Submission 2261

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

I am a person with a disability and current NDIS participant who prior to my disability was a government Executive in public policy. This submission has been written with assistance from my carer/partner due to my functional capacity.

Summary

I have serious concerns and call on the Government to withdraw this Bill. The Bill, as currently drafted, does not address the fraud and provider integrity issues that were the NDIS reform’s originally stated justification. Instead, it systematically strips protections from participants, concentrates power in the hands of the Minister, limits access to independent review, and risks causing serious harm to some of Australia’s most vulnerable citizens.

I bring both lived experience as a person with multiple chronic disabilities and a background as a government executive in public policy. This submission identifies seven critical concerns with the Bill and proposes constructive amendments to each.

The NDIS requires modernisation and genuine integrity reform. This Bill does neither. Instead, it penalises participants and places lives at risk.

Issue 1: Tightened Eligibility for Access and Supports

The Problem

The Bill introduces a new formal definition of ‘functional capacity’ that requires applicants to exhaust available and appropriate treatments before accessing the NDIS, removing the existing requirement that treatments must be genuinely accessible to the individual — in terms of both geographic availability and cost.

The word ‘directly’ has also been added to provisions governing whether a need arises from an eligible impairment, creating a medicalised barrier that fails to account for the reality that multiple disabilities interact and often exponentially compound functional impairment.

Why It Matters & My Lived Experience

As a former Director in government, I was financially secure before becoming disabled. I now live below the poverty line on the Disability Support Pension. Most treatments for my conditions are not covered by PBS or Medicare, and specialist gap fees run into the hundreds of dollars per appointment. The treatments this Bill may deem ‘available’ are simply not accessible to me or to thousands of others like me.

A person with a lifelong condition could be denied NDIS access if a treatment is considered to reduce some impacts of their disability — even if that treatment is financially or geographically out of reach. Introducing a formal, standardised definition of ‘functional capacity’ further risks creating blunt assessment tools that fail to reflect the fluctuating, cumulative and lived reality of disability.

What Needs to Change

• Restore the requirement that treatments must be genuinely accessible — financially and geographically — before they can be considered ‘available’.
• Remove the addition of ‘directly’ in eligibility provisions, which ignores the compounding interaction of multiple conditions.
• Prohibit the use of standardised assessment tools as the primary determinant of functional capacity; assessments must remain individualised.

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Issue 2: ‘Not Contactable’ Provisions and Participant Communication Rules

The Problem

The Bill enables plan suspension or revocation where a participant is deemed ‘not contactable’. There is no defined standard for what constitutes ‘reasonable attempts’ at contact, no minimum timeframe, and no requirement to provide advance notice. Civil penalties may also apply for failure to comply with information requests.

Why It Matters & My Lived Experience

For many participants, periods of unavailability are not a choice - they are a symptom. A participant may be hospitalised, experiencing a mental health crisis, unconscious due to their condition, without a support person to manage communications, or in unstable housing. These are not edge cases; they are common realities for the people the NDIS exists to support.

The combination of no defined contact standards, private-number calls, civil penalty exposure, and plan suspension creates a regime that punishes people for the very conditions that make them NDIS participants. Due to my disability, I am unable to receive calls 95% of the day as I am bed bound, and am unable to communicate sufficiently by phone without my carer present and planned rest and medication in the lead up to it. I have missed every ‘private number’ phone call from the NDIS, and my carer and I have repeatedly requested that communication is written or scheduled ahead of time, to no avail. Instead, decisions are made without our input and without accountability by the NDIS staff. My specialist wait times also already exceed 12 months, and some of my specialists refuse to write NDIS reports due to their being time poor and choice to focus on treating patients instead, which is not unusual and is a further example of factors that complicate timely compliance for participants and are out of our control.

What Needs to Change

• Define ‘reasonable attempts at contact’ in primary legislation, including minimum number of attempts, methods, and timeframes with consideration of meeting the needs of people with disabilities where their disability impacts their ability to communicate.
• Require advance notice by multiple avenues including written before any plan suspension is triggered and sufficient timeframes.
• Establish explicit protections for participants who are uncontactable due to their disability, hospitalisation, or crisis.
• Remove or substantially limit civil penalty provisions for participants in these circumstances.

Issue 3: Restrictions on Plan Reassessment and Review

The Problem

The Bill would limit when participants can request unscheduled plan reassessments and imposes new restrictions on how and when changes can be made. Unspent funds for one-off items would no longer automatically carry over when plans are renewed, and there is no legislated timeframe for review decisions or right of appeal where a decision takes an unreasonable time.

Why It Matters & My Lived Experience

The practical reality of challenging an NDIS decision is that it is inaccessible to most participants by design. I am currently at the Administrative Review Tribunal for the second time - on this occasion, s seeking funding for a power wheelchair. Both times, I was unable to access an advocate because every service was at capacity. My carer and I have faced the NDIS’s legal team without any legal support or representation of our own.

The process is not designed for the people it is meant to serve. It takes months to years, demands sustained cognitive and physical energy that many participants simply do not have, and carries significant financial and emotional cost. During my first Tribunal process for access, my functional capacity deteriorated measurably due to the sustained stress - meaning that by the time I was

Submission 2261

approved for NDIS access, I required a higher level of support than I would have needed had the original decision been made correctly and promptly. In the interim and for over a year after gaining access, I needed to use a rusted wheelchair collected from the side of the road — with no rubber on its wheels — to attend medical appointments. This is not an exceptional case. It is what happens when decisions are inappropriate, and timeframes are not met and there is no accountability for the delay. The NDIS has missed every single processing timeframe in my experience — across my initial application, my change of circumstance requests, and both appeals. There is no communication when timeframes are breached and no consequence for the Agency. It is treated as an accepted norm. For participants, the cost of that norm is borne entirely by them. What my experience also reveals is that the Tribunal process itself frequently works — the NDIS has overturned its own decisions before matters have reached a hearing, suggesting the original decisions were indefensible. The barrier is not the merits; it is persistence and capacity. Participants who cannot sustain a lengthy, unsupported, high-stakes process will simply give up. The Bill’s proposed restrictions on unscheduled reassessments and plan reviews will make this worse, removing the only leverage many participants currently have to compel the Agency to act.

For participants on five-year plans, the inability to request reassessment in response to a significant deterioration in health or change of circumstance is dangerous. The scripting and procurement process for complex equipment such as wheelchairs routinely spans months; removing unspent fund rollover makes timely access to critical equipment a lottery.

What Needs to Change

• Preserve the right to request an unscheduled reassessment.
• Legislate binding timeframes for reassessment decisions, with a right of escalation if timeframes are not met.
• Retain automatic rollover of unspent funds for items with long procurement lead times, including assistive technology.
• Introduce mandatory participant notification and explanation for all plan changes.
• Preserve and strengthen, not limit, access to the Administrative Review Tribunal for all substantive NDIS decisions.
• Increase funding of advocacy support services for Appeals and Administrative Review Tribunal processes, so support is accessible by all individuals.

Issue 4: Ministerial Powers to Cap and Cut Funding Categories

The Problem

The Bill grants the Minister broad powers to set maximum dollar amounts or cap the intensity, ratio, or category of supports for entire classes of disability, by instrument. The specific cap values are to be set in a separate document that can be amended at any time, without parliamentary scrutiny, public notification, or participant consultation. The Bill essentially elevates ‘financial sustainability’ as a primary objective, placing it above the delivery of reasonable and necessary supports to individuals.

Why It Matters & My Lived Experience

The idea that a Minister could cut all funding in an entire support category — without notice, without individual assessment, and without any right of review — is fundamentally incompatible with a person-centred scheme. It would allow funding for, say, all personal care or all communication supports, to be reduced overnight at the whim of the Minister-of-the-day for thousands of participants based on budget pressures rather than individual need. The rhetoric used to justify stripping supports from people with disabilities rather than providing support to such a vulnerable group in our society has already been harmful on many levels. This Bill has spread it from Parliament to media to the public and impacted on I have already seen its impact in everyday interactions. People have asked me how much my (applied for) wheelchair cost tax payer’s

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money as if it is my fault I require it to mobilise, my fault it is so expensive, and it is a waste of money to allow me to leave my bed or home safely. This is the result of putting money above people in legislation and policy.

What Needs to Change

• Remove ministerial power to set funding caps by instrument without parliamentary oversight.
• Require any changes to support categories or funding levels to be subject to mandatory community co-design and an impact statement.
• Retain ‘reasonable and necessary supports’ as the primary object of the Act; financial sustainability must not override individual need.
• Require participant notification and individual impact assessment before any systemic funding change takes effect.

Issue 5: Automated Decision-Making and Reduced Participant Rights

The Problem

The Bill increases reliance on automated and system-driven decision-making, while simultaneously limiting access to independent external review through the Administrative Review Tribunal. Broad new information-gathering powers enable the NDIA to demand highly personal records — including bank histories and medical files — without clear privacy safeguards.

Why It Matters & My Lived Experience

The Robodebt scheme demonstrated catastrophically what happens when automated systems make high-stakes decisions about vulnerable Australians without sufficient human oversight or meaningful appeal rights. The consequences were devastating. Disability is complex, individual, and rarely reducible to an algorithm. Removing or limiting the right to independent review while simultaneously automating more decisions is a deeply dangerous combination.

The move toward automated and system-driven decision-making is made significantly worse by an eexisting cultural and operational failure: the NDIS routinely disregards clinical evidence provided by treating doctors, specialists, and allied health professionals. This is not an isolated complaint — it is a systemic pattern with serious consequences for both participants and the scheme’s own budget. As a participant, I provided occupational therapy reports — including from an NDIS-appointed independent OT — and specialist assessments explicitly recommending a power wheelchair and accessible housing. These reports were requested by the NDIA. Many were not read. None were actioned. Instead, I was forced through two rounds of appeals and Administrative Review Tribunal proceedings to access supports my entire medical team had documented from the outset. The legal costs the NDIS spent opposing those appeals exceeded the cost of the supports themselves.

When staff failed to engage with the clinical evidence I had funded at significant personal expense, The Agency commissioned its own independent assessment — which reached identical conclusions. This is where real savings exist: not in cutting supports, but in ensuring staff have the time, training, and clear mandate to properly engage with clinical evidence the first time. Increasing automation without first fixing this human failure will compound the problem. Any reform must establish that treating specialists are the primary authority on a participant’s support needs, that decisions made against the weight of clinical evidence require documented justification, and that a genuinely independent and timely review mechanism exists to catch errors before they reach the Tribunal. The current approach costs the scheme more, takes longer, and causes serious harm to the people it is supposed to support.

What Needs to Change

• Prohibit fully automated decision-making for any funding, eligibility, or plan decision; require human review at each decision point.
• Preserve and strengthen, not limit, access to the Administrative Review Tribunal for all substantive NDIS decisions.
• Introduce strict purpose limitations and oversight mechanisms for any expansion of information-gathering powers.

Submission 2261

• Require written reasons for all automated or system-generated decisions, with a clear and accessible pathway to review.
• Invest in staff knowledge and allow time for them to more accurately process participant documents, placing greater value on reports from health professionals as the experts.
• Up-skill staff to more appropriately review Appeals rather than them escalating and requiring lawyers to process support requests at the Tribunal.

Issue 6: Premature Legislation on Unresolved Prior Reforms

The Problem

This Bill sits on top of a series of significant NDIS reforms that are still being developed, trialled, and implemented. Foundational supports — which are critical to the scheme’s overall integrity — have not been built, tested, or funded by state and territory governments. Introducing further structural changes before the existing reform program has bedded down creates compounding uncertainty with no safety net. It also places no restrictions on transition measures.

Why It Matters & My Lived Experience

I have no certainty that I will be receiving NDIS support in the coming years. As a parent of a six-year-old, this is not an abstract concern — it directly affects my ability to keep my family safe. There is no alternative support system that covers these needs. These changes could contribute to a measurable increase in children in the child safety system, where parents with disabilities or children with disabilities lose the support that keeps their families together. It also increases the pressure on informal carers.

What Needs to Change

• Impose a legislative moratorium on further structural eligibility changes until foundational supports are operational and independently evaluated.
• Require mandatory community co-design with people with disability before any new rules are made under the Act.
• Legislate clear transitional protections with defined subject matter and timeframes for temporary rules and measures.

Issue 7: Increased Reliance on Informal and Unpaid Supports

The Problem

The Bill changes inherently shifts the burden of care even further to informal supports — that is, unpaid care provided by family members and friends. This disproportionately impacts women, who provide the majority of informal care in Australia.

Why It Matters & My Lived Experience

Informal carers are not a substitute for funded supports. They have their own health, employment, financial, and personal needs. Structurally relying on informal care suppresses women’s workforce participation, increases carer burnout, and creates a scheme where access to support is determined by the availability of unpaid family labour rather than individual need.

The lack of support I have received under the current system has had a direct impact on my carer who is also my partner. As a result of my disability, my carer has had to leave work to care for me full-time. Our relationship has been strained significantly. He has developed depression as a direct result of carer burnout. He has also required spinal surgery after injuring himself needing to help me mobilise and lift inappropriate second-hand mobility equipment due to the delays in NDIS providing sufficient support. If i had sufficient supports in place by NDIS from the start, all of these impacts could have been avoided. Instead, my reliance on my carer will be worsened under the proposed changes.

What Needs to Change

• Recognise in legislation that informal care is complementary to, not a substitute for, funded NDIS supports.

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• Conduct and publish an analysis of the gendered impact of this provision before the Bill proceeds.

Conclusion and Recommendations

The NDIS is not perfect, and genuine reform is needed — particularly to address provider fraud and strengthen scheme integrity. This Bill does not do that. It penalises participants, removes protections, concentrates ministerial power, limits review rights, and does so while the existing reform program is incomplete.

Economic modelling indicates that for every $1 invested in the NDIS, approximately $2.25 is returned to the Australian economy. The scheme supports over 270,000 jobs. Cutting it improperly will shift costs to health, housing, and child safety systems — costs that are harder to measure but no less real.

I ask the Committee to consider my lived experience when reviewing this Bill, and recommend that the Government: 1. Withdraw the Bill in its current form. 2. Commission an independent, co-designed review focused specifically on provider fraud and scheme integrity. 3. Develop any further structural eligibility or funding reforms only after foundational supports are operational and independently evaluated. 4. Ensure all future reform is subject to mandatory co-design with people with disability with binding timeframes. 5. Commit to the primacy of reasonable and necessary, individualised supports as the central object of the NDIS Act.

Australia should be judged by how it treats its most vulnerable citizens. This Bill, as drafted, fails that test.