National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 2393
Submission to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Name withheld—confidential submission
Note on confidentiality—I am requesting that my name not be published. I am conscious of the stigma currently attached to NDIS participants in public discourse, and of the risks that come with being publicly identified as a person with disability who is critical of this legislation.
Summary of concerns This submission focuses on the following key concerns (further matters are addressed in the body):
• False economy: The Bill pursues cost reduction at the expense of effectiveness— cutting supports already assessed as necessary, restricting access, and removing accountability mechanisms. The downstream costs will fall on overstretched health, mental health, and community systems, on families and informal carers, and ultimately on participants. Underinvestment in disability support does not produce net savings; it produces deferred, dispersed costs that are harder to address. Independent modelling estimates the NDIS generates $2.25 in economic activity for every dollar spent. Reforms that undermine its effectiveness erode those returns while shifting costs elsewhere. The Bill should be redesigned around genuine efficiency: better initial decisions, less adversarial administration, and investment in individualised supports that demonstrably reduce downstream burden. • Abandoning choice and control: The NDIS was built on a founding promise—that people with disability would have genuine choice and control over individualised supports, replacing a system of generic, fragmented, underfunded services that let people fall through the gaps. This Bill systematically dismantles that promise: through proposed section 25B, people can be excluded on the basis that another system might provide support. This is despite existing systems being chronically underfunded, rigidly generic, extremely limited and at capacity. In practice, there are no adequate alternatives—the practitioners within those systems are often the ones directing people toward the NDIS precisely because they recognised their own systems’ limitations. Returning people to a cycle of fruitless referrals, box- ticking services, and endless re-proof of need is not a reform. It is a regression to exactly the system the NDIS was created to fix—at greater human and economic cost. Whatever changes, genuine choice and control must be preserved—it is what separates support that works from support that merely ticks boxes. • Unreviewable ministerial cuts: The Bill gives the Minister power to cut whole categories of support—with a 50% average cut to social and community
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National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 2393
participation already announced from October 2026—overriding individual assessments of reasonable and necessary need with no avenue for appeal. Supports that have been properly assessed and approved can simply be halved by ministerial decree. That is not reform. It is the government deciding in advance that assessed needs do not need to be met. A 50% cut to the supports most essential to reducing isolation and enabling participation in daily life should not rest with a single minister acting alone, beyond the reach of Parliament and participants alike. Such determinations should require parliamentary approval and remain open to individual challenge. • Unaccountable decision-making: Restricting reassessments and removing ART access does not improve decision quality—it conceals poor decisions. Automated decision-making (proposed sections 59B–C) compounds this: without mandatory human review of adverse outcomes, or a whole-of-government accountability framework, the risk of a Robodebt-style failure is real. The Committee should maintain independent review mechanisms, require the NDIA to improve initial decision accuracy, and ensure automated decisions cannot proceed without robust, independently tested safeguards. • Harmful and inaccurate reassessment of existing participants: The Bill requires existing participants with permanent disabilities to be reassessed from scratch under standardised tools whose rules have not yet been made. Repeatedly re- living and re-proving your worst experiences to strangers is corrosive for any participant—it reinforces a deficits lens that erodes identity, resilience, and capacity. For people whose disability affects memory, executive function, or emotional regulation, it is also retraumatising and compounds the original disability. Also, standardised assessments by non-specialist assessors cannot capture complex, fluctuating, or interacting conditions and introduce serious risks of inconsistent and inaccurate outcomes. Participants with established permanent disabilities should not face unnecessary reassessment; any process must draw on existing treating practitioner evidence. • Standardisation over effectiveness: The Bill replaces individualised, real-world evidence with generalised frameworks that cannot capture how disability is actually lived—removing the whole-of-person approach, subordinating lived experience to population-level research, and prioritising standardised tools over the longitudinal knowledge of treating practitioners. The result is less accurate, less effective, and more wasteful support, falling hardest on people with complex or interacting conditions. The Bill should reinstate the whole-of-person framework, treat lived experience as primary evidence, and require assessments to draw on existing treating practitioner knowledge.
Opening I am an NDIS participant. My disability significantly affects executive functioning, emotional regulation, cognitive load, and my capacity to engage with complex systems— including the NDIS itself.
I support a sustainable and well-functioning NDIS. I want it to be efficient and work properly, and I understand why reform is on the table. But sustainability and effectiveness
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National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 2393
are not in conflict unless you design them to be. My concern with this Bill is not that it seeks efficiency, but that several of its key provisions will reduce real-world effectiveness while creating only the appearance of efficiency, relocating costs rather than eliminating them, and imposing harms that will not appear in any government budget.
Independent modelling by Per Capita—drawing on the economic framework originally established by the Productivity Commission in 2011—found that the NDIS generates an estimated $2.25 in economic activity for every dollar spent, through employment, carer workforce participation, and flow-on spending across the services economy. The then- Minister for Social Services cited this finding in a 2022 government speech, noting that an effective NDIS reduces avoidable downstream costs to governments across social security, employment, housing, and health. This Bill does not engage with that framing at all. It treats the NDIS purely as a line item to be reduced, not as an investment whose returns depend on it actually working.
This submission focuses on the provisions I believe will do the most harm and explains why in concrete terms.
The consultation timeframe undermines meaningful scrutiny
I want to begin by noting the conditions under which this submission has been prepared, because they are directly relevant to the quality and volume of input this process will receive. The Bill runs to 109 pages, with nearly 300 pages of accompanying explanatory material. The Senate inquiry was initially given a two-week window, later extended only slightly, for public response. The documents were not provided in accessible formats.
The process has not been designed in a way that enables equal participation by the people most affected: people with disabilities, many of whom face significant barriers in reading complex technical material, navigating government submission systems, understanding confidentiality options, and preparing a written response under severe time pressure.
I have found this submission process difficult to engage with fully. I have not had sufficient time or capacity to research every provision or refine this statement as thoroughly as I would like, and there may be matters I have missed. This doesn’t reflect a lack of concern, but the limits of a process that many people with disability will not be able to complete at all.
Australia’s Disability Representative Organisations stated in a joint submission that this timeframe creates ‘grave doubts that this will allow proper scrutiny of legislation, with major implications for the wellbeing, rights and supports for hundreds of thousands of people with disability, families and carers across Australia.’ I share that concern entirely. A two-week window for legislation of this complexity and consequence does not allow for genuine scrutiny.
The process of accessing the NDIS is already costly and debilitating Getting onto the NDIS took years. It required sustained effort at a time when my functional capacity was already significantly depleted. Negotiating multiple bureaucracies, negotiating repeated requests for impossible to access historical documentation, exhausting and invasive assessments, extensive new documentation requirements, and ongoing re-articulation of impairment at every stage—all took their toll. At significant personal expense, I obtained detailed professional reports, the substance of which were not always meaningfully reflected in decisions.
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National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 2393
Much of my available capacity over that period was directed toward navigating the system rather than toward recovery, stability, or participation in my own life. This meant that my health, self-esteem, resilience and work-capacity deteriorated significantly during this period.
I raise this not as a complaint about the past, but because this Bill will make that dynamic worse. Several of the proposed changes add new administrative layers, narrow the grounds on which participants can seek reassessment, and increase the consequences of being hard to reach. For people whose disability directly affects their capacity to engage with complex systems, these changes are not neutral. They are barriers that compound.
The most harmful thing for me about the NDIS participation process is how it makes you relive your worst experiences, over and over, reinforcing and amplifying your weaknesses and vulnerabilities. You have to try to remember specific and relevant examples (very difficult and time-consuming given my memory issues and distressing trauma traps when I try to reconstruct them), then explain and justify them in detail, over and over, to so many different people, just to try to be understood. That is horrifying. It does not feel like support, more like being trapped inside the worst parts of your life.
Over time, that can change how you see yourself. You start to live through a deficits lens, sapped of strength, resilience, and capacity. That is not a neutral process. It is exhausting, humiliating, and deeply corrosive. Worse, it leaves people stuck in an endless limbo. When the supports that could lift you up are conditional on you remaining in your worst states, you can never fully find stability or confidence.
This is compounded by an assumption embedded in how plans are designed and reduced over time—assuming that people with conditions already robustly established as permanent and significant will recover toward independence if simply given less support. That is not an evidence-based expectation. It is a budget assumption dressed as an outcome, and it ignores the basic reality that recovery and capability require adequate support, not the withdrawal of it.
The process should be redesigned so people are not forced to constantly relive trauma and have their vulnerabilities reinforced just to access support. Once someone has been assessed as having a permanent and significant disability, that finding should not need to be re-proved from scratch at every turn. Assessment should draw on existing evidence, minimise unnecessary repetition, and recognise capabilities alongside needs.
With genuinely adequate and appropriate support, meaningful improvement and greater independence is surely possible for many participants. But that outcome cannot be assumed in advance, mandated by reducing supports, or treated as inevitable simply because it would be convenient for a budget. I am sure most participants share that wish (for recovery and/or independence), but what we need is support adequate to make it possible, not the removal of support on the assumption that it already is.
Other systems cannot absorb what the NDIS drops Before accessing the NDIS, I relied on public mental health services, employment services, and other community systems. I am not dismissing the individuals within those systems—some were genuinely helpful, and their efforts mattered. But they operated within chronically underfunded and fragmented structures that cater for generic rather than individual needs. The supports available were limited, often inaccessible, and
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National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 2393
frequently inadequate for someone with my level of complexity and need for genuine individualisation.
What I remember most clearly about that period is not any single failure, but the cumulative effect of the whole: endless referrals between services, each system treating my needs as someone else’s responsibility; advice that bore little resemblance to what services actually delivered; impersonal box-ticking that was very demoralising for someone who has spent their life being as resourceful and self-directed as possible. This felt less like support than deterioration with paperwork.
Many of the practitioners and workers within those systems were themselves the ones directing me toward the NDIS. They recognised that what I needed—genuine choice and control, flexible and individualised support, continuity—was beyond their systems’ design and resourcing. The NDIS was not presented to me as a luxury, it was presented as the appropriate pathway for needs that other systems couldn’t meet.
Proposed section 25B would allow people to be excluded from the NDIS on the basis that another system ‘could’ provide their support—reversing the Federal Court’s Sutherland decision. That assumption is contradicted by direct experience. Those other systems are already overstretched and not designed to provide individualised support—they were often the ones referring people toward the NDIS in the first place. Redirecting people back into them does not solve the problem. It is an abdication dressed as a policy.
It returns people with complex needs to an exhausting, demoralising cycle of referrals that go mostly nowhere—each service pointing to the next, none taking responsibility, every rejection requiring another application, another explanation, another proof of need, more fruitless yet demanding personal investment, and the repeated surrender of deeply personal information to systems whose security can’t always be guaranteed.
For people with limited executive function, that extraordinary and futile administrative burden is more than frustrating, it is depleting in ways that compound the original disability. For people who experience rejection acutely, it is not merely discouraging—it is damaging. And for anyone paying attention, it is a profound waste: of people’s limited capacity, of practitioners’ time, and of public money spent on redundant systems that can only refer rather than help.
Ultimately, much of the unmet need will not be redistributed to other services—it will simply go unmet. For people with significant disability, that is not an abstract outcome. Clinicians and disability advocates have already raised concerns about increased suicide risk as a direct consequence of these reforms. That cost will not appear in any government department’s budget. But it is real and it is foreseeable.
The ‘all appropriate treatment’ requirement is unjust in practice Proposed sections 24(5)(a) and 25(1B)(a) would require people to have tried ‘all appropriate treatment’ before they can access the NDIS. The Bill provides that exceptions may exist for medical reasons, but the burden of demonstrating this falls on the applicant.
In practice, this will present serious problems for many people with complex or long- standing disability histories. Treatments that are nominally ‘available’ may be inaccessible due to cost, geography, or the fact that they were tried—and abandoned as harmful—many years ago. Documentation of past treatments is frequently incomplete or unavailable: detailed records were not always kept, or they are lost to time or deep 5
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 2393
archiving, practitioners have moved on, and there is little incentive for current clinicians to reconstruct historical treatment histories from archives.
For people with psychosocial disability, some of the treatments that are considered evidence-based were historically harmful, and no-one should be required to re-expose themselves to a damaging intervention simply to satisfy an administrative threshold. The Bill says medical reasons may excuse this, but the process of documenting those reasons, obtaining the right reports, and satisfying the NDIA’s evidentiary requirements is itself a significant burden that many will not be able to meet.
The Explanatory Memorandum suggests that some psychosocial conditions may be exempted through Rules to be drawn later. That falls seriously short. The exemptions do not yet exist, the rules are not yet made, and the people most at risk of harm under this provision won’t necessarily know whether they qualify for an exemption until they’ve already been refused.
Standardised assessment tools cannot capture my disability The Bill allows the Government to introduce standardised tools to assess functional capacity, both for new applicants and for existing participants (proposed section 9B). This is a significant departure from the current approach, where people can use reports from their own doctors and allied health practitioners.
A standardised tool is unlikely to capture how my disability presents in daily life. Functional capacity is not a fixed quantity. It is shaped by accumulated cognitive load, stress, environmental demands, and what has already been asked of me that day or that week. On a good day, in a structured assessment environment, I might perform reasonably well on a discrete task. That result would not reflect what it takes to hold a life together with this disability—or how quickly available capacity is consumed by the administrative requirements of the NDIS itself.
I also have significant memory and attention limitations that affect how I can effectively communicate about my recent and historical capacity in a pressured context. I may interpret things differently than intended and struggle to recollect even recent examples to provide a full and accurate picture.
This is why it’s so important to use the reports prepared by practitioners who work with you and understand you over time, where they use their experience and expertise to help you properly and consistently understand the questions, and where I have been given some time to re-build my memory architecture, so I can mine my own experience appropriately to map onto functional capacity documentation.
The prospect of being reassessed through a tool not designed to capture the complexity of my disability, and potentially losing access as a result, is alarming and stressful.
Removing the ‘whole of person’ approach harms people with multiple conditions In 2024, Parliament inserted a new s 34(1)(aa) into the NDIS Act to ensure funding decisions considered whether a support addressed needs arising from the participant’s impairments in a practical, real-world way. In Eastham in February 2026, the Federal Court confirmed that this provision should not be read narrowly so as to ignore how multiple impairments interact. The Bill now proposes replacing that approach with a more restrictive test in proposed s 34(1)(aa). 6
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 2393
Under the new wording, supports would need to arise “directly” from a qualifying impairment. For people with co-occurring or interacting conditions, that creates an artificial legal distinction that doesn’t reflect how disability is experienced in everyday life. The Explanatory Memorandum describes Eastham as an “unintended expansion”, but for many participants it was simply the law doing what it was meant to do: recognising that impairment, function, and support needs often arise from the combined effect of several conditions, not one neatly isolated diagnosis.
This change is especially concerning for participants who, on the advice of treating practitioners, originally limited their access request to one qualifying condition, with the intention of later seeking reassessment to include additional conditions with equal or greater functional impact. This whole-of-person approach provided an important safeguard in that situation. The Bill now appears to have narrowed that reassessment pathway as well, closing off both routes at once.
Restricting plan reassessments punishes participants for following professional advice Under current rules, participants can request plan reassessments before their plan’s scheduled end date—for instance, where needs have changed, new evidence has become available, or funding is running out. For participants with complex multi-condition presentations, this has been a critical pathway: a way to come back with fuller clinical evidence once it could be gathered, and to have additional conditions properly reflected in the plan so they can be appropriately supported.
Proposed section 48A would restrict plan reassessments to cases where there has been a “significant and ongoing” change in support needs. The Explanatory Memorandum explicitly states that running out of funding early is not sufficient grounds. Providing additional clinical evidence about conditions that were always present but not included in the original application would also not qualify, since the underlying need has not newly changed—it was simply never properly captured.
Participants who followed professional advice in good faith when applying—advice given precisely because the NDIA has historically struggled to process complex multi-condition presentations—would find that pathway closed. The Bill removes the flexibility that has allowed the system to self-correct over time, and replaces it with a rigidity that will lock in underfunded plans with no route to revision.
Sustainability is being prioritised over need—and the cuts are unreviewable The Bill replaces the existing objects of the NDIS Act with language prioritising ‘financial sustainability of the Scheme’ (proposed section 17B). Courts and tribunals have historically used the existing objects and principles—which focus on individual need, goals, and genuine choice and control—to guide planning decisions. These are being replaced with a framework that explicitly directs decision-makers toward cost containment.
The Bill also gives the Minister power to make ‘support determinations’—effectively percentage cuts to whole categories of support—without those reductions being reviewable by participants (proposed section 34A). The Minister has specifically flagged social and community participation as a target. The Explanatory Memorandum gives a
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National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 2393
worked example in which a participant is assessed as needing $44,000 of community supports, but a determination caps their actual spending at $30,000. The participant cannot appeal that gap.
Social and community participation supports are not optional extras. The first concrete exercise of the ministerial determination power has already been announced: a 50% average cut to this category from October 2026, with no avenue for individual appeal. For participants who use their full allocation, that is not a recalibration—it is a halving of the funding that reduces isolation, enables community connection, provides access to health services, and in many cases makes any other participation in daily life possible. For me, this is the most alarming provision in the Bill. This is where genuine choice and control over how I meet my own needs actually sits. Cutting it does not eliminate the need—it sweeps it under the rug.
This is precisely the pattern the Productivity Commission’s original investment framing warned against. Underinvestment in disability support does not produce net savings for government. It produces deferred, dispersed, and harder-to-address costs. The Bill’s approach to support determinations—cutting supports that have been assessed as reasonable and necessary, without any avenue for review—is a clear example of false economy in the legislation.
The Committee should recommend a right of individual appeal against support determinations. Without it, the Bill deliberately creates a gap between assessed need and actual funding, and removes any mechanism to close it. That said, a right of appeal is only meaningful if the process for exercising it is not itself a barrier—the existing dispute and review system has been experienced by many participants as exhausting, demoralising, and deliberately designed to discourage challenge. Any recommendation on appeal rights must also address the accessibility and human cost of those processes. The problem is not only that the gap exists—it is that the system has never made it genuinely safe or feasible for participants to fight it fairly.
Removing review rights conceals problems rather than repairing them Beyond the ministerial determination power, the Bill systematically narrows participants’ ability to challenge decisions that affect them. The Explanatory Memorandum explicitly states that running out of funding early—where support needs have not otherwise changed—will not be sufficient grounds for reassessment. Decisions to transition participants to new framework plans are also not reviewable.
The NDIA has a well-documented history of spending tens of millions of dollars fighting participants through lengthy proceedings—and losing a significant proportion of those disputes, including the recent Eastham and Sutherland decisions. The ideal solution is better initial decision-making: more consistent, more accurate, and more responsive to individual circumstances. Instead, this Bill removes or restricts the review mechanisms that expose such failures.
Removing access to independent review does not make the NDIA’s decisions more accurate. It makes them less contestable. Wrong decisions will stand, unmet needs will accumulate, and the downstream costs—to health, mental health services, other social services and the broader economy—will grow. Making costs invisible is not the same as eliminating them.
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National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 2393
If the Government genuinely wants to reduce NDIS spending, it should start with the largest sources of waste and leakage, not with participants’ supports. The public record already shows substantial concern about provider overcharging, fraud, and other forms of “integrity leakage”, while the NDIA has also spent tens of millions of dollars on legal disputes with participants challenging access and funding decisions. Cutting participants’ crucial supports is not only cruel; it is economically inefficient, because it shifts the burden onto the least powerful people in the system rather than tackling misuse, overpayment, and avoidable administrative cost at source.
The ‘loss of social licence’ narrative requires scrutiny Minister Butler’s central justification for this Bill is that the NDIS is losing its ‘social licence’, citing polling that suggests 6 in 10 Australians believe the scheme is ‘broken’. I would ask the Committee to examine that claim carefully—not because public concern about the NDIS is illegitimate, but because public attitudes do not arise in a vacuum.
It has been reported that in 2023, the then-Minister for the NDIS commissioned political strategy firm RedBridge to conduct focus groups and narrative testing about how to sell changes to the NDIS. RedBridge’s advice was to focus on rorts, fraud, and spiralling costs. It seems the Government has followed that messaging ever since—through budget announcements, parliamentary inquiries into fraud, media briefings, and the coordinated media messaging to signal that the scheme’s social licence was at risk. The media coverage of NDIS fraud and cost blowouts that followed was extensive and, in significant part, driven by that government messaging.
The ‘six in ten’ polling figure cited by the Minister has not been attributed to any independently published survey. The source and methodology of that figure should be part of any scrutiny of the social licence argument.
I am not suggesting Australians have no concerns about the NDIS. I am suggesting that those concerns have been actively cultivated and amplified as a precondition for the changes now being proposed—and that the ‘loss of social licence’ argument therefore cannot be treated as an independent finding about community attitudes. It is a political argument dressed as a polling result, and it is being used to justify cuts that will harm people whose needs are real and whose eligibility was already properly established.
The participants whose lives will be affected by this Bill are not abstract budget entries. Many of us went through years of assessment, documentation, and re-articulation of impairment to access supports we genuinely need. While there may be exceptions, we are not the rorters or fraudsters the public messaging has implied—we are people trying to live our lives, trying to contribute to and participate in society like everyone else.
Lived experience evidence being downgraded Proposed subsections 34(1E) and (1F) would require the CEO to prioritise published, peer- reviewed, generalisable research over a participant’s own evidence when deciding whether a support is ‘effective and beneficial’. The CEO may find a support ‘ineffective’ even where the participant can demonstrate it has worked for them, if peer-reviewed research on it is limited.
This concerns me because my complex disability does not present in a way that maps neatly with the available research. The supports that have worked for me are ones I have arrived at through experience, often in ways that are specific to my circumstances. A
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National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 2393
framework that systematically subordinates that evidence to generalised population studies will make it harder to retain supports that work, and easier for the NDIA to refuse them on grounds that do not reflect individual outcomes.
Independent support workers provide flexibility agencies cannot The Bill changes who qualifies as an ‘NDIS provider’, with mandatory registration requirements to be set by rules not yet made (proposed section 10C). I understand the intent to regulate more providers, but I am concerned about the practical effect on access to independent support workers, including through platform-based arrangements.
In my experience, access to independent workers has been one of the most important factors in whether supports are usable and functional. The ability to choose someone based on their experience, how they communicate, how they approach my specific needs, and how flexibly they can respond is not a mere preference—it’s what makes support work. More standardised, agency-based models have frequently been too rigid and insufficiently responsive to the level of individualisation required. Any reform that reduces access to independent workers should be carefully assessed for this impact before it is implemented.
In a related matter, many support workers and service providers have indicated that the proposed registration requirements—the details of which are not yet defined—risk driving significant workforce exit if they prove administratively burdensome and costly. An already-stretched industry losing experienced workers to compliance costs would reduce available services, create gaps in continuity of care, and further erode the flexibility and choice that make supports usable. Introducing major registration changes without a clear workforce impact assessment, and without the detail that would allow workers and participants to clearly understand what is required of them, is not a responsible way to manage a reform of this scale.
Transparency and consistency: eligibility, evidence, and plan use If there is a genuine commitment to a better functioning NDIS, one area that deserves urgent attention is the chronic inconsistency and opacity around eligibility criteria and what applicants are required to demonstrate. In my experience of applying, every person and organisation involved—advocates, report writers, allied health practitioners, LACs, and NDIS staff themselves—understood the requirements differently and frequently contradicted each other. I spent significant time and energy trying to communicate between them, interpreting what I understood the NDIA needed from their reports, while simultaneously receiving contradictory guidance from people who were supposed to be authoritative sources. This is not an isolated experience. It reflects a systemic failure of clear, consistent, and accessible communication about how the scheme works.
The result is that accessing the NDIS has come to resemble a test of bureaucratic endurance rather than a process of identifying and meeting genuine need. It systematically disadvantages people with less capacity, less support and resources, and less prior knowledge of how to work a bureaucratic system. That is inequitable by design, even if not by intent.
This problem does not end at the point of access. Once people have a plan, significant confusion persists about what they are and are not eligible to spend it on. The rules are not clearly communicated. They are interpreted inconsistently by different NDIA staff, and participants routinely receive conflicting information from support coordinators, 10
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 2393
LACs, and the NDIA itself. This creates anxiety, avoidance, and underspending—not because participants are gaming the system, but because the system has not been made legible to the people using it.
Any genuine reform agenda should include a commitment to making eligibility criteria, evidentiary requirements, planning processes, and the rules governing plan use genuinely clear, consistent, and accessible—to applicants, to the practitioners supporting them, and to the sector as a whole. That would be a real efficiency gain, and one that doesn’t require cutting anyone’s support to achieve.
Automated decision-making: the risk of a new Robodebt The Bill also introduces the use of automated decision-making for certain claims and plan approvals (proposed sections 59B–C), with the ability for the Minister to expand its use by rule. There is currently no whole-of-government framework for safeguarding automated government decisions. This matters enormously given recent history: Robodebt demonstrated what happens when automated systems make consequential decisions about vulnerable people without adequate human oversight or right of appeal. The disability community has every reason to be alarmed by the prospect of the same approach being applied to NDIS claims.
Any use of automated decision-making in this context must require mandatory human review of adverse decisions, be subject to independent testing before deployment, and be accompanied by a robust and transparent accountability framework—none of which this Bill provides. Alongside this, the NDIA should be required to publish regular, detailed data on claim outcomes, approval and rejection rates, and safety incidents. Participants, practitioners, and the public cannot hold the system to account for what they cannot see.
Closing I want the NDIS to be sustainable. I also want it to be effective. Those goals are not in conflict—but this Bill treats them as if they are, and in doing so risks producing a Scheme that appears cheaper on paper while becoming more costly in practice.
The NDIS generates returns across the economy precisely because it enables participation. Reforms that reduce effective access to supports will erode those returns, shift costs to other systems, and impose harms that will be expensive to address later.
Real efficiency would mean better clarity, better initial decisions, fewer adversarial disputes, and less public money spent fighting participants in court over needs that turn out to be legitimate. This Bill does not pursue that kind of efficiency. It removes accountability mechanisms, narrows access, and makes it harder for participants to get and keep supports that work. Those are not savings. They are costs that are being made harder to see.
The NDIS was built on a promise that people with disability would be supported to participate in their own lives on something closer to equal terms. That promise has economic value as well as human value. I urge the Committee to recommend substantial amendments to this Bill, and to ensure that the voices of participants—including those who could not find the capacity to submit in the time available—are taken seriously in that process.
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