Submission 2826
Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee Inquiry Submission:
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future
Generations) Bill 2026
I am multiply disabled, chronically ill and neurodivergent. I also have extensive experience in the disability, community, and education sectors, all with a focus on disabled people. I have held several roles advising government and service providers on disability and inclusion issues. I make this submission as a private citizen.
In the scramble to provide a submission to this Senate inquiry within the inadequate two-week consultation period, many Disabled People’s and Disability Representative Organisations encouraged people to stay specific and concrete over the abstract, regarding the proposed legislative changes. While I agree this is important, I also strongly believe that Australia’s legal obligations as a signatory to the 2006 UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) remain equally important to uphold. Our human and disability rights are anything but abstract, they are the literal foundation of our lives. This Bill takes major steps to damage the foundations of our lives.
Respectfully, the Senate Committee will be derelict in its duty if it does not give weight to the negative human and disability rights implications of the proposed reform Bill alongside the massive individual negative outcomes for disabled people highlighted in other submissions.
Australia ratified the UN CRPD in 2008. Broadly, the Convention seeks to ensure disabled people live and experience life on an equal basis with others in society. If the proposed Bill becomes law, the following changes are likely to breach specific articles and represent a significant reduction in our rights and the quality of our lives, both of which are required by the Convention to be on an equal basis with the rest of Australian society.
Article 3: General Principles (Dignity, Autonomy, Non-discrimination, Full Participation)
Article 3 establishes the foundational principles of the Convention, including respect for inherent dignity and individual autonomy, including freedom to make one’s own choices; non-discrimination; full and effective participation and inclusion in society; and equality of opportunity.
Several Bill provisions cut against these principles as a whole:
● By making financial sustainability the primary driver of funding decisions, rather than individual need, goals, and choice, the Bill undermines disabled people’s autonomy and dignity at the most fundamental level. ● Similarly, removing the “whole of person” approach ignores intersectionality entirely and treats people with multiple intersecting disabilities as less deserving of full support than the Convention’s principles require. Intersectionality means disadvantage compounds - we require more support, not less. ● Automated decision making should not be implemented for NDIS decisions. Disability is complex and unique - no two people with the same disability have the same lives. Implementing automated decision making will result in an increase in the number of already unacceptable decisions made by NDIA staff that are overturned on review or at Tribunal. You are undoubtedly aware of the significant and widespread harm done to individuals affected by DSS’ Robodebt approach. We are already so disadvantaged, under so much chronic stress. Dealing with the NDIA
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is an overwhelmingly hostile experience that impacts our mental and physical health. Adding poorly implemented automated decision making will only make this worse. People will enter crisis. People will die.
An equal basis with the rest of Australian society?
Non-disabled Australians access the health system, education, housing, and community services without having to demonstrate that their needs are “reasonable and necessary” (as per the increasingly narrow window given by the NDIS, again against the expertise of the disability community); that they’ve exhausted all possible treatments; or that no other system should be responsible. Disabled people under this Bill must run a gauntlet of eligibility tests, treatment requirements, and system-of-origin checks before receiving any support at all. I myself tried and failed to access the scheme several years ago, and the impact of the process on my mental health has been significant. I have yet to be well enough to try again - and so, I continue to receive no supports, and my physical and mental health continues to worsen. The administrative burden of proving and re-proving disability under threat of losing support is itself a form of inequality that consumes time, money, emotional energy, and often requires paid help to navigate.
Article 4: General Obligations
Article 4 requires states to take all appropriate legislative, administrative and other measures to implement the rights in the Convention, and to modify or abolish existing laws that constitute discrimination against persons with disabilities. It also requires states to closely consult with, and actively involve, persons with disabilities in the development and implementation of legislation affecting them.
The Bill moves firmly in the opposite direction:
● It reverses legislative protections that the disability community previously secured (“whole of person” reforms such as Eastham, McGarrigle, Davis, Sutherland). ● The Government provided only two weeks for community consultation on a 109-page bill with nearly 300 pages of accompanying material. That falls well short of meaningful involvement of people with disability in decisions that directly concern them. That Minister Butler has repeatedly stated ‘nothing about us without us’ when discussing the proposed reforms is disingenuous and offensive when all we can do is write a letter within a two-week window, with the Inquiry’s outcome to be settled a mere fortnight later. ● The published timelines for reform are much too fast, and will not allow for meaningful co-design and co-production by the disability community. ● As part of this timeline, offboarding thousands of participants from the NDIS without stable, thoughtful, co-designed alternative supports in place is irresponsible and literally puts lives at risk - both disabled people’s and their families’ (particularly parents), pushed to the edge trying to care for them without appropriate support.
Article 5 - Equality and Non-discrimination
Article 5 requires states to prohibit all discrimination on the basis of disability and guarantee persons with disabilities equal and effective legal protection against discrimination on all grounds. It also requires states to ensure reasonable accommodations are provided.
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The Bill introduces several measures that are extremely likely to operate in a discriminatory way:
● Standardised assessments that replace individualised evidence from doctors and allied health professionals who know the individual well risk systematically disadvantaging people whose disabilities are complex, dynamic/variable, or not easily captured by a uniform tool. This will create unequal outcomes based on disability type. ● Excluding people covered by compensation schemes from NDIS access creates a class of people with disability who are denied support on the basis of how they acquired their disability - a distinction that amounts to discrimination between people with disability. ● Funding caps that leave people with less than their needs - even as assessed by the government where those caps apply differentially across impairment or support type, constitute discriminatory denial of accommodation.
Article 7 - Children with Disabilities
Article 7 requires states to take all necessary measures to ensure children with disabilities enjoy all human rights and fundamental freedoms on an equal basis with other children, and that in all actions concerning children with disabilities the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration.
● The Bill introduces a legal presumption that parents are responsible for providing substantial care for their children - including supervision, personal care, transport, and behavioural support without any corresponding requirement to consider whether the child’s needs exceed those of a child without disability, or whether support would improve the child’s capacity. This puts cost-saving above the best interests of disabled children, in direct conflict with Article 7. ● Children are part of the core purpose of the NDIS. Section 25 (Early Intervention) is a core, co-equal pathway in the law. Children who meet this threshold belong on the Scheme. Generalised programs such as Thriving Kids may save the government money (money it could easily find elsewhere if it were brave enough - instead it has gone for the ‘easy’ target of the marginalised, vulnerable disability community), but it is clear they will not result in better outcomes for children. In fact, it is extremely unlikely it will even result in the same outcomes that we have at present.
An equal basis with the rest of Australian society?
The Bill’s legal presumption of parents’ responsibility and capacity is not on an equal basis. In practice this means disabled children will be denied supports or offered inferior supports (Thriving Kids) that would directly improve their development, participation, and quality of life, simply because a parent is assumed to be able to fill the gap. Non-disabled children are not subject to any equivalent presumption that limits their access to services.
Article 12 - Equal Recognition Before the Law
Article 12 recognises that persons with disabilities enjoy legal capacity on an equal basis with others in all aspects of life, and requires that measures relating to legal capacity be subject to regular review by a competent, independent and impartial authority.
In contravention of Article 12, the Bill removes or restricts the ability of participants to seek review of key decisions affecting their lives in these ways:
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● Automatic plan renewals cannot be reviewed or appealed, even where the Minister has made significant alterations ● Scheme-wide funding cuts via ‘support determinations’ (ie. legislative instruments) are not reviewable ● Plan suspension and revocation can occur without adequate safeguards ● Denying people the right to challenge decisions that directly affect their support removes meaningful legal recourse and removes their equal standing before the law.
An equal basis with the rest of Australian society?
Non-disabled Australians can challenge government decisions that affect them through established legal and administrative review processes. Under the Bill, some of the most significant decisions affecting disabled people - Ministerial funding caps, automatic plan renewals, transitions to new framework plans are explicitly non-reviewable. A person can have their funding meaningfully cut by a legislative instrument and have no avenue to contest it. The removal of the McGarrigle protection, which required the NDIS to fully fund assessed reasonable and necessary supports, means there is no longer a legal backstop guaranteeing that assessed need will be met. This is a clear form of legal inequality: disabled people have fewer rights to contest decisions about their own lives than other Australians do.
Further, if a non-disabled Australian is hospitalised, in crisis, or simply hard to contact, government agencies do not automatically cancel their access to essential services. Under the Bill, a disabled person who is unreachable for 90 days can have their plan suspended, and after a further 90 days, can be removed from the NDIS entirely - with no requirement for the NDIA to check whether the person is unable to respond due to their disability, a hospitalisation, or a crisis. Disabled people are therefore uniquely vulnerable to losing essential support at precisely the moment they are most vulnerable.
Article 17 - Protecting the Integrity of the Person
Article 17 states that every person with disabilities has a right to respect for their physical and mental integrity on an equal basis with others, yet:
● The proposed requirement that people try all appropriate treatments before accessing the NDIS, with no exception for personal (non-medical) refusal of treatment, effectively compels people to undergo medical procedures or other interventions as a condition of receiving support. Forcing someone to alter their body or undergo treatment to qualify for disability support is a serious interference with physical and mental integrity. The CRPD’s Committee has consistently held that the right to refuse treatment is central to this Article.
An equal basis with the rest of Australian society?
No non-disabled Australian is required to alter their body or submit to medical intervention in order to access government services. Under the Bill, a person may be denied NDIS support unless they have tried every “appropriate” treatment that could improve their condition - even if that treatment takes years, only partially works, or the person objects to it for personal reasons. This creates a class of people whose right to support is conditional on compliance with medical authority over their own bodies. A non-disabled person retains complete bodily autonomy; a disabled person must surrender a degree of that autonomy just to qualify for basic assistance.
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Article 19 - Living Independently and Being Included in the Community
Article 19 recognises the equal right of all persons with disabilities to live in the community, with choices equal to others; and requires states to ensure persons with disabilities have access to a range of in-home, residential and other community support services, including personal assistance necessary to support living and inclusion in the community, and to prevent isolation or segregation from the community.
This is one of the most directly applicable articles:
● The combination of stricter access requirements; funding caps below the government’s own assessed needs; reduced community participation support; stricter reassessment rules and plan suspensions will leave people without the support they need to live independently. ● A person who loses funding mid-plan, or is barred from the NDIS because they can’t afford or access a possible treatment, may be unable to remain in the community at all. This risks institutionalisation, severe social isolation, or complete dependence on family,who are unlikely to be able to provide unaided the support and resources necessary to achieve this. ● The requirement that providers be registered will result in worse outcomes for many disabled people. Unfortunately, it has become clear from several well publicised cases that registration guarantees neither safety, competence, or compliance. Choice and control of disabled people and their families to build strong and specialised multidisciplinary teams of trusted, knowledgeable independent support workers - particularly those providing personal care - is crucial.
An equal basis with the rest of Australian society?
Non-disabled Australians can generally choose where they live, who they live with, and how they participate in their community. For many disabled people, that choice depends entirely on having adequate support - personal care, transport assistance, communication support, community participation funding, SIL or SDA funding.. When those supports are capped, reduced, or lost through plan suspensions and restrictive reassessment rules, the practical consequence is that a person may no longer be able to live independently at all. They may be forced into greater dependence on family, into residential care, inappropriate aged care, or into isolation. A non-disabled person is never placed in that position by a government funding decision.
Article 25 - Health
Article 25 recognises the right of persons with disabilities to the highest attainable standard of health without discrimination on the basis of disability, and requires states to prohibit discriminatory denial of health care or health services on the basis of disability. The proposed Bill puts our health and wellbeing last:
● Requiring people to exhaust all treatment options before accessing supports - including treatments that may only partially work or take years to have effect - risks leaving people without necessary health-related supports during that period. ● The supposedly “effective and beneficial” changes that prioritise generic, population-level research (peer-reviewed or otherwise) over an individual’s own treating practitioners’ evidence also conflict with the CRPD principle of access to individualised, disability-appropriate health care.
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● People with progressive conditions face a worse trajectory than non-disabled people and disabled people with stable conditions. A disabled person with a progressive condition may, under this Bill, be required to try treatments that only slow their decline - and be denied NDIS access for years while doing so - with no guarantee of accessing the support they need when the treatment inevitably proves insufficient. The system creates a structural disadvantage for people whose disability worsens over time, compared to both non-disabled people and disabled people with stable conditions.
An equal basis with the rest of Australian society?
When a non-disabled person sees a specialist and that specialist recommends treatment or support, the recommendation carries weight and is acted on. Under the Bill, decisions about whether a support is “effective and beneficial” must prioritise population-level, peer-reviewed research over evidence from a person’s own treating practitioners - or their own lived experience and expertise. This means a disabled person may be denied funding for a support that demonstrably works for them, because generalised research suggests it doesn’t work on average. Non-disabled people are never told their individualised clinical evidence is legally subordinate to a population average.
Article 26 - Habilitation and Rehabilitation
Article 26 requires states to organise, strengthen and extend comprehensive habilitation and rehabilitation services and programs, based on the multidisciplinary assessment of individual needs and strengths, to enable persons with disabilities to attain maximum independence and full inclusion and participation in all aspects of life.
The removal of the whole-of-person approach and the introduction of funding caps means people will be denied supports that are essential to their rehabilitation and independence, simply because their support needs arise from more than one interacting impairment. This directly contravenes the Convention’s requirement of multidisciplinary, individually-tailored habilitation.
Article 28 - Adequate Standard of Living and Social Protection
Article 28 recognises the right of persons with disabilities to an adequate standard of living, including the continuous improvement of living conditions, and right to social protection without discrimination on the basis of disability. It specifically requires states to ensure access to appropriate and affordable services, devices and other assistance for disability-related needs, and to ensure access for persons with disabilities and their families living in situations of poverty to assistance with disability-related expenses.
● Funding caps that leave people with ○ less than their assessed level of need; ○ non-reviewable support reductions; ○ the loss of carryover funding; and ○ the exclusion of people receiving aged care from the NDIS
are likely to reduce people’s living standards below an adequate threshold. The explicit example of a person assessed as needing $44,000 receiving only $30,000, illustrates that a diminished standard of living is a foreseeable, designed outcome. This is unacceptable.
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● For First Nations people who qualify for aged care at 50, exclusion from disability-specific supports will be particularly severe. Aged Care is not Disability Care. Workers are trained differently, work from different frameworks, and have different skills and experience. Aged Care services cannot meet the needs of people with disabilities appropriately.
An equal basis with the rest of Australian society?
This is perhaps the starkest inequality in the Bill. A non-disabled person who needs health care receives it based on clinical assessment of what they need. Under the Bill, a disabled person can be assessed as needing $44,000 worth of support and receive only $30,000 - because a Ministerial determination has capped their category of support for budgetary reasons. There is no equivalent in the Australian system where a person is officially assessed as needing something and then officially given less on the basis of system-wide cost control. The gap between assessed need and funded support is inequality written into law.
Article 33 - National Implementation and Monitoring
Article 33 requires civil society - in particular persons with disabilities and their representative organisations - to be fully involved and participate in the monitoring process for CRPD implementation. However:
● The provision giving the Minister power to unilaterally change how the NDIS Act operates for twelve months after the Bill passes, without parliamentary scrutiny, removes a key mechanism of accountability. ● Changes of this kind, made outside parliamentary oversight and without meaningful consultation with disability organisations and disabled people, undermine the monitoring and accountability obligations Australia has under the Convention. ● The aggressiveness of the government in trying to speed these hugely significant changes through parliament without the disabled people they are in office to serve having meaningful influence on their design, scope, or timing is deplorable. I do not feel that the government has my or my community’s best interests at the forefront of its decision making.
The Bill in its current form creates increasingly unequal lives.
No single one of these inequalities that contravene the UN CRPD exist in isolation - they compound the disadvantage of an already disadvantaged, marginalised, and systemically excluded group of Australians. A disabled person can simultaneously face a harder path to accessing support; a requirement to try unwanted treatment, recommended against by their own healthcare professionals; capped funding below assessed need; non-reviewable decisions; their needs being presumed to be smaller than they are, OR their needs being recognised but then ignored, by law; and the risk of losing everything if they become temporarily unreachable. Non-disabled Australians face none of these barriers as a condition of participating in ordinary life. The cumulative effect is not just that disabled people receive less support it is that they are required to expend vastly more effort, accept more intrusion, surrender more autonomy, and live with more precarity, simply to approach the baseline that non-disabled Australians take for granted.
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The overall effect of the proposed reforms together represents a systemic regression in the rights of people with disability that the CRPD explicitly prohibits.
That the Australian Government is so willing to worsen the daily lives of disabled people and breach their fundamental rights and freedoms under the UN CRPD and other relevant international law disgusts and disappoints me.
Recommendations
● Having ratified the UN CRPD, the Senate Committee and Australian Government must recognise Australia’s obligations to people with disability and give equal weight to the human and disability rights implications of the Bill alongside the individual harms shared in other submissions.
● The Bill should not proceed in its current form, as multiple provisions are likely to breach Australia’s obligations as a signatory to the UN CRPD, representing a significant and systemic regression in the rights of disabled people.
● The Bill’s extreme prioritisation of financial sustainability over individual need, goals and choice must be removed, as it undermines the foundational CRPD principles of dignity, autonomy and equality of opportunity in direct contravention of Article 3.
● The whole-of-person approach of the scheme must be restored. Removing it ignores the compounding nature of intersecting disabilities and identities, and treats multiply-disabled people as less deserving of full support. ● Automated decision making should not be implemented, as it will result in bad decisions that worsen individual quality of life, and increase stress and harm.
● The Bill must be amended to uphold, not reverse, the legal protections previously secured under Australian law, including the Eastham, McGarrigle, Davis and Sutherland decisions, in fulfilment of Australia’s Article 4 obligations.
● The entire timeline for every aspect of the reform project must be substantially revised and expanded to allow time for real consultation, co-design and co-production by disabled people to occur, as required by Article 4.
● The removal of thousands of NDIS participants from the Scheme must not proceed until stable, thoughtfully co-designed alternative supports are in place. Proceeding without those supports puts lives at risk - both disabled people’s and their carers’ - in breach of Article 4.
● Standardised assessments cannot and must not replace individualised evidence from treating doctors and allied health professionals, as they will systematically disadvantage people with complex or variable disabilities and produce unequal outcomes based on disability type, contrary to Article 5.
● The exclusion of people covered by compensation schemes from NDIS access must be removed. Denying support on the basis of how a disability was acquired is discrimination between people
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with disability, contrary to Article 5.
● The Bill must make provision for participants to elect to use unregistered support workers in certain cases, at minimum.
● Funding caps that leave people with less than their assessed needs must be removed. Applying caps differentially across impairment or support type constitutes discriminatory denial of reasonable accommodation, contrary to Article 5.
● The legal presumption that parents are responsible for providing substantial care for disabled children must be removed. It places cost-saving above the best interests of the child and contravenes Article 7, under which children’s best interests must be the primary consideration.
● Generalised programs such as Thriving Kids must not be treated as equivalent alternatives to individualised NDIS supports for children. They are unlikely to produce the same outcomes and will leave disabled children without the support they need to develop, participate, and thrive, contrary to Article 7.
● The Bill must restore the right of participants to seek review of decisions that directly affect their lives - including automatic plan renewals, scheme-wide support determinations, and plan suspensions and revocations - in fulfilment of Article 12’s requirement for equal recognition before the law.
● The provisions allowing plan suspension and cancellation when a participant is unreachable must be amended to require the NDIA to investigate whether the person is hospitalised, in crisis, or unable to respond due to their disability before taking any action, consistent with Articles 12 and 19.
● The requirement that people try all appropriate treatments before accessing the NDIS - with no exception for personal refusal - must be removed. Conditioning access to support on submission to medical intervention is a direct violation of the right to physical and mental integrity under Article 17, a right the CRPD Committee has consistently held to be non-negotiable.
● The combination of stricter access requirements, funding caps, reduced community participation support, stricter reassessment rules and plan suspensions must be comprehensively reconsidered. Together they risk forcing disabled people out of their communities and into institutionalisation, residential care or isolation, in breach of Article 19.
● The McGarrigle protection - requiring the NDIS to fully fund assessed reasonable and necessary supports - must be restored. Without it, disabled people have fewer rights to contest decisions about their own lives than any other Australian, contrary to Articles 19 and 28.
● The prioritisation of population-level research over evidence from a person’s own treating practitioners must be removed from the “effective and beneficial” framework. Disabled people must not be denied funding for supports that demonstrably work for them simply because generalised research suggests otherwise, contrary to Articles 25 and 26.
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● The treatment exhaustion requirement must be removed for people with progressive conditions in particular, as it will deny them NDIS access for years while their condition worsens, with no guarantee of support when treatment proves insufficient - a structural disadvantage with no equivalent for non-disabled Australians, contrary to Article 25.
● The whole-of-person approach must remain central, to ensure that people whose support needs arise from multiple interacting impairments receive the multidisciplinary, individually-tailored habilitation and rehabilitation the Convention requires under Article 26.
● Funding caps, non-reviewable support reductions, the loss of carryover funding and the exclusion of aged care recipients from the NDIS must all be removed or reversed, as together they will reduce many disabled people’s living standards below the adequate threshold required by Article 28.
● The exclusion of First Nations people in aged care from NDIS supports must be specifically addressed. Aged care services are not disability services - they are trained differently, work from different frameworks, and cannot meet the needs of disabled people appropriately, making this exclusion a particularly severe breach of Article 28.
● The Minister’s power to unilaterally amend the operation of the NDIS Act for twelve months without parliamentary scrutiny must be removed. This power, exercised without meaningful consultation with disabled people and their organisations, directly undermines Australia’s monitoring and accountability obligations under Article 33 and goes against the Hon. Mark Butler’s clearly disingenuous invocation of the disability community’s own slogan, ‘nothing about us without us.”
Please. Slow down and listen to us.
Yours sincerely
1 June 2026
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