Submission to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation
Committee
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for
Future Generations) Bill 2026
Submitted by: Speech Pathologist (2018 to present) and Primary School Teacher (2009 to present),
Melbourne, Victoria
June 2026
About This Submission
I am making this submission as both a speech pathologist and a primary school teacher. I have worked in education since 2009, across mainstream and specialist school settings, and have practised as a speech pathologist since 2018. My clinical work has focused particularly on supporting disabled children and adults with complex communication support needs.
These two roles have given me an unusual vantage point. I have sat with disabled adults who are trying to hold down jobs and maintain their place in their communities. I have watched children start school in settings that were not ready for them, and I have seen what that costs them. I have supported people to communicate when the system around them was not designed to listen. I am making this submission because the proposed changes in this Bill carry real risks for the people I work with, and I think those risks are not being adequately acknowledged.
I want to be clear that I am not opposed to reform. The NDIS has serious integrity problems and genuine sustainability pressures that need to be addressed. My concern is that a number of the provisions in this Bill will not fix those problems, and will instead create new ones for disabled people, their families, and the workers who support them.
Concerns About This Bill
- Restricting choice of support workers will cause direct harm One of my deepest concerns about the direction of current reform is the potential for disabled people to lose genuine choice over who supports them. I work with a young disabled woman who has built, over time, a team of support workers who know her, understand her communication, and enable her to do her job. That team was not assembled overnight. It took years. It represents an enormous amount of trust and relationship-building on her part. Without that team in place, she will not be able to fulfil her employment role. Her participation in the workforce depends directly on having support workers who are the right fit for her.
I have also heard, first-hand, from disabled people who cannot engage with their community because of a lack of support worker time, and because the support workers available to them do not share their values or understand their communication needs. When support workers are underpaid, undervalued and treated as interchangeable, the quality of support deteriorates. I have witnessed this directly. A support worker who has no job security, no genuine professional investment in the work, and no relationship with the person they are supporting is not in a position to provide the kind of support that makes a real difference to someone’s life.
Any reforms that reduce funding for support, restrict participant choice about who provides that support, or further compress the wages and conditions of support workers will compound a problem that is already serious. The workforce crisis in disability support is not separate from the scheme’s sustainability problems. It is part of them.
- Children are starting school without the support they need, and this Bill will make that worse
I have worked in schools for a long time. I have seen disabled children start school in mainstream settings where the right supports were simply not in place. I have seen what happens to a child when the environment is not set up for them, when the adults around them do not have the training, the time, or the resources to meet their needs. The consequences are not small. For some children, a poor start to school has effects that follow them for years.
The NDIS, at its best, is one of the mechanisms that makes a better start possible. Early intervention therapy, the right communication supports, access to workers who know the child before they start school: these things matter. When NDIS-funded capacity building supports are reduced, the gap does not disappear. It transfers to schools, to teachers, to teacher aides who are already stretched, and ultimately to the children themselves.
The proposed 50% reduction to social and civic participation budgets, and the 10% reduction to capacity building daily activity budgets, will reduce access to exactly the kind of early and ongoing support that makes a difference for disabled children’s development, learning and participation. I am not in a position to say with certainty what the precise downstream effects will be in every case. But I have seen enough to know that cutting these budgets will be felt in classrooms, and that the children most affected will be those with the fewest alternative options.
- The new permanence test does not reflect clinical reality The Bill introduces a provision that an impairment is not considered permanent unless the person has exhausted every appropriate treatment available in Australia. It further states that the assessment of what is ‘appropriate’ is not required to consider a person’s individual financial circumstances or geographic location.
As a speech pathologist, this provision concerns me significantly. Many of the people I work with have conditions that do not resolve with treatment. The goal of therapy is to build communication capacity and participation, not to cure an underlying condition. Under the proposed test, a child with developmental language disorder, or a person with a lifelong
communication disability, could be assessed as not having a permanent impairment because all available treatments have not been tried. This is not how disability works, and it is not how clinical practice works.
The geographic dimension is particularly troubling. For people in regional and rural areas, ‘available’ treatment is often a theoretical concept. Waitlists are long, specialists are scarce, and travel is a genuine barrier. The Bill appears to allow for permanence decisions to be made on the basis of what is available in Australia in principle, rather than what is actually accessible to the person being assessed. This will disproportionately affect people in areas where services are already thin on the ground.
- The functional capacity assessment framework lacks the detail needed to assess its impact
The move toward functional capacity assessment is not inherently wrong. A consistent, evidence-based approach to assessing support needs has some merit. The problem is that the Bill legislates the framework while leaving the detail of how assessments will actually work to delegated legislation and tools that have not yet been finalised or publicly consulted on.
From my clinical experience, a person’s functional capacity is not a fixed number. It varies with context, fatigue, anxiety, familiarity with the assessor, and a range of other factors. People with complex communication support needs are particularly vulnerable to underperforming in unfamiliar assessment contexts. A point-in-time assessment that does not account for this variability will produce results that do not reflect the person’s actual support needs. For children in particular, the stakes of an inaccurate assessment are very high.
I am also concerned about reassessment processes. Families I work with already describe the review and reassessment cycle as one of the most stressful aspects of the NDIS. Introducing a new assessment framework without adequate consultation on how it will work, who will conduct it, and what the appeal pathways will be adds uncertainty at a time when families and participants are already managing a great deal.
- Communication access and community participation must not be treated as optional
I want to name something that I think gets lost in conversations about NDIS sustainability. For many disabled people, particularly those with complex communication support needs, NDIS-funded supports are not extras. They are the difference between participating in their community and not participating. They are the difference between having relationships, having a job, having a voice, and not having those things.
I have heard directly from disabled people about being unable to engage with their community because their support worker hours were insufficient, or because the support workers available to them were not the right fit. These are not abstract participation outcomes. They are real losses of connection, dignity and self-determination. A scheme that is financially sustainable but fails to support participation is not fulfilling its purpose.
I want the committee to hold this in mind when considering the cumulative impact of the changes proposed in this Bill. Each individual measure may look modest. Together, they risk a significant reduction in what the NDIS actually enables disabled people to do and be.
Recommendations
I ask the committee to recommend the following before the Bill proceeds:
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Revise the permanence test to require that geographic location and financial circumstances be considered when assessing whether available treatments are genuinely accessible to the person
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Commission an independent analysis of the likely impact of proposed budget reductions on child development and educational outcomes before those changes are operationalised
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Commit to full public consultation on the functional capacity assessment tool and process before implementation, with specific attention to how assessment will account for variability in presentation and communication support needs
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Protect and strengthen participant rights to choose support workers, and ensure that any changes to plan management or provider arrangements do not reduce that choice in practice
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Commission a workforce review that genuinely addresses support worker pay, conditions and professional recognition as part of a scheme sustainability strategy, not separate from it
Conclusion
I have spent seventeen years working alongside disabled children, young people and adults in schools and clinical settings. I have seen what genuine support makes possible. I have also seen what happens when support is inadequate, inconsistent, or withdrawn. The consequences fall not just on the individual but on their families, their schools, and the workers who try to fill the gaps with insufficient resources.
The NDIS is worth protecting. I believe that. But the version of protection this Bill offers, in a number of its provisions, looks more like reduction than safeguarding. I am asking the committee to examine those provisions carefully, to listen to the people who will be directly affected, and to require changes that reflect the real-world impact of what is being proposed.
Thank you for the opportunity to make this submission.
Speech Pathologist & Primary School Teacher
Melbourne, Victoria
June 2026