National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 2475
Senate Submission: NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026
Submitted to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee May 2026
I am an NDIS participant and a disabled person submitting this in response to the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026. I am writing because I believe this Bill, as it stands, will cause serious and irreversible harm to hundreds of thousands of Australians — and I want that placed firmly on the public record.
Invisible Illness Is Not Lesser Illness
There is a dangerous and persistent assumption embedded in public policy: that disability must be visible to be real. It must not.
People with invisible illnesses — including autism, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, POTS, Functional Neurological Disorder, ADHD, CPTSD, and many others — are not healthier than those with physical disabilities that can be seen. In many cases, their conditions are more profoundly disabling. The absence of a visible marker does not mean the absence of suffering, functional impairment, or genuine need.
And yet, people with these conditions are already fighting every day to be believed by medical professionals, employers, and the general public. This Bill will make that fight harder, not easier. It will ask people to prove — through a standardised tool — the very things that are hardest to see.
The Eligibility Changes Are Not Neutral — They Are Targeted
The shift from diagnosis-based to function-based eligibility sounds reasonable in theory. In practice, it is deeply flawed — and autistic people will bear the brunt of it.
Standardised functional assessments are designed to measure what people can do in ideal, controlled conditions. They are not designed to account for how autistic people mask — performing competence and coping in short-term environments while experiencing profound unseen impairment the rest of the time. A high-masking autistic person may present as capable in a 90-minute assessment and be bedbound for three days afterward from the effort of it.
The I-CAN tool, selected for these assessments, has not been proven to reliably capture the needs of people who mask. Using it as a gatekeeping mechanism for one of Australia’s most vulnerable populations is not evidence-based policy. It is cost-cutting dressed up as reform.
I also want to ask a question that has not been answered publicly: if the government is moving away from diagnosis-based eligibility, does that mean conditions that were previously excluded — such as Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, POTS, ADHD, and Functional Neurological Disorder — will now be considered? If functional impact is
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 2475
the measure, these conditions clearly meet it. Will the government commit to that openly?
“Moving People to Other Supports” Is Not a Plan — It Is an Excuse
The government has repeatedly said that people removed from the NDIS will be supported by foundational supports and state-run programs. But these programs largely do not exist yet. Crossbench MPs have said so. Disability advocates have said so. The evidence says so.
The NDIS was built specifically because the patchwork of community services that existed before it was inadequate. It was inadequate then, and it is still inadequate now. A handful of GP-referred sessions will not manage complex, lifelong, degenerative conditions. It will not provide daily living support. It will not replace the individualised, participant-directed care that the NDIS — at its best — makes possible.
Removing 160,000 people from the scheme before the alternatives are built and operational is not a transition. It is abandonment. And disabled people and their families will be the ones paying for it — with their health, their safety, and in some cases, their lives.
The Community Participation Cuts Are an Attack on Human Connection
A 50% cut to social, civic and community participation budgets is not a minor administrative adjustment. For many NDIS participants, these supports are the difference between being part of society and being completely isolated.
The government’s own justification — that spending in this area grew from $4 billion to $12 billion in five years — should not be read as evidence of a scheme out of control. It should be read as evidence that for decades before the NDIS, disabled Australians were being denied the supports they needed to exist in the world alongside everyone else. That growth reflects decades of unmet need finally being addressed.
Cutting it in half does not improve social inclusion. It reverses it. It tells disabled people that their participation in community life is a luxury the country cannot afford.
On the Phrase “Nothing About Us Without Us”
Minister Butler used the phrase “nothing about us without us” in his second reading speech introducing this Bill. That phrase belongs to the disability community. It was forged through decades of advocacy, often by people fighting with their last reserves of energy to be heard by a system that would rather not listen.
Using it as framing for a Bill that:
• Was given less than two weeks of public consultation time with no advance warning • Has seen disability advocates refused meetings or cut off mid-conversation • Proposes removing 160,000 people from the scheme without the community’s informed consent • Was introduced before any replacement system is ready
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 2475
…is not honouring that phrase. It is weaponising it. And the disability community notices.
On the Question of Trust
Prime Minister Albanese campaigned on compassion. He spoke of his mother’s struggles. He appealed to disabled Australians and the people who love them — not with a specific NDIS promise, perhaps, but with a promise of character. Of being a government that sees people.
This Bill does not see people. It sees a budget line.
That matters — not just morally, but politically. Disabled Australians are not an isolated constituency. We have parents, partners, children, siblings, friends, and communities who have fought alongside us our entire lives. We are not going to quietly accept this. We push through pain every single day just to stay alive. The idea that we will not fight to keep our human rights fundamentally misunderstands who we are.
This does not pass the pub test. It does not pass the ethics test. And if the government proceeds with this Bill as written, it will discover at the next election exactly how many disabled people and their families there are in Australia — and how clearly they remember who chose not to stand with them.
What Should Actually Happen
Cutting 160,000 people off is not the answer. The scheme has real problems. The government should actually fix them:
• Conduct genuine audits of providers and participants where there is evidence of fraud — rather than removing vulnerable people wholesale • Explain publicly why government agencies — including the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing — billed nearly half a billion dollars from the NDIS in a single year, and what accountability exists for that spending • Build foundational supports that actually work before removing people from the scheme, not after • Ensure that any functional assessment tool used for eligibility is validated specifically for people who mask, people with variable conditions, and people with pain conditions who present differently to what assessors expect • Give the disability community genuine time and access to engage with these reforms — not a two-week window dropped without warning
We are slower sometimes. We are tired often. We are in pain more than you will ever see, because we are very good at hiding it. But we are paying attention. And we are not people you can walk all over.
Try again. This time, actually listen.