National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 2441
Dear Life Changers,
I write to you as a person who has struggled as a child with what is now known as autism and ADHD. I am undiagnosed, but it really does not take a diagnosis to figure out that I am autistic. I wish I had support back in the day. More so, I wish I had the skills and tools to manage life a lot sooner than when I had eventually learnt them.
I live with my partner and her child. They are both on the spectrum. Her child has been diagnosed with Level 2 Autism and is fortunately on an NDIS plan… but is this fortune about to just wither away in the whirlwind of budget cuts without a real deep dive into how it may affect lives like my stepchild’s, in the long run? This herein, lies the motivation behind this submission.
I want to firstly commend the initiative to target the fraudulent practices that we all know exist in this industry. The efforts that are being made is acknowledged and well appreciated. I hope within my heart of hearts that all the people who are in charge of this arduous and complex process practise what they preach and will fight justly for the ethically right operatives to achieve an upright scheme that is fair, robust and person-centred.
I don’t want to comment on the amendments proposed, but I ask you, kind reader(s), to consider some questions that I do have, after reading parts of the memorandum. The questions are not meant to be attacks in any way. Rather, they are genuine questions from a curious person who lives and breathes life with an autistic child, an autistic partner, and is an autistic person herself. I hope that through these questions posed, thoughts will be revisited, decisions reconsidered, and there will be further discussions before the bill is passed as the impact is significant to so many lives.
Schedule 1, Part 1 – Defining functional capacity
- What is this functional assessment process going to look like, and how is it going to cater for the unique situation of each participant or potential participant? Who will be conducting these functional assessments, and with what qualification?
- A person can be functional, but are still impaired in ways that require support (e.g. an autistic child could be going to school, but is struggling at home with self-care, and behaviours that require support from professionals like an occupational and/or speech therapists) – how will this be taken into account with the proposed functional assessment process?
Schedule 1, Part 3 – Strengthen Link between and Impairment and Need for Support
- I struggle to understand the disconnection of providing funding holistically to a person who is already impaired and has secondary diagnoses that may not meet disability or early intervention requirements. How is the person then able to seek
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 2441
support elsewhere? Will resources be provided to them as to where they can seek the appropriate services, which was previously provided to them by the NDIS?
Schedule 1, Part 4 – Support Determination
- Why shouldn’t the circumstances of a particular person be taken into consideration, with a blanket reduction of funding component made to everyone? What if transport is required more for Rebecca who lives in a regional town, and the same is not so for Robert who lives within the metropolitan Perth area? How is it fair that Rebecca’s location would somehow determine a lower funding for other Core support elements due to probable higher transport costs?
- From the example of Omar provided in the memorandum, it seems like there is some kind of compounding reduction when a decision to reduce the function across the board by a Minister is made. Omar starts with a $40,000 plan, a reduction of 25% is made due to the Minister’s decision (i.e. $30,000). Omar’s plan gets reassessed, and gets a new funding of $35,000, which then gets reduced again by 25%? How long will it be before Omar gets no funding at all?
Schedule 1, Part 6 – Reasonable and Necessary Supports
- How is the NDIS proposing to support communities to respond to participants’ individual goals and needs? What would this support entail? Schools as a community resource is not the answer – they are already under immense pressure, under- resourced, and at the brink of losing more children to home-schooling due to the lack of support parents (particularly those with autistic children) are getting. Unless this is what NDIS is trying to achieve? Forced silence through burnouts and homeschooling due to the lack of support? And then this begs the next question – how are parents meant to put food on the table, with rising costs of living and single-parent families becoming unsustainable?
- I question the statement of the proposed new subsection 17B(2), noting participants often do better when informal supports, including family, peers, clubs, employers and local services play alongside funded supports. Has a poll been done, particularly with the neurodivergent families? My personal experience is that our autistic child is able to up-skill himself in the presence of people whom he masks with. Granted, the consequence of that is the meltdowns, and flopping due to dysregulation, however, there is noticeable increase in social and interactive skills when therapists are engaged in session. This translates over time to better coping skills at school. The safety circle of any autistic child can sometimes be counterproductive to the goals that they need to achieve.
- Referring to Item 73 – After subsection 34(1), where there is reference to Effective and beneficial considerations in the proposed amendments, how will research and evidence which is published, peer reviewed and generalisable be helpful when each
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 2441
participant has their own unique story and impairment circumstance? What has happened to person-centred care? 4. Referring to proposed new subsection 34(1G), how is substantial care and support for their children really defined? Is this defined in the neurotypical sense of the word? Or have considerations been made for neurodivergence (with which when a child or more have been diagnosed with autism, you would expect the mum and/or dad to also be autistic, diagnosed or not)? Substantial care in the neurodivergent world can sometimes mean 12-18hours of the 24 hours in the day – is this expected from a neurotypical set of parents? And of course, we need to make this relative to the age of a child, but the question still remain as to how is this level of care determined for NDIS to then warrant for funding to be allocated? 5. Referring to proposed new subsection 34(1J), reducing burden on parental time, below what is reasonably expected of any parent is again ambiguous because… what is deemed as reasonable of any parent when the expectations and the burden of a parent of a neurotypical child and that of a neurodiverse (ASD) child is different? And how is this measured when ASD is not something that is measured discretely? We have levels to determine the level of support and how high functioning an ASD child/adult may be, but the truth is that every individual is different in their presentation of their autistic traits and behaviours.
Schedule 1, Part 8 – Tightening meaning of permanence to reduce access where an impairment can be treated
- Referring to the insertion of a new subsection 24(5), discussing how permanence is assessed for the purposes of determining whether a person meets the disability requirements, it states that an impairment or impairments are not permanent or likely to be permanent unless a person has undertaken all appropriate treatment for an impairment or impairments. This looks like a means to potentially remove all autistic participants from the scheme, given the inability to measure treatment for autism? Extrapolating this into the future, if the theory suggested here is true, then how will autistic people who need support be able to get that support? Thriving Kids has been spoken about but to date, there is not certainty as to how this will be achieved? And what about the adults with ASD, and are on the scheme, requiring significant support? Autism is permanent, but there is no treatment from my understanding. Is this a case for pushing autism out of the NDIS altogether?
Schedule 1 – Part 9 – Eligibility based on access to other services
- The summary of this part within the memorandum states that the amendment is to tighten eligibility to the NDIS where alternative supports are available through other service system which can reasonably meet the needs of a person, or where the service system has a responsibility for meeting the needs of a person, such as workers
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 2441
compensation or motor vehicle accident compensation schemes. Have there been discussions with these other service systems or service streams to ensure that there is a smooth transition for the existing participants, or even new ones to know where to go to seek these supports? Will there be a resource sharing point where participants can find out how to seek other support systems? Are the other systems on board with this? How will this all be categorised?
I ask you, life changer(s), to re-consider a lot of what you are seeking to amend because it will impact thousands of lives, and the family of those thousands of lives. I speak specifically for the family of autistic children and adults, who are burnt out, and are developing mental health issues (or already developed). Phasing them out of your system and handballing it to another is only going to put further pressure on an already stressed-out education and health system. We are one country, so why can’t government departments, and the private sectors who are meant to be supporting the people just behave like a family and try to come to a unified solution? What it really feels like, is a case of moving people from one bucket to another, without really informing people how the transition of buckets will go and what it will require.