National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026
Submission 2812
Submission on the NDIS Amendment Bill
I am a: Clinician / worker
I have been working as an Independent Disability Support Worker for the last two and a half years. I am dedicated to my work in supporting disabled people in the community and my clients rely on me for daily activities and community participation.
My main concerns about this Bill:
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Loss or reduction of supports In my experience as a support worker, my clients are already under-funded and struggling to meet their daily needs. I am concerned about the powers given to the minister to make executive decisions on funding with the broad and arbitrary requirement to “have regard” for the safety of participants. Without engaging directly with participants, getting insight into their daily life and needs, I worry these reductions in support will be made on a fiscal basis and not on a human-centred level of what is crucially needed. I can say with certainty, should this Bill pass, lives will be lost – the lives of some of my clients and hundreds if not thousands of disabled people in our Australian community. The supports I and other support workers provide to our clients are sometimes the only reason they are still alive, not to mention the capacity-building aspects of the work we do that supports participants in building more independence to meet their own needs.
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Not contactable While I have concerns about almost every aspect of this bill, it is the new clause on clients being non-contactable and losing their supports that particularly worries me. Many of my clients have barriers to maintaining ongoing and predictable communication, should a client not respond to the NDIS for 28 days (regardless of whether they have been hospitalised or in crisis), this should never indicate that a client does not require support, if anything, it should do the opposite. I am gravely concerned about what would happen should any of my clients lose their support especially in the instance of not being contactable. This clause suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of disability and the barriers / limitations related to contact for disabled people.
What I want the committee to understand is:
Disabled people in this country need more support, not less. The fraudulent behaviour of providers should never result in a loss of supports for disabled people on the NDIS or those requiring it. These are not numbers, or stats or facts, these are real people, with real lives and real needs. I had a client whose wheelchair broke and the battery could barely last them getting to the toilet and back. They were bed-bound for months as a result. Their mental health completely decimated. They applied for a repair and after months of not hearing anything, got rejected. The rejection was due to the fact that they had requested a new wheelchair. This didn’t consider their daily needs for social engagement, leaving the house, even getting to the kitchen. Later, the application for the new wheelchair was also rejected. This is just a drop in the ocean of injustice that disabled people in this country are experiencing. There are thousands upon thousands of stories like this and far worse. If you haven’t heard them and if they don’t get submitted, perhaps it is because there are too many barriers in doing so, or because there is so much evidence that no one will care.
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026
Submission 2812
Please listen, I am begging you.
I ask that the Government withdraw this bill. There are far better ways to address the issues that have arisen from the NDIS without the suffering of participants and those who desperately want to care for them and are doing the best they can to do so.