Submission 2057
Submission to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026
Amanda Larkin Founder, Cultivating Curiosity AU Pty Ltd Unregistered NDS Provider delivering support under Capacity Building – Improved Daily Living Skills
- About Me
I run Cultivating Curiosity AU Pty Ltd, a business owner in Perth, Western Australia. I am an unregistered NDIS provider delivering Capacity Building – Improved Daily Living Skills supports to a small participant cohort. These participants make up less than 20% of my client base.
My qualifications cover both disability support and education. They include a Bachelor of Primary Education, Certificate IV in Disability, Diploma of Counselling, Mini Certificate of Gifted Education, certified LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® facilitator training, Coach (Growth Coaching International), and additional training in executive function supports for twice-exceptional participants. This combination is deliberate. The participants I work with need both.
My NDIS work is with twice-exceptional participants. For these participants, disability does not present in isolated ways. It appears through the interaction of co-occurring conditions, school environments, developmental stages, and the gap between what a participant can think and what their nervous system can manage on any given day. The supports I provide include executive functioning, emotional regulation, metacognitive development, and transition planning, are grounded in diagnosed disability and documented in service agreements and provider reports.
I have lived experience as a twice-exceptional person with DSM-5 diagnoses, and I am raising two twice-exceptional children.
In 2026, Cultivating Curiosity was nominated for a WA Disability Support Award in the Excellence in Innovation category for Camp Curiosity, a program built for twice exceptional participants who fall between gifted education and disability support systems. That nomination sits in direct tension with this Bill. A provider recognised by the disability sector for innovation with complex neurodivergent participants is an unregistered provider. Under the direction this Bill signals, that may not remain an accessible service for the participants I work with. The Committee should ask what is lost when compliance costs push specialist providers out of the market.
Submission 2057
I am submitting under my name because an anonymous submission carries less weight. That is not a comfortable decision. As a small, unregistered provider, I know that attaching my name to a public submission critical of this Bill creates a real risk of scrutiny of my practice. Participants face the same calculation. Challenging decisions about your plan, funding, or treatment carries real risk in a system that holds significant power over your life. That does not make these concerns less accurate. But the Committee should understand that the chilling effect on the people most affected by this Bill is not theoretical. It is one reason many providers and participants who share these concerns will not submit. That accountability gap matters too.
Flawed Administration
This Bill has one foundational problem. It assumes that disability, support needs, treatment, and permanence can all be assessed in direct, isolated, single-cause terms.
For the participants I work with, that assumption is clinically wrong. Twice-exceptional participants experience disability through the interaction of multiple co-occurring conditions, shaped by environment, developmental stage, and systems that were not built for them. Support needs do not arise neatly from one impairment. They arise from impairments compounding on each other in environments that repeatedly fail to accommodate them.
The change to paragraph 34(1)(aa), swapping “arising from” for “arising directly from”, is where this problem first appears in the text. But the same assumption is threaded throughout the Bill. It appears through the reasonable and necessary framework, assessment and reassessment processes, permanence and treatment provisions, and the provider framework itself. At every stage, participants with complex, interacting disabilities are filtered through a model that prioritises direct, isolated, single-cause relationships.
“Directly Arising From”
Schedule 1, Part 3 changes “arising from an impairment” to “arising directly from an impairment” in paragraph 34(1)(aa). For participants with co-occurring conditions, this is not a minor change.
A participant with autism and ADHD does not experience executive functioning difficulties separately from emotional regulation difficulties, school refusal, or burnout. These impairments interact and compound each other. Support needs arise from multiple interacting impairments meeting environments that are not built for them. The proposed wording gives the NDIA a mechanism to argue that the causal link is not direct enough.
The Bill also makes it easier to exclude supports by classifying them as another system’s responsibility, education, health, or another service framework. For many
Submission 2057
For families, these are systems that have already failed to provide adequate support. “More appropriately funded elsewhere” may describe where government prefers the cost to sit. It does not mean equivalent support actually exists.
Recommendation 1
Retain “arising from” in paragraph 34(1)(aa), or provide explicit guidance that cumulative and interacting impairments meet the causal standard. Exclusions based on other service system responsibility should apply only where those systems demonstrably provide equivalent access and support.
4. Reasonable and Necessary
Schedule 1, Part 6 applies the same logic to the reasonable and necessary framework. Supports must now be consistent with financial sustainability, meet elevated evidence standards, and be measured against undefined “comparable supports”.
Financial sustainability belongs at the scheme level. It should not determine whether an individual participant’s support needs are considered legitimate. When it operates at the planning level, genuine need risks being reclassified as unaffordable.
This framework privileges large-scale, generalisable evidence. That disadvantages neuroaffirming, relational, and individualised supports, particularly for participant groups too small to generate conventional evidence bases. For the participants those programs serve, they are often the only supports that work. Deciding they do not qualify as evidence-based because they lack large-scale trial evidence is not neutral. It is a decision about whose evidence counts.
“Comparable supports” is not defined. A cheaper support is not automatically comparable. A group program is not comparable to individual coaching for a participant whose masking makes group settings harmful. A generalist is not comparable to a specialist when specialist knowledge is what makes the support effective.
Recommendation 2
Remove financial sustainability as a criterion at the individual planning level. Define “comparable supports” according to functional equivalence, not cost. Require evidence standards to accommodate relational, neuroaffirming, and small-cohort approaches.
5. Assessment, Treatment and Access
Functional Capacity
Schedule 1, Part 1 assesses functional capacity without supports, assistive technology, or environmental context. Many participants I work with function because of scaffolding, co-regulation, and relational safety. Removing those supports does not reveal true capacity. It measures functioning without the conditions required for participation. The Bill risks interpreting successful support as evidence that less support is required.
Submission 2057
Reassessment
Schedule 1, Part 2 limits reassessments to significant, ongoing, and unanticipated changes. For autistic burnout and psychosocial deterioration, distress is often invisible until it becomes acute. Early intervention is often more effective and less costly. This Bill makes preventative responses more difficult.
Appropriate Treatment
Schedule 1, Part 8 introduces “all appropriate treatment” as part of the permanence assessment. The Bill does not define what “appropriate” means, who determines it, or how harm is assessed.
Harm from therapeutic intervention is a real and documented risk when treatment is delivered without adequate consideration of a participant’s co-occurring conditions and full clinical profile. Participants and families who make careful, evidence-informed decisions to decline or modify interventions on that basis should not face losing NDIS support as a result. This Bill offers no protection against that outcome.
Access and Equity
Even where treatment is appropriate and well-delivered, participants in regional and remote areas, participants on long waitlists, culturally and linguistically diverse participants, and participants for whom culturally safe services do not exist may still be unable to access it. Support eligibility should not depend on services that are unavailable in practice.
The framework does not adequately recognise participant autonomy or informed refusal of treatment, including where treatment conflicts with a participant’s values, culture, or prior experience of harm. That sits in direct tension with the NDIS principle of choice and control.
Recommendation
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Define “appropriate treatment” to require consideration of a participant’s full profile of co-occurring conditions, not only their primary diagnosis. Provide explicit protections for participants and families who decline treatment on the basis of documented harm or contraindication. Require permanence determinations to account for actual geographic, cultural, and systemic access barriers. Affirm participant autonomy and informed decision-making without penalty.
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Provider Viability
Schedule 2 expands the provider definition as the foundation for broader mandatory registration. The same logic that narrows what counts as a legitimate support need is now narrowing what counts as a legitimate provider. Compliance infrastructure and organisational scale are rewarded. Specialisation and relational continuity are not.
Submission 2057
For small specialist providers operating under Capacity Building – Improved Daily Living Skills, registration costs already exceed revenue derived from NDS-funded work. This is not unusual. It is the reality for many experienced providers working with complex neurodivergent participants, providers who have built specialist knowledge over years, who hold relationships with participants that cannot simply be transferred elsewhere, and who offer flexibility that larger organisations often cannot.
If mandatory registration is extended to providers in this category, the most likely outcome is not improved quality. It is that providers whose value comes from specialisation and continuity leave the market. What replaces them will typically be organisations with the infrastructure to absorb compliance costs and standardised service models that work least well for complex participants.
I am already accountable through formal service agreements linked to participant goals and regular provider reporting against reasonable and necessary criteria. The idea that all unregistered providers represent an accountability gap does not reflect the way many small specialist providers actually operate.
Recommendation 4. Legislate a genuine tiered enrolment model separating low-risk specialist capacity-building supports from high-risk personal care and supported living services. Light-touch enrolment pathways for sole practitioners and small specialist providers should be included in primary legislation rather than left to subordinate instruments. Any impact analysis of expanded registration should model sole-trader and small-provider exit rates, and the resulting impact on participant access to specialist supports.
- Closing
This Bill contains one core issue threaded throughout its provisions. It assumes that complex, interacting, contextual disability can be assessed, funded, treated, and supported through frameworks that prioritise direct, isolated, single-cause relationships.
The participants I work with have real, permanent, and significant disability. There is often no equivalent support system available to them outside the NDIS. The supports that work for them are frequently the very supports this Bill makes hardest to access and sustain.
I am asking the Committee to address this issue at its root and to make recommendations that protect the scheme for the people it was built to support.