National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 2371
To the Committee,
I would like to thank you for the opportunity to provide a submission regarding the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 currently before parliament, while also bringing your attention to the fact that the submissions timeframe and process have lacked sufficient accessibility, particularly for a cohort under significant stress due to the manner in which these changes have been introduced and characterised to the public and covered in the media.
I am making this submission as a mother and nominee of an NDIS participant, as someone who has worked as a personal care attendant for people with complex disabilities prior to the NDIS being available and a tax paying Australian citizen who votes.
I am very thankful for the NDIS. It has never been easy to navigate and is a very long way from perfect, but I am thankful for the support it provides for my teenage son, who has Down Syndrome, to have therapies that help him work towards improving his communication and independence, to have a support worker to help him participate in society outside of our family home and to participate in social programs that help him develop the friendships and social connections that he desperately craves. If we did not have this support his world and ours be much smaller. My personal participation in the workforce would be much more restricted than it currently is, and my son would suffer the indignity and frustration of not receiving the full support he needs to reach his full potential.
I am quite confident that every participant of the NDIS is well aware that it is wracked by inefficiencies that mean it is costing the taxpayer more than it should and that this needs to be addressed. However, I would implore you not to pass this Bill in its current form as it removes participants’ rights, reduces their choice and control and will ultimately harm people with a disability throughout Australia.
In general, I support the recommendations in the submission to this committee from Children and Young People with a Disability Australia (CYDA), but I would also like to submit to the committee the evidence of my own experiences which illustrate why I believe this Bill is not only harmful but would ultimately fail in its stated goal to ‘safeguard the NDIS’ if passed in its current form.
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 2371
Firstly, I am very concerned about the proposed use of automated decision making, particularly coupled with restrictions to participants’ ability to access review.
The NDIS already works very hard to keep participants at arms-length (and more) from decision makers. To take the next step of then replacing human decision makers with an automated system is never going to lead to better outcomes for participants. As an example of how this space between participants/nominees and decision makers leads to poor outcomes already, here is a true story of my own recent contacts with the NDIS from a couple of weeks ago.
I needed to find out if I was able to claim the cost of a camp my son had recently attended under his plan. Normally this should be pretty straightforward, but my son’s plan has been rolled over several time and there have been many changes to the NDIS since this plan was first established. To find out I first need to contact my Local Area Coordinator (LAC). I don’t have a direct number for my LAC, who is employed by Intereach, so I called the central number for Intereach in my area and was told that my LAC was unavailable but that she would call me back within 2 days. This was frustrating as I had put aside time to have a conversation with her and had my son’s plan in front of me on my laptop so I could go through it with her, but I thought there was a good chance she might get back to me before the two days. However, from previous experience, I also knew in my heart that that call back would happen at the most inconvenient time possible. I also knew that I couldn’t ask to be called back at a more convenient time as an LAC can only ever promise to call you back ‘within 2 days’. And that’s what happened – the call back occurred later that afternoon as I was about to take my kids to Subway for lunch. So instead of being able to have a constructive conversation with my LAC with my son’s plan in front of me, I had to have that conversation on the footpath out the front of Subway with two hungry kids in tow. The outcome of that conversation? The LAC didn’t know – she couldn’t tell me if my son’s plan would fund that camp, because my son’s plan was written in such a way that it might be possible, but she had no authority to be able to tell me if it was. She suggested I call the NDIS directly. That is, the NDIS’s 1800 number that would put me through to a Serco contracted employee who would not only have scant training and little knowledge of what my son’s plan would cover, they would also have limited ability to find out or do anything about it. I made the decision to put the claim in for the camp to see what would happen and then take it from there. After a few days I received an email to say my claim was unable to be paid because it was not valid. The email explained that the claim was not valid as the information needed to process the claim was missing. Given I had made the claim in the same way I had made hundreds of successful and valid claims over the years and had provided the invoice which included explanations of the services provided, this was a perplexing response. So I called the 1800 number and spoke to a very
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 2371
nice and sympathetic woman who tried to redirect me to my LAC. After my explanation about my LAC’s advice, she seemed somewhat distressed that an LAC would direct a client in this manner, knowing how limited the call centre staff are in what they can do. The system at her end was obviously as unwieldy as the claims system at my end (and I would encourage you all to have a look at what the claims the system is like for self-managed participants/nominees – it’s abominable and I’d be pretty sure there are plenty of dollars leaking out there) as she had trouble determining the status of the claim, which looked like it was still pending (even though I had received an email to say it was cancelled). She did what she could for me, which was to open a claim enquiry. Around a week later I received an email from a Payments Triage Officer, confirming the enquiry had been opened and saying they would contact me if they needed more information and that I could provide further details and information to them by return email if I wanted. I responded to that email asking what further information I could supply that might help, but that email went unanswered. Nearly two weeks later I received a text saying someone from the NDIS would call me from a private number within 1 hour. About 2-and-a-half hours later I received that call and spoke to a Payments Officer, who also was unable to answer my questions directly. Initially she told me my claim had not been paid because I had not supplied an invoice (which was not the case). Then she told me it had not been paid because I had uploaded the wrong invoice (also not the case). Then she started to give me details about an internal mistake that had been made in cancelling and reinstating a different claim (completely irrelevant) and after my asking her several times if there was any way the item I was trying to claim was payable under my son’s plan she eventually told me there was a note on the system that said the claim was not compatible with the plan and that she had to close the enquiry now. End of call. She then followed up with an email saying that I should ensure that the claim is in the correct category so the funds are used in accordance with the plan. I am still none the wiser as to whether there is any discretion for this item to be claimed under my son’s plan.
The purpose of my outlining this long and Kafka-esque anecdote for this submission is twofold. The first goes back to my point of how distancing participants from decision makers leads to poor outcomes. Imagine how different the above scenario would have played out if I was able to reach a decision maker on the phone, have them look at my plan, make the decision about whether or not the camp was claimable and explain to me why/why not. Instead it took so much time, stress, and all of those people who are being paid to not be able to give me any answers, to not answer my question definitively. You will never save the NDIS by pushing participants further away from human decision making. The only way to have a properly functioning, fit for purpose scheme is to bring us closer and show up with humanity, to treat each participant as an individual and provide packages that fit the participant rather than trying to fit them into an unsuitable and ultimately unsustainable everybody-gets-the-same model. Every single person with a disability has their own unique needs and goals and replacing human decision making with a
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 2371
standardised automated model will condemn NDIS participants to more administrative abuse, more stress and more distress and a lot of needs going unmet which can only lead to more wastage.
Secondly, I would like all of you to imagine if you had received a similar level of ‘customer service’ from your health insurer or home insurer or any other business you might deal with. Then you see that company come out in the media saying ‘Oh, we’re going broke. It’s because of fraudsters and shonky operators’. Is that a line you would buy? I find it very hard to swallow. Now imagine they go on to say ‘we’re going to fix it by only covering half of what we did before and handing the major decision making for claims over to AI’. At least you would have the choice of changing providers.
The second part of the Bill I would like to address is that of the centralisation of ministerial decision making power. The NDIS has been a political football since before its inception. Providing for unfettered ministerial interventions without oversites puts NDIS participants at constant risk of having their rights restricted according to the dog whistlers of the day. For example, we have previously seen the cutting of access to specialised sex services for participants under the guise of preserving the scheme’s ‘social licence’ and claims it was to preserve the sustainability of the scheme. It’s very hard to find information about exactly how much the NDIS saved by cutting this service, which had been found by the Federal Court to be a reasonable and necessary support, but the suggestion is that the saving was somewhat negligible and the only conclusion to come to was that it was a cut that was made to appease a little moral panic at the expense of those who used those services to improve their lives. The suggested changes to ministerial power open the NDIS up to more such cuts. People with a disability need to have their actual needs addressed and not be subject to the whims of ‘pub tests’ or whatever pandering to the noisy minority of the day the government feels they need to do. Currently at risk is access to social and community participation. It’s an easy target as most families who are unaffected by disability are able to live their lives not thinking about how much social and community participation is integral to human well-being. It’s easy for the media to frame it as support workers being paid to drink coffee and go to the movies, when in reality these supports allow participants to be a part of the world, contribute to their communities and be a part of society. Giving the government unfettered powers to cut these supports creates so much stress and uncertainty for disabled people and their families. As the CYDA submission outlines, “There is evidence from the Australian National Audit Office that high levels of ministerial power lead to resource misallocation, corruption, and erode public trust”. Rather than centralised power, the NDIS desperately needs a strong structure of bipartisanship to be built into it to safeguard participants against the political vagaries
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 2371
of this and future governments. If local, state and federal governments were to be enmeshed in the administration and provision of services there would much less incentive to constantly pull the NDIS apart for political point scoring.
In conclusion I would like to remind the committee members that every single participant in the NDIS is important – just like every other Australian. The money spent on supporting the NDIS does not go down the drain. It is an investment in our whole society, not just in people with a disability. By supporting and including people with a disability the outcomes are better for all of society (you can read more about this with included research sources here at http://alsoweb.org/nonprofit-blog/the- positive-impact-of-people-with-disabilities-on-communities/ ). Australians deserve to live in the best society we can make. Surely we are smart enough to find a way to provide support for everyone who needs it. People with disabilities are a much better investment than submarines or keeping Japan happy with the price of our resources. Now is the time to act with courage and humanity. Please do not fail us.