Submission 233
I am writing to make a submission to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee inquiry into the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026.
I am making this submission as [choose one or more]:
- A person with lived experience of disability
- A carer of a person with disability
- A worker in the disability sector
- A concerned Australian citizen
- An advocate for people with disability
I request that this submission be published in full as part of the public record of this inquiry.
I understand that once accepted by the committee this submission is protected by parliamentary privilege.
Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee
Inquiry into the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026
Public Submission — May 2026
Page 1 of 14
Submission 233
Opening Statement
This submission examines the documented sequence of events that produced this bill and asks when people with disability will stop being political targets in this country.
This submission asks the committee to examine this bill in the context of the documented sequence of events that produced it — because that sequence raises serious questions about democratic accountability, the legal rights of people with disability, the economic honesty of the government’s stated justifications, and whether a publicly funded and legislatively initiated reform process has been abandoned without lawful basis.
Australia ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2008. Its foundational principle is nothing about us without us. Eighteen years later, a government has commissioned a political consultancy to find the most effective narrative for cutting supports to people with disability, abandoned a publicly funded roadmap built by those people, and removed 160,000 of them from a scheme they have a legal right to access — without mandate, without genuine consultation, and without honest public disclosure.
This submission asks the committee to address not just this bill, but the structural failure that made it possible. Because without permanent, enforceable protections that place people with disability beyond the reach of political expediency, the next government will do exactly what this one has done.
The Provisions This Submission Addresses
This submission addresses the provisions of the bill relating to eligibility and access criteria, the reduction of participant support budgets, the ministerial powers over pricing and funding, the rights of participants to review decisions, and the absence of the foundational supports the independent review prescribed as preconditions for these changes.
Submission 233
The Chronology — How We Got Here
Every decision documented here is on the public record. The sequence matters.
2013. The NDIS is established.
The promise of lifelong support once access is granted is made explicitly and publicly to every person who enters the scheme. People with disability and their families make irreversible life decisions based on that promise.
Before the NDIS, states and territories were spending approximately $7.4 billion annually on disability services. As the NDIS absorbed that demand, states progressively wound back their own services. In states like NSW, alternative disability services were eliminated entirely. There was no plan for what would happen if people were ever removed from the NDIS. There is still no plan.
2013–2022 — The governance failure that preceded everything
From the scheme’s inception, successive governments — Coalition and Labor alike — failed to govern it properly. The most consequential failure was provider registration. From the beginning, 90% of NDIS providers were unregistered, operating with minimal oversight. This was known, publicly reported, and repeatedly not acted upon.
The fraud that subsequently became the justification for cuts to participants was the direct and predictable consequence of deliberate governance inaction. Every government since 2013 knew about the provider registration loophole. Every government chose not to fix it.
In 2021, the NDIA under the Coalition quietly established a Sustainability Action Taskforce with an explicit brief — documented in an internal paper marked ‘sensitive’ — to slow growth in participant numbers and spending. Meanwhile, in the final months of the Morrison government, more than 220 participants were having their funding cut by 20% or more every single day — in many cases against the advice of their own medical experts.
June 2022. Labor wins government. Bill Shorten is appointed NDIS Minister. He inherits a scheme with more than 1,580 new AAT cases in a single quarter and $42 million in legal costs spent fighting participants in ten months. He commissions the most comprehensive independent review of the scheme in its history.
April 2023. Before the independent review is finalised, Prime Minister Albanese announces at National Cabinet a target to reduce NDIS annual growth from 22% to 8% by July 2026. The disability community immediately identifies it as a cap. The government renames it a ‘growth target.’ Neither Albanese, Shorten, nor Treasurer Jim Chalmers explains how the target will be met safely. No modelling on downstream costs is released. No plan for foundational supports is announced.
This target — set before the roadmap was finalised, before the community was consulted — is the origin of everything that follows. It is a budget number in search of a policy.
Submission 233
- While the independent review is underway, the government commissions Redbridge — a Labor-aligned political consultancy founded by former Victorian Labor campaign strategist Kos Samaras — to conduct focus groups testing public attitudes toward the NDIS. This is subsequently revealed by The Saturday Paper.
The Redbridge research finds two things. It finds that Australians hold deep empathy toward people with disability — as popular as Medicare. And it finds that fraud and rorting narratives are the most effective at building public support for funding cuts.
The empathy finding is consistent with the roadmap’s direction. The fraud finding becomes the communication strategy. Someone decided that empathy was not useful and suspicion was. The committee must require the government to identify who made that decision and when.
The sequence is critical: the budget target came first. The political narrative came second. The roadmap — which prescribed a careful, co-designed, five year transition with foundational supports as a precondition — came third. And it was the roadmap that was subsequently abandoned.
September 2023. ABC Four Corners airs ‘Careless’ — a major investigation exposing provider fraud. This is the watershed moment when fraud becomes a mainstream national story. The Redbridge research has already been completed. The review findings are three months away.
December 2023. The independent review roadmap is handed to government. Over 10,000 Australians contributed — more than 2,000 personal stories, nearly 4,000 submissions. The result is 26 recommendations and 139 specific actions, with one explicit instruction: implement them as a whole. Foundational supports are prescribed as a non-negotiable precondition before any changes to participant eligibility or plan funding.
2024 — How every check was bypassed
Shorten introduces the Getting the NDIS Back on Track No. 1 Bill. What happens next reveals precisely how human rights protections, discrimination law, and democratic scrutiny were bypassed.
e- Before the bill was introduced, some Disability Representative Organisations were shown details of the legislation but were required to sign non-disclosure agreements preventing them from telling their communities what was coming. The people most affected were legally gagged. There was no public exposure draft. There was no prior public discussion.
e- The Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights stated it could not conclude whether the bill was compatible with human rights — because the critical rules that would determine how the legislation operated had not yet been written. This is how human rights protections were bypassed. Not by being rejected. By being made impossible to assess.
Submission 233
The bill passed the House of Representatives but the government did not have enough support in the Senate. It was referred to a second committee hearing. Hundreds of submissions objected. The Greens pushed back. The disability community called for the bill to be rejected.
Shorten then reached a deal with the states and territories. The deal included faster timeframes for approving NDIS rules and — critically — a move from unanimous to majority decision-making for NDIS rule changes. Previously every state had to agree. Under the deal, a minority of states could be overruled.
That is how it was done. Every check that existed was either bypassed, delayed, or made structurally impossible to apply. The legislation that resulted — with its broad ministerial rule-making powers — is the legal foundation on which Butler has since built everything.
The Dorothy Dixer — 2 July 2024 On 2 July 2024, Shorten delivered a prepared list of NDIS expenditure items into the parliamentary record via a staged Dorothy Dixer — a question coordinated with a Labor backbencher to give the minister a platform to deliver prepared statements. The list included cruises, gambling, crystal therapy, clairvoyants, taxidermy, and cryptocurrency. He told parliament that billions of NDIS spending was being rorted.
As of 30 June 2024, the Fraud Fusion Taskforce had just 72 active fraud cases with an estimated fraud value of $34.5 million — in a scheme spending $42 billion annually. That is not billions. That is 0.08% of annual spending under active fraud investigation.
The list was not drawn from confirmed fraud investigations — it could not have been, because the confirmed fraud figure was $34.5 million. It was drawn from unverified tip-offs in a system examining less than 0.4% of claims by dollar value.
A minister told parliament billions were being rorted. The confirmed fraud figure at the time was $34.5 million. Those two statements cannot both be true.
The fraud narrative — presenting millions as billions, drawn from unverified allegations — was the political instrument used to create the conditions under which resistant crossbench senators passed the legislation granting broad ministerial powers. This committee must ask whether those senators would have passed that legislation had the confirmed fraud figures been placed before them instead.
In March 2026 — one month before Butler’s announcement — One Nation moved in the Senate for a specific inquiry into NDIS fraud. The government voted it down. 34 senators voted against an inquiry that would have verified the fraud they had been publicly citing for two years.
Submission 233
That is not the behaviour of a government confident in its evidence base. That is the behaviour of a government that needed the narrative but could not afford the scrutiny.
June 2024. The NDIS quarterly report shows scheme expenses coming in approximately $600 million under budget. Plan inflation is stabilising. The governance measures are working. These results receive no public attention equivalent to the fraud narrative.
January 20, 2025. Shorten leaves the NDIS portfolio and takes the Vice-Chancellorship of the University of Canberra. His review co-chair Lisa Paul is already installed as Chancellor of the same institution. He leaves behind a stabilising scheme — and a legal architecture with broad ministerial powers, a National Cabinet cost reduction agreement, and a Redbridge communication strategy sitting ready to be used.
May 13, 2025. Mark Butler is sworn in as Minister for Health, Ageing, and Disability including the NDIS. Butler ran Albanese’s first campaign for the Labor leadership against Shorten. His uncosted climate policies are publicly documented as having damaged Shorten’s 2019 election campaign. His career was subsequently rehabilitated entirely under Albanese. He is now handed the NDIS — the defining legislative achievement of both Julia Gillard, who established it, and Bill Shorten, who reviewed and legislated its reform framework.
He inherits a completed roadmap. Passed legislation. A stabilising scheme. A five year transition framework. A growth target already set. A Redbridge communication strategy already developed. Broad ministerial powers already legislated. All of it.
August 20, 2025. Butler makes his first major NDIS announcement at the National Press Club. He signals that children with autism may not need full NDIS plans and begins using ‘original intent’ language to reframe who the scheme was designed for. Disability organisations say they were not consulted. State premiers say they learned about it from the press conference.
January–March 2026. The fraud narrative reaches its most extreme form. A fresh parliamentary inquiry into NDIS fraud is convened. Labor backbenchers make coordinated media appearances warning about cost blowouts and autistic participants. This is a coordinated campaign laying the groundwork for what follows.
April 22, 2026. Butler announces that 160,000 people will be removed from the NDIS over four years, average plans will be reduced by $5,000, and participant numbers will fall from 760,000 to 600,000. Growth is capped at 2% annually — below inflation, a real terms cut every year. The foundational supports the review prescribed as non-negotiable preconditions do not exist. None of this was taken to the Australian people at the 2025 federal election. There was no mandate.
Submission 233
According to The Saturday Paper, fraud and rorting accounted for just 1.05% of the projected $19 billion savings. A third of the savings came from removing children from the scheme.
May 14, 2026. The National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 is introduced to parliament. It is 113 pages long. The public has fifteen days to respond.
What Australians Were Told. What the Evidence Shows.
Lie 1: The scheme is riddled with fraud
The fraud narrative came from focus groups, not from evidence about how the scheme was operating.
The Redbridge research found that Australians hold deep empathy toward people with disability. It also found that fraud and rorting narratives were the most effective at building public support for funding cuts. Someone decided to use the second finding and discard the first.
The fraud was real. But it was committed against participants by providers — not by participants. Fraud accounted for 1.05% of projected savings. The rest came from removing people.
Lie 2: Participants were never meant to be covered
Butler stated publicly that people being removed were ‘never intended to be covered by the NDIS in the first place.’ This is false. People with autism account for nearly four in five entrants and approximately half of all participants. The Productivity Commission — the body that designed the NDIS — identified autistic people as exactly the population the scheme was designed to serve.
The demonisation of autistic people has had real and documented consequences. People with disability report increased community hostility and abuse as a direct result of two years of government-funded narrative. This hostility was manufactured. It must be repaired by the government that manufactured it.
Submission 233
Lie 3: The NDIS is unsustainable
The NDIS delivers $2.25 to the Australian economy for every dollar spent — generating $52 billion in economic value in a single year. It is not a drain. It is a growth industry employing hundreds of thousands of Australians.
The primary unaddressed cost driver is Supported Independent Living — with individual plans averaging $487,300 per year. The 2023 review made specific recommendations about SIL pricing and governance. Those recommendations have not been implemented. Instead Butler has cut social and community participation supports by 50% — the funding that allows disabled Australians to leave their homes and participate in ordinary life.
Lie 4: This will save money When people with disability lose NDIS supports they do not disappear from public expenditure. They reappear in emergency departments, hospital wards, housing crisis services, and mental health systems. The NDIA spent $34.8 million fighting participants in the AAT in a single year. As 160,000 people are reassessed and removed, that figure will increase.
Women provide the overwhelming majority of informal disability care in this country. These cuts will push women out of paid work to provide unpaid care the state has abandoned — reducing their lifetime earnings, superannuation, and economic independence. This is happening in 2026, while this government claims to support women’s economic equality.
Lie 5: States will provide alternative supports
States dismantled their disability services when the NDIS absorbed that demand. There is nothing to fall back on. Queensland has already refused to sign the Thriving Kids agreement. The foundational supports the review prescribed as non-negotiable preconditions do not exist.
Submission 233
The Toxic Environment Nobody Is Naming
The government created this damage. It must repair it.
The NDIS was something people were proud of. Disability workers chose careers in the sector because they believed in what it represented. That pride has been deliberately destroyed.
Two years of government-funded messaging positioned participants as rorters, providers as fraudsters, and the scheme as broken beyond repair. Workers spend the majority of their hours managing reviews and disputes rather than supporting people. Carers face reassessments from a position of complete exhaustion. Participants live with increased community hostility manufactured by a paid political strategy.
The government created this toxicity. It is obligated to repair it — with explicit, sustained, publicly funded counter-messaging that tells the truth about what the NDIS is, what it costs, what it returns, and why it matters to every Australian.
People Are Dying. This Is On The Record.
These are not statistics. These are named people whose deaths are documented consequences of funding decisions.
Noah Johnston was a young man with severe disabilities who required 24-hour care including ventilator support. His mother had been in a prolonged dispute with the NDIA over funding for registered nursing support. Noah died in December 2025 after his ventilator tube became dislodged overnight at a time when no registered nurse was present — because the NDIA had not funded one to be there.
Koa Gibson was a four-year-old child who required round-the-clock care. Under changes introduced by the NDIA in May 2025, her support was reduced to three hours of nursing care per week. When her mother fell ill and urgently requested additional funding, the NDIA denied. Koa died several days later.
In 2024-25, $60 million was spent fighting participants through the Administrative Review Tribunal instead of funding their supports. While children died because funding was denied.
Submission 233
The number of younger people with disability living in aged care was over 7,000 before the NDIS. The scheme reduced that to 829 by September 2025. These changes will reverse that progress.
This committee must ask the minister to account for Noah Johnston and Koa Gibson — as people whose deaths are documented consequences of funding decisions made by his agency.
Robo-NDIS. The Government That Promised It Would Never Happen Again Is Doing It Again.
The Robodebt Royal Commission recommended more oversight of automated government decision-making, not less. From mid-2026, NDIS plans will be largely computer-generated using I-CAN — the Instrument for Classification and Assessment of Support Needs. Human involvement will be dramatically reduced. Planners will not be able to override its decisions.
Independent MP Andrew Wilkie has stated publicly this is deeply concerning given the Robodebt Royal Commission’s explicit recommendations. The Commonwealth Ombudsman is already investigating complaints about an equivalent automated tool in aged care.
This government explicitly opposed the Coalition’s robo-NDIS reforms in opposition. It is now implementing them.
Malfeasance — Who Is Responsible And At What Level
This submission uses the word malfeasance carefully. It means knowingly doing something wrongful while in office.
The evidence in this submission establishes the following on the public record.
Prime Minister Albanese set a National Cabinet growth target before the independent review was finalised, without releasing modelling on downstream costs, and without a plan for foundational supports.
Treasurer Chalmers incorporated that target into budget projections without releasing whole-of-government cost modelling.
Shorten passed legislation with broad ministerial powers the disability community explicitly warned would be misused. He delivered a prepared fraud list in parliament drawn from unverified allegations, presenting $34.5 million in confirmed fraud as billions.
Submission 233
Butler inherited all of that and removed any pretence of care. He proceeded without foundational supports, without mandate, and without the safeguards the review prescribed. People have died. More will die.
The question of malfeasance does not rest with one minister. It rests with a chain of decision-makers who were told — repeatedly, specifically, and on the public record — what the consequences of their decisions would be. Who had the roadmap. Who had the Royal Commission recommendations. Who had the deaths of Noah Johnston and Koa Gibson on the record before announcing further cuts.
And who proceeded anyway.
Australia ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2008. Its foundational principle is nothing about us without us. None of that happened here. Not under the Coalition. Not under Shorten. Not under Butler.
The Disability Royal Commission made 222 recommendations. Combined with the NDIS Review findings, 248 recommendations were made in 2023. The most important structural ones — a Disability Rights Act, a dedicated disability portfolio — have been ignored.
What This Committee Must Require Before This Bill Passes
The following questions must be answered on the public record before this bill proceeds.
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Non-disclosure agreements — Before the Getting the NDIS Back on Track No. 1 Bill was introduced, Disability Representative Organisations were required to sign non-disclosure agreements preventing them from informing their communities. The Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights could not conclude whether the bill was compatible with human rights because the operative rules did not yet exist. The committee must ask how legislation affecting hundreds of thousands of Australians was introduced without an exposure draft, with key stakeholders legally gagged, and with human rights compatibility structurally impossible to assess. Is the same approach being used with this bill?
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The July 2024 Dorothy Dixer — A minister told parliament billions were being rorted. The confirmed fraud figure at the time was $34.5 million. Those two statements cannot both be true. The committee must require the complete evidentiary basis for each item on the July 2024 list to be tabled. It must require the government to explain why it voted down a Senate fraud inquiry in March 2026. And if the evidence does not support the claims, the committee must correct the parliamentary record.
Submission 233
The Redbridge engagement
The minister must table all documentation — scope of work, full findings, and timeline of engagement relative to policy decisions. The minister must identify on the public record who made the decision to adopt the fraud narrative rather than the empathy finding, and when.
The abandoned roadmap
Which of the 26 recommendations does this bill implement and which does it contradict? Has the government obtained advice from the review panel that proceeding without foundational supports is consistent with the review’s intent? If so, that advice must be tabled.
Whole-of-government costs
What does Treasury project that hospitals, mental health services, housing, Centrelink, and the justice system will spend absorbing what the NDIS drops? What is the current annual cost of government legal representation in ART matters and the proportion resolved in favour of participants?
The National Cabinet growth target
The Prime Minister and Treasurer must table the evidence base on which the 8% growth target was set, the whole-of-governments modelling on downstream costs, and the gender impact modelling on workforce participation and superannuation impacts on women. If that modelling does not exist, the committee must say so publicly. A budget target set without that modelling is fiscal negligence.
The political history
Julia Gillard built this scheme. Bill Shorten reformed it. The two men who have now dismantled it are the same two men with the most documented political history against Shorten’s legacy. The committee must put this question directly to the Prime Minister, the Treasurer, and the Minister: did any consideration other than policy evidence and public interest inform the decision to abandon the 2023 review framework?
Democratic mandate
These changes were not taken to the Australian people at the 2025 federal election. On what democratic basis does the government claim authority for changes of this magnitude?
Human rights
An independent assessment of this bill’s compatibility with the UN CRPD, the Disability Discrimination Act 1992, and the NDIS Act must be commissioned and tabled before the bill passes.
Women
A full gender impact assessment must be tabled — covering workforce participation, superannuation, and lifetime economic impacts on women who will absorb displaced care. This is 2026.
Robo-NDIS
A full human rights impact assessment of the I-CAN automated planning tool must be tabled before implementation. The government must explain why the Robodebt Royal Commission’s recommendations on automated decision-making are not being applied here.
Deaths
The minister must account for Noah Johnston and Koa Gibson. What review has been conducted of all deaths and serious adverse outcomes linked to NDIA funding decisions in the past three years — and why has that review not been publicly released?
Submission 233
Narrative damage — The minister must table a specific plan and committed public resources for repairing the reputational damage done to people with disability, the workforce, and the sector by the government-funded fraud narrative.
Structural protections — This committee must recommend that no further changes to NDIS eligibility or funding proceed until a Disability Rights Act is enacted, a dedicated disability governance structure is established, genuine co-design is embedded in legislation, and the 248 recommendations made in 2023 are fully implemented.
Submission timeline — Fifteen days for 113 pages of legislation affecting the legal rights of hundreds of thousands of Australians is not consultation. The submission period must be extended.
The Question Nobody Has Been Able To Answer
Examined from every angle, the same conclusion emerges.
There is not a single positive justification for what has been done.
Not economic — the NDIS returns $2.25 for every dollar spent and cutting it shifts costs, it does not save them. Not fiscal — the whole-of-government cost has never been modelled and released. Not structural — the real cost drivers have not been addressed. Not humanitarian — people have died. Not democratic — there was no mandate. Not legal — rights protected under domestic and international law are being stripped without justification. Not for women — carers will leave the workforce and lose superannuation. Not politically coherent for a party that claims to represent working people.
There is no arena — economic, budgetary, social, legal, or political — in which these decisions produce a positive outcome for Australia.
When a government makes decisions harmful by every available measure, that contradict every relevant expert, that abandon a publicly funded roadmap built by the people most affected, and that have already contributed to the deaths of vulnerable Australians — the question of what is actually driving those decisions is not a distraction from the policy debate.
It is the policy debate. And it must be answered.
Submission 233
The Permanent Demand
People with disability are not a budget line. They are not a political instrument. They are Australians with legal rights — rights protected under domestic law and international treaty — and those rights must be placed permanently beyond the reach of political expediency.
This committee must recommend a Disability Rights Act. Not as a future aspiration. As a precondition for this bill proceeding.
Nothing about us without us is not a slogan. It is the foundational principle of international disability rights law. Eighteen years after Australia ratified the convention that contains it, a government has once again demonstrated that without enforcement, that principle is worthless.
The committee has an opportunity to change that. It must take it.