn & Gregory ² joint submission Page 311

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What the legislation does, however, sits in tension with the safety it promises. The provider- facing measures place plan management under a dedicated, tightly conditioned registration regime and give the Minister a structured power to set prices (plan-management registration, Sch 2 Pt 6; the Minister’s pricing power, Sch 3 Pt 1 s 45C), alongside the mandatory registration of supported-living providers and new practice standards already announced for the middle of 2026. But, as Flynn’s analysis of the market shows, heavily conditioned registration tends to favour large, generic providers over the small, specialised ones that complex participants depend on, and a pricing regime that underprices high-skill, low-volume support will, over time, remove the providers who deliver it - not by banning them, but by making the work uneconomic. More fundamentally, this safeguarding model is coupled to shared support by default (default shared support: Sch 1 Pt 6 s 33(2EA); pricing, Sch 3 Pt 1 s 45C; framework, Sch 4): it strengthens oversight of the very settings the Royal Commission identified as the most dangerous in the system.

The documented record exposes the contradiction. The Commission’s central finding was that congregation concentrates harm; safeguarding that steers people into congregate settings is therefore self-defeating. And the Commission’s own prescription was structural, not merely regulatory: that no one be compelled into disability-only settings, that group homes be phased out - a course four of the six commissioners recommended within fifteen years - and that the Convention be translated into an enforceable Disability Rights Act. Regulatory uplift is not a substitute for those recommendations; it is being offered in their place while they are deferred. The substitution is the heart of the objection. The Royal Commission did not recommend better paperwork around the existing service model; it recommended a change in the legal standing of disabled people - rights made enforceable, segregation wound back as a matter of entitlement rather than discretion. To answer that call with an expanded registration scheme is to offer process where the Commission asked for protection, and to present the smaller, administrable reform as though it discharged the larger, structural one.

Present practice shows safeguarding already leaning on congregate oversight, and the SIL paper records the same logic dressed in the language of quality and stewardship. The lived account, which we only reference, describes what safety actually depends on: support involves intimacy, trust, and presence in the most private parts of a life, and, as When the System Forgets to Listen puts it, a system that treats workers as interchangeable fails to understand the intimacy of support. Safety, on this account, is built from autonomy, continuity, and trusted relationships, and the SIL paper’s alternative makes the same case - safeguarding reconceived around trusted relationships, continuity, and community inclusion rather than congregate control. The claim fails because quality regulation of a service model the country’s most exhaustive inquiry condemned is not safety; it is better-regulated risk.

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safeguarding model carries a market consequence that runs directly against safety. By

privileging scale and standardisation, it erodes the conditions in which continuity of

relationship can survive: the small, specialist provider who keeps the same worker alongside

the same person for years is precisely the provider least able to absorb registration overhead

and underpricing, and most likely to exit. Safety built on trusted, enduring relationships

cannot be regulated into existence while the economics quietly dismantle the providers who

furnish those relationships. Even the Review¶s safeguarding emphasis, and its concern to

protect existing participants, is not satisfied where the system¶s default steers people toward

shared and congregate settings.

Recommended finding (6.6): The Committee should find that safeguarding cannot be

advanced by measures that increase congregate living, and recommend that quality reform

protect small specialist providers through pricing that reflects the true cost of complex

support, preserve continuity and choice of support worker, and be implemented together with

the Royal Commission¶s structural recommendations ² not offered as a substitute for them.

† ² Fairness, transparency and review

The seventh claim is that the Bill makes the scheme fairer and more transparent, and that it

preserves the participant¶s ability to have a decision reviewed. On this account a standardised

assessment applied to everyone is fairer than the uneven, discretionary judgements of the past;

a clear method produces decisions that are consistent and defensible rather than arbitrary;

and the ordinary protections of administrative law remain in place, so that a person who

disagrees with an outcome can still have it examined. Fairness and transparency, the argument

runs, are precisely what the old system lacked, and the Bill supplies them.

The intuition is not only real but important, and it should be granted at its full strength.

Opacity is itself a form of unfairness. A scheme whose decisions cannot be understood, whose

reasons cannot be examined, and whose outcomes vary for reasons no one can explain treats

the people inside it as subjects rather than citizens. The aspiration to consistent, explicable,

reviewable decision-making is one the disability community has itself pressed for years, and

no one defending participants would defend arbitrariness. The question is not whether

transparency and review matter ² they matter more than almost anything else the Bill touches

² but whether this Bill delivers them or removes them.

What the legislation actually does is reduce, at several points at once, the participant¶s capacity

to know, to test, and to correct a decision about their own life. Access and planning are routed

through a standardised functional-capacity instrument whose content the community has not

seen (Sch 4, s 32L assessment instrument and the new framework method, s 32K); the

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methodology that converts an assessment into a budget ² the calculation on which the entire entitlement turns ² is to be set by delegated instrument and is not disclosed (the budget method is fixed by delegated rules ² Sch 4, s 32K, esp. s 32K(3B)±(3E)); the grounds and occasions for reassessment and variation are narrowed (Sch 1 Pt 2 ² narrowed unscheduled reassessment, s 48 and the reassessment limits); and much of the operative substance is moved out of the Act and into rules the Parliament and the public will see only after the fact (operative matters left to rules and instruments ² s 32K, s 32L, s 34A, s 209; transitional power Sch 5 item 1). Above all, at the very moment the apparatus of assessment and planning is being remade, the Government has not confirmed that participants will retain full access to independent merits review of decisions under the new system (the amending text neither names nor preserves the Tribunal; the cumulative effect is set out at 6.8 and in Movement VII ² ss 99±100, s 50A, s 34A, s 59B). The single thread running through these changes is the withdrawal of the means by which a person could find out why, and contest it.

The documented record shows why this is the most serious failure of all, because procedural fairness is not one value among many but the value that protects every other. The Productivity Commission built the scheme on a promise of certainty and individual entitlement ² a person was to know what they were entitled to and why, and to be able to rely on it. The Royal Commission¶s entire account of how harm occurs turned on disabled people not being heard and not being able to challenge what was done to them; opacity is the precondition of unaccountable harm, and the inquiry said so across thousands of pages. And the Government¶s own Review, taken at its word, pursued integrity in participants¶ interests while expressly insisting that participants retain access to independent review, and called for transparency over the automated and methodological decisions the scheme makes. On the record the Government itself relies upon, the means of knowing and contesting a decision is treated as fundamental ² which is exactly what the Bill leaves in doubt.

Present practice confirms that the new architecture narrows what can be seen of the person at every step, and then makes the result hard to examine. As Flynn¶s analysis of the new planning framework sets out, individualised clinical evidence ² produced by professionals who actually know the participant ² is replaced by a standardised instrument administered by assessors recruited for generic interpersonal skills rather than clinical qualification, applied to a person abstracted from the environment they live in, weighted by sustainability, and run through caps that may sit below cost. Flynn¶s analysis draws the consequence with precision: the framework does not correct under-funding so much as conceal it, routing the shortfall through processes too standardised, too automated, and too unreviewable to be visible as under-funding from the outside. That this under-funding is real is not in dispute even by the scheme¶s managers; The Minister has publicly acknowledged that a substantial share of participants ² put at

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around twenty per cent ² are funded below what they need. A process that hides a known

correction mechanism for all the others. A right left unconfirmed at the very moment decision-making is remade is a right removed exactly when it is most needed. And even on the Government¶s own terms, the claim is not made out: the Review the Government relies on required transparency over automated and methodological decisions and the preservation of independent review, and the Bill delivers neither. Even on the Review¶s own terms, the fairness claim collapses.

Recommended finding (6.7): The Committee should find that the Bill reduces rather than enhances fairness and transparency, and that the loss of disclosure and review operates as a multiplier of every other harm in the Bill. It should recommend that full access to independent merits review be guaranteed in the primary legislation; that the assessment instrument and the budget-setting methodology be published, and that participants receive a statement of reasons for decisions affecting their funding; and that the substantive elements of the scheme be set in the Act, subject to parliamentary scrutiny, rather than in undisclosed delegated rules.

Flynn & Gregory ² joint submission Page 315

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• Efficiency and automation

The eighth claim is that the Bill makes the scheme more efficient, in part by allowing routine administrative actions to be carried out automatically. Automation, on this view, reduces delay, removes inconsistency, frees staff from mechanical tasks, and lets scarce resources go to supports rather than to process. A scheme of this scale, the argument concludes, cannot be run by hand, and modern administration properly uses computers to do at speed what people would otherwise do slowly and unevenly.

There is real force in this, and it should be conceded plainly. Delay in the scheme is itself a harm: people wait months for decisions that govern their daily lives, and faster processing would be a genuine kindness. Inconsistency born of human variability is a real unfairness, and reducing it is a legitimate aim. Automation has proper uses in any large administrative system, and a reflexive hostility to it would be neither serious nor fair. The objection that follows is not to efficiency, and not to automation as such, but to what this Bill automates and to what it removes in the process.

What the legislation does is take a set of decisions that bear directly on a participant’s entitlement and make them capable of being executed by the operation of a computer program, with the list of decisions amenable to automation expandable by instrument (Sch 3 Pt 2, s 59B – including action involving a discretion, evaluative judgement or state of mind, s 59B(4), with designated provisions expandable by instrument). It does this against a background in which several of those decisions have been carefully drafted so as not to be reviewable: a plan can renew automatically and shed approved one-off funding with no reviewable decision attached (Sch 1 Pt 5, s 50A; the renewal is stated not to involve a reviewable decision, note to s 103A); a plan can be suspended on grounds – a participant who cannot be reached – that reduce neatly to a rule a machine can apply (Sch 1 Pt 7, s 40A); and information demands lend themselves to automated generation and dispatch (Sch 2 Pt 3 – information-gathering powers and notices). The combination is the point: automation laid over decisions that have been removed from review.

The documented record counsels particular caution here, because the country has run a version of this experiment and knows how it ends. The Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme examined what happens when administrative decisions affecting vulnerable people are produced by an automated process operating at scale without adequate human judgement or accessible avenues of challenge, and found that the result was decisions made unlawfully and serious harm done to the people on the receiving end. The lesson was not that computers are dangerous but that automating a flawed or unaccountable decision does not make it sound – it makes it fast, and it multiplies it. That Commission did more than diagnose the failure: it

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recommended that any future automation of government decisions be built with a clear pathway to review, with transparency about how and why a decision is made, and ² in its words ² with human agency at its centre; and the Government accepted those recommendations. This Bill, drafted only a short time later, moves the other way ² authorising the automation of evaluative judgements and leaving their reviewability to a deeming provision (s 59B), rather than guaranteeing the review the earlier failure showed to be indispensable. The design premise of the scheme, as the Productivity Commission framed it, was that decisions about a person¶s entitlement are consequential enough to require accountable, reviewable judgement; the Review, for its part, sought transparency precisely over the scheme¶s automated and methodological decisions. Both point the same way: automation is acceptable where the decision remains visible and contestable, and dangerous where it does not.

Present practice, as Flynn¶s analysis sets out, shows the danger in its specific form. Taken one at a time, each automation looks like housekeeping; taken together, they describe a system in which a participant¶s plan can be renewed, their funding stripped, their plan suspended, their information demanded, and their status put in question without a single human officer ever picking up the file. Flynn¶s account names the result exactly: the decision-maker disappears, not by announcement but as the cumulative effect of provisions that individually resemble efficiency. And it draws the consequence that matters for this claim ² when the wheelchair is refused, there is no officer who decided; when the plan is suspended, no one weighed the circumstances; the thing happens to the participant with no person on the other end of it.

Automating a decision that has already been drafted out of reviewability removes nothing a human was otherwise going to give the participant; it simply ensures the loss arrives with no author and no remedy.

The lived account, which we do not extend, supplies the human shape of this. The four works describe the participant whose custom equipment is mid-delivery when the plan ticks over and whose funding vanishes by operation of a rule rather than by anyone¶s decision; and the participant who cannot be reached during a health crisis and whose support is suspended by a process that mistakes the disability for non-engagement. In each case the harm is done by the system as such, to the person least able to absorb it, and with no decision they can point to and contest.

The claim therefore fails, because efficiency that removes the ability to contest is not efficiency ² it is the quiet transfer of the cost of error from the system to the participant. A black-boxed outcome cannot be meaningfully appealed: a person cannot challenge reasoning that is never disclosed, and cannot seek review of an action that has been defined as not reviewable.

Measured honestly, efficiency must count not only the administrative cost of making decisions

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but the human cost of the wrong decisions that can no longer be corrected; a process optimised only for the first while suppressing the second is not efficient but merely cheap to run and expensive to be subject to. This is the same failure that condemns the fairness claim, in a sharper form: automation here is the engine that drives the opacity of † to scale. Even on the Government¶s own terms ² the Review¶s insistence on transparency over automated decisions ² a regime that couples automation to unreviewable, undisclosed outcomes is not the efficient administration the Review envisaged.

Recommended finding (6.8):

The Committee should find that automating decisions which affect a participant¶s funding or status, when those decisions have been drafted to be unreviewable and their reasoning is not disclosed, is incompatible with lawful and fair administration and repeats a failure the country has already paid for. It should recommend that no decision affecting a participant¶s funding, plan, or status be made solely by automated means without a responsible human decision-maker, a statement of reasons, and a full right of review.

† ² Flexibility through rules

The ninth claim is that leaving much of the detail to rules and legislative instruments gives the scheme the flexibility it needs. Primary legislation is slow to change; a scheme this complex must be able to adjust to evidence, correct problems, and respond to circumstances without returning to the Parliament for every adjustment. Delegated rule-making, on this account, is ordinary, sensible, and ultimately in participants¶ interests, because it lets the scheme adapt around them.

The premise is partly sound, and the concession should be made without grudging. No scheme of this size can place every operational detail in an Act; some matters genuinely belong in subordinate instruments; and the capacity to adjust quickly can, in the right hands and on the right matters, serve participants well. Delegated legislation is a normal feature of modern government, and the objection here is not to its existence. It is to what has been placed beyond the Act, over whom the resulting powers operate, and the conditions under which they are to be exercised.

What the legislation does is relocate the operative substance of the scheme ² the matters that determine what a participant actually receives ² into rules, instruments, and ministerial and Commissioner discretion. The caps, intensities, and worker-to-participant ratios that govern the size of supports are to be set for classes of participants by determination (Sch 1 Pt 6, s 33(2EA)(a)±(c) ² maximum amount, intensity and worker-to-participant ratio for classes of participants); a funding category can be reduced across a whole cohort without any individual

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reassessment (Sch 1 Pt 4, s 34A); the assessment method and the budget methodology sit in instruments rather than in the Act (the assessment and budget methods are set by delegated rules ² Sch 4, ss 32K and 32L); pricing is set by ministerial instrument (Sch 3 Pt 1, s 45C ² the Minister¶s pricing power); and a wide field of further matters is left to rules to be made later (operative matters left to rules and instruments ² s 32K, s 32L, s 34A, s 209; transitional power Sch 5 item 1). These powers operate not on individuals through individualised decisions but on cohorts, at a stroke, and without the safeguards that attach to a decision about a particular person ² and they are to commence on a fixed date, while the rules that will fill them out have not been released.

The documented record turns this claim against itself, and it is here, with † that the cross-cutting weapon bites hardest. The Productivity Commission¶s defining structural choice was to entrench the scheme¶s core entitlement in legislation, precisely so that it could not be eroded by executive discretion or by the pressures of the budget cycle; governing the entitlement through broad, amendable rules is the very arrangement the original design was built to prevent. And the Government¶s own Review, taken at its word, made genuine co- design with people with disability a condition of reform ² not a courtesy but a requirement, The modern expression of the principle that nothing about disabled people should be decided without them. As the crosswalk in Appendix F records, the Bill instead leaves the operative substance to delegated rules and to ministerial and Commissioner discretion, with key rules unreleased and the timetable compressed to a fixed commencement; co-design is displaced by executive discretion exercised against a deadline, and the community is asked to consent to ules it has not seen. A measure that proceeds in that way cannot be the faithful delivery of a Review whose explicit condition was that the substance be designed with the people it affects.

Present practice shows what cohort-level discretion produces when it is exercised without genuine co-design. The four works document the operative choices ² shared support as the default, ratios and caps that may sit below cost, reductions applied at the level of a category ² already being made administratively, ahead of the law; rules made under these powers would harden that practice into entitlement-shaping instruments, cohort by cohort. The history this submission has traced supplies the precedent directly: when the Agency last sought to impose a standardised assessment, that proposal was advanced without genuine co-design and was refused by the community precisely because it placed an administrative instrument ahead of the person. The same instinct ² to settle the design centrally and present it to the community as fixed ² runs through the rule-making structure of this Bill.

The lived account, which we only reference, records what it is like to be governed by a rule one had no part in making and cannot see: the participant whose support is reshaped by a determination applied to a class they happen to fall within, who learns the rule only through

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its effect on their plan, and who has no individual decision to engage because the change was made at the level of the cohort. The works describe this as control exercised at a distance ² decisions about a life taken by people who will never meet the person living it.

The claim therefore fails, because “flexibility” here names the breadth of executive discretion, not a benefit to the participant. Flexibility for the administrator is uncertainty for the person: the more freely the rules can move, the less a participant can rely on anything. Discretion exercised over whole cohorts, against a fixed deadline, over rules the affected community has not seen and did not shape, is not adaptiveness but power without the safeguards that make power legitimate ² and it is most dangerous for those whose needs are least standard, because a cohort rule is built for the middle of a category and the person at its edge is governed by a measure that was never designed with them in mind. And even on the Government¶s own terms the claim collapses: the Review made genuine co-design a precondition, and a structure that relocates the substance into unseen rules and cohort-level discretion is the precise opposite of what the Review required. Even on the Review¶s own terms, the flexibility claim is not made out.

Recommended finding (6.9):

The Committee should find that the “flexibility” the Bill provides is the breadth of delegated and discretionary power rather than a benefit to participants, and that governing the scheme¶s substance through unseen rules over cohorts is inconsistent with both the entrenched entitlement the Productivity Commission designed and the genuine co-design the Government¶s own Review required. It should recommend that the substantive elements ² assessment method, budget methodology, caps and ratios, and eligibility ² be set in the primary Act subject to parliamentary scrutiny; that all rules made under these powers be released and genuinely co-designed before commencement; and that no cohort-level reduction take effect without individualised safeguards.

† ² Plan certainty and fixed durations

The tenth claim is that fixed plan durations give participants certainty. A plan that runs for a set period, on a predictable cycle, lets a person know what they have and for how long; it removes the anxiety of plans changing without warning and allows people to organise their lives around a stable budget. Certainty, on this account, is a gift to participants who have lived with too much unpredictability.

The intuition is genuine, and the harm it responds to is real. The scheme¶s unpredictability has been a serious source of distress: plans altered unexpectedly, reassessments that arrive without warning, budgets that shift for reasons a person cannot anticipate. People do need to be able to plan, and stability in a support budget is a real good. The concession is therefore full

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² and the question is whether the Bill delivers certainty of the thing that matters, or merely fixes in place a number that may not meet the need.

What the legislation does is establish fixed plan durations and a renewal cycle in which, at the end date, a renewed plan comes into force that is identical to the last except that it drops any one-off funding, with no reviewable decision attached (Sch 1 Pt 5, s 50A ² the automatic plan-renewal cycle, which is stated not to involve a reviewable decision, note to s 103A). Two consequences follow from the design. The budget is set by the standardised methodology and then fixed for the period, regardless of whether it meets the cost of the supports ² because the caps that feed it may be set below cost (Sch 1 Pt 4, s 34A(5) ² effective even where the result is below the cost of the support; cf. s 32K(3C) and the s 33(2EB) note). And approved one-off or capital funding does not roll over; it falls away if it has not been spent by the time the plan resets (Sch 1 Pt 5, s 50A ² the renewed plan carries the old plan¶s terms only, shedding approved one-off and capital funding).

The result is not stability of provision but a funding cliff on a fixed timetable, with whatever shortfall the plan contains locked in for its duration.

The documented record exposes the equivocation in the word “certainty.” The certainty the Productivity Commission designed into the scheme was certainty of having one¶s need met ² funding based on assessed need, reliable because it tracked the need and was insulated from the budget cycle. Certainty of an amount fixed without regard to whether it meets the cost of the support is a different thing entirely, and in many cases its opposite: it is the certainty of a shortfall, guaranteed for the life of the plan. A scheme can make a person certain of being under-funded; that is not the security the design promised, and calling it certainty trades on the appeal of a word while delivering the reverse of its substance.

Present practice, as Flynn¶s analysis sets out, shows the cliff in its clearest single case. Flynn¶s analysis examines the automated-renewal provision through the example of a participant approved for a new wheelchair: the chair is measured, quoted, ordered, and built ² custom equipment of this kind is typically manufactured overseas and takes weeks or months to arrive ² and during that interval the plan reaches its end date and resets. The one-off funding for the wheelchair is removed on renewal because the provision requires its removal; the chair arrives; the invoice is presented; and the funding to meet it no longer exists, with no decision anyone can review, because the renewal is defined as not involving a reviewable decision. The participant most exposed to this is the one least able to absorb it: a person with high and complex needs, dependent on custom equipment, facing the slowest supply chains, the largest invoices, and the least capacity to carry a debt of tens of thousands of dollars that has just become personally theirs. Fixed duration plus no carry-over does not produce certainty; it produces a scheduled cliff that falls hardest on the people the scheme exists to protect.

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The lived account, which we only reference, gives this its human form: the wheelchair that never arrives in time, the approved support that evaporates at midnight on a date, the participant who did nothing wrong and whose circumstances did not change, presented with a bill the scheme had already agreed to meet. The works describe the particular cruelty of a loss that no one chose ² a harm with a date but no author.

The claim therefore fails, because certainty of an inadequate amount is not security but locked-in underfunding, and predictability of the wrong number does not help a person; it trenches their shortfall and resets it without recourse. Certainty that cannot be revisited when need changes within the period, and that strips approved one-off funding on a fixed schedule, is rigidity dressed as stability ² the system made predictable for itself at the cost of the participant¶s actual provision. And even on the Government¶s own terms the claim is weakened: the Review required that existing participants transition without losing the supports they rely on, and a renewal mechanism that removes approved funding by operation of a rule does precisely what the Review said must not happen. Even on the Review¶s own terms, fixed durations of this kind do not deliver the security claimed.

Recommended finding (6.10):

The Committee should find that fixed plan durations combined with automated forfeiture deliver rigidity and locked-in underfounding rather than genuine certainty, and that they expose the highest-need participants to scheduled funding cliffs. It should recommend that approved one-off and capital funding carry over until it is acquitted; that any reduction occurring on renewal be a reviewable decision made on notice and with reasons; and that plans remain variable where a participant¶s needs change within the plan period.

† ² Administrative streamlining

The eleventh claim is that the Bill streamlines the scheme¶s administration: it cuts duplication, simplifies the participant’s journey, consolidates fragmented processes, and makes a notoriously difficult system easier to deal with. Less red tape, on this account, is good for everyone ² for participants worn down by paperwork, for providers, and for the scheme itself.

The premise deserves a fair hearing, because the burden it names is real and heavy. The scheme is genuinely hard to navigate; participants spend enormous and exhausting effort managing plans, evidence, claims, and reviews, and any honest simplification would be a real kindness. Reducing duplication is sensible, and a system that demanded less of the people inside it would be a better system. The objection is not to simplification but to what is being simplified, for whom, and at what cost ² because streamlining measured from the system¶s cost can be the opposite of relief on the participant¶s side.

Flynn & Gregory ² joint submission Page 322

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What the legislation does is consolidate and standardise in ways that concentrate the market and channel people toward standard supply. Plan management is placed under a dedicated, tightly conditioned registration regime, and assessment and planning are routed through panels and a standardised pipeline (plan management, Sch 2 Pt 6; claims, Sch 2 Pt 5; the assessment instrument and planning framework, Sch 4, ss 32L and 32K); pricing is set centrally by instrument, with stewardship of the market exercised from the centre (plan- management registration, Sch 2 Pt 6; provider registration, Sch 2 Pt 1; the Minister¶s pricing power, Sch 3 Pt 1 s 45C); and home-and-living provision is organised around configurations that assume shared support by default (shared-support economics ² Sch 1 Pt 6 s 33(2EA); pricing, Sch 3 Pt 1 s 45C; new framework, Sch 4; there is no separate µHome and Living¶ schedule). Each of these reduces variety and administrative friction from the scheme¶s point of view. The cumulative effect is fewer, larger, more standardised providers, and pathways that run most smoothly toward the cheapest standard option.

The documented record explains why this is simplification of the system at the participant¶s expense. The Productivity Commission¶s route to simplicity was empowerment ² give the person a single, certain, individualised entitlement and the authority to direct it, and the complexity that came from fragmented, rationed, program-by-program provision would fall away. Streamlining that instead removes individual tailoring achieves neatness for the administrator by narrowing the options of the person. And the Royal Commission¶s findings make the direction of this particular streamlining dangerous: the standard, shared, congregate models toward which a cost-driven pipeline naturally runs are the very settings the inquiry identified as where violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation concentrate. A path of least resistance that leads there is not an administrative convenience but a safety risk.

Present practice, as Flynn¶s analysis of the market sets out, shows the concentration already in motion. A heavily conditioned registration regime favours large, generic providers over the small, specialised ones that complex participants depend on; and a pricing regime that underprices high-skill, low-volume, complex support removes the providers who deliver it – not by banning them, but by making the work uneconomic. As the new planning framework outes assessment through non-clinician panels and a standardised instrument, the choice that remains to a participant narrows from the inside. And the burden the reform claims to lift does not vanish; it is displaced onto the participant, who must now identify the exception, assemble the evidence, and pursue the review that standardisation makes necessary. The paperwork is not removed; it is moved onto the person least equipped to carry it. The effect is sharpest where the market is already thin. In regional and remote areas, and in the specialised corners of metropolitan provision, consolidation does not tidy a crowded field ² it removes the few providers willing to do difficult, low-volume work at all, and a streamlined pathway

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through a market that has lost its specialists leads only to whatever standard supply remains.

For the participant in such a place, “simpler” means fewer doors, and the door left open is the shared, standard one.

The lived account, which we only reference, names the destination of the funnel. The four works describe the participant steered toward shared and congregate supply because the specialist provider has exited the market or the individual alternative is too hard to drive ² and they describe what that supply is when imposed by default: as When the System Forgets to Listen puts it, containment with nicer language. Streamlining, on this account, is experienced not as a lighter journey but as a narrower one, with the cheapest standard model waiting at the end of it.

The claim therefore fails, because streamlining measured from the system¶s side is, from the participant¶s side, a heavier burden and a smaller set of real choices. A pathway engineered to run smoothly toward the cheapest standard model is not a convenience but a funnel; reducing the scheme¶s administrative friction by concentrating the market and standardising supply transfers effort and risk to the person while narrowing the very choice and control the scheme exists to provide. And because the standard model toward which it funnels people is the congregate one the Royal Commission condemned, the streamlining claim does not merely fail on convenience; it runs against safety. What is presented as cutting red tape is, in substance, the construction of a path of least resistance toward the settings the country has already found to be the most dangerous.

Recommended finding (6.11):

The Committee should find that the streamlining measures reduce administrative friction for the system while increasing burden and narrowing choice for participants, and that they tend to concentrate the market and channel participants toward shared and congregate supply. It should recommend that simplification be measured from the participant¶s experience rather than the administrator¶s; that pricing be set so as to sustain small and specialist providers in thin and complex markets; and that no “streamlined” default pathway channel participants toward shared or congregate supply without a genuine, funded, individual alternative.

† ² The rebuttal, gathered

The Government¶s case for the Bill is, in the end, a single argument wearing many coats. Across the claims this Movement has tested ² that the scheme must be made sustainable; that its integrity must be restored; that the Bill brings consistency and fairness; that it merely clarifies what is reasonable and necessary; that it returns the scheme to its original intent; that it secures the scheme for future generations; that it strengthens safeguarding and quality; those are all variations on one theme: control through standardisation.

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it improves fairness, transparency and review; that it brings efficiency through automation; that it provides flexibility through rules; that it delivers plan certainty; and that it streamlines administration ² the same proposition recurs. It is that the changes are difficult but necessary trade-offs: hard balances struck responsibly between generosity and sustainability, between ease and integrity, between individual tailoring and consistency, between human judgement and efficiency, between rigidity and flexibility, between unpredictability and certainty. On that framing, to oppose the Bill is to deny the trade-offs and to wish the scheme¶s costs away.

We have not denied the trade-offs. We have tested each claim by a single, fair method, applied the same way every time: stating the Government¶s proposition at its strongest, conceding the real intuition within it, setting out what the legislation actually does, measuring that against the record of the Productivity Commission that designed the scheme and the Royal Commission that examined how it fails, against the scheme¶s present decision logic, against the lived account contained in the four works, and finally against the Government¶s own Review. Tested that way, the claims do not survive. And the reason they do not survive is that the trade-offs are not the ones the Government describes.

Examined one by one, each supposed balance turns out to be a transfer. The sustainability is not a saving but a displacement ² of cost onto hospitals, families, and other parts of the Commonwealth¶s own budget, and of risk onto the participants whose supports keep them out of crisis. The integrity is not targeted enforcement against wrongdoers but a net cast wide e enough to catch the ordinary participant in ordinary difficulty. The consistency is not fairness but the flattening of unequal needs into equal inputs, which produces unequal safety. The clarification is a substantive narrowing. The return to original intent is a departure from it, contradicted by the very documents invoked to support it. The securing of future generations rebuilds the congregate settings a Royal Commission found unsafe. The safeguarding regulates the most dangerous settings rather than dismantling them. The fairness and transparency remove the means to know and contest a decision. The efficiency removes the ability to correct a wrong one. The flexibility is the breadth of unchecked discretion. The certainty is a locked-in shortfall. And the streamlining is a funnel toward the cheapest standard model. In no case is the trade-off the one named; in every case the cost falls on the participant, and the benefit accrues to the budget.

That convergence is itself the finding. The claims fail not at random but together, because beneath all of them lies a single conception: that the scheme¶s problem is its cost, that disability can be assessed in the abstract and away from a person¶s actual life, and that the responsible course is to contract what the scheme provides to the people who most need it. Two of the failures, moreover, are not merely items on the list but the mechanism that locks in the rest: the loss of fairness and transparency, and the automation of decisions drafted to be

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unreviewable, together remove the participant’s means to know a decision and to correct it ²

so that every other harm, once done, can no longer be tested or undone. Procedural fairness is

the multiplier; remove it, and the scheme’s substantive reductions become not only heavier

but irreversible. The justifications are the public expression of that conception, and they fail

when tested because the conception is wrong at its root ² and a structure built throughout on

a flawed foundation cannot be repaired claim by claim, because the foundation is the thing at

fault.

It bears emphasis that none of this required us to reject the Government’s own Review. We

took that Review at its word, on the reading its sharpest critics give it, and found that it already

condemns the central moves of the Bill: the package pulled apart instead of sequenced; the

participant pathway advanced ahead of the foundational supports the Review made a precondition; existing participants exposed to loss the Review said they must be spared; the

substance relocated into rules instead of being genuinely co-designed; transparency and independent review left in doubt rather than preserved. A measure that even the Government’s

own review would not sanction cannot be defended as the faithful delivery of it. On the

Government’s own terms, the case does not hold.

The Government’s justifications, taken together and tested, do not establish that the Bill makes a hard but necessary set of choices. They establish that the choices are not the ones described, and that they are not necessary in the form proposed. What is presented as difficult but responsible stewardship is, on the evidence, the displacement of cost and risk onto the people the scheme exists to serve ² and that is a conclusion the Committee can reach without resolving a single contested question of value, because it follows from the Government’s own documents, the country’s own inquiries, and the plain operation of the Bill’s own words.

Having tested the Government’s stated case and found that its central justifications do not survive contact with the Bill’s own text, the history, the inquiry record, current practice, and the Government’s own Review, we complete the record. The rebuttal answered the arguments the Government has chosen to make. This pass answers a different and more exacting question: of all that the Bill actually does, across all five Schedules, is there anything the collection has left unexamined? The discipline here is deliberately narrow. We do not re-argue what the four works and the foregoing rebuttal already establish. For each provision not yet addressed in its own right, we state plainly what it does, why it matters to a participant, and where in this collection its argument is carried. We proceed Schedule by Schedule, so that the Committee can check coverage against the clause map at Appendix B and satisfy itself that no Part has been passed over.

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One preliminary observation is worth making, because it bears on how the Bill should be read.

Several of its Part headings describe their own purpose with unusual candour. A Part is titled, in the Bill itself, “Tightening meaning of permanence to reduce access where an impairment can be treated.” Another is titled “Limit unscheduled plan reassessments.” The Bill, in places, names what it is for. We take it at its word.

Schedule 1 ² Access and planning measures

The substantive measures in this Schedule ² the new functional-capacity definition (Part 1), The support-determination and budget machinery (Part 4), plan renewal and the end of rollover (Part 5), the reasonable-and-necessary test (Part 6), and plan suspension (Part 7) ² are examined in When the System Forgets to Listen (Part 6) and in the rebuttal above. Three further Parts complete the Schedule.

Part 3 ² the impairment±support link. This Part inserts a single word into the test for

what may be funded, and the single word does considerable work. Paragraph 34(1)(aa) is amended so that a support must address a need arising directly from an impairment, rather than a need arising from an impairment. It also repeals subsection 32K(3A). The effect is to narrow, at the level of statutory language, the connection a participant must demonstrate between impairment and support: needs that flow from an impairment at one remove ² the consequential, compounding needs that disability produces across a life ² become harder to fund, and easier to characterise as someone else¶s responsibility or no one¶s. The argument against this narrowing is carried in the rebuttal at 6.3A, where the quiet contraction of reasonable and necessary is examined; we note here only that the contraction begins this early, in the definition of the link itself, and commences on the seventh day after Royal Assent.

Part 4 ² the funding-reduction power (section 34A).

The support-determination machinery in this Part is addressed across the collection, but the completeness of the record requires that one provision be named in its own right, because it is the single clearest expression in the Bill of the proposition this submission contests. New section 34A permits the Minister, by legislative instrument, and expressly “for the purposes of ensuring the financial sustainability” of the scheme, to determine a percentage by which the funding for a specified group of supports is reduced. The reduction then takes effect automatically across every plan to which the determination applies: the funding component amount and the total funding amount stated in a participant’s plan are taken to be the reduced amounts, by force of the instrument, without any individual decision being made about that participant. The Minister must have regard to the safety of participants. But the provision then removes any doubt about its own reach: by subsection 34A(5), the determination has effect “even if the result is” that the funding provided for a reasonable and necessary support ² a support the

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Act still requires the CEO to be satisfied is reasonable and necessary ² “is less than the total cost of the support,” whether for a single support or for all of a participant’s supports taken together. A support may thus be both legally necessary and deliberately underfunded, by category, by instrument, for fiscal reasons. The argument is prosecuted in the rebuttal at 6.1 and 6.3 and in Peter Gregory’s analysis of community-participation funding; ithe provision is recorded here as the statutory engine of that argument, commencing 1 October 2026.

Part 8 ² permanence and treatment.

This Part narrows access by tightening what it means for an impairment to be permanent. New subsection 24(5), mirrored for early intervention in subsection 25(1B), provides that an impairment is not permanent unless the person has undertaken all “appropriate treatment,”, no other treatment is likely to materially improve or reverse it, and it is likely to persist for the person’s lifetime. The definition of appropriate treatment, in new section 25A, is where the difficulty lies. treatment is appropriate if it is evidence-based, can reliably be expected to materially improve the impairment, and is regularly undertaken in Australia. Critically, subsection 25A(2) provides that a treatment may be appropriate “regardless of whether the person’s individual circumstances restrict the person from accessing” it - and the note records that those circumstances include the person’s financial circumstances and geographical location. The consequence is plain: a person may be found not to have a permanent impairment, and so be refused access to the scheme, because an appropriate treatment exists in principle, even where that person cannot afford it, and even where it is not available within reach of where they live. Whether the person can actually obtain the treatment is, by the express terms of the provision, beside the point. This Part is not walked by any of the four works; it is recorded here, and its logic - access determined by an abstraction rather than by a person’s real situation - is of a piece with the design failure that When the System Forgets to Listen describes throughout its Part 6. It commences 1 January 2028.

Part 9 ² eligibility based on access to other services.

This Part conditions access to the scheme, and continued participation in it, on a new set of “alternative support requirements” in section 25B. a person meets those requirements only if, among other things, at least one of their impairments is not an “excluded impairment.” An impairment is excluded where it was caused by a motor vehicle accident and a compensation scheme provides benefits for it, or where it was caused by a work-related injury and a workers’ compensation law provides benefits for it. it is also excluded where the National Disability Insurance Scheme rules declare a support to be an “alternative support” for the impairment - a declaration the Minister may make, by reference to the service system through which the support is offered, on being satisfied that it is not appropriate to fund the support through the scheme. New paragraph 21(1)(d) applies this test at the point of access; new paragraph 30(1)(c) applies it to

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eexisting participants, whose status may be revoked if the CEO is satisfied they do not meet the

alternative support requirements. Two features warrant the Committee¶s attention. The first

is that the “declared alternative support” power is open-ended: it is the mechanism by which

whole categories of support may be moved, by rule, from the scheme¶s responsibility to

another system¶s ² or to none, if the other system does not in fact provide them. The second

is that this is a displacement provision, and displacement is taken up in the rebuttal at 6.3A: where support is withdrawn from the scheme, people are not thereby made not to need it; they are pushed toward the crisis systems that the evidence shows are least able to hold them safely.

The Part commences 1 January 2028.

Schedule 2 ² Fraud measures

This Schedule contains the integrity measures whose general character the rebuttal addresses at 6.2 and 6.6: the concern is not that fraud should go unaddressed ² it should not, and the submission concedes plainly that fraud occurs and is serious ² but that powers framed against wrongdoing are drawn widely enough to burden the ordinary participant and the ordinary provider. The completeness record sets out the Parts at provision level.

ePart 1 ² registration of NDIS providers. This Part expands the registration architecture, amending the definition of NDIS provider and the registration provisions (sections 10B, 73C, 201A). The participant-facing concern, examined in the rebuttal at 6.2 and 6.11, is that an expanded registration requirement bears on the small, the local, and the self-directed ² the participant who employs their own workers or assembles their own supports ² rather than only on the large providers fraud actually implicates.

eePart 2 ² civil penalties and regulatory powers. This is the largest Part of the Schedule, and the most significant for the structure of regulatory power. It substantially expands the Commissioner¶s compliance and enforcement toolkit ² civil penalties, enforceable undertakings, compliance notices ² and inserts two new Parts into the Act, on compliance and enforcement in relation to the Commissioner¶s functions and in relation to the Agency¶s functions respectively, alongside amendments across sections 73ZDA to 73ZP and sections 80 to 114, and to the information-publication provisions. The breadth is the point at issue: powers of this reach, examined at 6.2 and 6.6, fall on the whole regulated population. Their proportionality depends entirely on how they are exercised, and the Bill leaves that to administration.

eeePart 3 ² information gathering powers. This Part expands the powers to compel information (sections 53, 54, 56, 118). The concern, related to the procedural-fairness

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argument at 6.7, is the asymmetry it deepens between an Agency that may compel and a

participant who may not see how decisions about them are reached.

Part 4 ² retention of records.

This Part imposes record-retention obligations (sections 45A, 46, 92, 182). It is, in itself, unremarkable; it is recorded for completeness and because, cumulatively, the registration, information, and record obligations compose the administrative burden examined at 6.11.

Part 5 ² reducing claim times.

This Part makes one change, and its size is easy to miss in a single amended paragraph. Paragraph 45A(5)(a) is amended to omit “2 years” and substitute “90 days.” The window within which a claim for payment may be made is reduced from two years to ninety days. For a provider, and still more for a participant who self-manages and must navigate the claiming process themselves, a missed ninety-day window is a payment forfeited for support already delivered. This is the forfeiture logic that When the System Forgets to Listen identifies in the plan that resets itself, transposed to the claims process; it is examined at 6.11, and it commences 1 December 2026.

Part 6 ² registered plan management providers.

This Part creates a registration regime for plan-management providers (the definition in section 9; sections 73C, 73E, 73F, 73ZK), and introduces a “related party” concept drawn from the Corporations Act. Its c commencement is left to Proclamation. Its significance, noted at 6.11, is that it reshapes the plan-management market ² and plan management is one of the practical supports that makes self-direction workable for participants with complex affairs.

Schedule 3 ² Governance arrangements

The two substantive Parts of this Schedule are addressed in the collection. Part 1 ² decision-making on pricing introduces, among other things, the power in section 45C to set maximum amounts payable for funding that is not managed by a participant, with an associated indexation mechanism in section 34B; the pricing and market-stewardship concerns it raises are examined in Peter Gregory¶s SIL analysis and in the rebuttal at 6.11. Part 2 ² automation of administrative action inserts a new Division (sections 59B to 59D) permitting the CEO to arrange for computer programs to take administrative action under designated provisions ² including, by subsection 59B(4), action that involves a discretion, an evaluative judgement, or a state of mind, governed by a standard operating procedure instrument; this is the subject of the rebuttal at 6.7 and 6.8, where the consequences for meaningful review are set out. For completeness, Part 3 ² minor amendments makes consequential and machinery changes; nothing in it alters the analysis above.

Flynn & Gregory ² joint submission Page 330

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Schedule 4 ² New framework planning

This Schedule is examined in full in When the System Forgets to Listen (Part 6), in Peter Gregory¶s community-participation analysis, and in the rebuttal at 6.1, 6.3 and 6.4. The completeness record pins its core. The new budget method in section 32K provides that the ules may specify levels of need and the funding amounts attached to them (subsection 32K(3B)); that such an amount “may be more than, equal to or less than the actual cost” of the support (subsection 32K(3C)); and that the rules may set, and the method must not exceed, maximum funding amounts (subsections 32K(3D) and (3E)); and the rule-making is to be done having regard to the financial sustainability of the scheme. The needs-assessment provisions in section 32L provide that the assessment must, and must not, have regard to information as the rules prescribe (paragraphs 32L(4)(b) and (c)), and govern who may undertake it. The Schedule¶s legal provisions commence on the seventh day after Royal Assent; the operational rollout of New Framework Planning has been announced for 1 April 2027.

Schedule 5 ² Transitional rules

This Schedule contains a single substantive item, and it is a broad one. Item 1 empowers the Minister, by legislative instrument, to make rules prescribing matters of a transitional nature relating to the amendments made by the Act, and provides that those rules may modify the operation of provisions of the National Disability Insurance Scheme Act and of the Act itself. The rules expire twelve months after they are made, and may not be made more than twelve months after the item commences. A power to modify the operation of primary legislation by instrument, even for a defined transitional period, is a significant delegation, and it sits alongside the many other matters this Bill leaves to rules and ministerial determination. It is examined, with those other delegations, in the rebuttal at 6.9.

What the sweep reveals

A completeness pass is, by design, the driest part of any submission. But walking the provisions one by one surfaces something the thematic argument can only assert: a pattern in the architecture. The proposition that the funding for a support need not meet the cost of that support is not confined to one provision that an amendment might cure. It appears three times, in three different mechanisms. It is in the new framework budget method, where aunding amount “may be « less than the actual cost” of a support (subsection 32K(3C)). It is in the determination of funding components for groups of supports, which applies “regardless of whether a funding component amount meets the cost of the supports” (the note to subsection 33(2EB)). And it is in the funding-reduction power, which has effect “even if” the result is that a reasonable and necessary support is funded below its cost (subsection 34A(5)).

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Across individual plan-making, across shared and group supports, and across category-wide ministerial reductions, the same rule recurs. That recurrence is not an accident of drafting. It is the design.

This is why the case made in this collection is structural rather than a matter of correcting a class. A flaw that appears once can be amended out. A principle that has been written into the budget method, the group-support mechanism, and the reduction power alike has been built into the foundations, and it expresses a settled choice about the relationship between a participant¶s need and the scheme¶s budget: that where the two conflict, the budget prevails, and the participant absorbs the difference.

Two things follow, and they carry us to the next Movement. The first is that the risks the collection has identified are not the risks of one bad provision but of an architecture, and an architecture produces its effects whoever administers it and however carefully ² which is the subject to which we now turn. The second is a matter the Committee should hold clearly in view as it deliberates. The Government¶s announced timetable assumes that this Bill will pass both Houses by the middle of 2026, and much of that timetable ² the new budget method, the funding-reduction power, the eligibility narrowing, the new assessment framework ² cannot lawfully proceed without the provisions examined above. The decision before the Committee is therefore not a decision on principle in the abstract. It is the authorisation, or the refusal, of the rollout entire. What remains, when every justification the Government has offered has been tested and set aside, and every provision is on the table, is a risk profile: foreseeable, documented, and serious. It is to those risks that we now turn.

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Movement VII ² The Risks, and the Way Back

Part 1 ² The risks that remain

The preceding movement did two things. It took each justification the Government has offered for this Bill ² sustainability, integrity, consistency, fairness, safeguarding, a return to original intent, the securing of the scheme for future generations ² and tested it against the Bill¶s own text, the historical and inquiry record, current practice, and the Government¶s own Review; and each, tested that way, was found not to be made out. It then walked the provisions one by one, and found beneath the thematic argument a pattern in the architecture itself. What remains, when the case for a measure has not survived contact with its provisions and those provisions are nonetheless on the table, is the question this movement takes up. It is not whether the Bill¶s stated purposes are admirable; reform, sustainability, and integrity all are.

It is what the Bill, built as it is, would actually do to the people who live inside the scheme ² and over what span of time.

Flynn¶s account frames the distinction that governs everything in this movement: a Bill is an event, but a design failure is a trajectory. A vote is taken on a single day. The architecture it enacts then plays out over years, in millions of individual decisions, long after the parliamentary moment has passed and the public attention has moved on. The risks set out below are therefore not predictions about the intentions of any minister or official. The collection does not claim to read private motives, and it does not need to. They are the foreseeable behaviour of a system built this way ² the effects an architecture produces whoever administers it, and however carefully. A system reveals its assumptions through the choices it keeps making, and the choices written into this Bill point, with unusual consistency, in one direction.

One finding from the completeness pass must be carried into everything that follows, because it changes the character of each risk named here. The proposition that the funding for a support need not meet the cost of that support is not confined to a single provision that an amendment might cure. It recurs three times, in three different mechanisms ² the new- support budget method, the rule for group-support funding components, and the across- the-board reduction power (s 32K(3C), the note to s 33(2EB), and s 34A(5)). The completeness pass above sets out how each operates; what matters here is the recurrence. A flaw that appears once is incidental. A rule written into the foundations in three places, across individual planning, shared supports, and category-wide reduction alike, is a design. The risks below are the risks of that design ² not of its occasional misapplication.

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Re-institutionalisation by administrative means

The first risk, and the gravest, is that the Bill rebuilds the settings this country spent the second half of the twentieth century dismantling ² and does so without rebuilding a single institution.

There will be no new asylum, no colony, no training centre with a name and a gate. The institution returns, if it returns, as the cumulative result of funding settings, and that is precisely what makes it hard to see and harder to stop.

The mechanism is economic before it is anything else. The Bill permits a maximum funding amount, a maximum support intensity, and a maximum worker-to-participant ratio to be set for classes of participants, and to be set below what the support actually costs (s 33(2EA); s 33(2EB) note). It permits the funding for a whole category of support to be reduced across a group without any individual plan being reassessed (s 34A). And it gives the Minister a structured power over the prices the scheme will pay (s 45C). Read together, these provisions do not compel congregate care in terms. They do something quieter and more effective: they make shared, grouped, and ratio-based support the only configuration a provider can deliver within the funded amount, and they make individualised, one-to-one, participant-directed support uneconomic to supply. People are then grouped not by their choice of where and with whom to live, but by the economics of supply. Peter Gregory¶s analysis of Supported Independent Living commissioning shows that the default shared-support assumptions on which this rests ² including a one-to-three ratio ² are grounded in provider viability and workforce economics, and not in any published evidence that such arrangements are safe, clinically appropriate, or compatible with the right to choose one¶s home and housemates.

The historical spine has already established why this matters, and the lesson bears restating in this context because it is the hinge of the whole risk. The features that made the institutions of the last century harmful were not the cruelty of their staff or the age of their buildings. They were structural: the concentration of numbers of relatively powerless people in settings shaped by others, under others¶ authority, out of the sight of the wider community. Those features generate harm wherever they are reproduced, regardless of intention, and regardless of how modern the setting looks. A group home commissioned around a staffing ratio is a smaller building than an asylum, but it can reproduce the same structural features ² the same concentration, the same loss of control over the ordinary texture of a life, the same reduction of visibility ² and it does so under the same warm administrative language of efficiency and care. Flynn¶s analysis makes the safety point exactly: community connection is a safety control. Isolation is not merely a diminution of someone¶s quality of life; it is a removal of the thing most likely to surface abuse and neglect when they occur. A scheme that funds people into smaller, more isolated, more provider-shaped settings is not making them safer by consolidating their care. It is removing the conditions under which they are safe.

                               Flynn & Gregory ² joint submission    Page 334

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This is reinstitutionalisation by administrative means: not a policy anyone announces, but a destination a funding architecture arrives at, one budget at a time. It is the clearest instance in the whole Bill of a design failure that is a trajectory rather than an event ² because no single decision will look like the reopening of an institution, and the pattern will be visible only in aggregate, only over years, and only to those who already know what they are looking at.

Rights erosion, and the displacement of democratic voice

The second risk operates at the level of principle, and it has two faces ² one turned toward the participant, the other toward the Parliament.

Turned toward the participant, the Bill erodes rights at their statutory source. It repeals the participant-centred planning principles ² the existing statement, in the Act, of choice and control ² and replaces them with principles oriented to the scheme¶s sustainability (Sch 1 Pt 6 item 66, repealing the s 31 principles; new ss 17A and 17B, with the decision-maker now required to have regard to scheme sustainability). It defines the gateway to the scheme through a test of “functional capacity” that is assessed in abstraction from the person¶s environment and supports (s 9B) ² a test that measures something that is not, in the lived sense, disability at all, because disability is precisely the interaction between an impairment and the world a person must navigate. And it rewords the scheme¶s central promise, so that what is reasonable and necessary becomes a function of what is sustainable. These are not adjustments to the machinery of the scheme. They are changes to what the scheme is for. The right to live in the community, which Australia affirmed when it ratified the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, is not honoured by a system that funds people below the cost of living anywhere but in a group.

Turned toward the Parliament, the Bill displaces democratic voice in two directions at once. A striking volume of what will actually govern participants¶ lives is left not to the Act the Parliament is being asked to pass, but to rules, ministerial determinations, and instruments made afterward: the budget method and its levels of need (s 32K), the reduction power (s 34A), The standard operating procedures for automated action (s 59B), and ² most broadly ² a transitional power to make rules that modify the operation of the primary legislation itself (Sch 5, item 1). Decisions of real consequence migrate away from the participant, who loses the choice and control the repealed principles expressed, and away from the Parliament, which is asked to authorise a framework whose content will be filled in later by the executive. And the third recipient of that migrated authority is not a person at all. It is the algorithm ² to which we now turn, because the means by which a participant might once have contested any of this is itself among the things the Bill reshapes.

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Procedural unfairness as a multiplier of every other harm

The third risk is the one the collection regards as decisive, because it is not a harm alongside the others but the thing that removes the mechanism by which the others might be caught and corrected. Every risk named in this movement ² a wrong assessment, a below-cost ratio, a forfeited package, a wrongful suspension ² depends, for its remedy, on a participant’s practical ability to understand how a decision was made, to test it, and to have it changed. Degrade that ability, and you do not add one more harm to the list. You multiply the consequence of every harm already on it.

The Bill degrades it cumulatively rather than by a single stroke. It removes categories of decision from the reviewable list. It arranges that the changes which most affect a participant’s funding happen by operation of law, so that there is no reviewable decision to challenge at all: a plan can renew automatically on its end date, shedding approved one-off and capital funding, with the Act stating in terms that the renewal does not involve a reviewable decision (s 50A; the note to s 103A); and funding can be reduced across a group by instrument (s 34A). And where review survives, the Bill hollows it from within. Because a participant’s budget must be worked out in accordance with the rules-specified method (s 32K(1A), applying the needs- evaluation report under s 32L), a person who succeeds on review does not obtain a different figure. They obtain a fresh needs assessment, which is fed back into the same method, which produces a budget closely resembling the one that was challenged. When the System Forgets to Listen describes this plainly as a closed loop: review remits the matter to be reassessed; reassessment runs the same instrument; the instrument returns a near-identical result. The right to seek review remains. The capacity of review to change the outcome does not.

To this the Bill adds automation. It permits the substance of a decision ² including a decision involving a discretion, an evaluative judgement, or a state of mind ² to be produced by a computer program operating under a standard operating procedure (s 59B(4)), and it then deems the program’s output to be administrative action taken by the chief executive (s 59B(5)). The collection does not argue how a court should construe those provisions; that is the work of the disability and human-rights lawyers, and it is being done. But it is entitled to report the concern those provisions have raised among the people whose field this is, because that concern bears directly on whether the safeguard will hold. Legal scholars ² among them Anna Huggins at QUT, and Yee-Fui Ng and Maria O’Sullivan at Monash ² have identified a doctrinal gap in this area, drawing on the Full Federal Court’s decision in Pintarich v Deputy Commissioner of Taxation, where the majority held that a valid decision requires a human “mental process of reaching a conclusion.” Their concern is that a purely automated output, lacking that mental process, may fall outside the reach of review ² and that a provision

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deeming the output to be the chief executive¶s supplies the label of a decision without supplying the human reasoning that review exists to examine.

What makes this more than a technical worry is the recent history. The Robodebt Royal Commission examined, at length and at cost, what automated government decision-making does when it goes wrong at scale; it noted that the availability of review of automated decisions was uncertain, and it recommended legislative reform to guarantee a clear pathway for review, transparency about how and why automated decisions are made, and systems “designed with human agency at its centre.” The Government accepted those recommendations. That was in 2023. This Bill, two years later, moves in the opposite direction: it authorises the automation of evaluative decisions and leaves their reviewability to a deeding provision of exactly the kind the Robodebt experience put in doubt. This is the couplet of this collection in its most literal form. When nations forget, history repeats ² but here the nation is not even forgetting slowly. It accepted the lesson within recent memory, and is now legislating against it. Procedural fairness is the safeguard that makes every other safeguard work. A Bill that thins it does not lose one protection among many. It removes the floor beneath all of them.

The harm is not evenly distributed

The fourth risk is that the contraction falls hardest on the people least able to absorb it. On the Government¶s own announcement, the number of people the scheme supports is projected to fall from around 760,000 today to around 600,000 by the end of the decade ² on the Minister¶s framing, around 600,000 “instead of growing to well over 900,000” ² with some 160,000 current participants expected to transition off the scheme, and no account yet given of who they will be, or where they will go. The provisions that will sort them are not neutral in their incidence. A functional-capacity gateway assessed in abstraction from environment (s 9B), and a narrowing of eligibility where another service system is said to be more appropriate (s 25B), bear most heavily on people whose support needs are real but do not map neatly onto a single, legible impairment: people with psychosocial disability, people with episodic or fluctuating conditions, people whose needs arise from the interaction of several impairments, and children whose developmental needs are to be redirected to other programs. Flynn¶s point about standardisation is exact here: a standardised gateway and a standardised budget method buy consistency at a price, and the price is paid by the people whose needs are atypical enough that the standard does not see them. The harm of this Bill is therefore concentrated twice over ² first on those most likely to lose support, and again on the same people, who are also least equipped to navigate the degraded review system described above in order to contest the loss.

Flynn & Gregory ² joint submission Page 337

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Foreseeable harm, named plainly

Only now, with the pathways established, is it possible to name what lies at the end of them ² and to do so without melodrama, because it is already a matter of public record rather than prediction. The Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability found that segregated and congregate settings concentrate violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation; that finding is not contested in this collection, and it is the destination toward which the reinstitutionalisation pathway runs. There is, alongside it, a long coronial record of preventable deaths. And there is Flynn¶s analysis of the regulator¶s own data, covering more than nine thousand deaths, which finds a rate of potentially avoidable death several times that of the general population. These are not the speculative costs of a hypothetical reform. They are the documented consequences of the conditions this Bill¶s architecture would rebuild. The decision logic is, moreover, not waiting to begin: the plan- review paper documents that continuous one-to-one support is already being treated, in current administrative practice, as available only in undefined “exceptional circumstances.” The Bill does not introduce these dangers from nothing. It gives statutory force to a trajectory that participants are, in part, already living.

The risks set out in this Part are, in the end, a single risk seen from several angles: that an architecture built to subordinate the participant to the budget will produce, predictably and over time, the harms that subordination has always produced. They are systemic, not incidental ² the product of the design rather than of any administrator¶s failing ² which is why they cannot be managed away by good intentions or careful implementation, and why an architecture that produces them cannot be made safe by adjusting it at the edges. And the stakes are not abstract. The Government¶s announced timetable assumes the Bill will pass by the middle of 2026, and much of that timetable ² the new budget method, the reduction power, the eligibility narrowing, the new assessment framework ² cannot lawfully begin without the provisions examined here. The decision before the Committee is therefore not a decision on principle in the abstract. It is the authorisation, or the refusal, of the rollout entire.

To say that a direction is wrong is to invite a fair question in return: if not this, then what? A submission that opposed without answering would deserve the suspicion that it was merely defending the status quo. This collection does answer, and it is to that answer that the final movements turn.

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(s 32K, s 32K(1A), s 32K(3C), s 32L); Sch 5 item 1; commencement table at s 2. Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability, Final Report, 2023 (segregated and congregate settings concentrate violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation). Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme, Final Report, 2023, and the Government’s response (November 2023): the uncertainty of review of automated decisions; the recommended legislative reform for a clear review pathway, transparency, and systems “designed with human agency at its centre.” Pintarich v Deputy Commissioner of Taxation [2018] FCAFC 79, and the scholarship identifying the consequent gap (Anna Huggins, QUT; Yee-Fui Ng and Maria O’Sullivan, Monash) ² cited as the concern of those scholars and that inquiry, not as the collection’s own legal conclusion. The reform timetable and participant- umber projection as announced by the Hon Mark Butler MP, National Press Club, 22 April 2026. Figures drawn from the analysis in Flynn’s analysis, When the System Forgets to Listen (Daniel Flynn), and the sources it relies on: the projected scale of the contraction; the regulator’s data on more than nine thousand deaths and the rate of potentially avoidable death. When the System Forgets to Listen (Daniel Flynn) ² the framing that a Bill is an event but a design failure is a trajectory, and that community connection is a safety control. Commissioning “SIL” and the Risk of Reinstitutionalisation, and Considerations for Preparing a Plan Review Report (Peter Gregory) ² default shared-support and ratio assumptions, and the treatment of continuous one-to-one support as exceptional in current practice. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, Article 19. Cross-references: The historical spine (Movement I); the rebuttal (Movement VI), in particular the treatment of review at 6.7±6.8; the completeness pass (Movement VI); Appendix B (clause map).

Part 2 ² The way back Rejecting this direction is not a defence of the status quo Before the alternative is set out, one thing must be said plainly, because the credibility of everything that follows depends on it. To oppose this Bill is not to defend the scheme as it currently operates. The scheme has drifted a long way from the design the country was promised; cost is a genuine consideration that no honest analysis can wave away; and fraud occurs, and is serious. The collection has said so throughout, and says so again here. The argument has never been that nothing should change. It is that this change ² in its magnitude, its design, and its human incidence ² is the wrong one, and that a reform exists which would secure the scheme’s finances without legislating regression. That alternative is set out in full in Flynn’s account, as a rights-based, safety-based, participant-led program ² the way back. What follows points to its shape, theme by theme, since Flynn’s analysis itself is reproduced whole earlier in the collection and need not be restated here.

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Start with the outcome, not the line item

The first move of the alternative is to invert the order of reasoning the Bill installs. This Bill begins with a budget envelope and a standardised instrument, and works forward to a number; the participant’s life is what is left over once the method has run. A reform built around the person begins at the other end – with the life the person is trying to live, the outcomes that matter to them, and the supports an ordinary life in the community actually requires – and works back to what that costs. This is not a softer way of doing the same thing. It is the difference between a scheme that asks what a person needs and a scheme that asks what it is prepared to fund, and When the System Forgets to Listen is right that the whole character of the system follows from which question it puts first.

Safety through harm minimisation, not zero-risk fantasy

The second move is to be honest about safety, because the Bill’s safeguarding case rests on a confusion between safety and control. Real safety for disabled people is not produced by gathering them into supervised, congregate settings; as Part 1 set out, that arrangement does not reduce risk but concentrates it, and removes the community connection that is itself a safety control. Safety is produced by harm minimisation built around autonomy, continuity, and trusted relationships – by the presence of people who know the person well enough to notice when something is wrong, and by a life embedded enough in the community that what happens in it is seen. The alternative therefore reaches for guardrails, not guard towers: oversight that protects people within the lives they have chosen, rather than surveillance that protects the system by controlling people into settings designed for its convenience. A safeguarding model that makes people less visible in the name of keeping them safe has misunderstood where the danger lies.

Co-design as the discipline it actually is

The third move is the one on which the collection’s recommendation turns, and it is the answer to the most obvious objection to everything written here – that the Government is, after all, consulting the disability community as it proceeds. Flynn’s analysis sets out genuine co-design not as a sentiment but as a recognised professional discipline, with an established structure: eight tenets – among them co-ideation, the shared authorship of the ideas themselves before the solution space is narrowed; co-design, a genuine share in how the system is built; cowrite, the community’s hand in the actual text of the instruments that will govern their lives; co-implementation; and co-monitoring – all bound by the principle the disability movement won and named, nothing about us without us. Measured against that standard, the manufacture of “consultation” works by honouring some tenets while quietly denying others: a vibrant workshop whose resulting policy is then authored behind closed doors is not

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co-design, however it is described. Flynn’s account of this ² the capture of the language of

co-design ² is what allows the collection to say, without overclaiming, that engagement

conducted after the ideas have been chosen and the budget set is not the genuine article.

And this is where the alternative meets the recommendation. Genuine co-design, by its nature,

must be free to consider every path forward, rather than ratifying an outcome that has already

been drafted. A Bill forecloses that freedom ² it is, precisely, a predetermined outcome. One

cannot co-design one’s way to a conclusion that has already been written into a Bill before the

Parliament. That is why the way back cannot begin by amending this Bill, and why withdrawal

is not a separate or more drastic demand sitting beside the call for co-design. It is the

precondition for the co-design to be real.

Preserve participant-directed support, and protect the people who make it

work

The fourth move is to protect the arrangements that make an ordinary life workable, which

the Bill’s integrity architecture risks treating as suspect. Self-management and self-direction,

the direct employment of support workers, and the clinicians who train and supervise those

workers are not loopholes to be closed; they are the means by which many participants

exercise the choice and control the scheme was built to provide. A reform that secures integrity

by aiming its registration, penalty, information-gathering and record-retention powers at

genuine bad actors ² rather than at the ordinary participant and the participant-directed

arrangement ² protects the scheme without dismantling the very supports that make it work.

Design for thin markets and regional reality

The fifth move is to design for the country as it actually is. A scheme calibrated to the median

participant in a capital city, and priced against metropolitan benchmarks, fails everyone whose

circumstances are different ² in thin markets, in regional and remote areas, and wherever the

supply of support is scarce. Flynn’s treatment of thin markets and regional reality, and its

warning that standardisation can protect some while abandoning others, point to a reform that

builds for that variation rather than legislating it away: pricing that reflects real local costs,

and a framework with enough flexibility that the people it does not fit neatly are not the people

it leaves behind.

Keep clinical supports where clinical need is, and pursue sustainability

without regression

The sixth move follows from the rebuttal’s central finding about the sustainability case. A

contraction that displaces the cost of disability support into hospitals, aged care, families, and

income support has not removed that cost; it has moved it onto systems less equipped to carry

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it, and onto households, where much of it will simply go unmet. A reform genuinely concerned

with sustainability keeps disability supports where the need is ² including in clinical settings

where that is what a person requires ² and pursues the scheme’s finances by means that do

not transfer the cost of the contraction onto disabled people. Flynn’s fiscal counter-analysis is

the evidence that this is possible: that the scheme’s sustainability and the rights of its

participants are not, in the end, opposed. A scheme that destroys the lives it was funded to

enable has not become sustainable. It has become something else, wearing sustainability’s

name.

What the way back requires

What every element of this alternative has in common is that none of it can be reached from

where this Bill begins. A gateway that measures something other than disability; planning

principles reoriented from the person to the scheme’s cost; a reasonable-and-necessary test

inverted; a budget that need not meet the cost of the support it funds; a review that loops back

into the instrument that produced the result ² these are not the starting conditions from

which a rights-based, participant-led reform can be built. They are its opposite, written into

law. The way back, therefore, is not a longer schedule of amendments to this Bill. It begins by

setting this Bill down, and by opening a genuine co-design ² one free to consider every path

forward, including the paths this Bill has foreclosed. What that asks of the Committee, in plain

and operative terms, is the subject of the recommendations that follow.

Sources (Part 2): When the System Forgets to Listen (Daniel Flynn) ² the way back as a

rights-based, safety-based, participant-led alternative, and in particular: planning that

starts with the outcome rather than the line item; safety through harm minimisation rather

than congregate control, and community connection as a safety control; co-design as a

recognised professional discipline, its eight tenets and the governing principle “nothing

about us without us,“ and the capture of the language of co-design; the preservation of

participant-directed support; design for thin markets and regional reality, and the warning

that standardisation can protect some while abandoning others; and the fiscal counter-

analysis showing that sustainability is achievable without regression. Commissioning “SIL”

and the Risk of Reinstitutionalisation, and Considerations for Preparing a Plan Review

Report (Peter Gregory) ² the protection of participant-directed and self-managed

arrangements and the clinicians who support them. Convention on the Rights of Persons

with Disabilities, Article 19 (the right to live in the community). “Guardrails, not guard

towers“ is the collection’s own framing. Cross-references: the rebuttal of the sustainability

case (Movement VI); the recommendations that follow (Movement VIII), which set out,

illustratively and not as a prescription, the areas genuine co-design will need to address.

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Movement VIII ² Recommendations and Conclusion

Part 1 ² Recommendations

This collection set out to carry a single thesis through a great deal of evidence: that when systems forget the people they were built for, those people are harmed; and that when a nation forgets the lessons of its own history, it repeats them. Across eleven Movements and four complete works, that thesis has been carried not by assertion but by the public record ² by the design the Productivity Commission set out in 2011 and the conditions it attached to it; by the Convention the scheme exists to honour; by the findings of the Disability Royal Commission; by the coronial trail and the regulator¶s own mortality data; by a decade of practice as it is actually conducted in planning rooms, in shared-support arrangements, and in the commissioning of services; by independent modelling of what the contraction will cost; and, throughout, by the text of the Bill itself, read for what each provision does to a person rather than for how it might be construed.

What the collection has established can be stated plainly. The Bill subordinates the participant to the budget, reversing the order in which the scheme was designed to work ² need first, than funding. It recreates, in modern language and through ordinary administrative machinery, the structural conditions of the institutional harm the nation spent decades dismantling. The harm that will follow is not a worry but a record, foreseeable because it is documented, and in important respects already occurring. The justifications offered for the Bill do not survive contact with the Bill¶s own text, with the history, with the evidence, with current practice, or with the Government¶s own Review. And reform is nonetheless legitimate and necessary: a better path exists, one that is rights-based, participant-led, and sustainable without regression. Movement VI tested the Government¶s defence of the Bill claim by claim and found that the claims fail together, because beneath all of them lies a single conception ² that the scheme¶s problem is its cost, that disability can be assessed away from a person¶s actual life, and that the responsible course is to contract what the scheme provides to the people who most need it. Movement VII then set the Bill¶s claims aside and asked what remained: a risk profile, and against it the shape of a genuine alternative.

What that record asks of this Committee can be put in operative terms, and it is the task of this final Movement to put it there. The recommendations fall into two tiers, and the relationship between them is the whole of the argument. The first tier is a single operative recommendation ² the one thing the collected evidence compels the Committee to do. The second tier is not a list of further recommendations and not a schedule of amendments; it is an indication of the shape the replacement reform will need to take, offered to show the

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Committee both the direction of travel and the reason the first recommendation cannot be

softened into a set of fixes.

Recommendation 1 ² That the Bill be withdrawn, and a genuine co-design

begun in its place

The Committee should recommend that the National Disability Insurance

Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 be

withdrawn, and that the Government begin in its place a true, deep, end-to-end

co-design of NDIS reform with the disability community ² a process free to

consider every path forward, rather than a predetermined one.

This is the conclusion the collected evidence compels, and it is offered as that and not as a position taken in advance of it. The case for the Bill, examined across this collection, is not made out. Its asserted savings are a displacement of cost onto hospitals, families, and other parts of the Commonwealth¶s own budget rather than a removal of cost; its integrity architecture is a net cast wide enough to catch the ordinary participant in ordinary difficulty rather than enforcement aimed at wrongdoing; its claim to consistency flattens unequal needs into equal inputs and so produces unequal safety; its claim to return the scheme to its original intent is contradicted by the very documents that defined that intent; and its claim to secure the scheme for future generations would, on the Royal Commission¶s own findings, rebuild the congregate settings in which disabled people are most often harmed.

The defects the collection has identified are not defects of detail. They are foundational, and they sit at four levels at once. They sit in the ideas behind the drafting ² a conception of disability, of sustainability, and of the participant¶s place in the scheme that is wrong at the root. They sit in a gateway that measures functional capacity stripped of the person¶s environment and supports, and so measures something that the modern and internationally accepted definition of disability says is not disability at all. They sit in planning principles reoriented from the person to the scheme¶s cost, removing from the law the statutory expression of choice and control. And they sit in a reasonable-and-necessary test quietly inverted, so that the budget becomes the fixed point and the person¶s assessed need the variable adjusted to fit it. A flaw of that kind cannot be reached by amendment, because it is not located in any single provision an amendment could rewrite; it is located in the premises from which the provisions were drawn.

There is a second reason amendment cannot reach these defects, and it is more fundamental than their breadth. Amendment operates on text. It can alter the wording of a provision, narrow a power, soften a threshold, restore a deleted principle. But the defects identified across this collection do not originate in the wording of the Bill; they originate in the ideas Flynn & Gregory ² joint submission Page 344

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that produced the wording ² the conception of disability as a cost to be contained, of capacity as something measurable apart from the life in which it is exercised, and of sustainability as the contraction of what the scheme provides to the people who most depend on it. Those ideas are not located in any clause. They sit behind every clause, and each provision drawn from them carries the defect forward regardless of how it is drafted. Rewrite the wording, and the conception simply re-expresses itself in the new words.

This is why the volume of amendment required is not the heart of the problem but a symptom of it. A measure could be amended in a hundred places and remain unsafe, because each amended clause would still be an expression of the same premises. To reach the defect, one would have to begin not with different drafting but with a different set of ideas ² and a measure built from a different set of ideas is not this Bill amended. It is a different Bill. The conclusion follows as a matter of analysis rather than preference: the only operation capable of producing a safe and effective scheme is to set this Bill aside and begin again from premises that place the participant, rather than the budget, at the centre. That is not the more drastic of the available options. On the evidence this collection has assembled, it is the only coherent one.

There is a second, and in the end decisive, reason the Bill must be withdrawn rather than amended, and it follows directly from the breadth of what would have to change to make it safe. The list of areas set out below is long, and it reaches into almost every operative part of the Bill ² the access gateway, the planning principles, the budget method, the reduction and ratio powers, the forfeiture and suspension mechanisms, the integrity and information powers, the pricing settings, the review architecture, and the treatment of self-directed support. When the changes required to make a measure safe extend that far across it, the breadth is itself the proof: there is no residual sound instrument waiting to be refined beneath the parts that would have to go. The Bill is not a good design with bad provisions; it is provisions built throughout on the wrong foundation, and a structure built throughout on a flawed foundation cannot be repaired piece by piece, because the foundation is the thing at fault.

This is why withdrawal and co-design are not two separate demands, and why withdrawal is not the more drastic of two options. Genuine co-design, by its nature, must be free to consider every path forward, including paths this Bill never contemplated, rather than ratifying an outcome that has already been written. A Bill before the Parliament is, precisely, a predetermined outcome. One cannot co-design one¶s way to a conclusion that has already been drafted; engagement conducted after the ideas have been chosen, the instruments authored, and the fiscal envelope set is not co-design but consultation on a settled plan. Withdrawal is therefore the precondition for the co-design to be real. It is not an additional ask sitting beside

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the call for co-design; it is the thing that call requires. The recommendation is singular for that reason: withdraw the Bill, and let a genuine process begin ² and let that process, not this submission and not this Bill, settle what the reform should contain.

Two objections to withdrawal should be met before the areas are set out, because they are the objections on which a decision to amend rather than withdraw would rest. The first is that withdrawal leaves the status quo in place, and that the status quo is itself unsatisfactory. The collection agrees that the status quo is unsatisfactory; it has criticised the present scheme at length ² the funding base left exposed, the safety reforms that became unsafe, the support models hollowed out, the actuary¶s decade of data that the system could not read. But withdrawal is not a vote for the status quo. It is the precondition for a reform genuine enough to improve on it, and the alternative to this Bill is not the present scheme preserved but the path that a real co-design would produce. The second objection is that withdrawal causes delay, and that delay has its own costs. So it may; but the costs of this Bill are front-loaded, and that changes what delay means. On the Government¶s own announced timetable, the community-participation reductions begin from late 2026 and the budget-reduction and plan-suspension powers commence in law on the first of October 2026 ² ahead of the new framework, the new eligibility rules, and the foundational supports meant to catch the people the changes displace. To pause that sequence is not to withhold a benefit from participants; it is to prevent a harm that the Bill schedules to arrive before its own safeguards do. Delay of a reform that begins by reducing supports is, for the people whose supports would be reduced, protection rather than cost.

A word is owed on why this submission does not, in the manner submissions of this kind often do, attach a schedule of proposed amendments. It is not an oversight, and it is not a refusal to do the work. It is a position the authors are obliged to take by the same professional judgement that produced everything above. To draft amendments to this Bill would be to represent, by implication, that the Bill can be made safe and effective by amendment ² and that is precisely the proposition this collection has found, on the evidence, to be false. Neither author can in good conscience lend their standing to a remedy they do not believe exists. The surgical work of statutory and legal critique is being done, and done well, by the legal and human-rights practitioners to whom it properly belongs; this submission leaves it to them. What the authors offer instead is the finding their own disciplines equip them to make: that the Bill is flawed at its foundations, that no amendment can reach a foundational flaw, and that the responsible course is therefore withdrawal and a genuine beginning again.

Flynn & Gregory ² joint submission Page 346

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The shape of the replacement ² the areas a co-designed reform will need to

address

What follows is offered in a particular spirit, and the spirit matters as much as the substance.

These are not further recommendations, and they are emphatically not amendments to the Bill. They are an indication of the ways a co-designed reform would differ from this Bill, and of the areas such a reform will need to focus on ² including, but not limited to, the following.

The submission sets them out for two reasons. The first is that genuine co-design owns its own answers; it would be a contradiction for a submission that calls for the community to share authority over the design to arrive with the design already written. The collection therefore points to the direction and to the areas, and deliberately does not pre-empt the work. The second reason is demonstrative. Each area below is keyed to the provision whose defect it answers and to the Government claim it meets, so that the list does double duty: read forward, it sketches the replacement; read against the Bill, it shows why amendment cannot cure what is wrong. The areas are drawn primarily from Part 7 of Flynn¶s analysis ² its account of “the way back” ² and from the rebuttal in Movement VI. None of them is phrased as an instruction to alter a clause, because none of them can be reached by altering a clause; each describes the substance a genuine co-design process would be likely to recover once the Bill is set aside.

Restoring the participant to the centre of their own plan. The Bill repeals the participant-centred planning principles ² the statutory expression of choice and control ² and replaces them with principles oriented to the scheme¶s sustainability, to which the CEO is required to have regard (Schedule 1, Part 6, item 66, repealing the planning-principles Division including section 31, with new sections 17A and 17B; the object recast as subordinate to sustainability at section 3(1)(d); and the new value-for-money, evidence-hierarchy and family-contribution tests at section 34(1A)±(1K)). A co-designed reform would begin where the scheme was designed to begin: with the participant as the author of their own plan, in the literal sense the repealed principles required, and with planning that asks, of every decision, what a person needs in order to live safely, freely, and with dignity in the community, with genuine choice and control. A planning process built around that question has concrete content. It asks, for each participant, what is needed for them to live in their own home, with workers they choose, in a community they take part in, and to contribute as they wish; it asks what is needed to prevent foreseeable deterioration, hospitalisation, institutionalisation, or death, and treats prevention as central rather than residual; and it treats the assessment instrument ² whatever instrument is used ² as a servant of those questions rather than a substitute for asking them. The instrument¶s job is to help the system understand the person; it does not get to define the person it is helping to understand. This is the answer the collection gives to the Government¶s claim that the Bill returns the scheme to its original intent

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(Movement VI, claim 6.4) ² and it is the foundation on which the rest depends, because every other part of a reform is bolted onto the wrong question if the planning principles ask first about cost. It cannot be reached by amendment, because the principles in question are not a provision to be adjusted but the conception of whose scheme this is.

Measuring disability as it actually is ² impairment in interaction with environment. The Bill¶s access gateway turns on a “functional capacity” test that excludes the person¶s environment and supports (Schedule 1, Part 1, item 4, section 9B). It measures the person abstracted from the conditions in which their disability actually lives ² and in doing so measures something the scheme¶s own founding Convention says is not disability. A co-designed reform would restore a conception of disability as the interaction between impairment and environment, so that the instrument used to understand a person serves that understanding rather than substituting for it. In operative terms, that means an access process that asks what a person can and cannot do in the settings they actually live in, with and without the supports and adjustments around them, rather than scoring an abstracted individual against a fixed scale ² the conception the scheme¶s founding Convention adopts when it locates disability in the interaction between impairment and the barriers a person meets.

There is an a fortiori here that the collection presses: even the Government¶s stated aim of consistency concedes that like cases should be treated alike, and two people with the same diagnosis but very different environments are not like cases ² so a test blind to environment does not deliver the consistency it promises, it defeats it. This is the answer to the Government¶s claim that the new test brings consistency and fairness (Movement VI, claim 6.3): a gateway calibrated to the wrong thing does not produce fairness; it produces a consistent failure to see the people the scheme exists to serve. Amendment cannot reach it, because the defect is in what the test is for, not in its wording.

Ending automatic forfeiture, and defining the thresholds for suspension and revocation. Two mechanisms in the Bill strip protections from participants by operation of law rather than by a decision anyone makes. The first automatically renews a plan on its end date without carrying forward approved one-off and capital funding, and attaches no reviewable decision to the loss (Schedule 1, Part 5, item 50, section 50A ² in particular the absence of one-off funding under section 50A(2)(b) and the absence of any new statement or reviewable decision under section 50A(4)); the result, in Flynn¶s image, is the wheelchair that has been approved, ordered, and is in transit, and that disappears at renewal. The second permits suspension, and eventually revocation, of a participant¶s access on undefined thresholds of “reasonable” contact attempts (Schedule 1, Part 7, item 83, section 40A, and the revocation power at item 79, section 30(1A)) ² a power that falls hardest on precisely the people the system finds hardest to reach, in circumstances where reachability is itself a

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function of the supports being suspended. A co-designed reform would end automatic

forfeiture of approved support, and would define clear, fair, and reviewable thresholds for any

suspension or revocation. In operative terms, that means a participant does not lose funding

already approved and committed merely because a plan reaches its end date; and that no

access is suspended or revoked without genuine, documented attempts to make contact

through the very supports a person relies on to be reachable, without a decision made by a

person who can be identified and held accountable for it, and without a clear right to have that

decision reviewed before its consequences fall. What Flynn¶s account calls suspension by

silence ² the loss of standing that follows from a participant¶s failure to answer a system that

may itself have removed the means by which they could be reached ² is the opposite of a

safeguard. This answers the Government¶s claims of plan certainty (Movement VI, claim 6.10)

and of strengthened safeguarding (claim 6.6): certainty that resets to a participant¶s

disadvantage is not certainty, and a safeguard that punishes the unreachable does not

safeguard them. These mechanisms cannot be amended into fairness, because their unfairness

is structural ² they are designed to operate without a decision, and so without the means to

test one.

Constraining systemic reductions and shared-support-by-default. The Bill builds

in several powers that move the scheme away from individualised support and toward

standardised, shared, and reduced provision. A funding component for a class of supports can

be cut for a group of participants across nominated plans by instrument (Schedule 1, Part 4, )item 34, section 34A, especially section 34A(1)±(2) and (5)). A determination may set, for a

class of supports, a maximum funding amount, a maximum intensity, or a maximum

worker-to-participant ratio ² the power behind the “1:3” policy figure (Schedule 1, Part 6, item

68, section 33(2EA), in particular section 33(2EA)(c)) ² and these maxima may apply

regardless of whether the funding meets the cost of the supports (section 33(2EB), Note 1).

The new budget method may itself set a budget below the cost of the supports a person needs

(Schedule 4, item 4, section 32K(3C), within section 32K(3B)±(3E)). A co-designed reform

would constrain systemic, non-individualised reductions, and would refuse to make shared /support the default: continuous one-to-one support would not be treated as exceptional, no /worker-to-participant ratio such as 1:3 would be imposed without a published safety and /evidence base demonstrating it is safe for the people it applies to, and the funding of a person¶s /housing would be separated from the funding of their support, so that where someone lives /and with whom is not dictated by how their support is most cheaply delivered. This answers /the Government¶s claims of sustainability (Movement VI, claim 6.1), of safeguarding and /quality (claim 6.6), and of flexibility through rules (claim 6.9): a ratio set below safe levels is /not flexibility but the abandonment of individualised support, and it pushes participants /toward the congregate settings the Royal Commission identified as the locus of the worst harm

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² the same settings whose societal cost the Commission estimated in the order of forty-six billion dollars a year, and which all of its commissioners agreed no person should be compelled to enter. There is, moreover, a sustainability argument the right way round here, and a co-designed reform would make it. The insurance model the Productivity Commission designed manages cost across the lifetime of a participant ² it invests early, prevents deterioration, and avoids the much larger costs that accumulate when prevention fails: hospital admissions, institutional placements, carer breakdown, and the cascading clinical complications that follow withdrawn support. A funding maximum set below the cost of a person¶s need does not reduce that lifetime cost; it externalises it, moving it out of the scheme and into the hospital, the family, and the other systems that absorb a deteriorating life. A power to fund below the cost of need cannot be amended into safety; the power itself is the problem, and the missing element is the published evidence base it has never been required to have.

Directing integrity powers at bad actors, not at the ordinary participant. The Bill¶s integrity architecture broadens who counts as a provider, creates wide monitoring, investigation, and penalty powers, and extends information-gathering and record-keeping obligations (Schedule 2, Part 1, item 3, section 10C; Schedule 2, Part 2, item 33, the new Part 3C of Chapter 4, sections 73ZSA±73ZSM, including the inspectors and investigators at section 73ZSK and the civil penalty at item 12, section 53(3); and the information and record powers in Schedule 2, Parts 3 and 4). The difficulty is not that integrity matters ² it does, and fraud occurs ² but that the architecture treats the participant as a compliance subject rather than as the person the scheme exists to serve. A co-designed reform would direct integrity powers precisely at genuine wrongdoing, distinguishing the bad actor from the ordinary participant and from the participant-directed arrangement, so that the scheme¶s integrity is secured without auditing an entire population of disabled people as if each were a risk to be managed.

This is the answer to the Government¶s integrity claim (Movement VI, claim 6.2): the bad- actor problem and the participant problem are not the same problem, and a system that designs its standards and audits as though the worst actor were the typical case will drive out the careful, person-specific arrangements that keep people safe. The breadth of the powers cannot be amended away without rebuilding the conception of the participant beneath them.

Preserving full independent merits review, and requiring transparency over automated outcomes. No single provision of the Bill abolishes independent merits review; the degradation is cumulative ² a death by a thousand cuts ² and the collection has been careful to describe it as exactly that and not to overstate it. Some decisions are removed from the reviewable set, including a reassessment-decision category struck from the reviewable- decisions table; the time the Agency has to act on a reassessment request is extended, easing the internal pathway out toward ninety days; and the largest changes ² automatic renewal

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under section 50A, and group reductions under section 34A ² are made to operate by force of law, so that there is no reviewable decision at all (the note to section 59B(1) confirms as much; section 50A(4)(b) confirms renewal is not reviewable; suspension, by contrast, remains reviewable under section 99(1) item 5A, and the collection does not claim otherwise). And where review survives, its substance is hollowed by the mandatory method: because a budget must be worked out in accordance with the rules-specified method applied to the needs-assessment report (Schedule 4, sections 32K(1A) and 32L), a reviewer cannot substitute a different figure but only direct that the method be re-run.

Above all, the Bill permits plans and budgets ² including the evaluative judgements a decision normally requires ² to be generated by computer program, and then deems the output an administrative action of the CEO to keep it nominally reviewable (Schedule 3, Part 2, item 11, sections 59B±59E).

A co-designed reform would preserve full, genuine independent merits review of the decisions that affect a participant¶s funding, and would require methodological transparency wherever an outcome is produced by automated means ² so that a participant can know how and why a decision was reached, and can test it. This answers the Government¶s claims of fairness, transparency, and review (Movement VI, claim 6.7) and of efficiency through automation (claim 6.8). The collection presses this point on the country¶s own terms: the Robodebt Royal Commission warned that the judicial review of automated decisions is uncertain, recommended a clear review pathway and systems “designed with human agency at its centre,” and the Government accepted those recommendations; this Bill moves the opposite way barely two years later.

The legal concern is the scholars¶ and the Commission¶s, not this submission¶s to rule on; but the direction of travel is the couplet, literalised ² a lesson accepted and then legislated against.

This area carries a weight the others do not, and the rebuttal explains why: the loss of fairness and transparency, and the automation of decisions drafted to be unreviewable, are not merely two harms among the list but the mechanism that locks in the rest. Procedural fairness is the multiplier; remove the means to know a decision and to correct it, and every other reduction the Bill makes becomes not only heavier but irreversible. None of this can be cured by amendment, because a deeming provision can supply the label “decision” but not the human reasoning that review exists to scrutinise.

Pricing for the country as it actually is ² local and thin-market realities. The Bill empowers the Minister to set maximum payable amounts, with the Agency prohibited from paying and providers from charging above them (Schedule 3, Part 1, item 4, section 45C, read with section 33(2F)). Where those maxima are set against national benchmarks that assume metropolitan supply chains, they fail every participant whose market is thinner than the average ² in regional, rural, and remote Australia, and wherever the supply of clinicians and trained workers is scarce.

A co-designed reform would require pricing that reflects actual local costs and the realities of thin-market availability, treating thin markets as a structural feature Flynn & Gregory ² joint submission Page 351

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of an Australia-wide scheme rather than as a residual category of difficult cases. In operative

terms, that means price settings able to recognise the higher real cost of delivering support in

regional, rural, and remote areas, and in any market where workers and clinicians are scarce,

so that a participant’s funding can actually purchase the support the plan describes rather than

a support that exists only on paper. The point reaches the right the scheme exists to secure:

the Convention’s guarantee of life in the community of one’s choosing is empty for a person

whose community has no provider willing to work at the national price, and a scheme that

prices as though supply were uniform quietly confines those participants to wherever the

market happens to be thick. This answers the Government’s claims of consistency and fairness

(Movement VI, claim 6.3) and of sustainability (claim 6.1): a national price that does not exist

in a participant’s market is neither consistent nor fair to that participant, and a scheme

designed for thin markets at the outset can still work in deep ones, while the reverse is not

true. A price-setting power exercised on the wrong assumption is not corrected by amending ithe power; it is corrected by designing for the country the scheme actually serves.

Protecting self-management and the self-direction of support. Although no provision of the Bill abolishes self-management or self-direction, the registration, market- separation, penalty, information, and record-keeping settings around plan management and provision constrain participant-directed arrangements as collateral damage (the plan- management registration and separation provisions at Schedule 2, Part 6, items 94±98, sections 73EA, 73EB, and section 73E(2A)-(2B), read with the integrity architecture above).

For many participants - and for people with high and complex needs in particular - participant direction is often safer than provider control, because the participant knows the body, the risks, the history, and the failure modes in ways a roster-driven provider cannot. A co-designed reform would preserve self-management, self-direction, and the direct employment of support workers as legitimate, properly funded, and properly supported delivery models, and would protect the clinicians who train and supervise those workers. The protections are not exotic; they are the ordinary regulatory work any scheme committed to participant direction has to do, and which the present settings have left undone: documented competency expectations that match real practice, clinical-governance pathways a practitioner can rely on, indemnification arrangements that do not load the entire professional risk onto the individual clinician, and quality-and-safeguards rules that recognise and accommodate the clinician-trained, worker-delivered model rather than treating it as a regulatory residual.

Where the support is person-specific, the training should be person-specific too, and people must be able to choose the workers who enter their home. This answers the Government’s claims of safeguarding and quality (Movement VI, claim 6.6) and of flexibility through rules (claim 6.9): regulation can and must target unsafe practice without destroying safe individualised models, and conflating the two produces exactly the displacement that has

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hollowed the worker-delivered, clinician-trained model out. Amendment cannot reach this, because the constraint is the cumulative effect of an integrity design that imagines the participant as a risk.

Building safety on harm minimisation and early intervention, continuity through hospital, and oversight that measures outcomes. Three further areas from Part 7 of Flynn¶s analysis belong to the shape of the replacement, because they go to whether the scheme is safe and whether it can see itself. First, safety: a co-designed reform would name harm minimisation, not zero-risk avoidance, as the operating principle of the scheme¶s safety regime, and would invest in the front-loading and early intervention the allied health professions have practised for half a century ² designing standards and audits around whether a person is actually safer rather than whether an institution is more insulated. Second, hospital continuity: a continuity-of-support test would replace the automatic withdrawal of disability supports at hospital admission, so that where those supports are necessary for safety, communication, daily living, or the prevention of deterioration and the hospital cannot deliver them, they continue ² the burden of justification falling on withdrawal, not on continuity.

When the System Forgets to Listen sets out why this matters concretely: a person whose disability supports are stripped on admission can lose the very workers who know how they communicate, how they eat, how they signal pain, and what keeps them safe, at the moment they are most vulnerable and least able to advocate for themselves ² and the hospital, built for acute clinical care, is rarely equipped to supply that knowledge in their place. Continuity of support through an admission is therefore not a funding convenience but a safety measure, and in some cases a measure on which survival depends. Third, oversight: a reformed regime would measure the things that matter to a participant¶s life ² whether people are safe, housed, supported continuously, free of unmet need, in control of who enters their home, able to participate and to contribute, and free of foreseeable preventable harm ² and would do so under a co-monitoring discipline in which the data is collected and interpreted with the community and made available for independent scrutiny. These answer the Government¶s claims of safeguarding and quality (Movement VI, claim 6.6) and of securing the scheme for future generations (claim 6.5): a system that measures only what is administratively visible accumulates a decade of evidence and still cannot read it, while a system that protects an institution by controlling people into congregate settings has misunderstood where the danger lies. None of this is amendment work; it is the work of asking the scheme to measure, and to keep safe, the life rather than the ledger.

Genuine co-design as the discipline the whole reform turns on. The last area is not one area among the others; it is the governing one, and it is the hinge of the entire recommendation. Flynn¶s analysis sets out genuine co-design not as a sentiment but as a

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recognised professional discipline with an established structure: eight tenets, bound by one governing principle. Five track the lifecycle of a reform ² co-ideation, the shared authorship of the ideas themselves before the solution space is narrowed; co-design, a genuine share in how the system is built; co-authorship, the community¶s hand in the actual text of the instruments, rules, and assessment tools; co-implementation, carrying that authority through into delivery so a sound design cannot be quietly undone at the operational layer; and co- monitoring, the publicly scrutable performance data without which co-design is a one-off event rather than a living practice. Three are conditions that must hold across the whole lifecycle ² co-equal, replacing the funder¶s unilateral veto with genuine shared decision- making; co-ownership, a continuing stake in the scheme as the community¶s own; and co- consent, the recognition that consent to how a system operates is ongoing, not deemed once at the point of access. Together they are what the disability movement¶s demand ² nothing about us without us ² requires when it is taken seriously as a design discipline rather than as a slogan.

A reform built this way must include people with high and complex needs in the main rooms where the main decisions are made, not in a separate working group consulted at the margin, and must include regional, rural, remote, culturally and linguistically diverse, First Nations, and low-socioeconomic perspectives from the outset. It must proceed at the depth co-design requires, not at the speed of a budget cycle, and it must build the foundational supports, and sequence the change, before the participant-facing reductions ² not after them.

The collection presses this on the Committee on the strongest possible ground, which is the government¶s own. The community¶s reservations about the Independent Review of the NDIS are documented and well founded ² the growth cap set by National Cabinet before the Review reported, the prominence of the largest providers, and the co-design the Review called for but which has since been honoured largely in its absence ² and the submission does not assert that the Review was captured or impugn anyone who served on it. It sets all of that aside, and takes the Review at its word. Even on that reading, the Review itself required genuine co- design, required its recommendations to be implemented “as a package over a five-year transition period,” and made the availability of foundational supports a stated precondition for the participant-pathway reform; the national peak body for people with disability records that there is “no confirmed start date” for those supports and no guarantee they will be in place before the other changes take effect. If even the Government¶s own Review insisted on genuine co-design and on supports before reductions, a Bill that proceeds without the first and reverses the second cannot be defended as the faithful delivery of that Review ² and it cannot be made faithful by amendment, because the thing missing is the process, and the process cannot begin until the predetermined outcome is withdrawn.

That is the hinge, stated once more and plainly: a true co-design must be free to consider every path forward; a Bill forecloses that freedom; withdrawal is therefore the precondition for the co-design, ot a separate ask.

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areas above are what such a process would be likely to recover. They are offered as an indication of its substance ² never as a substitute for the process itself.

Read together, the areas above make the case for the single recommendation more forcefully than the recommendation can make it alone. Each is keyed to a different operative part of the Bill ² the access gateway, the planning principles, the budget method, the reduction and ratio powers, the forfeiture and suspension mechanisms, the integrity and information powers, the pricing settings, the review architecture, the treatment of self-directed support, the safety regime, and the relationship with the hospital system ² and each describes a change that cannot be reached by rewriting the provision, because what is wrong is the premise the provision expresses. That is the demonstration the list was built to make. A measure whose every load-bearing part rests on the wrong foundation is not refined by amendment; it is replaced by design. The areas mark out the territory a genuine reform will cover and the direction it will travel. The instrument for producing it is the co-design the first recommendation asks the Committee to make possible ² and the first step in producing it is to withdraw the Bill that now forecloses it.

Part 2 ² Conclusion: the warning Parliament must hear

What this collection has established

This collection has made an argument that, by its end, is better described as a record assembled than a case constructed. It began with a couplet and a claim ² that systems which forget the people they serve cause harm, and that nations which forget their history repeat it ² and it has carried both through the design of the scheme, the testimony of those who live inside it, the findings of the institutions the Commonwealth itself convened, and the provisions of the Bill now before the Parliament. Four complete works sit at its centre, reproduced whole and unedited because their authority lies in being read as their authors wrote them: an account, from the inside, of what happens to a scheme when it stops listening; and three close studies of the decision logic, the shared-support economics, and the community-participation changes through which the regression is actually being delivered.

Around them, eleven Movements have set the present Bill in the long history that gives it meaning, tested the Government¶s defence of it claim by claim, and named the risks that remain even when every claim is set aside.

What that record establishes is not a single complaint but a convergence. The Bill measures, as the central concept of its access regime, something that is not disability and that the scheme¶s own Convention says is not disability. It removes from the law the principles that placed the participant at the centre of their own plan, and installs in their place principles

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oriented to the scheme’s cost. It inverts the test of what is reasonable and necessary, so that the budget governs the need rather than the need governing the budget. And it builds its planning, its caps and ratios, its forfeitures, its suspensions, and its enforcement on those altered foundations. These are not separable defects to be weighed one against another; they are facets of one failure, and the collection has shown ² from the institutions’ own evidence ² that the failure is foreseeable in its harm, false in its sustainability arithmetic, and contrary to the direction of the Government’s own Review. The scheme that was built to give people lifetime certainty, genuine choice and control, and a realistic chance of an ordinary life in the community would, under this Bill, be reoriented around its own budget as the controlling principle, with participants reduced from the authors of their plans to the subjects of an assessment that cannot see the lives they actually lead.

Stated at the level of the whole collection, five findings carry the argument. The Bill places the budget before the person, where the scheme was built to place the person first. It recreates, in contemporary and administrative form, the conditions of the institutional past the country spent decades dismantling. It will cause harm that is not speculative but foreseeable, documented, and in part already visible in the record. Its public justifications do not survive being tested against the scheme’s design, against its history, against the evidence, against current practice, and against the Government’s own Review. And none of this is an argument against reform: a rights-based, participant-led reform that is sustainable without regression remains both possible and necessary. Everything across the eleven Movements and the four works is, in the end, in service of those five findings ² and they converge, every one of them, on the same conclusion about what should now be done.

What is at stake

It is worth saying plainly what is at stake, because the public framing of the reform has trained the country’s attention on one set of numbers ² the cost of the scheme, its rate of growth, its share of the Budget ² and almost none on another, which is the set of human consequences the reform will produce. The numbers that matter for what follows are not measured in billions of dollars. They are measured in people. People whose plans will fall below the level at which their lives can be sustained safely in the community. People pushed, against their preference and against the country’s own settled view of best practice, into congregated arrangements where harm has been formally documented to concentrate. People who will lose, at the renewal of a plan, the funding for equipment already approved and on its way. People whose supports are suspended because the system could not reach them. People prevented from ever entering the scheme because a gateway calibrated to the wrong thing cannot see them. Family members who will leave paid work to provide full-time care, and whose security will erode in proportion to the years they spend doing it.

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these consequences arrives ahead of the rest: the community-participation budgets begin to

reset downward from late 2026, and the Bill¶s budget-reduction and plan-suspension powers

commence in law on the first of October 2026 ² before the new framework, before the new

eligibility rules, and before the foundational supports that were meant to catch the people the

changes displace. The cuts move first.

The scale on which this will operate is not hidden; it sits in the Government¶s own projections

and in the modelling done around them. The reform is designed to reduce the number of

people the scheme supports from around 760,000 today to around 600,000 by the end of the

decade ² on the order of 160,000 fewer people ² with no public account of who loses their

place or how that is to be decided. The average community-participation plan is set to fall from

about $31,000 to about $26,000. Independent modelling commissioned by the sector puts

the effect on the disability workforce in the order of 200,000 jobs. These are the figures the

public conversation has mostly passed over; and behind each of them is the human figure the

collection has kept in view throughout ² the participant whose support is the thing that stands

between them and the harm the rest of this submission has documented.

What is at stake, in other words, is not an administrative arrangement but a generation¶s worth

of ordinary lives ² home, safety, participation, dignity, and for some participants the

continuity of support on which breathing itself depends. These are not luxuries; they are the

conditions of citizenship for the people the scheme exists to bring into citizenship. They will

not survive the contraction in its present form, and the people who lose them will not be

returned to them by any later inquiry or future reform. The losses, once accepted, are durable

² and they are made more durable still by the same Bill¶s treatment of review. When the

largest reductions are arranged to take effect by operation of law, with no decision to challenge,

and when the decisions that remain are produced by a method a reviewer can only ask to be

re-run, the ordinary means by which a wrong is found and put right is itself narrowed.

Procedural fairness, as the rebuttal put it, is the multiplier: remove the means to know and

contest a decision, and every reduction beneath it becomes not only heavier but harder to

reverse. That is why the timing matters as much as the substance, and why a harm scheduled

to arrive ahead of its own safeguards is not a harm that can be safely allowed to begin.

The false choice the reform asks the country to accept

The reform is defended through a particular framing, and that framing should be named and

refused. The country is being asked, repeatedly, to accept that there is a choice to be made

between sustainability and rights ² that the scheme cannot be both fiscally responsible and

faithful to its founding promise, and that responsibility must therefore come first. This is

presented as the hard-headed acknowledgment of constraint, and those who object are cast as

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unwilling to face the realities of public finance. The collection refuses the framing, and it has

supplied the grounds on which to refuse it. A scheme whose contraction predictably forces participants into the settings the Royal Commission identified as most harmful does not become sustainable; it increases the country¶s largest single category of disability-related cost.

A scheme that moves its workforce onto income support and its participants¶ carers out of paid work has not saved money; it has shifted cost from one Budget line to others. A scheme that abandons the participant-centred principles that made its measurable gains in workforce participation possible will not preserve those gains; it will reverse them. Sustainability, properly understood, is the capacity of a system to keep delivering on its purpose over time, and a scheme that destroys the lives it was funded to enable has not become sustainable. It has become something else, wearing sustainability¶s name. Genuine sustainability and faithful delivery of rights are not opposed in this scheme; they are the same set of choices made well, and the same choices made poorly are what produce both fiscal waste and human harm.

There is, in any case, a more disciplined account of sustainability available, and the country already owns it. The scheme was designed by the Productivity Commission as an insurance model whose funding was deliberately insulated from the annual budget cycle, precisely so that supports would track assessed need rather than the fiscal weather of a given year ² and the Commission warned that tying the scheme to short-term budget pressure, or holding its spending to a predetermined path while needs grew, would undermine the very thing it was built to do. A reform that subordinates need to a growth target is not a more sustainable version of that design; it is a departure from it, and it reintroduces the risk the original architecture was constructed to remove. Sustainability of the kind the scheme was promised is achieved by investing early, preventing deterioration, and keeping people in the community where support is cheapest to sustain over a life ² not by capping what the scheme provides and absorbing the larger cost elsewhere.

The assumption beneath the decades

There is a question the collection has circled from its first Movement to its last, and it must be put directly before the end. Why does this pattern recur? Why, across very different governments and decades and labels, does disability policy keep arriving at the same place ² more control by systems, more suspicion of the people the systems serve, more standardisation, more congregation, and a steady willingness to treat the autonomy of disabled people as conditional? The answer this collection has reached is not that any particular government has acted in bad faith, and the submission has been careful throughout not to claim that it has. The answer is that beneath the changing language sits a recurring institutional assumption ² an assumption about the cost of disabled lives, the limits of Flynn & Gregory ² joint submission Page 358

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disabled people’s contribution, and the conditional nature of their freedom ² and that the

assumption survives every change of label because it is never named, and so is never refused.

This is not a new observation, and the first Movement of this collection set out the long version of it: the asylums and institutions the country built and then, after decades and a great deal of documented harm, resolved to close; the segregated settings a Royal Commission has only recently examined again; the recurring discovery ² made, forgotten, and made again ² that disabled people are not rendered safe by being managed out of ordinary life. The pattern is the couplet’s first clause written across a century: a nation forgetting, at intervals, a lesson it had already paid in full to learn. What makes the present moment different is only this ² that the lesson is now held in the country’s own commissioned records, set down in evidence the Commonwealth itself gathered, and so is available to be remembered before the harm rather than after it.

Flynn’s account of this collection puts that recognition better than the collection’s own voice can, and it does so in the voice of someone writing from inside the consequences. The submission lets it stand, unedited, as the reflective climax of everything that has come before.

One of the most sobering things about this submission is that, in many respects, it has assembled itself.

That is not because the argument has been easy to write. It has not. It is because the evidence has required very little reaching. Again and again, the same pattern appears: systems designed in our name, but not with us; reforms presented as safety, sustainability, or modernisation, but experienced as restriction, standardisation, exclusion, and risk; language that speaks of rights and choice while policy settings move people back toward dependency, congregation, and institutional logic.

That should tell us something.

It should tell us that the problem is not only one bad decision, one flawed Bill, one poorly designed rule, or one ministerial misstep. The deeper problem is the set of assumptions that keeps reappearing beneath the surface: assumptions about the cost of disabled lives, the limits of our contribution, the conditional nature of our freedom, and the extent to which our rights can be compromised for the convenience of systems, markets, budgets, and governments.

I do not need to pretend I can read the private thoughts of individual ministers, parliamentarians, parties, or power brokers. I cannot. But systems reveal their assumptions through the choices they keep making. Across successive governments, oppositions, crossbench voices, and political movements of very different ideological flavours, the pattern is difficult to miss. When pressure builds, the proposed answer is almost always a return to older power structures: more control by government, more control by providers, more suspicion toward participants, more restriction of choice, more standardisation, more segregation by stealth, and more willingness to treat disabled people’s autonomy as conditional.

That is the groupthink that matters. Not the private belief of any one

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politician, but the recurring institutional assumption that disabled people with complex needs

are safest, cheapest, and most manageable when our lives are organised by others. That

assumption has sat underneath disability policy for decades. It has changed language many

times. It has changed labels, schemes, ministers, departments, and slogans. But the underlying

logic remains painfully familiar. > > Different parties may dress the argument differently.

Some call it sustainability. Some call it safety. Some call it fraud control. Some call it market

stewardship. Some call it returning to basics. But when the practical result is to restore the

same power structures that disabled people have spent decades fighting to escape, the label

matters far less than the direction of travel. > > You cannot read the contents of another

person’s mind. But you can learn a great deal from the company they keep, the positions they

repeatedly defend, and the power structures they choose to preserve when the rights of

disabled people are on the line. > > That is the cruelty of systems that forget. Society may

eventually rediscover what it should never have forgotten. There may be another inquiry,

another commission, another report, another apology, another national moment of shame.

But for many of the people forced to live through the consequences, including people like me,

that reckoning may come too late.

The couplet, closed $and what is asked of the Committee$

That is where the whole argument has been leading, and it is where the couplet closes. When

a system forgets the people it was built for, those people are harmed $not as a risk but as a

record, and the record is already written. When a nation forgets the lessons of its own history,

it relearns them, and the relearning falls on people who will not, in many cases, be there to see

it. This collection exists so that the lesson need not be relearned the hard way a second time.

The Commonwealth holds, in records it commissioned and paid for, the evidence of where the

institutional logic of this Bill leads. It does not need to be re-confirmed. It needs to be

remembered. To remember it, in the only sense that counts, is to act on it while acting is still

possible $before the budgets reset, before the suspensions begin, before the people this

submission is about have been moved, quietly and at scale, out of the lives the scheme was

built to make possible. A memory that arrives after the harm is not memory; it is the apology

the collection’s first Movement showed the country has already had to make, in one form or

another, more than once before.

The submission therefore ends where it began, with a single request, now addressed directly

to the people in whose hands the legislation sits. The case made across this collection is not

that the Bill is the product of ill will; it is that the Bill is flawed in its foundations, and that a

measure flawed in its foundations cannot be repaired by amendment, because the flaw is not

in any provision an amendment could reach. We ask the Committee to recommend that the

National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future

                               Flynn & Gregory $joint submission$    Page 360

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The Generations) Bill 2026 be withdrawn, and that the Government begin in its place a genuine, end-to-end co-design of NDIS reform with the disability community $ conducted across the eight tenets this collection has set out, free to consider every path forward, and built on the understanding that withdrawal is the precondition for that process to be real. The community has done its part: it has gathered the record, and laid it before the Parliament. What remains is the oldest question in democratic life $ what the country chooses to do with a record it cannot say it did not have. The people most exposed to that choice have already told the Parliament what they need. The only question left is whether, this time, they will be heard while it still matters.

Sources (Movement VIII).

• Flynn, D. 2026, When the System Forgets to Listen: Systems Design, Human Rights, Safety, and the Human Cost of NDIS Regression $ Part 7 ($The way back $ a rights- based, safety-based, participant-led alternative$), and in particular: starting with the outcome rather than the line item, and the restoration of participant-centred planning; safety through harm minimisation and early intervention rather than zero- risk avoidance; the rebuilding of co-design as a governance discipline; the preservation of participant-directed support and the protection of the clinicians who make it work; design for thin markets rather than metropolitan averages; continuity of disability support through hospital admission; and oversight redesigned around real outcomes. Also Flynn¶s account of false co-design and the capture of the language of co-design; the eight tenets of genuine co-design and the governing principle “nothing about us without us”; the functional-capacity / “naked person” critique; the capabilities, ratios, and the abandonment of individualised support, and on choice of home, housemates, and support workers; the automated-forfeiture and “suspension by silence” chapters; and the work¶s own conclusion that the Bill is flawed in its foundations and must be withdrawn rather than amended. The closing passage in Part 2 is reproduced verbatim from Flynn¶s conclusion (Daniel Flynn). [Locked work reproduced whole and unedited in Movement II; cited here by theme, ot chapter number.]

• Gregory, P. 2026, Considerations for Preparing a Plan Review Report; SIL Commissioning Analysis; and Social, Economic and Community Participation Changes $ the decision logic of plan review; the shared-support economics behind shared-support-by-default; and the community-participation reductions. [Locked works reproduced whole in Movements IV, VI, VIII.]

• Productivity Commission 2011, Disability Care and Support, Report no. 54 $ the original design (insured, needs-based, individualised, choice-driven entitlement;

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• funding insulated from the budget cycle) and the co-design and funding

• preconditions the Commission attached to it.

• Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with

  Disability 2023, Final Report ² the unanimous finding on the concentration of harm

  in congregated and group-home settings; the estimated annual societal cost of that

  harm (in the order of $46 billion); and the mortality and avoidable-death analysis.

• Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme 2023, Report, and Australian

  Government 2023, Response (November 2023) ² the uncertainty of judicial review

  over automated decisions, the recommended clear review pathway and transparency,

  and the recommendation that such systems be built with human agency at their

  centre, together with the Government¶s acceptance of those recommendations. The

  doctrinal gap is the one identified by the named scholars (A. Huggins; Y-F. Ng and M.

  O¶Sullivan) by reference to Pintarich v Deputy Commissioner of Taxation [2018]

  FCAFC 79; reported here as the experts¶ and the Commission¶s concern, not as this

  submission¶s own legal ruling.

• Independent Review of the NDIS 2023, Working Together to Deliver the NDIS (7

  December 2023) ² the requirement that its recommendations be implemented as a

  single package across a five-year transition, the foundational-supports precondition,

  and the call for co-design; read together with the National Agreement on

  Foundational Supports 2026±31 and the peak body¶s note that no start date for

  foundational supports has been confirmed. (See Appendix F, the Bill-versus-Review

  crosswalk, for the a fortiori.)

• Australian Government, NDIS reform announcement (the Hon Mark Butler MP,

  National Press Club, 22 April 2026) and the Government¶s NDIS Bill fact sheet

  (automation described as “processing claims and payments”) ² the announced

  timetable, the projected reduction from around 760,000 to around 600,000

  participants by the end of the decade, the average community-participation plan

  reduction (about $31,000 to about $26,000), and independent peak-body modelling

  of the workforce effect (in the order of 200,000 jobs).

• National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future

  Generations) Bill 2026, and the NDIS Act 2013 as proposed to be amended ² clause

  references as pinned in Appendix B and CLAUSE_KEY.md, in particular: ss 3(1)(d),

  9B, 17A, 17B, 30(1A), 32K(1A) and (3B)±(3E), 32L, 33(2EA) and (2EB), 33(2F),

  34(1A)±(1K), 34A, 40A, 45C, 50A, 53(3), 59B±59E, 73E(2A)±(2B), 73EA, 73EB, 10C,

  73ZSA±73ZSM, and 99(1) item 5A; with the commencement table at s 2.

• Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2006/2008), Article 19 ² the

  right to live independently and be included in the community.

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References

Harvard (author±date) referencing. Sources are consolidated from all wrapper components. Legislation, cases, and international instruments follow standard Harvard treatment for legal materials. The four works reproduced as Attachments A±D are listed first as primary materials of this submission.

Submission attachments (primary materials)

• Flynn, D. 2026, When the System Forgets to Listen, Attachment A to this submission.
• Gregory, P. 2026a, Considerations for Preparing a Plan Review Report, Attachment B to this submission.
• Gregory, P. 2026b, Commissioning “SIL” and the Risk of Reinstitutionalisation (SIL Commissioning Analysis), Attachment C to this submission.
• Gregory, P. 2026c, Social, Economic and Community Participation Changes, Attachment D to this submission.

Legislation and Bills

• National Disability Insurance Scheme Act 2013 (Cth).
• National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 (Cth).
• Disability Services Act 1986 (Cth).
• Commonwealth Sheltered Employment (Assistance) Act 1967 (Cth).

Cases

• Nojin v Commonwealth [2012] FCAFC 192.
• Pintarich v Deputy Commissioner of Taxation [2018] FCAFC 79.

International instruments

Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, opened for signature 30 March 2007, 2515 UNTS 3 (entered into force 3 May 2008) (µCRPD¶), adopted by UN General Assembly resolution A/RES/61/106, 13 December 2006; Australia ratified 17 July 2008. See in particular Article 19 (living independently and being included in the community); Australia¶s interpretative declarations to Articles 12, 17 and 18 (2008).

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United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities 2017, General Comment

No. 5 (2017) on living independently and being included in the community, UN Doc

CRPD/C/GC/5.

United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities 2013, Concluding

Observations on the Initial Report of Australia, 10th session.

government, inquiry, and parliamentary sources

Australian Government 2023, Australian Government Response to the Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme, November 2023.

Australian Government 2024, Australian Government Response to the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability, Commonwealth of Australia.

Australian Human Rights Commission n.d., materials on Australia¶s signature and ratification of the CRPD and its Optional Protocol, and statement to the CRPD Committee requesting withdrawal of the interpretative declarations to Articles 12, 17 and 18.

Australian Law Reform Commission 2014, Equality, Capacity and Disability in Commonwealth Laws, ALRC Report 124.

Butler, M. (Hon. Mark Butler MP, Minister for Health, Disability and Ageing) 2026, address to the National Press Club, Canberra, 22 April 2026.

Department of Health, Disability and Ageing 2026, Securing the NDIS for Future Generations, and the Governments NDIS reform fact sheet, Commonwealth of Australia.

Federal Financial Relations 2026, National Agreement on Foundational Supports 2026±31 (commenced 2 February 2026).

Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission 1993, Report of the National Inquiry into the Human Rights of People with Mental Illness (the Burdekin Report).

Independent Review of the National Disability Insurance Scheme 2023, Working Together to Deliver the NDIS: Final Report, 7 December 2023 (the µNDIS Review¶), B. Bonyhady and L. Paul (co-chairs).

NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission 2023±24, Own Motion Inquiry into aspects of supported accommodation, and consultations on separating Supported Independent Living and Specialist Disability Accommodation.

Flynn & Gregory ² joint submission Page 364

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New South Wales Parliamentary Library and Legislative Council, records on the history of mental health inquiries in New South Wales (Tarban Creek 1846; Commission of Inquiry 1855; Royal Commissions 1923 and 1961; Richmond 1983; Barclay 1988; Burdekin 1993).

Productivity Commission 2011, Disability Care and Support, Inquiry Report No. 54, 31 July 2011, Commonwealth of Australia.

Richmond, D.T. 1983, Inquiry into Health Services for the Psychiatrically Ill and Developmentally Disabled (the Richmond Report), New South Wales.

Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme 2023, Report, Commonwealth of Australia.

Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability 2023, Final Report, Commonwealth of Australia (established 2019; Final Report 29 September 2023; 12 volumes; 222 recommendations).

Books, articles, and scholarly works

Bigby, C. et al. 2024, “A flawed model or weak implementation? A critical review of the approach to group homes taken by the Disability Royal Commission”.

Charlton, J.I. 1998, Nothing About Us Without Us: Disability Oppression and Empowerment, University of California Press.

Grattan Institute 2024, Better, safer, more sustainable: How to reform NDIS housing and support.

Lamb, H.R. 1984, “Deinstitutionalisation and the homeless mentally ill”.

Monk, L., Henderson, D. et al., Failed Ambitions: Kew Cottages and Changing Ideas of Intellectual Disabilities; and the Kew Cottages History Project (La Trobe University / Victoria University), oral history collection 2005±08.

Oliver, M. 1990, The Politics of Disablement, Macmillan.

Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS) 1976, Fundamental Principles of Disability.

Sector, peak-body, and reference sources

Ability First Australia, materials on its provider alliance.

Alliance20, materials on its market-stewardship agenda (collective of large providers including Life Without Barriers, Endeavour Foundation, Cerebral Palsy Alliance and Aruma).

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Australian Disability Enterprises (peak body), $^{μ}$A brief history of Australian Disability Enterprises$π$.

Australian Federation of Disability Organisations, materials on Australia’s ratification of the CRPD.

Community Visitor Scheme materials (Disability Support Guide; Department of Social Services / Department of Health Community Visitors Schemes Review; New South Wales Official Community Visitors data). eMelbourne, $μ$Intellectual Disability$π$. Find & Connect, $μ$Inquiry into Health Services for the Psychiatrically Ill and Developmentally Disabled$π$. Inclusion Australia, ADE Snapshot. Inner Sydney Voice 1993, on the unfunded community-replacement failure. National Disability Services (peak body), materials on market stewardship. One Door Mental Health, $μ$Deinstitutionalisation in Australia$π$. People with Disability Australia 2026, $μ$What we know so far about latest NDIS changes$π$, 28 April 2026; and Wage Justice Campaign materials. Starting With Julius, materials on supported-employment wages. University of Technology Sydney, $μ$Remembering disability institutions$π$ (Peat Island, Stockton, Tomaree Lodge). Victoria University Research Repository, $μ$Imprisoned in State Care? Life inside Kew Cottages 1925±2008$π$.

News and commentary

The Conversation 2024, coverage of the Government’s response to the Disability Royal Commission. The Guardian 2026, coverage of the Government’s NDIS reform announcement, 22 April 2026. MyCareSpace 2024, coverage of the Disability Royal Commission response. SBS News 2024, coverage of the Disability Royal Commission response.

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Team DSC, μTimeline of NDIS changes¶ and related coverage of the Disability Royal Commission response and Community Visitor schemes.

Clause-level provisions of the Bill and the NDIS Act are pinned in full at Appendix B (clause map) and Appendix F (the Bill measured against the NDIS Review). The doctrinal concern regarding the reviewability of automated decisions is that identified by A. Huggins, and by Y-F. Ng and M. O’Sullivan, by reference to Pintarich v Deputy Commissioner of Taxation [2018] FCAFC 79, and by the Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme; it is reported in this submission as those experts’ and that Commission’s concern, not as the submission’s own legal conclusion.

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Appendix B ² Clause map of the Bill

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

Submission to the Senate Standing Committees on Community Affairs ² Daniel Flynn and Peter Gregory

This map indexes the Bill provision-by-provision and shows where each is addressed in the submission. It exists to make coverage checkable: the four works and the rebuttal (Movement VI) prosecute the substantive measures; this map confirms that every Part of every Schedule is accounted for, and marks the provisions the Movement VI completeness pass picks up.

References are to the National Disability Insurance Scheme Act 2013 (the NDIS Act) as amended, except where a Schedule amends the «(Getting the NDIS Back on Track No. 1) Act 2024.

Commencement (s 2): The Bill commences on a staggered timetable. The participant-facing measures in Schedule 1 Part 4 (support determinations) and Part 7 (plan suspension) commence first, on 1 October 2026; eligibility-tightening (Parts 8±9) waits until 1 January 2028. The full table is reproduced at the foot of this appendix.

Schedule 1 – Access and planning measures

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|Part |Key provisions |What it does (plain language) |Commences |Addressed in |Status| |- |- |- |- |- | Pt 4 ² Support determinations |support-determination mechanism; reads with Sch 4 ss 32K±32L |Governs how supports are determined and funded |1 Oct 2026 |Flynn¶s analysis Pt 6; SIL paper; SCCP paper; Movement VI 6.1/6.3/6.3A |covered

Pt 5 ² Plan renewal |s 9 (reassessment date); s 32A; s 33(2)(c); ss 37±38 |Replaces plan rollover with fixed plan end dates and a renewal process |1 Feb 2027 |Flynn¶s analysis Pt 6; Movement VI 6.10; IX completeness pass |covered

Pt 6 ² Reasonable and necessary supports |ss 17A, 32K, 33(2E), 34, 47A |Alters the reasonable-and-necessary test and how it is applied |1 Feb 2027 |Flynn¶s analysis Pt 6; Movement VI 6.3A |covered

Pt 7 ² Plan suspension etc.|ss 33, 34, 47A;

s 99 |Creates a plan-suspension regime; suspension continues until the participant makes contact or status is revoked | |1 Oct 2026 |Flynn¶s analysis Pt 6; Movement VI 6.1/6.7; Movement VIII rec |covered

Pt 8 ² Tightening meaning of permanence |ss 9, 24, 25 |Narrows access where an impairment is treatable by tightening “permanence” |1 Jan 2028 |Movement VI completeness- completeness pass |pass

Pt 9 ² Eligibility based on access to other services |ss 21, 26, 30 |Conditions NDIS access on a person’s access to other service systems |1 Jan 2028 |Movement VI completeness- completeness pass |pass

Schedule 2 ² Fraud measures

|Part |Key provisions |What it does (plain language) |Commences |Addressed in |Status| |- |- |- |- |- | Pt 1 ² Registration of NDIS providers |s 9 (def); ss 10B, 73C, 201A |Expands and alters provider registration requirements |7th day after RA |6.2/6.11; IX completeness |pass

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Schedule 3 ² Governance arrangements

Part

Key provisions

What it does (plain language)

Commences

Addressed in

Status

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Schedule 4 ² New framework planning

Schedule 5 ² Transitional rules

Commencement table (Bill, s 2) – reproduced

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Provisions

Plain-language descriptions use original wording and are deliberately short (copyright discipline). The clause-by-clause argument is carried by the four works and Movement VI; this map is the index, not the analysis.

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Appendix F $ The Bill measured against the NDIS Review

Submission to the Senate Standing Committees on Community Affairs $ Inquiry into the

National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Daniel Flynn and Peter Gregory

Purpose of this appendix

This appendix exists to make one argument unavoidable, and it makes it on the Government’s own terms.

Much of the disability community does not accept the Independent Review of the NDIS as its own document. It points to the eight per cent growth cap that National Cabinet imposed in April 2023 $ months before the Review reported $ to the prominence of the largest providers and their peak bodies in the process, and to the co-design the Review called for but which has since been honoured largely in its absence. Those concerns are set out in section 7 of the submission and they are well founded.

This appendix sets all of that aside. It takes the Review entirely at its word, and reads it as its critics describe it: the Government’s own review, conducted on the Government’s own terms, with the scheme’s sustainability written expressly into its objectives. The question this appendix asks is narrow and, for that reason, difficult to evade: even on that reading $ even taking the Review as the Government’s own $ does this Bill do what the Review said must be done, in the way the Review said it must be done?

The tables below show that it does not. The Bill departs from the Review’s own guardrails on sequencing, on the foundational-supports precondition, on the protection of existing participants, and on co-design; and it runs against the Review’s substantive direction toward needs-based, individualised, community-based support. A measure that the conditions of the Government’s own review would not permit cannot be defended as a faithful implementation of that review $ still less as a “return to the original intent” of a scheme whose original intent was defined by the Productivity Commission in 2011 (see section 6 of the submission, and Appendix on the Productivity Commission benchmark).

How to read this appendix. The left-hand column quotes or references the Review’s published text directly. The Bill-side column states the correspondence at the level of principle, now pinned to the operative clauses; the full clause-by-clause map is at Appendix B,

and the rebuttal is at Movement VI, with which this appendix should be read alongside.

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F.1 ² How reform must be done: the Review’s process guardrails,

and the Bill

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The NDIS Review said (process What the Bill does The departure Cross-reference

and sequencing)

Existing participants should Reassessment into the new Transition risk is shifted off Movement VI 6.7, 6.10 ransition smoothly to any new framework, combined with the the system and onto the suspension/revocation arrangements, without Bill¶s budget-variation and individual participant. thresholds; losing the supports they plan-reassessment non- support rely on. mechanisms, exposes existing individualised reductions); The departure participants to reductions reductions); the Plan before an alternative support Review paper and the system exists to catch them. SCCP paper

[Bill: Sch 1 Pt 2 (reassessment limits, ss 32B/34); Pt 5 (plan end dates, s 33(2)(c)); Pt 7 (suspension, ss 33/34/99); Sch 4 (s 32K budget method); Sch 5 transitional plan-end-date provisions, cf. 1 Oct 2027.]

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F.2 ² What reform must protect: the Review’s substantive direction, and the Bill

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The NDIS Review’s What the Bill does The departure Cross-reference

direction (continuous with the 2011 design)

Parts 3B/3C); Pt 3 info- collection; Sch 3 Pt 2

automation of administrative action incl. evaluative judgements (ss 59B±59D, s 59B(4)) ² review preserved only in form (s 59B(11)).]

F.3 ² The sequence the Review required, and the sequence as it is actually scheduled

Element The order the Review required The order as actually scheduled

The fiscal envelope Sustainability pursued through A growth cap was set by National insurance discipline, foundational Cabinet in April 2023 ² before the supports and shared Review reported ² and tightened in Commonwealth±State accountability, April 2026 to a target of roughly 5±6 sequenced over five years. per cent growth, with the scheme projected to fall from around 760,000 to around 600,000 participants by the end of the decade. The financial answer was fixed first.

Foundational supports (the Established and working first, as the National Agreement on Foundational precondition) explicit precondition for participant- Supports commenced February pathway reform. 2026; supports still being designed; only partly funded; dependent on State and Territory agreements met warily; “no confirmed start date or guarantee they will be in place before other changes take effect.”

Community-participation budgets Protected, and reformed only as part of Reset downward from late 2026 the sequenced, supports-first package. ² average plans in this area to fall from about $31,000 to about $26,000 ² ahead of the new framework, the new eligibility rules, and the foundational supports.

The planning framework and budget After foundational supports, as part of Operationally delayed to 1 April 2027 model the package, with disruption because, on the Government¶s own minimised. account, the system was not ready and more design work was needed ² an admission of precisely

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Element The order the Review required The order as actually scheduled

The unreadiness the Review¶s sequencing rule existed to prevent. (The enabling provisions, Sch 4, nonetheless commence 7 days after Royal Assent: the legal architecture is switched on at once, the rollout staged.)

Eligibility (access) Stable for existing participants; any Diagnosis-based access replaced by change sequenced behind the supports. standardised functional-capacity assessments (Sch 1 Pt 1, s 9B), with the permanence and other-services tightening (Sch 1 Pts 8±9) commencing 1 January 2028 ² determining who keeps or gains a place in the scheme.

The result Supports precede and cushion the The reductions precede the change. supports: the budget method and plan-suspension regime commence 1 October 2026, the contraction of the scheme is set in train, and the precondition is neither built nor guaranteed to arrive before the changes take effect.

The Review built the sequencing rule for a reason that the history in this submission makes plain: it is precisely the “withdraw first, replace later” pattern ² embraced closures, unfunded replacement ² that produced the worst failures of the deinstitutionalisation era † and it is the pattern that leaves the individual to fall through the gap that opens in between. The timetable above reproduces that pattern in the exact grammar the Review tried to forbid.

F.4 ² Conclusion

This crosswalk establishes the a fortiori on which much of the submission turns.

If the Bill departed only from what the disability community wanted, the Government could answer that reform requires hard choices. But the Bill departs from the conditions the Government¶s own review placed on its own recommendations ² on sequencing, on the foundational-supports precondition, on protecting existing participants, and on co-design ² and from that review¶s substantive direction toward needs-based, individualised, community-based support. It does so, moreover, against the unanimous finding of a Royal Commission that the settings the Bill makes easier are the settings in which disabled people are most often harmed.

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A measure that even the Government’s own review, on its own terms, would not sanction

cannot be characterised as the faithful delivery of that review. Nor can it be characterised as a

return to the scheme’s original intent: that intent was defined in 2011 by the Productivity Commission as an insured, needs-based, choice-driven entitlement, deliberately insulated from the budget cycle † and this Bill moves in the opposite direction. On the Government’s own documents, read against one another, the Bill fails the test the Government itself set. And because much of this timetable cannot lawfully proceed unless the Bill is passed, the correspondence set out above is not academic: it describes what the Committee would be authorising.

This appendix is anchored on the published text of the NDIS Review (Working Together to Deliver the NDIS, 7 December 2023) and on the public reform timetable (National Agreement on Foundational Supports 2026±31; the New Framework Planning commencement). The clause-by-clause substantiation of the Bill-side entries is provided in Appendix B (clause-map) and Movement VI (rebuttal of the Government’s justifications), with which this appendix should be read together.

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