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

Submission 2252

Submission to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee

Inquiry into the NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026

Date: 29 May 2026

Introduction

I am aBehaviour Support Practitioner (Core) and a teacher registered with the Victorian Institute of Teaching. I have 19 years of experience working within the education sector and now work with Step 2 Allied Health in Geelong, Victoria. In my current role I work with NDIS participants who have complex behavioural support needs.

Given the short submission timeframe, this is not as detailed as I would normally prepare. I have focused on the issues that matter most from a behaviour support perspective.

I oppose the Bill in its current form.

When the NDIS works, it works because participants have consistent, well-funded, well-implemented support.

To give a de-identified example, I have been supporting a 16 year old participant since October 2025. When I met the participant he was living within an informal care arrangement. His parents had reached burnout and had identified that both parental murder of the participant and parental suicide were genuine threats with a high likelihood of occurring if he were to return home when the informal carer ceased support after a period of approximately 6 months of the young man living with them.

At this point the participant was engaging in behaviours of concern, all multiple times daily including headbanging, other SIB, physical aggression and property damage. With the engagement of Positive Behaviour Support the participant has moved into a DFFH out of home care pathway, is supported by a team of dedicated Support Workers and has seen a decrease in behaviours of concern to the point of the above behaviours now occurring less than one time per week, sometimes less than monthly.

Engagement with the NDIS, Positive Behaviour Support and the removal of the daily burden of care from the parents through accessing an out of home care pathway has potentially saved the life of this young man, his mother and has seen his quality of life dramatically increase. He is now in a skill building phase and is looking forward to transitioning into adult programs which he can access due to the decreased behaviours of concern.

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

Submission 2252

I am significantly concerned about the redefining of parental responsibility to include substantial behavioural support. Behavioural support is specialist work. It is regulated under the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission, requires registration, training in positive behaviour support, and a working knowledge of restrictive practice authorisation. Legally categorising that work as ordinary parental responsibility misunderstands what behavioural support is and leads to the following consequences -

• Participants and carers will be at increased risk of harm - Parents already exhausted will be expected to deliver high-intensity, specialist intervention without the training, supervision or relief any paid worker receives as a baseline.

• Risk of relinquishment will increase - Children with complex behavioural needs already end up in out-of-home care when families cannot meet their needs. This clause will accelerate that trend.

• Risk of serious incidents, including injury and death, will increase - The behaviours I see include self-injury, attempts to exit moving vehicles, ingestion of non-food items, and physical aggression. Asking parents to manage these as ordinary parental duty is unreasonable and dangerous.

• Reliance on restrictive practices will increase - Where trained staff are not available, the practical fallback is restraint as this is often the only known strategy for staff who fear for the safety of the person they are supporting and themselves.

The Bill will cause harm to participants, to families and carers, and to the workforce. In the medium to long term it will harm the financial sustainability of the scheme it claims to protect, by pushing participants into more expensive forms of care while reducing the support that keeps them out of those settings.

I urge the Committee to recommend that the Bill not be passed in its current form.

Specifically, I urge the Committee to recommend removal of the proposed redefinition of parental responsibility.

I am happy to be contacted if further detail would assist the Committee.

Yours sincerely,