NDIA Accountability Project

Cuts to speech therapy and ignoring medical evidence for autistic daughter

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Submission 2172

To: Committee Secretary Community Affairs Legislation Committee Department of the Senate PO Box 6100, Parliament House CANBERRA ACT 2600

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

I am writing as the mother and primary carer of my daughter, redacted. redacted is 15 years old. She has severe Level 3 Autism, ADHD, profound intellectual disability, Generalised anxiety disorder, and OCD. She is non-verbal. She has very high and complex needs.

I am submitting this evidence to highlight how the legislative mechanisms proposed in the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 will fail vulnerable, non-verbal participants and actively risk their developmental progress.

Cuts to Therapy and Budget Substitution

  • What the Bill changes: The Bill creates strict, rigid rules for budgets.
  • Our Reality: We asked the NDIS to add Positive Behaviour Support (PBS) to redacteds plan because her doctor and therapists recommended it due to her specific challenges and we need more help. The NDIS gave us PBS, but they cut her Speech Therapy budget to pay for it.
  • The Impact: For a non-verbal child, behaviour support is not a replacement for speech therapy.redacted needs speech therapy to learn how to communicate. Because of these unfair budget limits, I had to cut her speech therapy sessions to once every two weeks. Today, I had to cancel her session completely because the money ran out. Each session costs $242.49 (45 mins session + 30 minutes non face to face support). This choice by the NDIS stops her from making progress.

Ignoring Medical Evidence

  • What the Bill changes: The Bill wants automated, rigid plan assessments instead of listening to specialists.
  • Our Reality: The NDIS planner completely ignored the written reports from redacteds Paediatrician and therapists. The planner decided that behaviour support cures everything.
  • The Impact: This wrong decision forces me to apply for an internal review of the plan. To do this, we must exhaust our already limited budget to obtain a new, comprehensive report (Functional Capacity Assessment) from redacteds Occupational therapist which used 12 hours of her education time and another from her behaviour support practitioner. This directly steals valuable educational and developmental time away from redacted. The law must stop planners from ignoring expert medical evidence.

Submission 2172

Cuts to Community Access and Social Isolation

  • What the Bill changes: The Bill proposes big cuts to community and social support funds.
  • Our Reality: The NDIS completely removed ’s budget for Support Workers and Community Activities.
  • The Impact: the complete removal of ’s budget for support worker and community participation has been a devastating blow. Specialized gymnastics class are being stripped away. This class was run by an experienced coach specifically to target her balance, fine motor skills, coordination, muscle tone, and physical strength, alongside mastering transitions. cannot safely join mainstream group classes. Removing targeted funding for these specialized environments which are even much more expensive than the mainstream ones, stops her from building capacity and denies her any opportunity to safely interact with other children under expert supervision. The Bill must clearly define community participation as a core pillar of clinical capacity-building, not an optional luxury or simple social outing. Removing Community Participation budget will isolate at home. We need make more opportunity for all special needs people to be in the community.

Emotional Toll on Families

The NDIS plan is our safety net. A NDIS plan holds far more than just financial value for individuals with high, complex needs, it provides profound emotional and psychological stability for the family unit. Educating a non verbal child with profound disabilities and navigating their daily life challenges is incredibly demanding, frequently leading to chronic exhaustion and despair. The support allocated by the NDIS acts as a vital safety net and a source of hope.

Before her current plan approved, I felt stronger and more resilient for . I believed that with NDIS support combined with our own dedication, we could overcome these hurdles.

During our plan reassessment phone call, the NDIS planner dismissed everything we said and ignored ’s medical reports. Operating under the flawed view that Behaviour Support was a generic cure-all for all of ’s challenges, whether related to speech or behaviour. This rigid system has caused me severe anxiety, making our circumstances feel significantly harder and more hopeless.

Conclusion & Recommendations to the Committee:

  ’s current plan is entirely insufficient to meet her high functional requirements due to a rigid assessment process.

My Recommendations to the Committee:

  • Please do not allow the NDIS to cut speech or occupational therapy just because behaviour support is added.

Submission 2172

  • Please make it a law that NDIS planners cannot ignore reports from a participant’s paediatrician and therapists.
  • Please stop the proposed funding cuts to social and community support for high-needs children. Please guarantee that for non verbal and high-needs participants, specialised community participation is legislated as a fundamental right.

Thank you for considering my submission.

Sincerely,