Submission to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee Inquiry into the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 | External submission

Submission 2523

Submission to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee

Inquiry into the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment

(Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026

July 10th, 2026

I, Duncan Wakes-Miller, CEO of Northside Enterprise Inc. and Bushlink, welcome the opportunity to make this submission on the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026.

Northside Enterprise is a NDIS-registered provider and Australian Charities and Not-for profits Commission (ACNC) registered charity supporting people with disability across Sydney’s Northern Beaches. Through Bushlink, our award-winning social enterprise, we create supported employment opportunities for people with disability while delivering environmental restoration, gardening and community services. Together, we work alongside participants, families, carers, employers and local communities every day, giving us direct insight into how proposed reforms will affect both participants and the organisations that support them.

We support reform of the NDIS. We support measures that improve integrity, reduce fraud, strengthen safeguarding, increase provider visibility, improve market stewardship and place the Scheme on a fiscally sustainable footing for the long term. We do not support this Bill in its current form because, while the headline is right, the substance is not. The title promises reform. Much of the Bill delivers cost cutting.

The NDIS Review gave governments a blueprint for genuine reform. It said the recommendations were interdependent, had to be implemented as a package, required deep public consultation, and should be sequenced over a five-year transition with the foundations in place before other changes are rolled out. The Review’s objective was not merely to suppress expenditure. It was to build a fairer, more coherent and more sustainable disability support ecosystem. This bill does not faithfully implement that blueprint. Instead, it front-loads restrictive powers and budget pressures before the supporting architecture has been shown to exist at the necessary scale. (Reference: NDIS Independent Review).

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Duncan Wakes-Miller CEO Northside Enterprise and Bushlink: Submission to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee Inquiry into the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future

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The most telling provision is proposed section 34A. It would allow the Minister, by legislative instrument, to reduce funding for specified groups of supports for the purpose of “ensuring the financial sustainability” of the NDIS, and it would do so even if the result is that funding for reasonable and necessary supports is less than the cost of those supports. Parliament should be honest about what that means. That is not a quality reform, a safeguarding reform, a workforce reform or a fraud reform. It is a reserve power to cut budgets.

The same pattern runs through other parts of the bill. Proposed section 50A allows plans to roll over automatically without a new participant support statement and without any reviewable decision being made. Proposed section 48A narrows access to unscheduled reassessment at the same time as the decision period stretches from 21 days to 90 days. Proposed section 9B adopts a functional-capacity concept that strips out the lived interaction between disability and environment. Proposed sections 24, 25 and 25A tighten access by requiring “appropriate treatment” even where a person’s circumstances may prevent them from obtaining it. These measures reduce flexibility, reduce reviewability and raise the threshold of support. They may save money. But they do not amount to the kind of evidence-based, person-centred reform the Review called for. (Reference: NDIS Independent Review).

We support the elements of reform that focus on provider visibility, stronger oversight, risk proportionate registration, better compliance arrangements and a more serious anti-fraud framework. Those changes are consistent with the concerns raised by the peak body National Disability Services (NDS) and by the Disability Royal Commission about quality, safety, oversight and workforce capability. Good reform should pursue rogue operators and organised criminal exploitation with force. It should not weaken the position of legitimate participants, carers, allied health professionals and small disability businesses that deliver lawful, local, safeguarding-critical support. (Reference: Disability Royal Commission 2023)

The evidence from the sector is clear that the bill, in its present form, risks harm that goes well beyond participants’ budgets. NDS warns of disruption to participant supports, provider instability and market exits, reduced access to quality services, cost-shifting into other systems, and over-reliance on informal carers. With significant consequential impacts to employment, communities and mental health. Our own community forum, held on July 7th, 2026, recorded exactly the same fear from the ground: trusted providers becoming financially unviable, continuity of care being disrupted, automation becoming dehumanisation, and families being left to absorb the stress. That is why this is not just an NDIS-audit issue. It is a question of community infrastructure, family resilience, local employment and public trust. These concerns were not isolated opinions. They reflected remarkably consistent themes raised by participants, carers, providers and allied health professionals throughout the evening. Page 2 of 6

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Minister Butler has an opportunity here. He can be the minister who improved Labor’s legacy by separating genuine reform from blunt retrenchment. Or he can be remembered as the minister who secured a politically marketable title while Parliament enacted mechanisms that weakened the Scheme’s human core. His own second reading speech makes clear that he sees urgent cost pressures in reassessment growth and community participation spending. Those pressures are real. But the answer must be sharper stewardship, better pricing, stronger fraud control, more transparent evidence and staged transition not sweeping ministerial powers to cut first and explain later. Without addressing these structural issues now, the Bill risks deferring rather than solving the underlying sustainability challenge, leaving future governments to confront even greater fiscal and social costs.

The Greens and the Coalition should stop treating this issue as a tactical contest. A bad bill does not become good because one side wants urgency and the other wants a wedge. Sensible amendments are available. The Parliament should insist on them. The people affected are not abstractions. They are Australian participants, support workers, family carers, clinicians, disability advocates, and thousands of honest small businesses that keep money circulating in regional and metropolitan communities alike. In deference to The Federal Minister for Small Business Anne Aly the Committee should also consider the broader economic consequences of these reforms for thousands of legitimate small disability businesses that form an essential part of Australia’s care economy.

This Bill should be assessed not by whether it reduces NDIS expenditure, but whether it reduces the total cost of disability support across Australian society.

Proposed amendments

I respectfully urge the Committee to recommend that the bill not pass in its current form and that the following amendments be made before any passage through the Senate.

Recommendation 1 Remove or fundamentally narrow proposed section 34A. At the very least, any power to reduce funding for groups of supports should require published evidence, independent participant-safety and market-impact analysis, genuine consultation with the disability community, and parliamentary scrutiny stronger than an ordinary ministerial instrument. A law that expressly authorises funding below the cost of reasonable and necessary supports is not compatible with a genuinely individualised scheme.

Recommendation 2 Revise proposed section 9B so that functional capacity is not assessed in an artificial vacuum. Excluding environmental and personal circumstances departs from contemporary disability frameworks and risks narrowing access through a more medicalised test. The Independent NDIS Review itself stressed that the pathway

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should be centred around the whole person and their disability-related support needs, not stripped of context.

Recommendation 3 Change the “appropriate treatment” provisions so that affordability, accessibility, geography, cultural safety and clinical appropriateness must be considered in determining whether treatment is genuinely available to a person. Parliament should never tell a person in effect that they are ineligible for disability support because the law imagines treatment exists somewhere, even if they cannot reasonably access it.

Recommendation 4 Preserve timely reassessment and urgent review rights. If the Government believes reassessments are driving expenditure, the answer is not to leave participants in unsafe or inadequate plans for up to 90 days under a narrow test. At minimum there should be an expedited pathway for deterioration, carer breakdown, behavioural escalation, housing instability, psychosocial fluctuation and provider failure. NDS has specifically called for emergency reassessment criteria and faster urgent decision-making.

Recommendation 5 Remove the non-reviewable character of automatic plan renewal under section 50A. Any renewal that materially affects funding, rolls forward outdated assumptions, or removes one-off supports should come with notice, reasons and review rights. Administrative neatness is not a substitute for procedural fairness.

Recommendation 6 Ensure that no significant automation of eligibility, planning, funding, payment or claim rejection is permitted without strong statutory safeguards, independent audit, transparent methodologies and a guaranteed human review. The Government is right to say that technology can help with administration, but the Ombudsman-style warning drawn into public debate after robodebt remains apt: efficiency is worthless if it strips integrity or fairness out of a human service system. I call for stronger safeguards, transparency and accountability around automated decision-making. (Reference: NDIS overhaul will ‘harm’ Australians with disabilities, government’s own committee warns).

Recommendation 7 Require staged sequential implementation, independent readiness testing, and clear prohibition on funding reductions or structural exits before replacement supports and system capability are operational. This is the central sequencing point. The Independent Review called for a package, a five-year transition and an implementation roadmap that accounts for dependencies and risk. Reforms must not outpace foundational supports, pricing frameworks, workforce capacity and community alternatives.

Recommendation 8 Embed independent, evidence-based pricing and stronger market stewardship. If the Government is serious about sustainability, it should pursue the reforms that tackle inefficiency without hollowing out quality providers: differentiated pricing for complex and regional supports, transparent methodologies, publication of

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pricing advice, and active market monitoring for provider exits and service gaps. National Disability Services makes the case for this directly, and the Disability Royal Commission reinforces why workforce capability, supervision and rights-based services matter to safety.

Recommendation 9 Governance, transparency and consultation must be strengthened to match the scale of reform powers The Bill introduces significant reliance on Ministerial powers, delegated legislation and future rulemaking across core elements of the Scheme. Given the scale and consequences of these powers, stronger safeguards are required. At present, key elements of reform, including pricing approaches, planning methodologies and funding frameworks, remain to be defined. This limits the ability of participants, providers and Parliament to fully assess the impact of the reforms and creates uncertainty during a period of major structural change. Reform of this magnitude requires:

Transparent and evidence-based decision-making.
Meaningful consultation.
Appropriate oversight and accountability mechanisms.

In Summary

I do not come before this Committee to defend the status quo. Too many participants still wait too long for decisions. Too many families spend months fighting for supports they have already proved they need. Too many providers have exploited a system built on trust, and every dollar lost to fraud is a dollar stolen from a person who genuinely needs support. Fraud should be pursued relentlessly. Those who do not meet the eligibility criteria should not be in the Scheme. The quality of services must rise, the provider market must be better governed, and the NDIA must be held accountable for decisions—whether made by people or by automated systems that shape the lives, health and independence of Australians with disability. Pricing, planning and decision-making should withstand public scrutiny, not disappear behind opaque processes.

Reform should strengthen the Scheme and reduce the total cost borne by society - not create the appearance of savings by shifting greater costs onto families, carers, hospitals and other public services.

Real reform removes waste without stripping away dignity. It closes loopholes without closing doors. It restores public confidence without asking families to carry an even heavier burden. It builds a Scheme that is financially sustainable because it is well governed, transparent and trusted not because support has quietly been taken away from

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those least able to fight for it. That is the standard Parliament should demand. This Bill falls short of that standard.

Its most significant provisions do not reshape the system around better outcomes; they shift risk. They concentrate unprecedented power in delegated legislation, weaken long standing participant safeguards, create uncertainty for legitimate providers and transfer pressure onto families, carers, hospitals, emergency departments and community services before viable alternatives exist.

The apparent savings are immediate. The real costs emerge later in homes, hospitals, emergency departments and communities across Australia. This bill as it stands just shifts the burden from one place to another.

I respectfully ask the Committee to recommend substantial amendments before this Bill proceeds. I would also welcome the opportunity to appear before the Committee in person to assist with its deliberations and to work constructively with the Government, the Opposition, the Greens and the wider disability sector to develop amendments that achieve both fiscal responsibility and human dignity.

There is still time to produce legislation that future governments will point to as genuine reform not because it spent less, but because it governed better, protected the most vulnerable and preserved the promise on which the NDIS was founded.

Thank you.

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