Submission 2690
Submission to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation
Committee
Inquiry into the NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 — name withheld
I am the father of an adult daughter with intellectual disability and spastic diplegia. She does not live in her family home; she lives in the care of people who took her in and built a life around her. She has been an NDIS participant for years. I am keeping us both unnamed to protect her — which is more than this Bill does for her.
My daughter’s disability is permanent and lifelong. The NDIS gave her choice, dignity, safety and a life in the community, and it let the people who care for her keep going. This Bill puts all of that in doubt, and like so many families, we are left trying to understand how a scheme our daughter depends on came to be taken apart this way.
How did we get here? The questions we are left with
Like so many parents, carers, families and friends, we have been left grappling with how this happened. We are angry. We are unsupported. And we have more questions than answers. We do not write these as experts. We write them as ordinary people who can see something is very wrong. We ask that each of these questions be answered by the government, and that those answers be placed on the public record before this Bill proceeds any further.
The NDIS was demanded and built by disabled people and their families across decades of advocacy. It is a public program. The government’s own modelling projected it would support close to a million Australians within a few years. It is being dismantled as though it belongs to the government of the day — to the Labor Party, to Minister Mark Butler, to the ministry that now controls it. Whose scheme is this — the government’s, or the people it was built for and the public who fund it?
The government’s own modelling, marked Official Sensitive and released only when a Senate Order forced it out, describes 241,000 current participants as “assumed to be exited” by 2030-31. These are human beings. People with different abilities are still people. Why does an internal government document reduce people to a number to be removed, and why was it hidden from the public it concerns?
Australians were told foundational supports would be in place before anyone was moved off the scheme.
Submission 2690
Where are those supports, when will they exist, and what happens to people in the gap?
The questions that matter most
This Bill makes the budget a legal test for a person’s support. Who decides what is “financially sustainable,” on what basis, and can anyone challenge it?
Independent modelling puts the scheme’s return at $2.25 for every dollar spent. Does the government accept that figure? If not, what is its own, and where is it published?
If every dollar spent returns $2.25, then every dollar cut removes $2.25 of economic activity, jobs and tax. What will the return be once the scheme is cut, and where is the modelling that shows the net result?
The NDIS employs more than 270,000 people and underpins businesses across the country. Why is it only ever described as a cost, and never as the economic engine — the stimulus — it plainly is?
A scheme that returns more than it costs, supports close to a million people, and was built by the community that needed it is being taken apart rather than funded. If it works, why break it?
The questions about the law itself
This Bill adds, for the first time in the Act’s history, that supports will be provided only “so far as is consistent with the financial sustainability of the scheme” (Section 3(1)(d)). That makes the budget a legal test for whether a person’s support is reasonable and necessary. How is that consistent with Australia’s obligations under the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disability, ratified in 2008, which says a person’s rights must not be made subordinate to cost?
The Bill requires the NDIA to weigh “scheme sustainability” when deciding what an individual needs. Since when is what one person needs to live decided by reference to the total cost of everyone else?
The Bill ranks peer-reviewed research above the clinical evidence of a person’s own treating professionals, and above the lived outcomes of their previous plans.
Submission 2690
Why is the knowledge of the people who actually know a person ranked beneath a general study that may say nothing about them?
Plans will now “renew” with unspent funds lost, and the Minister will be able to cut whole categories of funding — social, civic and community participation, and capacity building — for entire groups of people at once. On what basis can one person’s support be cut for everyone at the stroke of a determination?
So much of what actually matters in this Bill — the assessment that decides who keeps their support and who loses it, the funding rules, the rights of review — is not in the Bill at all. It is to be written later, after the vote, through ministerial instruments the public and the Senate cannot yet see. The Senate’s own Scrutiny of Bills Committee exists partly to catch exactly this: under Standing Order 24 it must draw the Senate’s attention to any bill that inappropriately leaves to delegated legislation matters that should be settled in the law itself. This Bill is the clearest possible example. Its most life-altering provisions do not yet exist. It is, by any honest measure, unfinished — and an unfinished bill would not be accepted as complete in any other field of professional life, let alone one that decides whether hundreds of thousands of disabled Australians keep the support they live by. How has an incomplete Bill — one whose most consequential rules have not yet been written — been allowed to reach the Senate at all? It is not ready to be assessed, not ready to be legislated, and not ready to go anywhere. The Senate has both the power and the precedent to refuse it: a committee can recommend the Bill not pass, and the Senate can decline to proceed with it. On the ground of incompleteness alone, that is what must happen here. This Bill should be sent back and not progressed until it is whole.
The questions the government has not answered
The government cites billions in fraud to justify these cuts. Its own taskforce reported stopping “more than $60 million in estimated fraud” with “billions under investigation,” and the $6 billion figure is an estimate of what “may be” misused — not confirmed, prosecuted fraud. What is the actual confirmed figure, and how can an estimate of what might be misused justify removing 241,000 real people from real support?
In 2023 the government paid the consultancy Redbridge to find out how attached Australians were to the NDIS, and what messaging would most effectively change those feelings. Taxpayers funded both the research into their own support for the scheme and the strategy to erode it. What was the brief, who decided to deploy the fraud narrative, what did it cost, and will the full findings be tabled?
Submission 2690
There is no public analysis of what hospitals, aged care, mental health services, state governments and families will absorb when the NDIS withdraws. Where is the whole-of-government cost modelling — and if it does not exist, on what basis is this called responsible?
When support is removed, the care does not disappear. Overwhelmingly it falls to women — leaving work, losing income and superannuation, providing unpaid care no budget records. Who has counted that cost?
People with disability are the only Australians required to repeatedly prove eligibility for a permanent condition, and now the only Australians whose legal rights are subordinated to the budget in the very law meant to protect them. On what basis are they treated differently under Australian law to every other citizen?
What we are asking
I am asking the Committee to recommend this Bill not proceed until the assessment methodology, the funding rules and the review rights are written into the law and properly consulted on, and until the government produces honest modelling of the true, system-wide cost of these changes. My daughter deserves to know the scheme built to support her will still be there next year. As her father, I cannot tell her that today. I am asking you to make it so that I can.
A father, Western Australia
Submitted to: community.affairs.sen@aph.gov.au Subject: Submission — NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future