Submission to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee

Inquiry into the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026

REQUEST: NAME WITHHELD We are the parents of two children with autism and we ask that our names be withheld from publication. We are willing to be identified to the Committee in confidence, and our names and contact details are provided separately for that purpose. We request anonymity because this submission discusses the disability and medical circumstances of our children, who are minors, and we wish to protect their privacy. We are content for the submission itself to be published with our names withheld.

We are the parents of two children who have been diagnosed with autism. We are writing as parents, from direct experience of what it takes to have an invisible disability recognised in this country.

We want to put our central point at the front. We have reasonable communication skills and reasonable financial means, and securing recognition and support for our children has still been a constant fight. People without those advantages do not win that fight. They are simply invisible in the system. Our concern with this Bill is that it will make them more invisible, while doing little to fix the problems it claims to solve.

We oppose the access changes in the Bill, and we want to explain why, including where we think the Government is right.

The pressures behind these reforms are real. The scheme’s costs have grown quickly, and fraud within it is a genuine problem. We do not dispute either. But a scheme’s integrity is not repaired by reducing the number of disabled people it serves. Fraud is committed by providers and operators, not by autistic children. The measures that would actually address it are about oversight, payments and registration. Tightening who counts as disabled enough to enter the scheme does not touch the fraud problem at all. It removes people, and it removes first the people least able to argue their way back in.

The NDIS has done something other systems have not. It has acknowledged that our children’s disability is real and that it shapes their daily lives. Our son’s disability shows in the constant work of reading the social cues an ordinary day demands, and in slower processing when he is in an overstimulating environment. None of it is visible. All of it is consequential. He was diagnosed late and received no early support, because recognition for a child who masks and copes is hard to come by. We have spent years inside the education and medical systems trying to have his needs met. Those systems say they are focused on exactly this. In our experience the focus has been more performative than real. Even in formal settings such as senior secondary examinations, genuine fairness is hard to secure and takes relentless advocacy. The NDIS has been the exception, the one place where the reality of his disability has not been up for debate.

Autism has been badly under-recognised, and the cost of that is not abstract. Many autistic people mask its effects and carry the social burden of work and ordinary life in an unseen silence. Research finds autistic people face substantially higher rates of self-harm and suicide,

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

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Several times that of the wider population. They are also over-represented in the criminal justice system. Research indicates they are not more likely to offend; rather, systems fail to recognise and accommodate them, and the very difficulties our son has, reading social cues and responding under pressure, are turned against people who are never properly understood. The scale of this shows in education, where more than one in four school students now receive an adjustment for disability, up from fewer than one in five a decade ago, with autism a large part of that. Recognition has not gone too far. It has been catching up.

This under-recognition is not evenly distributed. Autistic women and girls are diagnosed later and missed more often than boys and men, in part because they learn to mask their traits, and that masking is more strongly linked to a later diagnosis in females. A standardised test that scores observable function will, by its nature, under-count people who have learned to hide their difficulties, and so it will compound an inequity in recognition that already runs along gender lines. As the parents of a daughter as well as a son on the spectrum, this is not an abstract concern for our family.

This is why the framing of the reforms troubles me. They have been presented to the public by two numbers: a reduction in participants from around 760,000 to around 600,000 by 2030, and around $15 billion a year in savings. When a disability scheme is measured by how many people it removes and how much it saves, disabled people have become the cost to be contained rather than the citizens to be served. Applied through the autism debate, where diagnoses are rising precisely because recognition is improving, this treats the least visible disabilities as the easiest to cut. We do not claim the Bill was designed to erase autistic people. We do say that a reform which counts its success in the number of disabled people removed is, in its effect, a form of ableism, whatever language is used to describe it.

The mechanism makes this worse. Access would shift from diagnosis to a test of substantially reduced functional capacity, assessed through a tool and a threshold that do not yet exist and that participants will not be permitted to see. An assessment of that kind rewards families who can navigate, document and argue, and fails those who cannot. It will not correct any imbalance of advantage. It will deepen it. The plan to move children aged eight and under with autism and lower support needs into a separate program that is not yet operational carries the same risk, because early recognition is already hardest for families without means.

Recommendations

1. Retain diagnosis as a recognised pathway to access, or at minimum require that any functional capacity assessment be independently validated for invisible disabilities, for people who mask their difficulties, such as many autistic women and girls, and for people with limited capacity to self-advocate, before it is used to decide access.
2. Publish the functional capacity definition, the threshold and the assessment tool, and test them through genuine consultation, before any access change commences. Eligibility must not turn on an instrument that families are not allowed to see.
3. Protect existing participants from losing access on reassessment. People already found eligible, including children already receiving support, should not be removed from the scheme under a new and untested assessment applied to them after the fact.

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

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4. Do not remove the under-eight autism cohort from the NDIS until the replacement program is operational nationally and independently evaluated as providing equivalent support.
5. Pursue the scheme’s real integrity problems, fraud and provider misconduct, through the oversight and payment measures designed for them, rather than through eligibility changes that fall on participants.

We are grateful for the opportunity to make this submission and are willing to speak to the Committee further if that would help.

References

1. Hedley D and others, “Updated Systematic Review of Suicide in Autism: 2018–2024”, Current Developmental Disorders Reports, 2024, vol 11(4), pp 225–256, doi:10.1007/s40474-024-00308-9. The review reports pooled prevalence of 34.2% for suicidal ideation and 24.3% for suicide attempts, and up to an eightfold increased risk of death by suicide compared with non-autistic people. (Lead author based at the Olga Tennison Autism Research Centre, La Trobe University, Melbourne.)
2. Chester V, Bunning K, Tromans S, Alexander R and Langdon P, “The Prevalence of Autism in the Criminal Justice System: A Systematic Review”, BJPsych Open, 2022, doi:10.1192/bjo.2022.179. The review found that autistic people offend at a rate equivalent to or lower than the general population, yet are over-represented within criminal justice settings.
3. Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), National Report on Schooling in Australia: school students with disability, drawn from the Nationally Consistent Collection of Data on School Students with Disability (NCCD), 2025 data. In 2025, 27.0% of school students received an educational adjustment due to disability, up from 18.0% in 2015. acara.edu.au/reporting/national-report-on-schooling-in-australia/school-students-with-disability
4. The participant and savings figures were announced by the Minister for Health, Disability and Ageing (Mark Butler) in his address to the National Press Club on 22 April 2026, alongside the 2026–27 Budget, setting a target of reducing NDIS participants from around 760,000 to around 600,000 by 2030 and around $15 billion a year in savings by 2030. See Australian Government Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, Securing the NDIS for future generations. health.gov.au/securingtheNDIS
5. Australian Government Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026: fact sheet, 2026. health.gov.au/resources/publications/ndis-amendment-securing-the-ndis-for-future-generations-bill-2026-fact-sheet
6. Australian Government Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, Securing the NDIS for future generations timeline, 2026, which provides that children aged eight and under with developmental delay and/or autism and low to moderate support needs will be supported by the Thriving Kids program instead of the NDIS. health.gov.au/resources/publications/securing-the-ndis-for-future-generations-timeline-0

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

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• Milner V, Colvert E, Hull L, Cook J, Ali D, Mandy W and Happé F, “Does camouflaging predict age at autism diagnosis? A comparison of autistic men and women”, Autism Research, 2024, vol 17(3), pp 626–636, doi:10.1002/aur.3059. The study found that autistic females are, on average, diagnosed later than autistic males, and that the relationship between camouflaging and age at diagnosis is stronger for females.