National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 2273
Inquiry into the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Name: Date: 29 May 2026
My name is , and I am writing as the family member of a person with a physical disability. My mother has lived with her disability for as long as I can remember, and I grew up watching what it means to navigate a world - and a system - that was not built with disabled people in mind. I also have other family members and friends who live with both physical and invisible disabilities, and have seen the serious toll that trying to navigate the modern support system takes. I want to be clear with the Committee from the start: I do not support this Bill. I have serious concerns about what it will do to people who already rely on the NDIS, and to the families and supporters around them. Growing up with a parent with a disability you learn that the burden of disability is not carried by one person - it stretches across a whole family, across friends and partners and the wider support network. You learn how much energy is taken up just trying to access what should be basic. And you learn how invisible all of that effort is to almost everyone around you. My mother grew up without adequate support, and in many ways the rest of us grew up without it too. I know how much harder life becomes when the systems that are supposed to help fall short, and I also know how much difference good support makes - not just for the disabled person, but for everyone who loves and cares for them. My mother never let her disability stop her from being an active and contributing member of our community, but it came at an excessive personal cost that the able-bodied community rarely appreciates. That is why I find this Bill so troubling. It will pull support away from people who need it, and it will push more of the burden back onto families who are already stretched. Disabled people already face enormous obstacles in a society that does not provide equal access. This Bill makes that worse, not better.
The provisions I am most worried about There are four parts of the Bill I would ask the Committee to look at carefully:
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The new functional capacity test and the reassessment of every participant from 2028 onwards. Putting every person in the Scheme through a new and largely untested assessment will create enormous stress, particularly for people whose conditions are stable but complex. Reassessment is exhausting at the best of times. Doing it to everyone, on a rolling basis, on the back of a new test, will cause real harm.
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The tougher unscheduled reassessment rules and the loss of review rights. Review rights matter. They are how participants challenge decisions that get it wrong - and decisions get it wrong often. Stripping these rights back leaves people with fewer ways to push back when the system fails them, which it will.
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The new “all appropriate treatments” test for permanence. Permanence should not depend on a person having tried every possible treatment. Many disabilities are lifelong and complex. Forcing people to demonstrate they have exhausted every “appropriate”
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 2273
treatment before being recognised places an unreasonable medical, emotional and financial burden on disabled people and their families.
- Automated decisions and algorithms with no individual right of appeal. Decisions that change a person’s life should not be made by software with no human accountability. Algorithms cannot understand the texture of someone’s actual life, and removing the right to appeal an automated decision is, in my view, not compatible with basic fairness. I thought the government had learnt its lesson from the disastrous and unlawful Robodebt scheme. Clearly not.
I would also ask the Committee to remember that the NDIS must consider the whole person, not just a single diagnosis, when deciding whether someone is eligible. Disability rarely sits in one neat category. Most of the disabled people in my life - including my mother - are managing more than one thing at a time, and how those things interact is what really shapes their day-to-day reality.
The human impact If this Bill passes in its current form, people will lose supports they currently rely on. People will be pushed to meet harder expectations under significant duress. People will lose the sense of agency over their own lives that the NDIS was designed to protect. And it will not only be disabled people who feel it. It will be the parents, partners, children and friends who step in to fill the gap - often without recognition, often at the cost of their own health and wellbeing. I grew up in that gap. I can tell the Committee, with confidence, that asking families to absorb more of it is not a saving. It is just shifting the cost somewhere else, with disastrous consequences, and pushing people with disabilities to breaking point.
What I am asking the Committee to do I respectfully ask the Committee to recommend:
- That the Bill be withdrawn. The Government should recommence the reform process in genuine partnership with disabled people and their representative organisations, consistent with the principle of nothing about us without us.
- That, if the Bill is not withdrawn, the inquiry timeframe be extended to allow meaningful consultation and evaluation. This should include accessible hearings, materials in Easy English, targeted engagement with the people most affected by the Bill, and enough time for the community to properly analyse the rules, tools and modelling that sit behind it. This is top-down reform at its worst. Please listen to the disabled community, and to the people who love and support them. We are telling you that this is not what we need. Thank you for considering my submission.