National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 2420
SUBMISSION TO THE SENATE COMMUNITY AFFAIRS LEGISLATION COMMITTEE Inquiry into the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submitted by: | 31 May 2026 | Sydney, NSW
- Introduction
I am , a mother of an 11-year-old son with autism, writing from Sydney, New South Wales. I am submitting to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee in response to the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 (the Bill).
I support the principle that the NDIS must be financially sustainable for current and future generations, and I do not dispute that the scheme requires reform. However, I am deeply and fundamentally opposed to several of the approaches in this Bill, which I believe will harm children with disability, weaken the effectiveness of support, and ultimately cost this country far more than it saves. I write with urgency, as a parent who has lived this journey for eleven years, and who knows firsthand what is at stake when the right support is found — and what is lost when it is not.
- Our Son’s Journey — What the Right Support Makes Possible
My son was diagnosed with autism at the age of two. At that time, he was non- verbal. Medical professionals advised us he would likely never speak, never make friends, and never live independently.
Over the eleven years since his diagnosis, our family has pursued every avenue available. He has accessed speech therapy, occupational therapy, Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA) therapy, and has participated in clinical trials. We have invested thousands of hours in coordinating his care, advocating for appropriate schooling arrangements, and providing hands-on support ourselves — at considerable personal, financial, and emotional cost.
Today, my son is verbal. He attends school. He makes friends. These outcomes were not predicted and were not inevitable. They happened because of the right support, given at the right time, by the right people.
He continues to need ongoing support. His progress is not a destination — it is something we actively work to maintain, build on, and protect. Without continued, individually-tailored support, the gains we have worked so hard to achieve are genuinely at risk of regression.
- Individual Choice in Support Is a Clinical Necessity, Not a Luxury
I want to place one specific aspect of our experience firmly on the public record: finding the right therapist or support worker is not simply a matter of preference or
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 2420
parental comfort. For a child with autism, it is a direct determinant of whether therapy produces any meaningful outcome at all.
Over the course of my son’s life, we have been fortunate to access highly qualified, experienced, and genuinely skilled practitioners. Some of them did not work for him. Not because they were not good at their jobs — they were — but because he did not connect with them. He did not respond. Progress stalled, regardless of how evidence-based the approach was on paper.
The practitioners and support workers who have produced the most significant results in his life share one thing in common: he connects with them. Where there is genuine trust, rapport, and a working relationship that he can engage with, the outcomes have been transformative. Where that connection has been absent, even excellent technique has yielded very little.
This is not merely our family’s experience. The quality of the therapeutic relationship is one of the most consistently replicated predictors of outcome across therapeutic disciplines in the clinical literature. For autistic children, who may have specific communication profiles, sensory sensitivities, and social differences that shape how they relate to others, this factor is amplified, not diminished.
The current NDIS model, for all its imperfections, allows families to exercise genuine choice and control over who delivers support to their child. That choice is not a perk — it is what allows families like ours to identify the person who actually works, and to stop investing in support that does not. Removing that choice does not just reduce family satisfaction. It reduces the clinical effectiveness of every support interaction that follows.
3.1 How This Bill Removes That Choice The Bill and the accompanying reform agenda reduce individual choice in several compounding ways.
• Diversion to Thriving Kids removes individual plans. The proposed Thriving Kids model moves children away from individually-funded NDIS plans and toward group-based, state-delivered community supports. This shifts the model from one built around the individual child to one built around the available program. My son’s progress was not built on programs — it was built on relationships and support designed specifically around him. • Tighter funding makes finding the right practitioner impossible. Identifying the right support worker or therapist requires time and, sometimes, the cost of trying an approach that does not ultimately fit. As budgets are reduced and plan flexibility constrained, this process becomes financially unworkable. Families will be forced to persist with a support that is not producing results, simply because they cannot afford to keep looking. • Narrowed fundable supports limit access to effective therapies. Part 3 of the Bill restricts funded supports to those directly arising from the qualifying impairment. In practice, this may exclude therapies that address co-occurring conditions or that work through an approach not fitting neatly into a narrow causal definition — even where those therapies have produced the most significant outcomes.
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 2420
When choice is removed, families are left with whatever is available rather than whatever works. For a child with autism, the gap between those two things can be the difference between progress and stagnation.
- Additional Concerns with the Proposed Bill
4.1 Progress Must Not Disqualify a Child from Support My son is verbal and able to attend school today because of years of intensive, funded intervention. Under the new eligibility framework, a child who presents with relatively strong functional capacity at assessment — capacity built through the very support the NDIS was designed to fund — may be assessed as not meeting the threshold for continued access. This creates a deeply unjust outcome: the more successful early intervention has been, the more likely a child is to lose the ongoing support that sustains those gains.
Functional assessments must distinguish between supported and unsupported capacity. A child’s ability to perform tasks with appropriate scaffolding in place tells us something fundamentally different from their ability to perform those same tasks if that scaffolding is removed. The Bill does not appear to adequately address this distinction, and the Committee should satisfy itself that the assessment framework does so before recommending passage.
4.2 Ministerial Powers Without Adequate Parliamentary Oversight The Bill enables the Minister to declare that a given impairment has an available alternative support, effectively excluding that impairment from the NDIS by legislative instrument — without a vote in Parliament and without a sunset provision. This is an extraordinary level of delegated power over the lives of people with disability. I urge the Committee to scrutinise this provision carefully and to recommend that such declarations be subject to parliamentary disallowance procedures and mandatory regular review.
4.3 Fraud and Waste Must Be Addressed at Their Actual Source The government has cited fraud and unsustainable cost as the primary justification for these changes. I agree that fraud must be addressed. However, publicly available data raises questions about where the real waste in this system lies — including the significant sums drawn from the scheme by government agencies themselves, and the cost of an agency that appears to lose or settle the overwhelming majority of participant-initiated decisions before they reach a hearing.
Reducing support to families with genuine and documented need is not the same as reducing fraud. The Committee should be clear-eyed about which problem each specific measure in this Bill is actually solving — and whether the people bearing the cost of these changes are the ones responsible for the problem.
- Recommendations
I respectfully ask the Committee to recommend the following:
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 2420
• That the Thriving Kids program be independently evaluated and demonstrated to deliver individually-tailored, evidence-based outcomes before any NDIS access changes take effect for children with autism. • That the principle of individual choice and control in selecting support providers be explicitly preserved in the Bill, with recognition that therapeutic effectiveness for autistic children depends directly on the quality of fit between practitioner and child. • That functional capacity assessments be required to distinguish between supported and unsupported capacity, and to assess the risk of regression if current supports are removed. • That the Minister’s power to exclude impairments from the NDIS through legislative instruments be subject to parliamentary disallowance and regular scheduled review. • That the definition of fundable supports in Part 3 retain sufficient flexibility to cover co-occurring conditions and multi-modal interventions that are clinically connected to the qualifying impairment. • That adequate plan flexibility and budget portability be maintained so families retain the practical ability to find and sustain the support arrangements that work for their individual child.
- Conclusion
My son was told at two years old that he would never speak. He speaks. He was told he would never make friends. He has friends. We are still working, every day, toward greater independence — and we are doing so because we found the right support, fought to keep it, and refused to accept arrangements that did not work for him specifically.
The thing that made the difference was never simply therapy. It was the right therapy, with the right person, in a relationship our son could trust. That is what individual choice in the NDIS protects. That is what this Bill threatens to dismantle.
I urge the Committee to recommend meaningful amendments before this Bill is passed. For the families who are today where we were nine years ago — who do not yet know what is possible for their child — the decisions made through this inquiry will shape everything that follows.
I would also like it noted that the way the Minister of Health has spoken about the disabled community has been disgraceful and has already done so much damage to the trust we have with our government. As a Labor voter I will not be able to continue to support a government that does this to the most vulnerable in our community and who speaks with such contempt for disabled people and their families. We deserve better than this.
Sydney, New South Wales 31 May 2026