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

Submission 2365

I am the father of a daughter and three sons. When my youngest son, let’s call him Lachlan, was small, he never learned to talk, he would spend hours in front of the TV, watching the same videos with his face inches from the screen. He knew each moment of each video by heart, and his whole body would tense and his arms would flap when an anticipated moment came. He would growl if anyone tried to interfere with what he wanted: growl and then scream in rage, and as he got older, lash out with violence. He never learned to read or write. He never learned how to have a friend or be a friend. He would lash out if we drove on a route that he wasn’t expecting. Whenever I would try to interact with him he would angrily tell me to “go away!”

Dealing with him split the family. When it became clear he wasn’t developing normally, you wife, who was a senior professional, withdrew from the workforce, and poured her life into trying to understand what was going on. We consulted with doctors, and learned about severe non-verbal autism and labels like intellectual disability. My wife spent her days and nights trying to find out how to help him, learning how to deal with his constant dysregulation, how to teach him, how to give him some kind of meaningful life. Meanwhile I focussed on being a dad to the other three children. The stresses of this time had an impact on our marriage.

Through Herculean efforts and helped by the advent of the NDIS, Lachlan’s mother constructed a meaningful life for him, with a team of support workers that has come to love Lachlan and that Lachlan has accepted and learned to trust. He is now 29 years of age and with 24/7 support is able to live a daily life: navigating self care in his home, enjoying cooking, arts and crafts, exercising outdoors, and contributing in his own way to the community.

This is his potted history, and fails to capture so much about his needs and how much the NDIS has given him a functional and meaningful life. I suppose if it wasn’t for the NDIS, Lachlan would live a life of frustration and distress, dependent on the work of unpaid carers, at risk of harm, practically unable to leave the house, and—to the degree that he is isolated from the community—living a poor and meaningless existence. After all, it’s having relationships with others that gives life meaning.

I’m worried that broad cuts to NDIS, for example cuts to funding for Community Participation that underpins Lachlan’s supported independent living, will shift Lachlan’s life from what he has now, to something more like that alternative, undermining the good that has been achieved through NDIS over the past eight years. I’m all for clamping down on whatever fraud might be happening, but I’d ask the review committee to remember that there are people that genuinely need that support, and whose lives would be severely diminished without it. I’m proud that Australia has developed such a magnificent system as the NDIS. It is a wonderful statement of what kind of country Australia is that we are willing to support the most vulnerable among us, keep them safe, and help them to be a valued part of the Australian community.