National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026
Submission 237
I have been an NDIS participant since 2019. For years, I was being involuntarily hospitalised for between two to four months each year due to severe schizoaffective disorder. I couldn’t work. I couldn’t participate in the community in the way I wanted to. I barely saw my family. When not in hospital, I mostly lay in bed and rarely left the house.
My psychosocial disability was completely paralysing.
It happened slowly, over years, but NDIS support slowly helped me get to a point of being able to live a life with a disability, rather than just merely being alive. The support to leave the house for a walk, to be accompanied to appointments and community events, to participate in skills building programs so I can look after my day to day needs fairly independently, slowly over time the support to return to meaningful work. It has turned my life around.
Now I work 3.5 days per week. I pay taxes. I volunteer in my local community. I see my family regularly. I have reconnected with friends. I occasionally go for a bush walk. I still live and deal with my disability but the NDIS support I continue to receive has brought me to a level of improved functioning. It has meant I have a purpose in my life again.
I am at risk of losing all that progress, should this Bill pass. I am strongly opposed to this Bill passing. I urge MPs to oppose it.
Most of what has assisted me is social and community participation support, which this Bill proposes to slash. The message this sends to disabled people like me is the government only cares about me being alive, not my right to live a life of meaning and dignity and connection to others.
I have friends on the NDIS for a range of other disabilities whose lives will be put at risk if this Bill passes. One friend requires her NDIS support so she can eat a reasonably healthy meal a day (cooked by her support worker as she is too disabled to exert the energy to cook). Without NDIS, she won’t change her sheets, wash her clothes, clean her house, even shower herself or eat regularly. She probably wouldn’t even tell anyone she was struggling and she could die.
I have other friends who need access to NDIS, whose functioning is so impaired by disability but due to strict rules about permanency already can’t access the support that could mean they could occasionally leave the house to go shopping for food, or they could contribute by paying taxes if they could return to work.
This scheme has saved lives. If this Bill passes, many will die or have their lives destroyed. Our lives matter. We deserve to have lives of basic dignity.
None of us would get support from state systems if our NDIS ended. This support doesn’t even exist yet.
Choice and control has brought dignity back to disabled people’s lives and this Bill will again reduce us to leading undignified, invisible lives of suffering and isolation.
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026
Submission 237
Please vote against this Bill.