Submission to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee
Inquiry into the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for
Future Generations) Bill 2026
To the Committee,
I am writing as a concerned Australian citizen to express my opposition to significant aspects of the proposed amendments to the National Disability Insurance Scheme.
I make this submission as a citizen who has had exposure to disability, caring responsibilities, and administrative systems from a number of different perspectives. Those experiences have given me an appreciation for the importance of transparency, accountability, procedural fairness, and meaningful review rights in systems that support vulnerable Australians.
My concerns about this Bill are not confined to its potential impact on NDIS participants. They also relate to broader questions about how public institutions exercise power, how government decisions are scrutinised, and how trust in those institutions is maintained.
A recurring concern throughout this Bill is that powers are being expanded while safeguards are being weakened. As decision-making becomes more centralised, more automated, and more insulated from scrutiny, the need for transparency, accountability, parliamentary oversight, and meaningful review rights becomes greater. Yet many of the proposed reforms appear to move in the opposite direction.
I recognise that the NDIS must be financially sustainable and that governments have a legitimate responsibility to ensure public funds are spent appropriately. However, sustainability cannot be pursued at the expense of accountability, transparency, procedural fairness, independent review, and the rights of people with disability to exercise genuine choice and control over their lives.
My concern is not limited to the budgetary measures contained within the Bill. Rather, I am concerned by the broader direction of travel represented by these reforms. When viewed as a whole, the Bill appears to concentrate power within the executive government and the NDIA, reduce opportunities for independent scrutiny, expand administrative discretion, and increase reliance on automated systems and processes that may be difficult for participants to understand, challenge, or meaningfully review.
The NDIS was established on the principle that people with disability should have greater choice and control over the supports they receive and the lives they lead. Many aspects of this Bill appear to move decision-making authority away from participants and towards administrative systems, automated processes, and executive decision-makers. I am concerned that this represents a significant departure from one of the scheme’s foundational principles.
I am particularly concerned by the provisions that authorise the use of automated decision making by the NDIA.
Disability is not experienced in a uniform way. People’s circumstances, functional capacity, support needs, and ability to participate in daily life are highly individual. Many disabilities are episodic, fluctuating, invisible, or difficult to capture through standardised assessment tools. A person’s needs cannot always be accurately understood through predetermined categories, formulas, or data inputs.
While technology may have a role in supporting administrative processes, decisions about disability supports are fundamentally human decisions. They affect people’s safety, health, independence, education, employment, community participation, relationships, and quality of life.
My concern is not simply that automated systems may make mistakes. All decision-making systems, including those involving humans, are capable of error.
My concern is that disability support decisions can have profound consequences when errors occur. Decisions about supports may affect a person’s ability to shower safely, manage medications, attend medical appointments, remain employed, avoid social isolation, maintain stable housing, participate in education, or live independently. In some circumstances, inadequate or inappropriate supports may contribute to serious injury, significant deterioration in physical or mental health, hospitalisation, or death.
Disability is also an area in which unfair outcomes may be particularly difficult to detect. Participants often experience disability in highly individual ways, and the consequences of inadequate support may emerge gradually over time rather than immediately. Where decisions are influenced by algorithms, assessment tools, or automated processes that are not transparent, there is a risk that flawed assumptions, biases, or systematic underestimation of need may remain hidden for extended periods.
I am concerned that increasing reliance on automated decision-making risks creating a system in which important judgments are shaped by assumptions embedded within algorithms, assessment tools, and data models that are not transparent to participants and may not be readily open to scrutiny. If a person’s needs are underestimated at the assessment stage, or if the inputs relied upon by the system fail to reflect the reality of their circumstances, the resulting decisions may also be flawed.
This concern is particularly acute where assessments, scoring systems, or other intermediary processes effectively determine what supports a person is considered to require, while participants have limited ability to understand, challenge, or obtain review of those underlying determinations. A meaningful right of review requires more than the ability to challenge the final output. It requires the ability to challenge the foundations upon which that output was built. Otherwise, there is a risk that participants are left contesting outcomes while being unable to challenge the assumptions, methodologies, or inputs that actually drove those outcomes.
Australia’s experience with Robodebt demonstrated the risks that can arise when governments place excessive confidence in automated processes and administrative efficiency without adequate safeguards, transparency, human oversight, and accessible
avenues for review. The lesson of Robodebt was not simply that one particular program failed. It was that governments should exercise extreme caution when using automated systems to make or facilitate decisions affecting vulnerable people, particularly where those decisions have significant personal, legal, or financial consequences.
The concern is therefore not automation in isolation. It is the combination of automation, reduced transparency, diminished review rights, expanded administrative discretion, and reduced parliamentary oversight. Together, these measures create a greater risk that errors, biases, or flawed assumptions may go undetected and uncorrected, despite potentially serious consequences for those affected.
I am also concerned by provisions that appear to reduce opportunities for independent review and administrative scrutiny.
Independent review is not an inconvenience within a democratic system. It is an essential safeguard against error, inconsistency, unfairness, and unintended consequences. Where government agencies exercise powers that affect people’s rights, entitlements, and wellbeing, meaningful opportunities for independent review should be strengthened rather than weakened.
The extension of NDIA decision-making timeframes from 21 days to 90 days, combined with the removal of deemed refusal provisions, is concerning in this regard. Participants may be left waiting months for action while being deprived of practical avenues to challenge that inaction.
More broadly, I am concerned by what appears to be a trend towards reducing opportunities for independent scrutiny. In circumstances where tribunal decisions have highlighted deficiencies in decision-making or produced outcomes that were not favourable to the NDIA, the appropriate response should be to improve decision-making, policy, or legislation. It should not be to narrow review pathways or create new forms of decision-making that are more difficult to challenge.
A review process is only meaningful if individuals are able to contest the matters that are genuinely driving the outcome. Where important decisions are shaped by automated systems, assessment tools, internal methodologies, or discretionary processes that are not transparent or readily reviewable, there is a risk that review rights become increasingly formal rather than substantive.
Independent review also serves a broader public purpose beyond correcting individual decisions. Tribunal decisions help identify systemic issues, test administrative assumptions, improve decision-making quality, and promote consistency and accountability across government agencies. Measures that reduce access to meaningful review therefore affect not only individual participants but also the ability of the broader system to identify and correct recurring problems.
I am also concerned by the provisions allowing plans to be suspended, and potentially participant status revoked, where a person is considered “uncontactable”.
Many people with disability face circumstances that may affect their ability to respond to correspondence or engage with administrative processes. Hospitalisation, mental illness, cognitive impairment, communication barriers, family violence, housing instability, caring responsibilities, and periods of crisis are all realities that may affect a person’s ability to interact with government agencies. A system that risks suspending essential supports because a person is unable to engage with administrative processes may disproportionately affect those who are already among the most vulnerable.
Indeed, I am concerned that some of the people least able to navigate complex administrative systems will be those most likely to experience the greatest harm from these reforms. Individuals with cognitive disabilities, psychosocial disabilities, communication difficulties, limited literacy, limited advocacy support, or complex support needs may be least able to articulate their circumstances in ways that align with rigid criteria, standardised assessments, or automated decision-making processes. Yet these are often the very people for whom errors or misunderstandings can have the most serious consequences.
I am further concerned by the cumulative effect of expanded compliance powers, extensive record-keeping obligations, shortened claim periods, automated decision-making processes, broader ministerial discretion, and reduced avenues for review.
Each of these measures warrants scrutiny individually. Taken together, however, they point towards a scheme that is becoming more centralised, more administrative, more compliance-focused, and less accountable to the people it serves.
The provisions granting broad transitional rule-making powers to the Minister are particularly troubling. Significant changes to the operation of the NDIS should be determined through legislation subject to parliamentary debate and scrutiny.
I am concerned by provisions that would allow important aspects of the scheme to be altered through subordinate rules with limited parliamentary oversight. Such powers may be administratively convenient, but convenience should not come at the expense of democratic accountability.
More fundamentally, legislation of this significance should be sufficiently developed, consulted upon, scrutinised, and tested before enactment that extraordinary powers are not required to correct unforeseen problems after the fact. Parliament should not be asked to approve far-reaching reforms on the basis that substantial issues can later be addressed through executive rule-making with reduced scrutiny. If significant uncertainty exists about how the reforms will operate in practice, that uncertainty weighs in favour of greater parliamentary examination before implementation, not less.
I am also concerned that some measures presented as promoting sustainability may ultimately shift costs elsewhere rather than reducing them.
The consequences of unmet disability support needs do not disappear simply because funding is reduced or access becomes more difficult. Instead, those consequences may emerge elsewhere in the form of increased hospital presentations, greater reliance on
mental health services, increased demand for aged care and housing services, reduced workforce participation, and greater pressure on informal carers and family members.
The economic impacts extend beyond NDIS participants themselves. Family members and carers frequently reduce working hours, leave employment altogether, or experience financial hardship in order to fill gaps in support. Where participants lose supports that enable them to study, work, volunteer, or participate in their communities, there may also be broader economic and social consequences. Reforms should be assessed not only by their impact on NDIS expenditure but by their impact on the wider systems, families, communities, and economies that support people with disability.
Ultimately, my concern is that this Bill risks moving the NDIS further away from its original purpose. The scheme was intended to promote dignity, autonomy, inclusion, participation, and individualised support. Those objectives require decision-making processes that are transparent, accountable, reviewable, and responsive to the realities of people’s lives.
Reforms that affect some of Australia’s most vulnerable citizens should be approached with particular caution, especially where the consequences of error may be severe and where opportunities for independent scrutiny, review, and parliamentary oversight are being reduced.
I urge the Committee to recommend substantial amendments to the Bill. At a minimum, stronger safeguards should be introduced around automated decision-making, existing review rights should be preserved and strengthened, ministerial rule-making powers should be narrowed, and Parliament should ensure that accountability, transparency, and meaningful participant choice and control remain central features of the NDIS.
The success of the NDIS should not be measured solely by expenditure targets. It should also be measured by whether people with disability are able to live with dignity, participate fully in society, and have confidence that decisions affecting their lives are made fairly, transparently, and subject to meaningful oversight.