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

Submission 2266

I live in suburban Adelaide. I am a current participant of the NDIS.

Put simply, the NDIS has saved my life. I was planning my suicide. I had a method, time of day, and most of the details planned. I had tried a litany of options to manage my disorders, and they had not worked. There was one more, one I had not tried. I did not have the money to complete it myself. It was Dialectical Behavioural Therapy (DBT). It took three rounds of it and similar treatments, but I eventually stabilised. The NDIS funded it all.

It helped me treat an intersection of two of my disorders, Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), a psychosocial disorder. The tightening of supports to exclude supports that do not arise directly from an NDIS-eligible impairment (s34(1)(aa)) threaten to remove my access to that kind of support, one that I may need in future. Without access to it at the 时间，我 would have died.

More broadly, the NDIS has given me funding for supports that have allowed me to manage my disabilities so they are not so excruciatingly painful and exhausting. While they are not fully adequate to support me, the NDIS makes a significant contribution. The provisions suggesting a reduction of 50% to community access categories and 10% to capacity building supports (s34a) threaten to reduce funding that is already inadequate to meet all of my disability needs. These categories add a sense of dignity to the lives of disabled people, including myself, in bodies and brains that make it extremely difficult to connect with society the way that most people are able to do freely.

It is so important to maintain the NDIS as a broad support structure for the disabled community. It is a revolutionary program and a hallmark of its time. If it is insufficiently funded, then those costs will return to where they have been in the past – put on the shoulders of carers, parents, siblings, families, and their unpaid labour. This labour keeps them from holding full-time work, engaging socially, and having full lives. And those who do not have sufficient informal supports? Their lives and livelihoods will be put in danger. Mine will be put in danger – I do not have sufficient informal support to take on the work needed to take care of my disability needs. Changes to the “Reasonable and Necessary” criteria will put weight that my limited informal supports cannot take.

I have not felt like I have had time to consider how the changes will affect me. This funding allows me support and dignity I have not known before, and the threat of losing that, or part of that, is terrifying.

Many of the changes made have come through in a chaotic fashion – last year, the plan to remove the ability to use core funding to fund other exhausted categories almost left me unable to pay for most of my support workers for months, until, a week before I was to lose access to that funding, I learned that the change was postponed. I have been trying to prepare for the change in rules, but my disability makes it difficult to write and concentrate, and preparations have taken nearly a year so far.

In my view, changes to the NDIS must retain dignity for the disabled, interactions between disabilities, psychosocial and otherwise, breadth of circumstances of participants, be clearly explained, and most importantly, exude grace for disabled individuals, whose circumstances are individual and must be assessed individually by knowledgeable humans. I urge you to keep this in mind – my case, and the cases of the thousands of submissions you are reading. Keep in mind our humanity, our dignity, and our safety, when you consider these changes.

Thankyou.