Submission 2079 - Supplementary Submission

Supplementary Submission

Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee — Inquiry into the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026

Lee Knights — supplementary to my submission lodged 1 June 2026

Introduction

I lodged a submission to this inquiry on 1 June 2026. Since then the Senate has extended the Committee’s reporting date to 14 August 2026, and several developments have emerged that bear directly on provisions of the Bill and were not before the Committee when I lodged. I confine this supplementary submission to those five developments. I do not repeat the arguments in my original submission; this is a short addendum to it.

• Provider prices are already being cut ahead of the Bill

Relevant provisions: the Minister’s pricing-determination power (new s.45C); support determinations (new s.34A); Social, Civic and Community Participation (SCCP) supports.

While the Bill is still before the Senate, the National Disability Insurance Agency’s 2026–27 Annual Pricing Review is already reducing provider prices under the Agency’s existing administrative power — including a ten per cent cut to social and community participation prices for unregistered providers with indexation to cease from 1 January 2027, and freezes or reductions to allied-health items. These reductions commence a full year before the Bill’s access changes, do not require the Bill, and were published only as pricing “guidance,” with no media release and no ministerial statement.

This is directly relevant to the Committee’s consideration of the Bill in three ways. First, it pre-empts the direction the Bill’s s.34A power would authorise, demonstrating the Government’s settled intent before Parliament has decided the question. Second, it thins the very markets whose resulting low utilisation is then cited as evidence that participants are “over-funded” — a circular rationale, where the price cut manufactures the under-utilisation later used to justify the budget cut. Third, the Bill would transfer this pricing lever to the Minister personally under s.45C, demoting the published pricing review to mere advice. The Committee should treat the provider-price lever (administrative, already operating) and the

Submission 2079 - Supplementary Submission

access-and-budget lever (legislative, before the Committee) as distinct, and should ask why one is being exercised quietly in advance of the other.

2. The governments expected to provide the “alternative supports” say they have not agreed to provide them

Relevant provisions: the Schedule 1 access changes, which assume a foundational- supports safety net for people who lose or are denied access.

The Bill’s access-tightening rests on an assumption that people who are no longer eligible will be supported through “foundational supports.” The governments expected to deliver those supports have told this inquiry otherwise. The State and territory Disability Ministers’ joint submission states that they are “not in a position, and have made no agreement, to deliver like-for-like services to people who are exited from the NDIS,” and that they have not been provided the cohort, pathway and impact information needed to plan. Advocacy for Inclusion, a Disabled People’s Organisation in the ACT, told the Committee that “there is no jurisdiction in Australia where a properly designed, adequately staffed, and operationally ready system of Foundational Supports will exist by October 2026.” Queensland remains the only state not to have signed a Thriving Kids bilateral agreement, and its Disability Minister has publicly described the rollout as a cost- shifting exercise with little detail.

The access provisions therefore commence against a safety net that the responsible governments say is neither agreed nor ready. This is a sequencing failure on the face of the reform timetable, and it falls hardest on the cohorts for whom no replacement program has been named at all — adults, older children, and people with psychosocial disability.

3. The Government’s own integrity inquiry separates integrity from access

Relevant provisions: the Bill’s integrity rationale; the distinction between Schedule 1 (access) and Schedule 2 (integrity).

At the Joint Standing Committee on the National Disability Insurance Scheme’s Integrity of the NDIS inquiry, on 21 May 2026, the Australian Federation of Disability Organisations told that committee that the fraud and sharp-practice provisions are “probably okay,” but that the provisions said to return the scheme to its “original intent” are “in fact completely contrary” to it, and that the repeal of s.31 is “a fundamental change” that “fundamentally changes the philosophy and the basis of

Submission 2079 - Supplementary Submission

the scheme and the act“ (Proof Committee Hansard, 21 May 2026). This is a peak disability body, on the Government’s own integrity-inquiry record, drawing the same line my original submission drew: the integrity measures are broadly supportable; the access changes are the harm. It supports omitting Schedule 1 and deferring Schedule 2. That inquiry has now reported, and Part 5 below addresses its findings. The sequencing this supports is specific: the Government should consider the integrity inquiry’s outcome, respond to its recommendations, and redesign Schedule 2 to reflect them, before the integrity measures are presented to Parliament again. 4. The treatment-exhaustion test is distorting clinical decisions before it has been enacted

Relevant provisions: the permanence and treatment requirements (new s.24(5) and s.25(1B)), commencing 1 January 2028.

The permanence and treatment provisions do not commence until 1 January 2028, and Parliament has not yet voted on them. Evidence to this inquiry shows the treatment-exhaustion logic they would write into the access test is already operating in clinical conversations. As Senator Pocock’s dissenting report records, Professor Allan Fels told the Committee that participants are already being asked “Why not ECT, electroconvulsive therapy?” and “Why aren’t you having clozapine?” in order to demonstrate that their impairment is permanent. People are being steered toward serious medical interventions for evidentiary rather than therapeutic reasons — before the provision that rewards that behaviour has been enacted.

The new information for the Committee is the timing, and it parallels Part 1 of this submission: provider prices are already being cut under administrative power ahead of the Bill, and treatment decisions are already being reshaped in anticipation of it. The Bill’s effects are arriving before Parliament’s decision, at both ends of the scheme. Enacting s.24(5) and s.25(1B) would not create a careful clinical gateway; it would harden into statute — and reward — a dynamic the inquiry’s evidence shows is already distorting clinical practice. The Royal Australasian College of Physicians’ evidence explains why drafting cannot fix this: “there is rarely a clear point at which all reasonable treatment is complete,” and permanence “must reflect real-world circumstances, not hypothetical inaccessible treatment options.” For autism — the majority of new entrants, and a lifelong condition no treatment “remedies, reverses or alleviates” — the exhaustion limb has no coherent clinical content at all, as my original submission set out. The only

Submission 2079 - Supplementary Submission

thing it can produce is the evidentiary treatment pressure Professor Fels describes, applied to a cohort for whom the demanded treatments do not exist. 5. The integrity inquiry has now reported — and the Bill fails the test of its own pillar

Relevant provisions: the Bill’s integrity rationale; Schedule 2; the s.34A support- determination and s.45C pricing powers; Schedules 1 and 3 by omission.

The Joint Standing Committee on the NDIS tabled its Integrity of the National Disability Insurance Scheme report on 2 July 2026, making twelve recommenda- tions. Integrity is the pillar on which the Government has sought public sup- port for this Bill, so the report bears on this Committee’s review in a way no other document can: it is the Government’s own inquiry, answering terms of reference that expressly asked what “legislative or other reforms” are required to strengthen scheme integrity. The Bill is described in the report’s background chapters, but it appears nowhere in Chapter 6, which contains the committee’s views and recom- mendations, and no recommendation recommends passage of the Bill or of any pro- vision in it.

The mismatch runs in both directions. Four of the twelve recommendations (4, 7, 9 and 11) contemplate amendments to the NDIS Act — a mandatory reporting and penalty framework for kickbacks and inducements, whistleblower protec- tions harmonised with the Corporations Act 2001, a requirement that eligibility re- ports be completed only by registered clinicians, and limited exemptions enabling disclosure of misconduct findings. The Bill before this Committee amends the NDI-SAct and carries none of them: its text contains no kickback or inducement frame- work, no whistleblower provisions (its only references to the Corporations Act 2001 are definitional), no worker registration scheme, and no clinician-registration requirement. Conversely, nothing in the twelve recommenda-tions asks for the Bil-l’s Schedule 1 access changes, its Schedule 3 automation provisions, or the minis-terial support-determination and pricing powers.

Both additional-comments chapters warn against the fraud narrative carrying the ac- cess cuts. The Australian Greens found that the Government “has continued to rely on uncertain and inflated estimates of fraud to justify substantial changes to the Scheme,” noting the NDIA’s evidence that “We don’t measure a fraud figure in the NDIS” — only “broad integrity leakage” of 8.2 to 8.3 per cent, which the Agency acknowledged it cannot decompose into fraud and error. Coalition members, ar-guing the recommendations should have gone further on structural reform, adde-d that Australians expect those who defraud the scheme to be “confronted”

Submission 2079 - Supplementary Submission

directly, not merely monitored more efficiently; especially when participants are facing cuts.” Whatever weight the Committee gives each critique, neither side of the integrity inquiry treats participant-facing access restriction as an integrity measure.

Because integrity is the Bill’s stated foundation, I ask the Committee to test the Bill against what the inquiry’s evidence says integrity actually requires. The Fraud Fusion Taskforce itself has identified eight “patterns of recurring deficiencies” that enable fraud in government payment programs — among them “rushed deployment,” “misaligned incentives and market design failures,” “under-resourced and reactive oversight” and “weak enforcement” (report, paragraph 4.9). The Government’s own integrity taskforce has, in effect, published the checklist against which this Bill should be assessed. On the inquiry’s evidence, the Bill fails it in three ways.

First, enforcement capacity. The NDIA’s Deputy CEO for Integrity told the inquiry the agency’s integrity workforce is “in the realm of about 600 people,” including about 110 Fraud Fusion Taskforce staff, in a scheme processing between 600,000 and 660,000 claims a day. The Taskforce had 235 provider-fraud investigations on foot at 31 March 2026; 33 convictions have been secured over its lifetime. The inquiry heard that the NDIS Commission “may not have the capacity, currently, to effectively oversee a significant increase in registered providers,” with Aruma’s Dr Martin Laverty telling the committee: “I suspect they don’t have the capacity to deal with the scale of what’s ahead of us.” The Bill grants new powers; it does not resource the policing of them. New powers without enforcement capacity are paper integrity — “under-resourced and reactive oversight” and “weak enforcement” on the Taskforce’s own list. Before the Committee relies on the Bill’s powers as protection against fraud, it should ask what resourcing accompanies them.

Second, market conditions that can sustain quality. High-quality, high-integrity services require correct pricing: providers who cannot deliver at the funded price either leave the market, thinning it, or cut corners to survive in it. Either path is an integrity failure, and “misaligned incentives and market design failures” is on the Taskforce’s list. The inquiry’s evidence is that kickbacks and inducements do their worst damage precisely in areas “where markets are thin” (report, paragraph 6.44), and the committee asks for registration changes to be staged in thin markets for that reason. Yet the Bill’s new s.34A(5) expressly authorises funding a support at less than “the total cost of the support,” and — as Part 1 of this submission sets out — provider prices are already being cut administratively a year ahead of the Bill.

Submission 2079 - Supplementary Submission

The Bill’s pricing settings do not build the market the integrity evidence calls for; they build the one it warns about.

Third, deployment at a pace the system can absorb. “Rushed deployment” is the first pattern on the Taskforce’s list, and it is the same failure the inquiry’s 1 May evidence identified in the scheme’s original rollout. My submission of 1 June set out how the Bill’s commencement architecture repeats it. The integrity report now supplies the Government’s own vocabulary for that concern.

Submission 2079 - Supplementary Submission

Schedule 5, item 1, subitems (2) and (3) should be amended to remove the power to provide, by legislative instrument, that provisions of the NDIS Act 2013 have effect “with any modifications prescribed by the rules.” This is a Henry VIII clause: for twelve months it allows the Minister to modify the operation of primary legislation by instrument, without the parliamentary scrutiny that amending the Act would require. The Government’s own NDIS Reform Advisory Committee identified it as a Henry VIII clause in its submission to this inquiry. My original submission did not address Schedule 5; I add this recommendation because the clause completes the pattern this submission documents — substantive power exercised by legislative instrument, outside merits review and outside ordinary parliamentary amendment procedure.

The Committee should seek evidence on the enforcement resourcing that will accompany the Bill’s new powers — against the inquiry’s record of an integrity workforce of about 600 people, 235 provider-fraud investigations on foot against 33 convictions over the Fraud Fusion Taskforce’s lifetime, and the evidence that the NDIS Commission may lack the capacity to oversee expanded registration — and should recommend a published implementation and resourcing plan for the scheme’s anti-fraud functions before the Bill’s powers are relied on as fraud protection.

The NDIA should be required to publish a decomposed integrity-leakage measure that distinguishes fraud, error and unintentional non-compliance before fraud estimates are used to justify legislative change. On the Agency’s own evidence to the inquiry, “We don’t measure a fraud figure in the NDIS” — only leakage of 8.2 to 8.3 per cent that it cannot decompose.

Pricing should be treated as an integrity setting. New s.34A(5), which authorises funding below the total cost of supports, should be removed, and ministerial pricing and support determinations should be grounded in published cost evidence and remain subject to the independent Annual Pricing Review. I do not support the announced fifty per cent reduction to Social, Civic and Community Participation supports, and nothing in this submission should be read as accepting that a reduction of that kind is justified. If support determinations of this kind are to exist at all, they must be individually reviewable: the Department’s answers to this inquiry’s questions on notice confirm that reductions made through a Ministerial support determination are “not a reviewable decision.”

Submission 2079 - Supplementary Submission

Disclosure — use of accessibility tools

This submission has been prepared with the assistance of artificial intelligence tools, used as cognitive accessibility infrastructure to support my participation in the democratic process. I am a late-diagnosed Autistic adult, with executive function, communication, and information-processing characteristics that make drafting lengthy formal documents without structural and language support significantly more effortful and less accessible than it is for neurotypical submitters. Artificial intelligence tools have assisted me with structuring the submission, drafting sections from my research and analysis, and with language polish and source-tracking. The substantive arguments, the lived experience material, the primary-source research and verification, the factual claims, and the positions adopted throughout this submission are mine. I have reviewed every section and verified the primary sources on which substantive claims rest. The assistance is analogous to the support a neurotypical submitter with access to research staff and professional editors would receive, and reflects the Committee’s own invitation to participants to use accessibility tools where required. The underlying advocacy, the analytical judgements, and the views expressed are mine alone.

I make this submission in my personal capacity. The views expressed are mine and and do not represent the views of my employer.