Submission 2274

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

Introduction

My name is , and I am the sole living parent, entire informal support network and the nominee for a participant who was accepted into the scheme in 2019.

Why this submission is being made.

This submission is grounded in lived experience. It is not a legal brief. It is practical evidence about impact on disabled people if proposed NDIS settings proceed without stronger safeguards.

While reforms are proposed, and not yet fully operational, we do not need to wait for rollout to identify risk. We already have enough evidence from:

• Reform documents and public reporting.
• Community concerns across disability networks.
• Direct participant and family lived experience.

The core point is simple: when support is reduced, narrowed, delayed, or made harder to access, need does not disappear. The burden is shifted onto participants, families, unpaid carers, under-resourced services, or no one.

What is already happening in the disability community.

Proposed changes are already causing harm at community level through prolonged uncertainty. Participants and their families who already struggle with daily life have been living for months with fear about what comes next. A recurring theme in community accounts is fear of contact from NDIA, including fear that routine contact may trigger reassessment and support loss. For people with cognitive, psychosocial, communication, trauma-related, or complex behavioural support needs, this uncertainty is not abstract. It drives sustained distress, hypervigilance, and functional deterioration. These participants are often the least able to advocate for themselves in adversarial or complex administrative settings. In many cases, they are unable to do so at all or without sustained support.

Why the foreshadowed assessment direction is high-risk.

[Relevance to the Bill: Addresses Schedule 4 (New framework planning), which introduces provisions regarding “assessment tools” (Section 32L), and Schedule 1, Part 6 (Section 34), which alters how clinical evidence is weighed.]

Submission 2274

In our case, allied health funding was already reduced by around 50% in a mid-2025 review. The concern is that new mechanisms could entrench or widen this pattern if safeguards are not explicit. When it comes to allied health supports, momentum is key. Participants will be left with next to nothing in terms of allied health supports which will significantly reduce the effectiveness of Speech Therapy and Occupational Therapy which are just two of the critical areas that disabled people access.

Public materials describe major cuts to social, civic and community participation, including references to a 50% reset from 1 October 2026 and a 10% cut to some capacity-building daily activity supports. Earlier messaging referred to lower figures, adding to confusion and uncertainty. The practical effect would be greater isolation and reduced access to ordinary community life.

The proposed new assessment pathway is another source of considerable unrest for many participants.

Putting highly vulnerable participants through a rigid, high-stakes assessment pathway under these conditions is a recipe for disastrous outcomes. The risk is greatest for people who:

• Have fluctuating or complex needs.
• Struggle with communication, executive function, or distress tolerance.
• Cannot reliably self-advocate in formal assessment environments.
• Depend on continuity of trusted supports to remain safe.

If the process fails to capture these realities, the result will be ill conceived and underfunded boilerplate plans, rapid destabilisation, and avoidable crisis escalation which will include physical and psychological harm and trauma.

Impact of arbitrary funding cuts on participants.

[Relevance to the Bill: Addresses Schedule 1, Part 4 (Section 34A), which grants the Minister the power to determine a percentage to reduce funding for groups of supports, explicitly allowing funding to fall below actual costs.]

Arbitrary funding cuts are not neutral administrative decisions. They change what happens in a person’s day, their level of risk, and whether basic stability can be maintained.

For participants with complex disability, support budgets are not “extras.” They are the mechanism that makes eating, bathing, transport, medication routines, behaviour regulation, appointments, and safe community access possible.

When funding is reduced without a reliable link to real functional need, those activities do not become unnecessary. They become unsupported. The immediate effect is usually forced rationing of essential supports. Participants and families are pushed into impossible trade- offs:

• Keep support for personal care but drop community participation.
• Keep behaviour support but reduce supervision hours.

Submission 2274

• Keep daytime support but lose evening or weekend coverage.
• Keep crisis response capacity but lose preventative support.

These are not eƯiciency gains. They are risk transfers. Safety impacts can be immediate. Where there is known behavioural or psychosocial complexity, reduced support can directly increase exposure to:

• Self-harm incidents.
• Escalation episodes requiring emergency intervention.
• Unsafe absconding or high-risk behaviour.
• Harm to relationships with co-residents, workers, or family. Functional impacts also build quickly:
• Daily living skills regress.
• Increased social withdrawal.

Psychological impacts are serious. Participants already dealing with high support needs may spend months in fear that one contact point will trigger reassessment and loss of support. That chronic uncertainty worsens distress and reduces their ability to prepare evidence, communicate needs, and defend themselves in planning processes. Family and carer impacts are predictable and severe:

• Unpaid high-intensity care replaces funded support.
• Carers reduce work hours or leave work.
• Financial pressure escalates.
• Carer mental health declines.
• Family sustainability weakens.

In our case, cuts of this kind would create immediate and serious safety risks. This would be easily corroborated by our Behaviour Support Practitioner, Occupational Therapist, Speech Therapist, Support Coordinator, health system Psychologist and Psychiatrist and supported by hundreds of incident reports made to the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission. However, under new assessment guidelines the inputs of these professionals appear likely to be given significantly reduced weight..

[Relevance to the Bill: Addresses Schedule 1, Part 6, Section 34(1)(g), which allows the NDIS to refuse funding if a support is deemed “more appropriately provided or funded by… existing government service systems,” directly causing the cost-shifting described below.]

Submission 2274

Lived evidence from our case: why continuity and adequacy matter. [Relevance to the Bill: Addresses Schedule 1, Part 2 (Section 48A), which limits unscheduled plan reassessments. In a crisis like the one described below, these rigid conditions would prevent a participant from accessing urgent reassessments when their safety collapses.]

Our own participant and family records show what happens when risk, complexity, and continuity are not handled properly. My participants’ support profile includes high needs across daily living, behavioural regulation, and safety domains. Clinical and service materials describe risk patterns that require stable, informed, responsive support, not generic or intermittent coverage.

Currently, my participant is in the “complex care” stream, is SDA eligible and receives SIL and Community Access funding that equates to 24/7 support. My participant experiences a range of comorbidities which result in a complex presentation. NDIS does not recognise many of the diƯiculties my participant experiences.

My participant was physically assaulted by a registered provider in mid-2025. This provider was responsible for my participants care 24/7 but, as far as we are aware, they bore no consequences as a result of that assault and their failure in terms of duty of care.

When we asked for urgent help, NDIS took away Specialist Disability Accommodation (SDA) eligibility.

My participant had to move out of her Supported Independent Living (SIL) arrangement and move back in with me for 5 months while we tried to re-establish a support system and fight the NDIS decision, eventually winning that battle at ART in early 2026. Following that incident, we bore substantial flnancial and psychological consequences, including additional trauma and support system collapse that continue to aÛect our daily lives to this day and beyond.

It is little wonder that I, as the nominee, have experienced prolonged crisis load, employment disruption, and ongoing trauma burden. I have become a burnt-out hermit. My psychologist and an independent psychiatrist have advised that I suÛer from chronic depression and PTSD. My participant was approved to access NDIS in 2019 but by then I had already been oÛ work on Temporary Total Disability for chronic depression. When the TTD cover ran out in 2020, I was on Leave Without Pay for another 18 months. Too damaged to work but still OK to be the primary carer for my participant until 2022 when NDIS finally included useful supports in my participants plan.

I still suÛer chronic depression and PTSD, but I no longer have TTD support since my coverage expired at 65 years of age. So, I try to work. I do not have any other choices. Unfortunately, I still somehow spend almost two full days a week “herding cats” and advocating for my participant to make our support system work as intended for my participant.

My participant has experienced hundreds of incidents that have required emergency services intervention. Every incident is traumatic for all concerned. We have, for many years now,

Submission 2274

operated in a continuous crisis mode driven by recurring incidents and chronic short and long-term uncertainty.

There can be no certainty that:

• supports are going to show up when needed on any given day,
• the support provider will decide there is not enough profit to be made supporting my complex participant,
• allied health funding will not be further cut via a simple pen stroke or phone call.
• SDA eligibility will not be removed again at the next review.

And if any of these things happen, what then?

This is exactly why funding adequacy and continuity protections are not optional safeguards. They are core safety mechanisms.

Consultation fairness is part of participant safety. The short and rushed window for submissions to the committee does not impact all stakeholders equally. Large organisations can mobilise quickly through policy teams, legal support, and communications staƯ. Participants and families already managing disability, care coordination, crisis, and admin burden often cannot. That creates structural unfairness and weakens the quality of evidence available to decision-makers. A rushed process is not just administrative inconvenience. It can materially aÛect whether participants are heard and whether risks are understood before harm occurs.

People with disabilities cannot self-fund disability support. Many disabled people do not have the financial capacity to absorb support cuts. For participants reliant on the Disability Support Pension, income is already inadequate for essential living costs. In that context, any reduction or delay in NDIS-funded supports is not a minor inconvenience. It creates immediate risk: unmet care needs, isolation, loss of function, and greater dependence on informal carers and crisis systems. This is a central policy reality: if funded supports are restricted, most participants cannot purchase replacement supports privately. The gap is not filled by “choice.” It is filled by harm, exhaustion, and crisis.

Fraud should be targeted, not used to justify support cuts. [Relevance to the Bill: Addresses the contrast between Schedule 2 (Fraud measures) and Schedule 1 (Access and planning measures). While fraud controls are necessary, broad participant funding reductions punish participants for systemic provider issues.]

Submission 2274

What should be required before and during implementation?

• Preserve meaningful external review rights for funding outcomes.
• Require clear and documented consideration of participant-provided clinical and allied health evidence.
• Do not implement high-stakes support assessment tools without independent validation across diverse disability groups.
• Mandate continuity protections to prevent abrupt funding cliƯs and forced service disruption.
• Require formal safety impact checks before any reduction to supports linked to self- harm, behavioural escalation, or housing instability.
• Separate fraud-control mechanisms from participant eligibility and support adequacy decisions.
• Set realistic, accessible consultation periods so participants, nominees, and carers can engage properly.
• Publish participant-impact indicators (safety, continuity failures, crisis escalation, dispute outcomes), not only budget metrics.

Punishing disabled Australians for the fraudulent actions of others is not a solution.

Closing position We acknowledge these are “proposed” reforms, but the government is clearly intent on pushing these through. The foreseeable risk is already clear. Participants and their families cannot self-fund support gaps. Many participants are already living with prolonged fear and uncertainty. Many participants cannot defend themselves in complex reassessment processes without sustained help. For this cohort, a rigid or under-validated assessment pathway is likely to produce preventable harm.

If support settings are tightened without strong safeguards, the government has not reduced need. It has transferred risk to the people least able to carry it. People with disability are already reporting harm linked to prolonged uncertainty and reduced support continuity. If safeguards are not strengthened, foreseeable risks include serious deterioration, preventable crisis escalation, and avoidable deaths, including suicide risk among people exposed to sustained distress and repeated support failure. Disabled Australians and their families deserve better than that.

Regards,