Submission 2444 — Name Withheld — NDIS Future Generations Bill

National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 2444

Submission - NDIS (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026

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: An autistic adult, taxpayer, and parent of two autistic children, one of whom is a high-needs NDIS participant.

Request: I request that this submission be published with my name withheld. I am willing to be contacted by the Committee secretariat through the details provided with my submission.

Date: June 2026

About this submission

I write from two vantage points at once. I am an autistic adult, the parent of two autistic children, and the husband of a wife whose experience leads me to believe she is autistic too. I am also a business owner, a mortgage broker, and a taxpayer who spends his working life thinking about budgets, forecasting, incentives and the way systems shape behaviour. I do not come to the NDIS believing it should be beyond scrutiny. I accept that the Scheme has grown faster than was foreseen, that fraud exists, and that government has a duty to keep public resources sustainable. For those reasons I support reform of the NDIS in principle.

I do not, however, support this Bill in its current form. My concern is not that it seeks sustainability; it is that it concentrates significant power, reduces participant protections, decouples funding from the cost of the supports people actually need, and adopts a view of disability that risks overlooking how disability is genuinely experienced by participants and families.

My son, who is nearly 15, has high and complex support needs most consistent with Level 3 autism. He has significant communication challenges, acute sensory sensitivities, a deep dependence on routine, and substantial difficulty tolerating medical and dental procedures. He will need formal, individualised support for the rest of his life - including long after his mother and I can provide it. My interest in this Bill is therefore practical, not ideological. My central question throughout is simple: will these measures improve or worsen outcomes for people who genuinely need support, both now and for the generation the Bill claims to protect?

In keeping with the Committee’s requirement that submissions address the provisions of the Bill, every concern below is tied to a specific clause. Where I draw on lived experience, I do so only to show how a particular provision is likely to operate in the real world.

Summary of position and recommendations

I urge the Committee to recommend against passing the Bill in its current form, and to recommend the amendments set out in section 10. In short:

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National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 2444

Submission - NDIS (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026

1. Funding must remain tied to individual need - not set by category or “level of need”, and never reduced below the cost of a person’s reasonable and necessary supports (ss 34A, 33(2EA)-(2EB), Sch 4 s 32K).

2. Protect intensive and one-to-one support - remove the power to cap the worker-to- participant ratio (s 33(2EA)(c)).

3. Functional capacity must reflect real-world disability - not an “objective” test that strips away the very context in which autism and cognitive disability appear (s 9B).

4. Preserve review and reassessment rights - and recognise that a stable life is not a low-need life (ss 48A, 48(3)).

5. Constrain the delegated powers - eligibility, permanence and funding should be set by Parliament, not by non-sunsetting ministerial instruments (ss 9B, 25A, 25B, 34A, 45C).

6. Do not automate evaluative decisions about people’s lives - the lesson of Robodebt should not need re-learning (ss 59B, 59E).

7. Keep the anti-fraud powers, fix the collateral damage - integrity measures must target wrongdoing (overwhelmingly provider-side), not participants, families, or the small workforce they rely on (ss 40A, 30(1A), 10C, Sch 2 Pts 5-6).

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National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 2444

Submission - NDIS (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026

1. Common ground: the problems the Bill identifies are real

It would be dishonest to oppose this Bill on the premise that the NDIS has no problems. It plainly does. The Explanatory Memorandum is right that the Scheme has grown faster than was foreseen in 2013, that uncontrolled cost growth threatens its long-term viability, and that an unsustainable scheme ultimately fails the very people it exists to serve. It is also right that fraud and provider exploitation are serious, that they degrade the quality of supports, and that the Agency has lacked proportionate powers to regulate more than $50 billion in annual payments.

I therefore support the intent behind much of Schedule 2, and I support the principle that the Scheme should be financially sustainable. The disagreement that follows is about how. A sustainability problem can be solved by improving the match between need and funding, by removing waste and exploitation, and by strengthening governance - or it can be solved by quietly reducing the support available to individuals while leaving the underlying drivers untouched. This Bill, in its current form, leans heavily on the second approach, and dresses several cost-reduction levers in the language of fairness and sustainability. That is the core of my concern.

2. Disability is often invisible: the functional capacity test (s 9B)

A central theme of the Bill is the wish for greater consistency and objectivity in deciding who the Scheme is for. That is a legitimate goal. But disability - autism in particular - is frequently invisible to an objective, point-in-time assessment, because it lives in the interaction between a person and their environment. Proposed s 9B defines a person’s “functional capacity” as their ability to undertake an activity “without assistance from other people, assistive technology or modifications” and “in a context that excludes, as far as possible, the impact of the person’s environmental and personal circumstances”, with the methods, classifications and thresholds left to the rules (s 9B(2)-(3)). For my son, environmental context is not noise to be excluded. It is where his disability actually appears.

Let me explain with something that happened to our family. On paper, my son can appear to do a number of things - but every one of them carries a large asterisk, and I do not want to overplay any of them. He “plays basketball”, but it is a special-needs program: a large, quiet court, no competition, and coaching demands kept deliberately light - across an hour a week it amounts to bouncing the balls, passing to one another, and taking a few shots. He can “order his own food”, but only with a printed sheet of what to say; if the person serving him goes off- script, or cannot make out his unclear speech, he gets stuck. He can “travel on a train”, but never independently - he is one-to-one with a support worker or teacher aide, and even that is an improvement on the two-to-one he used to need. Viewed through the narrow lens of s 9B - a checklist of activities, stripped of context - even these heavily scaffolded approximations of ordinary tasks could be recorded as signs of independence.

The reality is that he is a flight risk. Several years ago he was playing beside our house while I made dinner. I could hear him pushing rhythmically against a side gate, every ten or fifteen seconds, so I knew where he was. Twice, the sound stopped. The first time, I checked and he was fine. The second time, the gate was open and he was gone. My wife called the police while I searched on foot with our neighbours. Police found him about fifteen minutes later, 1.8 kilometres away, about to cross a major unlit road. Our security footage later showed that

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roughly forty seconds had passed between him opening the gate and my checking it. Forty seconds was very nearly enough for my son to be killed.

No functional-capacity assessment that excludes “environmental and personal circumstances” would capture that. It would record a boy who can play sport, order food and catch a train - and miss entirely the reason he needs near-constant supervision. The real question for a participant like my son is not what he can do in a clinical room; it is whether he can safely and consistently participate in the world. A test built to be “objective” by stripping away context risks being technically consistent and practically wrong, and the people it will most often be wrong about are autistic participants and those with cognitive disability. I urge the Committee to ensure the s 9B definition, and any rules made under it, expressly account for the interaction between impairment and real-world environment - including safety, day-to-day variability, and the supervision a person needs to avoid harm.

3. The Bill moves away from funding people as individuals

The foundational promise of the NDIS is individualised support: funding that follows an assessment of what a particular person actually needs to live an ordinary life. Several provisions in this Bill, taken together, erode that promise and replace it with funding by category.

3.1 Funding by “level of need” rather than by the person (Schedule 4, s 32K(3B)-(3C))

Schedule 4 allows the rules to specify “one or more levels of need” for supports and to attach “one or more funding amounts for specified levels of need” (proposed s 32K(3B)(b)-(d)). The next subsection is the one that should concern the Committee most: a funding amount set for a level of need “may be more than, equal to or less than the actual cost of providing or acquiring the support” (proposed s 32K(3C)). This is the legislative architecture of a banding system. A person is assessed into a category, the category carries a price, and the price need not bear any relationship to what that person’s support actually costs.

Autism is the clearest illustration of why this is dangerous. Within my own household I can see autistic people whose support needs differ by an order of magnitude - my son at one extreme, my daughter much closer to the other. He cannot be “averaged” into a band with her without one of them being badly served. A banded model is administratively convenient precisely because it stops asking what the individual in front of it needs. The people most harmed are those at the extremes - the highest-need participants, like my son, whose actual costs sit well above any band an actuary would set as typical.

There is a deeper principle at stake, and it is the one I keep returning to. Segmentation is good for humanity but bad for humans. It is sensible - essential, even - to design rules and systems at the level of groups: to build a scheme that works for all people with a particular kind of need, in the same way we might design a tool that works for all left-handed people. That is segmentation doing its proper job. But the moment a group rule is applied to an individual as though the average were the person, it dehumanises them. A funding band says, in effect, that a person’s actual needs matter less than the category they have been sorted into. For people with disability - a group already reduced to a label by almost everyone they encounter - a banded model is one more signal from the state that they are interchangeable, that they are somehow less than, and, in the framing this Bill adopts, that they are a source of

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financial distress to everyone else. The NDIS was meant to be the one system that did the opposite: that met people as individuals. Segmentation belongs in the design of the Scheme; it does not belong in the moment funding meets a human being.

3.2 The power to cap one-to-one support (s 33(2EA))

Proposed s 33(2EA) allows a determination to specify, for a class of supports, “a maximum intensity” and “a maximum ratio of worker to participant”. A cap on the worker-to-participant ratio is, in plain terms, a rule that some people may not receive one-to-one support even where one-to-one support is what keeps them safe. For a child who becomes dysregulated, who may harm himself or others in a group setting, and who cannot communicate distress verbally, a mandated group ratio is not a saving - it is a withdrawal of the only support that works, and it transfers the risk onto the participant, the worker and the family. Section 33(2EB) compounds this by requiring funding methods to ensure the cap is never exceeded, “regardless of whether a funding component amount meets the cost of the supports.”

3.3 Reframing supports as a community and family responsibility (ss 17B, 34(1E)-(1K))

Proposed s 17B introduces “principles relating to scheme sustainability” that the CEO must weigh, including that participants “should be responsible for their day-to-day living costs” (s 17B(3)) and that funding should be distributed “across participants as a whole” and be “equitable, having regard to similarities in needs and circumstances” (s 17B(4)). The orientation of the section is away from the individual and toward the aggregate - toward what is typical for a group rather than what is necessary for a person.

The reasonable-and-necessary changes for children go further. Proposed s 34(1J) requires the CEO to refuse a support for a child if its “primary or substantial purpose” is to “reduce burdens on parental time below what is reasonably expected of a parent”, “improve household efficiency”, or give effect to a “parent’s preference”. I understand the intent - the Scheme should not fund ordinary parenting. But the drafting is broad enough to deny supports that are genuinely about a disabled child’s needs simply because they also, inevitably, relieve a parent.

Let me make this concrete. As I have been writing this submission, I have repeatedly gone up and down the stairs to help my son - who is nearly 15 - with his toileting. He still struggles to read his own body’s signals and does not yet have the self-care skills to manage on his own. I help him with his toilet routine every single day; if I timed it honestly, it would be close to two hours a day. No parent of a typical nearly-15-year-old is doing this. The point of s 34(1J) is to draw a line between “what is reasonably expected of a parent” and a genuine disability need

• but that line is far blurrier in lived reality than it looks on the page. Almost every support for my son both addresses his disability and relieves us, because his disability and our care are inseparable. A CEO working under sustainability pressure will be incentivised to read s 34(1J) narrowly, and the supports that go first will be precisely the ones that acknowledge the reality of round-the-clock care.

4. The Bill explicitly decouples funding from the cost of support

Across several Parts, the Bill repeatedly and openly contemplates funding a person less than their reasonable and necessary supports cost. This is not an unintended side effect; it is stated on the face of the Bill.

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4.1 The support-reduction determination (s 34A)

Proposed s 34A empowers the Minister, by legislative instrument, to reduce the funding for a specified group of supports across plans by a set percentage “for the purposes of ensuring the financial sustainability” of the Scheme. Subsection (5) is explicit that the determination has effect “even if the result is” that the funding for a reasonable and necessary support “is less than the total cost of the support”, or that total funding is less than the total cost of all supports. In other words, a support can be assessed as both reasonable and necessary and deliberately underfunded by ministerial instrument. The only stated constraint is that the Minister “must have regard to the safety of participants” (s 34A(3)) - a low bar that does not require the Minister to ensure needs are actually met.

4.2 Price-setting: support the discipline, protect participant control (s 45C)

I am, perhaps surprisingly, supportive of the price-setting measure in principle. Providers have long since adjusted to the NDIS’s annual price movements, and a clear, transparent mechanism for setting maximum prices is reasonable and probably overdue. I include this point precisely so the Committee knows my objections elsewhere are not reflexive opposition to anything that controls cost.

My objection here is narrower, but it matters: a participant must retain control over how their own package is spent. Under proposed s 45C the Agency must not pay above the determined maximum, a person “is not entitled” to the excess, and any overpayment becomes a debt due to the Agency (s 45C(3), (6)); the cap applies where funding is managed by the Agency or a registered plan manager (s 45C(2)). The proper role of government is to decide whether a support is acceptable within a person’s plan and then let the participant budget for it - not to dictate what a person may pay for a given support, in what quantity, and at what rate. If I want a particular support worker who bills above the benchmark, the natural consequence is simply that I can afford fewer hours of her time. That is my trade-off to make, and mine to manage; it is not something the Agency should be looking over my shoulder to police. Dictating the rate a participant may pay sits uncomfortably close to dictating what a pensioner or a jobseeker may spend their payment on - how much, on what, and at what price. Where a maximum sits below the real cost of a thinly-supplied specialist support, the participant must at least keep the freedom to reallocate their own budget to cover the gap.

4.3 An evidence hierarchy that disadvantages contested conditions (s 34(1E)- (1F))

Proposed s 34(1E) requires the CEO, when judging whether a support is “effective and beneficial”, to rank “published, peer reviewed and generalisable” research above evidence of outcomes for the individual participant. Section 34(1F) then permits the CEO to be “not satisfied” where peer-reviewed evidence is “limited or no”, even where there is clear evidence that the support has worked for that person. Many supports that demonstrably help autistic people - particularly individualised communication and sensory supports - do not have a large generalisable evidence base, because the population is heterogeneous and good trials are hard to run. Ranking the literature above the participant’s own demonstrated progress risks defunding supports that are working, on the basis that the academy has not yet caught up.

4.4 A caution from experience: underutilisation is not reduced need

A caution drawn directly from our own life. After COVID, my son’s funding was cut significantly because part of his budget had gone unspent; the apparent assumption was that unspent

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funds meant reduced need. The assumption was wrong. We had not stopped needing the support - we had been unable to find a suitable support worker to deliver it, because good workers for a child with complex needs are extraordinarily scarce. The shortfall was in the market, not in his disability. Any mechanism that reduces funding - the s 34A determination, a price cap, or a reassessment - must not treat underutilisation as proof that support is no longer required. More often, unspent funds are a sign of barriers to access, and cutting them simply locks the barrier in place.

5. “Stable” does not mean “low need”: reassessment restrictions (ss 48A, 48(3))

The Bill significantly tightens the circumstances in which a participant may request a reassessment. Proposed s 48A allows a participant-requested reassessment only where there has been a “significant change” to ongoing support needs, driven by a “significant and ongoing” alteration in functional capacity, or an “unanticipated, significant and ongoing” change in living, education, work or informal-support arrangements; and proposed s 48(3) extends the time for the CEO even to decide on a reassessment request from 21 days to 90 days. I understand the wish to curb unnecessary reassessments. But the framework assumes support needs only change when a participant deteriorates - and that is not how families actually experience disability.

Here I have to challenge an intuition that runs quietly through the Bill: that a stable life is a low- need life. My family’s life looks stable. We eat at the same time every night, we rarely travel, we avoid disruption, we hold to highly structured routines. That stability is not evidence that our son’s needs are low. It is the product of relentless, continuous effort, and of supports doing exactly what they are meant to do. Reduce the support because the participant “looks stable”, and you do not preserve the stability - you manufacture the very crisis the support was preventing.

There is a second danger in equating stability with sufficiency. Our stable life is not, by any ordinary measure, a normal life for a family with two teenagers. We will almost certainly never take a family holiday with our children; it is simply too complex to do safely. My kids hear about the trips and the experiences other teenagers have with their families, and in all likelihood will never have them themselves. That is stability - but it is also evidence of the opposite of “low need”. It is evidence that we do not receive enough support, and that there is too little community awareness of how to accommodate autism, so that an entire dimension of ordinary life is closed off to my children altogether. A framework that reads our stability as a reason to step back has the picture exactly inverted.

I recommend retaining stronger participant-initiated review and reassessment rights; not assuming that needs change only on deterioration; reducing the 90-day decision period; and creating an expedited pathway where a change in support is needed to prevent crisis.

6. Too much is left to unconstrained ministerial rule-making

A striking feature of this Bill is how many of the decisions that actually determine a person’s access and funding are not made in the Act at all. They are delegated to the Minister or the CEO to set by legislative instrument or rules. Among them:

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• the methods, classifications and thresholds for assessing “functional capacity”, which drive eligibility (s 9B(2)-(3));

• the circumstances in which a person is “taken” to have undertaken all appropriate treatment, which drives the permanence test for access (s 25A(4));

• the impairments and supports deemed the responsibility of an “alternative” service system and therefore excluded from the NDIS (s 25B(4)-(5));

• the percentage by which funding for groups of supports is cut (s 34A);

• the maximum prices payable for supports (s 45C); and

• the “levels of need” and the funding amounts attached to them (Schedule 4, s 32K(3B)).

Individually, each delegation can be rationalised as operational detail. Together, they amount to a transfer of the Scheme’s most consequential policy choices - who gets in, what counts as permanent, and how much anyone receives - out of primary legislation and into instruments. That concentration of power is concerning on its own. It is made worse by a drafting choice repeated throughout the Bill: the determinations under ss 34A, 34B and 45C are expressly exempted from the sunsetting regime in Part 4 of Chapter 3 of the Legislation Act 2003. Sunsetting is one of the few automatic checks that forces delegated legislation to be remade and re-justified periodically. Switching it off means these funding-cutting and price-setting instruments can persist indefinitely without that review.

This matters beyond governance theory. When the rules that decide a person’s entitlement can be changed by instrument, a participant and their family can never plan with confidence. For a parent trying to map out decades of support for a child who will never live independently, the difference between an entitlement set in the Act and one set in a revisable instrument is the difference between a foundation and a forecast.

This is not hypothetical for my family. My wife and I are actively planning how to support our son into his 80s - on the assumption, and the hope, that we ourselves live well into old age. In our best-case scenario, he outlives us by a single day, far into the future. Planning across that kind of horizon is impossible if the rules that define his entitlement can shift beneath us, and if every staffing change at the Agency carries the risk of a fresh opinion about “how disabled” he really is. Consistency is not a bureaucratic nicety to a family like mine. It is the difference between a plan we can build a life around and a hope we re-litigate every year.

I recommend that the eligibility, permanence and funding-setting powers be returned to the Act so far as practicable; that any delegations genuinely required be subject to sunsetting and disallowance; that instruments cutting funding or setting maximum prices be accompanied by a published participant-impact statement; and that broad reduction powers carry stronger parliamentary oversight, transparency and independent review.

7. Automating evaluative decisions about disabled people’s lives

Schedule 3, Part 2 authorises the CEO to arrange for computer programs to take “administrative action” - including making decisions - under designated provisions (proposed s 59B). Critically, s 59B(4) extends this to action that involves “a discretion being exercised”, “an evaluative judgement being made” or “a state of mind being formed.” These are exactly the judgements - whether a support is reasonable and necessary, effective and beneficial, or

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appropriate for a particular person - that demand human attention to an individual’s circumstances.

There is no need to be coy about why this should worry the Committee. Australia has very recent and very painful experience of what happens when consequential decisions about vulnerable people are automated without adequate human judgement: Robodebt. The Royal Commission into that scheme found it unlawful and that it caused profound harm to hundreds of thousands of people. The lesson of Robodebt was not merely that the algorithm was flawed; it was that automating judgements about people, at scale, without a human genuinely accountable for each decision, is dangerous - and that the harm lands hardest on those least able to contest it. Proposed s 59B would build that same capability into decisions about disability support.

The safeguards are weaker than they first appear. Proposed s 59E(1)-(2) requires the CEO to take reasonable steps to ensure automated action is valid - but s 59E(3) then provides that a failure to comply “does not affect the validity” of the action taken by the computer. An unlawful automated decision therefore still stands. Likewise, the duty to notify a person that a decision was automated (s 59E(4)) is expressly non-invalidating (s 59E(5)). A safeguard with no consequence when breached is not a safeguard.

I recommend that automation be confined to genuinely mechanical actions; that discretionary and evaluative determinations (s 59B(4)) be excluded from automation; and that the provisions preserving the validity of non-compliant automated decisions (ss 59E(3), (5)) be removed so that a person affected by an unlawful automated decision has a real remedy.

8. The anti-fraud measures: right intent, blunt drafting

I support the objective of Schedule 2. Mandatory, risk-proportionate registration of providers, proper record-keeping, faster detection of improper claims, and ending the conflicts of interest in plan management are sensible and overdue. Fraud and exploitation harm participants first. My concern is that, as drafted, several of these measures are blunt enough to harm participants alongside the wrongdoers they target - and, as I keep returning to, the wrongdoing in this Scheme is overwhelmingly on the provider side, not the participant side.

8.1 Suspending and revoking participants for being “not contactable” (ss 40A, 30(1A))

Proposed s 40A lets the CEO suspend a participant’s plan where the Agency has made “reasonable attempts” to contact the participant and the participant “is not contactable”, and proposed s 30(1A) lets the CEO revoke a person’s participant status where the plan has been suspended on that basis for at least 90 days. The people most likely to be “not contactable” are not fraudsters. They are participants with communication disability, those in hospital or crisis, those with unstable housing, and those whose only point of contact has broken down. My own son could not respond to an Agency request unaided; he relies entirely on us to receive and act on correspondence. A measure aimed at integrity should not be capable of stripping a profoundly disabled person of their plan because a letter went unanswered. I recommend that suspension and revocation on this ground require positive verification that the participant is genuinely no longer eligible or no longer wishes to participate - not merely uncontactable - with mandatory safeguards for participants with known communication or capacity needs and for their nominees.

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8.2 The single most important support is a relationship - protect the small workforce (s 10C)

The single most important support in my son’s NDIS plan is neither therapy nor equipment. It is his support worker. She is a sole trader who has worked with him consistently for about three years. She helps him with self-care, plays basketball with him, helps him access the community and learn routines, and supports him through ordinary teenage experiences without judgement or shame. The results are not abstract. Three years ago we could not have attended a family wedding safely; today we can. That change did not come from a line item - it came from a trusted relationship. The NDIS counts support in hours and dollars; families live it as relationships, and good support workers for autistic children with complex sensory and behavioural needs are not interchangeable units.

Over three years, this support worker has helped my son develop self-care routines, participate in community sport, safely access shops and public spaces, and build the confidence to interact with people outside our immediate family. These may sound like small achievements. For a child who will likely require support throughout his life, they are the foundations of future independence. They are precisely the outcomes the NDIS was designed to achieve.

That is why the definition of who must register matters. Proposed s 10C re-defines “NDIS provider” and extends it to a person who “provides supports or services to people with disability other than under the” NDIS where they are “prescribed by the” rules (s 10C(1)(b)). Tying the reach of the registration and penalty regime to a category the rules can later expand creates real uncertainty for small and sole providers. Good support workers are hard to find, and the best of them often do not want to work under a larger provider that simply skims a margin off the top of their labour - and it is hard to blame them. There is a basic question of economic freedom here, too. A support worker who wants to run her own small business should be free to do so; she should not be pushed, by the practical effect of a rule, to shut that business down and become an employee of a large provider just to keep working in the Scheme. Labour should be able to choose how it works, and participants are better served by a market that includes independent operators than by one funnelled into a handful of large institutions. A compliance regime calibrated for large organisations, and capable of being widened by rule, risks pushing exactly these workers out of the Scheme, taking with them relationships that took years to build. The scope of mandatory registration, and what it requires, should be settled in the Act with the small sole trader expressly in mind.

8.3 The 90-day claim window and participant-facing liability

Reducing the claim window to 90 days (Schedule 2, Part 5) is presented as an integrity measure, but for sole traders, small providers and self-managing participants it is a thicket of red tape - and it reeks of a mechanism designed to suppress legitimate claims by making them impractical to submit in time. A short, hard deadline does little to deter a determined fraudster, who simply claims promptly; what it does is strip honest providers and families of payment for support genuinely delivered, because life intervened and the paperwork slipped past day 90. The burden falls hardest on exactly the small operators in thin and regional markets that high- need participants rely on.

I also note that several amendments extend liability framing to participants and nominees (for example the consequential amendments to ss 97-98, and nominee reporting obligations backed by suspension or cancellation of appointment). Integrity measures should

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distinguish clearly between deliberate wrongdoing and the ordinary mistakes of unpaid family nominees doing their best. As drafted, the line is not clear enough.

8.4 Choice - including the choice to self-manage

I support ending the conflicts of interest in plan management, and I ask that the transition to a panel model (Schedule 2, Part 6) be sequenced so that no participant is left without a manager during changeover. But the principle that matters most to me here is choice. My family self- manages, deliberately. Being told that our funding must be managed for us, by someone from a panel, would itself be a barrier - not a convenience. As a household that includes a pathological demand avoidance profile, I can tell you plainly that the freedom to choose how we engage with a system is not a luxury; the removal of that control is, in itself, disabling. Whatever shape plan-management reform finally takes, it must preserve each participant’s right to choose how their plan is managed - including the right to keep self-managing - rather than narrowing the field of options in the name of tidiness.

9. The broader impact on families

A theme that runs quietly through this Bill is that supporting families is somehow separable from supporting participants. It is not. My wife and I have not had a meaningful opportunity to spend time together, without our son, in 13 years. We took a single four-day holiday when he was one year old; he is now 14, and in all the years since we have had no time away together, and we have not been away as a family at all, because there is no one else who can safely care for him. I say that not as a complaint but as a description of reality - and as a warning. The Bill leans heavily on informal supports, family, carers and community (ss 17B, 34(1K)), and its child-related provisions explicitly discount supports that relieve a parent (s 34(1J)). But informal support has limits, and families have a breaking point.

This is where my systems-thinking instinct and my lived experience point the same way. When a family carrying a load like ours breaks down, the cost does not vanish. It reappears - usually larger - in the health system, the mental health system, crisis accommodation, child protection and the courts. Families do not fail suddenly. They fail gradually, under sustained pressure, often long before any formal crisis becomes visible to government systems. A reform genuinely concerned with the long-term sustainability of public spending should be the last to assume that load can simply be pushed back onto families for free. Supporting families is not a separate act of generosity sitting alongside the Scheme’s purpose. For high-need participants, it is part of how that purpose is met.

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10. Consolidated recommendations

I respectfully recommend that the Committee report against passing the Bill in its current form, and recommend the following amendments.

1. Functional capacity (s 9B): ensure the definition and any rules made under it account for the interaction between impairment and real-world environment - including safety, supervision needs and day-to-day variability - rather than excluding context, particularly for autistic participants and those with cognitive disability.

2. Reassessment (ss 48A, 48(3)): retain stronger participant-initiated review and reassessment rights; do not assume needs change only on deterioration; create an expedited pathway where a change in support is needed to prevent crisis; and reduce the 90-day decision period.

3. Funding tied to individual need (ss 34A, 33(2EA)-(2EB), Sch 4 s 32K(3B)-(3C)): funding must not be set or reduced below the cost of supports assessed as reasonable and necessary; retain individual assessment above any banded baseline; if a reduction power is kept, require the Minister to be satisfied that assessed needs will still be met, not merely to “have regard to” safety.

4. One-to-one support (s 33(2EA)(c)): remove the power to cap the worker-to-participant ratio, and ensure no funding cap is set below the cost of supports necessary for a participant’s safety.

5. Underutilisation: ensure no funding reduction, price cap or reassessment treats unspent funds as evidence of reduced need; account for workforce and market availability as a cause of underspend.

6. Families and informal supports (ss 17B, 34(1J), 34(1K)): narrow s 34(1J) so that supports for disabled children are not refused merely because they also relieve a parent; and recognise in the Act that supporting families is part of supporting participants, and that load shifted off families reappears as cost in other public systems.

7. Price-setting (s 45C): retain it - I support it - but preserve participant control over the package, so that government decides whether a support is acceptable within a plan and the participant budgets for and reallocates within it (including trading rate against hours), rather than dictating what a participant may pay, in what quantity, or at what rate.

8. Delegated power (ss 9B, 25A, 25B, 34A, 45C, Sch 4 s 32K): return eligibility, permanence and funding-setting to the primary Act so far as practicable; for any delegation genuinely required, restore Legislation Act sunsetting and ensure disallowance applies; require a published participant-impact statement for instruments that cut funding or set maximum prices; and add stronger parliamentary oversight, transparency and independent review.

9. Access tests (ss 25A, 25B): a person should not be taken to have “undertaken all appropriate treatment” where they genuinely cannot access or afford that treatment (not only where there is a medical reason); and whole impairment classes should not be carved out of the NDIS by rule without primary legislation.

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National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 2444

Submission - NDIS (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026

10. Evidence (s 34(1E)-(1F)): give a participant’s demonstrated outcomes weight alongside, not below, generalisable research, recognising the limits of the evidence base for heterogeneous conditions such as autism.

11. Automation (ss 59B, 59E): confine automation to mechanical actions; exclude discretionary and evaluative determinations (s 59B(4)); and delete ss 59E(3) and 59E(5) so that unlawful or unnotified automated decisions do not retain validity.

12. Participant-facing integrity (ss 40A, 30(1A)): suspension and revocation for being “not contactable” must require positive verification of ineligibility or withdrawal, with mandatory protections for participants with communication or capacity needs and proper engagement of nominees.

13. Workforce, continuity and choice (s 10C; Sch 2 Pts 5-6): settle the scope of mandatory registration in the Act with the sole trader expressly in mind; reconsider the 90-day claim window; protect continuity of trusted support relationships and the right to self- manage; and sequence reforms to avoid driving small and regional providers out of thin markets.

14. Closing

I have tried to write this submission the way I try to approach every difficult decision: by asking what problem is being solved, and at what cost. The sustainability problem is real, and I would support a Bill that addressed it by matching funding more accurately to need, stripping out waste and exploitation, and strengthening governance. This Bill does some of that, particularly on integrity. But it also reaches for a different and more troubling set of levers - funding people by category rather than as individuals, decoupling funding from the cost of the supports people actually need, stripping context out of the assessment of disability, moving the most consequential decisions into instruments that escape ordinary review, and automating judgements that should be made by people who can see the person in front of them.

A sustainable NDIS matters. But sustainability should not be measured solely by slowing expenditure growth. The true measure of success is whether people with disability can participate meaningfully in society, and whether the families who support them can keep doing so without breaking.

If I could leave the Committee with a single sentence, it is this: the greatest risk I see in this Bill is that it repeatedly interprets successful support as evidence that support is no longer required.

My son cannot advocate for himself, and one day his mother and I will not be able to advocate for him either. The promise of the NDIS was that, when that day comes, a system would still see him as an individual with his own needs rather than as a budget line in a category. I ask the Committee to recommend the amendments that would keep that promise intact while still securing the Scheme for the future. The two goals are not in conflict - but this Bill, as drafted, treats them as if they were. That is the NDIS future I hope the Parliament chooses to secure.

Thank you for the opportunity to make this submission, and for the Committee’s consideration.

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