National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026
Submission 2839
To whom it may concern,
I have significant and serious concerns with the proposed “Securing the NDIS for Future Generations” bill. These concerns include many of the provisions of the bill, but also extend to:
- The manner in which the bill was drafted (in contradiction to Article 4(3) of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, requiring that for the purposes of “decision-making processes concerning issues relating to persons with disabilities, States Parties shall closely consult with and actively involve persons with disabilities”);
- The unreasonably short consultation period (which has inarguably caused direct harm to a large number of the disabled people the NDIS is intended to support, by making them choose between the detrimental impact of pushing through their own safe limits to respond to the legislation during the consultation period, and the detrimental impact of allowing this bill to pass unopposed);
- The framing of this bill as benevolent, helpful, and necessary to ensure the NDIS’ survival. If there is a true need to reduce the cost of the NDIS, there are a number of significant areas that the agency could address that would also improve the lives of the participants the scheme exists to help, and that could be improved without the need for additional legislative instruments. Instead, they are determined that the participants are to blame, and should bear the full burden. In truth the bill is a clear legislative overreach attempting to give the NDIS and the Minister significant direct power over the lives of vulnerable Australians with little or no consultation, oversight, limits, or right to review or reply (not just for participants, but also the ART, etc.).
The explanatory memorandum accompanying the bill states that the bill addresses two key vulnerabilities – the NDIS “growing at a rate that was unforeseen when it was established”, and the NDIS having “become the target for fraudulent activity”. I agree that both these areas need to be addressed, but do not believe this bill to be a good faith attempt to do so.
I am extremely short on both the time and energy required to make a submission as thorough or as detailed as I would like, due to the extreme levels of stress and exhaustion my partner and myself are both under. This stress and exhaustion is the result of more than 7 months trying to work within the current NDIS systems to address detrimental changes that were made to my partner’s plan in clear breach of the legislation. The instructions on making a submission to the committee imply heavily that personal experiences and individual concerns or complaints will not be considered in their decision making process, however I believe the reasons for this stress and exhaustion speak directly to the NDIA and the Minister’s dishonesty in the framing of the bill. I apologise, therefore, if any of the following is incomplete or poorly edited, and would like to state that I have many more issues with the proposed bill than just those addressed here.
Growth of the NDIS
The NDIS growing at a rate that was “unforeseen” when it was established is (i) entirely expected, and (ii) a good thing that we, as Australians should be proud of. The 2011 report by the Productivity Commission outlining the proposed NDIS scheme imagined it would support 410,000 people and cost $13.6 billion per year (~$20 billion dollars today when
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026
Submission 2839
adjusted for inflation). That estimate equates to an average of a little under $49,000 a year per participant in today’s dollars. If spent entirely on support work for assistance with personal domestic activities (i.e. the “cheapest” support work category), that amount would cover less than 16 hours of support per week for our most vulnerable Australians. If the participant needed a higher level of support, assistive technology, or any sort of therapy supports, it is clear that level of funding would not be sufficient.
In an earlier media briefing on the Productivity Commission inquiry, it was stated that “Figures released last week by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare showed that around 2.3 million Australians will have a high level of disability by 2030.” The Australian Bureau of Statistics reported a total of 4 million Australians with a disability in 2009, around ten times the number of people it was expected the scheme would support, and nearly twice the amount the media briefing predicted for 2030. By 2022, the ABS reported almost 5.5 million Australians with a disability. This is the most recent report, but more recent international statistics strongly indicate that post-viral complications from the COVID-19 pandemic will result in a significant and ongoing increase in people with a disability. That is to say, the number of Australians with a disability today is likely significantly higher than 5.5 million, and that number can be expected to increase in the next few years. It is disingenuous to discuss the growth of the scheme in isolation – see Figure 1 for a comparison against the number of Australians with a disability, as reported by the ABS.
[Image not converted to Markdown – “Growth of the NDIS scheme contextualized against the growth of Australians with a disability” – check the source PDF page for the actual content]
Figure 1: Growth of the NDIS scheme contextualized against the growth of Australians with a disability
The explanatory memo for the bill claims that it “includes important changes to improve the quality of NDIS supports for participants” – a claim in direct contradiction with the suggestion that it will check the scheme’s growth, and in direct contradiction to Mark Butler’s proposal to reduce the number of participants by 160,000 by 2030 (by which time there will be significantly more disabled Australians in need of the scheme, not fewer).
The “unforeseen” growth the NDIS has experienced still only sees us supporting around 760,000 participants - likely around 12-13% of Australians with a disability.
This number would undoubtedly be higher if the process of joining the scheme was not so inaccessible.
Submission 2839
requiring a significant outlay of potential participants’ time and money to obtain the diagnoses, assessments and reports required as evidence for assessment. A significant amount of good luck in finding Allied Health professionals is also required, given how common it is for disabled or chronically ill people to experience medical gaslighting. The explanatory note’s claim that the bill will result in more consistent or equitable access decisions are not supported by the contents of the bill, and are not consistent with the NDIA and the Minister’s plans to reduce the number of people on the scheme. Schedule 1, Part 1 Section 4 (9B Definition of functional capacity) (1) provides a minimal if broadly servicable definition of functional capacity, but (2) and (3) go on to allow the NDIS rules to “make provision for determining any matter for the purposes of subsection (1)”. How the NDIS chooses to determine functional capacity is an extremely critical factor in whether access to the scheme will be fair and equitable, and it is not appropriate for this bill to give an essentially open-ended authority to the NDIS and the Minister to determine those details once the bill has already become law. Schedule 1, Part 8 specifies that an impairment is not permanent unless “the person has undertaken all appropriate treatment for the impairment or impairments”. This is a patently nonsensical and open-ended claim that allows the agency unreasonable latitude in refusing participants’ access to the scheme. The proposed 25A(2) is particularly egregious, specifying that “Treatment may be appropriate treatment for a person’s impairment or impairments regardless of whether the person’s individual circumstances restrict the person from accessing the treatment”. This subsection would explicitly give the NDIS the ability to refuse to provide any and all support for a person’s impairments – regardless of severity – because a treatment exists that may alleviate the impact of their impairments, despite the NDIS being fully aware that the person is not able to access that treatment. It is appalling that any governmental agency has even proposed such a blatantly discriminatory piece of legislation. It is also appalling that this legislation is a blatant attempt to subvert established case law in the form of the Federal Court decision in National Disability Insurance Agency v Davis 2022 – a fact that is clearly stated in the Impact Assessment provided in the Explanatory Memo (pages 198 & 199).
The explanatory memo also includes the statement that the NDIS “is not intended to operate as an unconstrained funding source for all disability related needs, nor should it be used to address supports that would be more appropriately provided by other service systems”. This is clearly intended as justification for the changes the bill implements to give the NDIS and the Minister more tools and authority to refuse participants access to the scheme, but there is a clear burden of proof that has not been met. No attempt has been made to provide evidence that the scheme is currently or is predicted in the near future to be operating in this way to any degree, let alone to a degree that requires legislative action that will unduly harm disabled people.
Fraudulent Activity
It is clear that there are bad actors who are exploiting the NDIS for personal gain, but the framing of this problem by the agency and the Minister in many public communications up to and including the explanatory memo for this bill is simply not accurate.
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026
Submission 2839
The NDIA and the Minister persist in demonizing participants (see, for one example of many, the repeated mentions in the explanatory memo of “access lists” and the strong implication that there are enough people on the scheme and getting supports they do not deserve that the only recourse is legislative action. This is another case where neither the NDIS nor the Minister has provided evidence or even an estimate of the degree to which this is supposedly happening. It is also in direct contradiction to the lived experience of hundreds of thousands of disabled Australians who have had to fight tooth and nail to get access to the scheme and continue to work and fight to retain necessary supports – in many cases only achieving access for a subset of their permanent impairments and receiving only a bare minimum of necessary supports. This legislation is intended to provide the NDIA investigatory, enforcement and civil penalty powers that are a clear overreach of the agency’s intended functions, and such a significant change should bear with it a significant burden of proof that unequivocally not been met.
Numerous participants have attested that the NDIS has shown little or no interest in pursuing claims of fraudulent activity by suppliers, even when provided with explicit evidence of wrongdoing – a fact which I can corroborate. My partner, who is on the scheme, reported a registered provider to the NDIS with documented proof of fraudulent practices, including invoicing for supports that were never provided. Rather than taking the report seriously, the NDIS simply stated that the provider must remove late payment fees from the invoices. When the provider continued to seek payment of the fraudulent invoices – including late payment fees – the proof (now including evidence that the provider was ignoring the NDIS’ directive on late fees) was sent to the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission. Their response was to the effect that the matter did not have anything to do with them. If fraud undertaken by suppliers is indeed a serious concern and threat to the scheme, it does not follow that the first step to address it is to legislate the NDIA as a new policing body. There is plenty that the agency could be doing now that it is objectively not doing.
Additionally, there is clear evidence that the NDIS itself has engaged in at least borderline fraudulent activities. I am not able to judge their intent, so do not claim it would meet the definition of legal fraud in all instances, but the outcome for participants is the same – the agency misrepresents or withholds information, leading to both material and intangible losses to participants. Again, this is something I can corroborate. My partner’s support team raised another issue of fraud with the agency, where the agency had authorised a company to claim support coordination payments from her plan, despite her never having had any contact with that company. The agency showed no interest in pursuing this matter, so she requested a minor administrative change to her plan to reduce the risk to her funding and to the agency. This resulted in a plan reassessment being undertaken without any of the required notice or consultation and a significant and detrimental reduction to her supports. Over the past seven months attempting to resolve the issue, the agency has repeatedly withheld or misrepresented information, and has demonstrated that they believe themselves to be above accountability. The most striking example of this is that the “outcome” of a requested internal review of the changed plan does not refer to that plan, its contents, or our concerns with the plan or the process, focusing instead on why my partner could not have supports that she did not ask for, and that had nothing to do with the plan change being reviewed. Multiple NDIS employees have since stated that once a review
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026
Submission 2839
outcome is reached, there is no recourse to reinvestigate it, even in the case that the outcome is entirely unrelated to the decision under review. The problem is ongoing, but my partner’s health and conditions have materially deteriorated as a result of these actions, we have experienced significant financial strain, and the NDIS has already spent at least as much money failing to address this issue as they will save from the plan reductions. I will state for clarity that this is not an attempt to get any sort of action to be taken to resolve the problem. It is instead intended to demonstrate that the NDIS and the Minister are not acting in good faith with this bill.
Schedule 1, Part 3, Section 34
The section “Determination reducing funding for groups of supports” contains some serious oversreach that I have trouble believing would stand up in a court of law. As written, there is nothing stopping the Minister from reducing all categories of supports by 99% indefinitely solong as they claim they had “regard to the safety of participants”. This is effectively impossible to disprove. Serious limitations and oversight need to be added for any version of this legislation to even begin approaching acceptable.
Schedule 3, Part 2, Section 59
59D(3) States that “The CEO must be satisfied that the circumstances … are sufficiently objective in nature, such that their existence, or non-existence, can be ascertained by the operation of the computer program.” 59C(1)(a) allows that the contents of a participant’s plan may be determined by an automated administrative action. Anyone familiar with how complex even a single participant’s disabilities and functional support needs can be, let alone every potential participant, would be concerned at the suggestion that a complete, “objective” set of circumstances and rules could be specified in order to determine suitable contents for any participant’s plan.
Additionally, 59D(4) requires that the “CEO must ensure” the computer program “provides for the making of each evaluative determination in a way that is consistent with the standard operating procedure instrument”. As a software engineer I can attest that this is, for all intents and purposes, impossible. Even the simplest small programs with strict bounds on the inputs can be extremely difficult to test exhaustively. The GNU date utility is a small computer program installed on the vast majority of Linux computers across the world, that has a fairly simple job: to “print or set the system date and time”. It was first released in 1992, and in the past 34 years there have been hundreds (probably thousands) of bugs discovered and fixed in the software. Administrative actions as detailed as determining the contents of a participant’s plan will require programs that are orders of magnitude more complex than the date utility. Legislation suggesting that the CEO could ensure that a computer program to perform such an action would do so consistently with a standard operating procedure is objectively unrealistic, and its inclusion without any sort of requirement that the testing procedures, input data and results from ongoing continuous testing be published for review is either (i) a sign that this legislation was drafted without consultation with competent software engineers, or (ii) an attempt to give the agency license to pass off any number of administrative actions to unknowable computer systems with no quality control or accountability.
Submission 2839
59E(1-3) “CEO to ensure administrative action is action that could be validly taken” state that if a computer program takes an administrative action that could not validly be taken, it is still valid. As written, if a computer program that was supposed to take the administrative action of sending a notice about a payment instead took the administrative action of suspending a participant from the scheme, that would be considered a valid administrative action.
59E(4-5) require that the agency “must inform the person of the fact that the administrative action was taken by the operation of a computer program”, but explicitly make the administrative action still valid if that notice is not given. There is no reasonable justification to make it a legislative requirement that participants be notified if actions that affect them are being taken by an automated computer system, but also explicitly make those actions legally binding anyway even if the participant isn’t notified. If this legislation goes through as is, in the very likely event that fallible software makes bad decisions and participants are not made aware that software made those decisions, by what mechanism is it expected that the legislative requirement of notice will be enforced? At best, a participant who suspects that a computer program took the administrative action could submit an FOI request, making it again incumbent on the agency to provide that information, and to provide it in a timely fashion if the participant wishes to submit for an internal review.