Submission 2451
My name is Clarissa, and I am proudly Autistic. Without the support of the NDIS, I’m not even sure I could say that much. It took nearly three years of psychologist support — support that was only possible because of the NDIS — for me to feel safe, grounded, and confident in my diagnosis. When I was first diagnosed, it felt like everything in my life was shifting. And it was. But the support I accessed in the years that followed made those changes feel manageable, meaningful, and ultimately positive.
Now, looking at this “reform”, I can’t help but feel deeply worried. Not only for my own future in the scheme, but for the future of people like me — people who are receiving life-changing diagnoses yet are already being denied the support they need to survive that transition. The NDIS was meant to be a lifeline. For many of us, it still is. But these proposed changes risk turning that lifeline into something fragile, conditional, and out of reach for the very people it was designed to help.
At its core, I believe the NDIS was built to support people with a wide range of disabilities to live safer, fuller, more independent lives. For me, the NDIS has meant access to support I could never have afforded or navigated alone. It has meant knowing that my government recognises my needs, backs my potential, and wants me to succeed. That sense of security — of not being left behind — is what the NDIS represents to me.
The NDIS has always been a flawed system — one that is structurally confusing, inconsistent, and often overwhelming to navigate. This is especially ironic given that the scheme’s target audience includes people who struggle with complex systems, executive functioning, and bureaucratic processes. Instead of addressing these long-standing barriers, the proposed reforms risk making the system even harder to access and understand.
When people genuinely need support but feel stuck, lost, or defeated by the process, they are far more likely to disengage entirely. Many will never apply in the first place. Others will abandon their applications halfway through because the system feels impenetrable or hostile. These reforms, as currently framed, will only increase that sense of being shut out — not because people don’t need support, but because the pathway to receiving it becomes too confusing, too exhausting, or too demoralising to attempt.
Even as I write this, I have spent more than an hour trying to understand these proposed changes, yet I still cannot grasp the reasoning behind them. The only explanation offered so far is “budget pressure”, which feels like a clear signal that the government is prioritising financial targets over the wellbeing of the community it has a duty to protect. On top of that, the details of the reforms seem to shift constantly. It is difficult enough to understand what is happening, let alone how it will affect me as an individual.
How is it that changes which may remove crucial supports from disabled people are written in ways that disabled people cannot understand? The language is bureaucratic, dense, and inaccessible. If the very people whose lives will be shaped by these reforms cannot make sense of them, then the process is not just flawed — it is fundamentally exclusionary.
Submission 2451
What I can say with absolute certainty is this: any change to the NDIS that removes supports or makes the system harder to navigate is not just unhelpful — it is actively harmful. Stripping back supports will have immediate and long-term consequences for my generation of disabled people, and for every generation that follows. It is impossible to pretend otherwise. The NDIS was never meant to shrink. It was never meant to become more restrictive, more confusing, or more punishing to access. Yet that is exactly the direction these reforms are heading.
If the system is already overwhelming for many participants, making it even more complex or reducing what people can access is not “reform” — it is regression. Removing supports does not build independence; it creates instability, crisis, and preventable harm. And if this trajectory continues, I genuinely fear what the NDIS will look like in twenty years. It will not be a system that protects disabled Australians. It will be a system that abandons them.
I can say with confidence that without the supports I received through the NDIS, I would not have the skills, confidence, or independence I have today. If I had never accessed occupational therapy, I would be missing so many of the basic life skills that I learned through consistent, specialised support. Without OT, I would not feel safe grocery shopping on my own. I would not have the skills to cook even simple meals, or the practical knowledge to mop, vacuum, or manage basic household tasks in a way that is safe and sustainable for me.
And those skills would have meant very little without a support worker to help me practise them in real-world environments. My support worker gave me safe, structured opportunities to use the skills OT taught me — opportunities I never would have had otherwise. As someone who does not drive, support workers are also the only reason I can leave my house for essential appointments, errands, or meaningful social interactions. Without that support, I would be effectively housebound, isolated, and cut off from the community.
These are not “extras”. They are not luxuries. They are the foundations of my ability to live, participate, and function. Removing or restricting these supports would not make me more independent — it would take away the very tools that allow me to be independent at all.
If these supports are removed — or worse, if they had never been offered to me in the first place — the burden would have fallen almost entirely on my care family. And the reality is that many of the skills I now rely on every day may never have been learned at all, certainly not in a way that works for me, my needs, or the way my body functions. The NDIS didn’t just fill a gap; it prevented a much larger one. The system was designed to reduce that pressure — not shift it back onto families and hope they can cope.
One of the most alarming proposed changes is the shift in how the NDIA defines “permanence”. Under this model, participants could be required to exhaust every “available” treatment before being considered eligible — even when those treatments are
Submission 2451
unaffordable, inaccessible, or inappropriate. For me, and for many others, this approach is fundamentally misguided. Autism is not something that can be “treated” into disappearing. Nor should that ever be the intention behind accessing support. The same is true for countless other disabilities. These are not deficits to be cured; they are lifelong conditions we learn to live with, adapt to, and thrive alongside — but that learning is only possible within a system that actually supports us.
No amount of therapy will erase every support need I have. And without the NDIS, how exactly are disabled people expected to afford these so-called “available” treatments? This new definition is deeply deficit-based, unrealistic, and disconnected from the lived reality of disabled Australians.
At this point, I believe I have made my views on the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 abundantly clear. This legislation is not written with disabled people in mind. It will not fix a broken system — it will further damage it. And it will cause real harm, not only to disabled Australians, but to their caregivers, their families, and to society as a whole.
This bill reflects a worldview we should have left behind decades ago: one that treats disability as a burden to be minimised rather than a reality to be supported. The fact that such a bill was even proposed has already caused harm. It has sent a message to disabled people about where we stand in the eyes of the majority of the government — and it is a message of exclusion, not inclusion; of restriction, not support. Disabled Australians deserve better than this.