Submission 2805
Submission | NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 | Mark Sweeney
Submission to the Community Affairs Legislation Committee Inquiry into the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill
1. Introduction and Executive Summary
While it is acknowledged that the government’s intent is to ensure the long-term financial sustainability of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), the legislation in its current form cannot be supported. Rather than targeting systemic inefficiencies, the Bill fundamentally shifts the scheme away from its founding principles of choice and control, introduces rigid bureaucracy (likely at a higher administrative cost), and punishes participants and ethical NDIS businesses.
2. Reduced Review Rights and Operational Uncertainty
The proposed legislation significantly curtails a participant’s right to challenge arbitrary decisions made by the National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA).
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The Participant Perspective: Under the new model, budget allocations are determined by broad, top-down funding mechanisms rather than individualized planning. If a participant’s funding allocation is insufficient to cover their core needs, their mechanism for internal review and subsequent appeal to the Administrative Review Tribunal (ART) is severely restricted. Forcing participants into rigid, pre-defined funding categories means they can no longer easily contest the adequacy of their overall package based on their unique, lived realities.
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The Provider Perspective: When participants face reduced review rights and sudden, inflexible budget cuts, small to medium providers bear the operational brunt. Small businesses in particular lack the capital to absorb sudden contract cancellations or carry debts when participants run out of funds mid-plan and are unable to appeal the decision. This creates a volatile business environment, forcing niche, high-quality providers out of the market.
3. The Reintroduction of De Facto Functional Capacity Assessments
The framework outlines a reliance on standardized tools to determine a person’s “functional capacity” and subsequent budget size. This is a thinly veiled reintroduction of the widely condemned Independent Assessments model.
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The Participant Perspective: Standardized, check-box assessments fail to capture the nuances of complex, intersecting, or fluctuating disabilities (such as psychosocial conditions, neurodivergence, or rare diseases). A single, cross-sectional tool cannot accurately quantify the support needed for an individual to live safely. This strips away person-centred planning and replaces it with an algorithmic approach that strips participants of their dignity.
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The Provider Perspective: Specialists in self-directed support know that true functional capacity is dynamic and highly dependent on the environment. Standardized assessments ignore the success of tailored, micro-configured support structures built by small professional providers. By lowering funding based on flawed, one-off assessments, the Bill will dismantle effective, long-term independent living arrangements.
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Submission 2805
Submission | NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 | Mark Sweeney
4. The Legislation Will Not Reduce Fraud
The Bill introduces heavy-handed restrictions on the architecture of plans and how funds can be spent. This logic is deeply flawed.
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Flawed Targeting: The vast majority of large-scale NDIS fraud, syndicates, and egregious overcharging investigated by the multi-agency fraud taskforce stems from unscrupulous, large- scale corporate providers and criminal networks—not from individual participants managing their own everyday supports; and services provided by ethical providers.
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The Participant Perspective: Restricting line items and implementing rigid “approved lists” of supports treats honest participants like criminals. It drastically limits the ability to pivot funds creatively (e.g., buying a specific piece of mainstream equipment instead of an overpriced, NDIS-badged alternative).
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The Provider Perspective: Micro-management does not stop syndicates; it simply chokes ethical operators in red tape. Real fraud reduction requires sophisticated data matching, proactive regulation of rogue providers, and better enforcement by the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission. Forcing small to medium businesses to navigate convoluted, shifting rules regarding “permissible supports” increases administrative overhead, driving up costs without stopping actual criminal activity.
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The Failure of Past Legislative Interventions: This approach is a repeat of flawed policy history. The NDIS Amendment (Getting the NDIS Back on Track) Bill, introduced in 2024, was heavily promoted by the government as the definitive mechanism to stabilize scheme operations, introduce structural integrity, and curb spiralling costs. Yet, only two years later, the data demonstrates that these top-down legislative overhauls have failed to deliver the promised operational efficiency or financial sustainability. Instead of looking inward at why the 2024 reforms failed to fix the NDIA’s systemic waste, this new legislation simply doubles down on the same failed strategy and policy settings—punishing the frontline ecosystem while NDIA internal costs continue to climb unchecked, and the NDIS regulator, NDIS Commission, escapes scrutiny. Regulatory oversight goes both ways. If providers are expected to meet strict, uncompromising reporting timelines—such as notifying reportable incidents within 24 hours to 5 days—the sector expects the same level of rigorous adherence to reporting from the top down. To build a sustainable, trusted NDIS, we need a visible, data-driven regulator leading the charge – to date the regulator has failed.
5. Destruction of Choice, Control, and Self-Direction
The core tenet of the NDIS is enshrined in the phrase Choice and Control. This legislation marks a philosophical shift toward paternalism.
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Erosion of Individual Agency: By dictating exactly how a budget must be spent through estrictive definitions of “NDIS supports,” this systematically dismantles self-direction.
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Impact on Innovation: Small to medium providers thrive on innovation. Co-design is more than a word: right-sized providers provide unique, community-based solutions with participants that do not fit into rigid institutional boxes. If the legislation forces all supports to conform to narrow bureaucratic definitions, the market will become entirely homogenous, dominated by large, inflexible corporate providers with a one-size fits all approach.
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Submission 2805
Submission | NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 | Mark Sweeney
6. Escalating NDIA Internal Operational Costs vs. Scheme Sustainability
While the legislation focuses heavily on cutting cohorts, participant packages and restricting frontline supports under the guise of financial sustainability, it conspicuously ignores the unsustainable growth of the NDIA’s own internal bureaucracy.
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The Participant and Provider Perspective: Over the last few years, we have observed a dramatic increase in the NDIA’s internal operational costs, driven by an expanding headcount of public servants, reliance on expensive external consultants, and the rollout of inefficient IT systems (such as the PACE system). It is contradictory to demand fiscal austerity from vulnerable participants and small to medium businesses while the Agency’s own administrative overhead continues to swell.
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The Need for Administrative Efficiency: True sustainability cannot be achieved solely by reducing the support line items of participants. For the NDIS to be viable long-term, the NDIA must look inward and reduce its own administrative overhead. Financial sustainability must be a shared responsibility; the Agency must streamline its internal processes, eliminate redundant bureaucratic layers, and curb its operational spending before enforcing damaging cuts onto the scheme’s beneficiaries and ethical providers.
7. There is broad support for digital payment modernisation alongside a critique of the PACE system and an alternative operational payments pathway:
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Support for Digital Modernization via a Functional Infrastructure: Both participants and ethical providers strongly support a strategic pivot toward modern digital payments to track funds and eliminate shadow markets. However, the NDIA’s rollout of the PACE system has not proven its baseline functionality to date. Rather than curbing fraud, PACE has frequently resulted in severe downtime, payment delays, administrative backlogs, and systemic glitches that disrupt the day-to-day cash flow of ethical businesses.
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A Better Way Forward—An Independent Payments Mechanism: The solution is not to double down on an unproven internal system, but to separate the role of plan builder from the role of paymaster. Moving payment processing entirely outside of the NDIA would dramatically increase integrity. This could be achieved by establishing a dedicated, independent federal payments agency, or by integrating NDIS funding with Services Australia’s existing, highly secure payment mechanisms (such as the Medicare payment infrastructure). Utilising a proven, multi-billion-dollar platform already optimised for rapid, auditable health and support transactions would instantly reduce fraud, cut administrative waste, and ensure financial security for both participants and providers.
8. Conclusion and Recommendations
The proposed Bill treats NDIS sustainability as a simple math problem to be solved by cutting access and limiting flexibility. In doing so, it severely harms the very people it was built to protect and decimates the ecosystem of ethical providers who deliver the highest quality of individualised care.
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Submission | NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 | Mark Sweeney
For the reasons outlined, it is essential that the Parliament reject the Bill in its current form and recommend:
- The reinstatement of robust internal and external review rights for all budget and planning decisions.
- The abandonment of mandatory standardised assessment tools in favour of evidence provided by a participant’s trusted, long-term treating professionals.
- A pivot in anti-fraud strategies away from restricting participant flexibility and toward targeting systemic corporate overcharging and criminal syndicates.
- The implementation of strict internal efficiency targets and an independent audit of the NDIA’s operational expenditure.
- Support for digital modernisation via a functional infrastructure with an independent payments mechanism (separating the role of plan builder and approver from the role of paymaster)
9. Further consideration: Proactive and Robust Regulation
The government must place priority to transition the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission from a reactive complaint-handling body into a proactive, digitally integrated regulator that protects participant safety, enforces strict compliance, and ensures market integrity.
A modernised regulator must shift its focus toward pre-emptive safeguarding and market stewardship by establishing clear operational goals:
- Proactive Safeguarding: Moving away from a system that relies on participants or families reporting abuse or neglect after it occurs, toward active risk profiling, unannounced site audits, and early intervention.
- Market Integrity and Standardisation: Setting enforceable quality benchmarks across both registered and unregistered providers.
- Participant-Centric Accountability: Creating an accessible, transparent, and swift redress mechanism where participants are actively supported through investigative processes.
The NDIS is navigating its most intense period of legislative reform in a decade. During such an immense transition, data isn’t just a compliance requirement—it’s the sector’s steering wheel. When the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission lags or pauses on publishing its quarterly performance reports (QPR), the ripple effect across the market is significant. Timely and quality data is crucial for:
- Provider Certainty & Registration Pipelines: Providers rely on quarterly metrics to gauge audit backlogs, registration renewal turnarounds, and worker screening trends. Without this data, businesses are left planning in the dark, impacting workforce recruitment and service expansions.
- Measuring the Integrity Crackdown: With the recent focus on eliminating fraud and improving code-of-conduct adherence, the QPR is the sector’s primary scorecard to see if compliance actions, corrective notices, and banning orders are moving the needle.
- Evidence-Based Policy: As the industry transitions toward a new legislative framework, missing data sets make it incredibly difficult for sector leaders to provide constructive feedback during crucial government consultation periods. The lack of Quarter 3 25/26 QPR is a case-in-point.