To the Community Affairs Legislation Committee
Dear Committee Members
Submission regarding the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the
NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026
My adult daughter who suffers from a brain injury receives NDIS support. I write in relation
to the proposed changes to the scheme. I am a retired lawyer who worked in the federal
public service for more than two decades.
Cost saving
As the changes are designed to moderate the rapidly increasing cost of the scheme, these are
some observations about some straightforward cost savings which could replace some of the
more severe pruning proposed for the budgets of NDIS participants:
1 Some NDIS registered providers make return of recently purchased, unused and
unopened products difficult, or refuse to allow returns. This can involve the loss of
thousands of dollars through wasted product, so reviewing the conditions under which
providers who supply scheme recipients should accept returns of goods. The
provisions of state fair trading legislation should apply to registered NDIS scheme
providers.
2 There should be increased scrutiny of providers involved with the NDIS. This would
result in a lot of cost savings.
I am aware of some individuals who are employed to assist scheme recipients with
administration of their plan, but are exploiting their position, and are not doing work
for which they claim payment.
For instance, my daughter manages her own support and liaison with the providers.
They have been the same providers since the start of her current plan. She had a very
good support coordinator upon whom she could call when she needed advice or help
with something, and she barely used any SC services in the 18 months since the
beginning of the current plan. She was managing to save her support budget for
situations that she thought she might need help with. Meanwhile there was nothing
that the coordinator needed to do.
However her support coordinator left the agency and my daughter was unaware that
he had left, and another person had taken over his position. My daughter discovered
that most of the money had been drained from her budget over a short period of
weeks, and discovered that it was due to claims for payment by a new support
coordinator, even though they had provided no service.
The support coordinator had not been involved in any substantive coordination work
nor would have had access to her budget and spending records. Yet in the support
coordinator responded to my daughter’s questions with what appeared to be an AI
generated answer. She claimed she had been “working through the plan
implementation which generally refers to the ongoing tasks involved in making sure
the plan is being used effectively. This can include things like:
reviewing the plan funding and support categories
assisting with identifying or engaging appropriate providers if needed
coordinating services and supports so they align with your goals
monitoring how the plan funding is tracking over time
assisting with planning for reports or information that may be required before
the next review
It doesn’t mean anything new has started with your plan — rather it’s the normal
coordination and oversight work that happens throughout the life of the plan”.
The support coordinator had no role in coordinating the supports for my daughter and
at the time for which she claimed payment for these generic services, my daughter
had been in hospital. So the payments claimed from the budget by the new support
coordinator appear extremely questionable.
This was the second time that a provider had acted dishonestly in relation to services
under the NDIS, presumably because the individuals involved assume that a person
with a brain injury will not question or understand what they are doing.
This kind of fraudulent charging of the NDIS for services that have not been rendered
needs to have better oversight. These are vulnerable clients. Not all clients would be
able to assess such claims by a provider, and the clients would be accused of
mismanaging their own budgets, when inf fact it was the service providers who had
whittled away the budget with questionable invoices.
I understand that other forms of exploitation occur. For instance when a group of
NDIS recipients are taken in a mini bus, the budgets of plans of each recipient is
charged the cost of the petrol and the cost of any person assisting the group, ie the
petrol cost is charged many times over and the service fee of the person is charged
many times over for the same service.
3 The legislation is proposes making it compulsory for NDIS recipients to use only
NDIS registered providers.
Registration as NDIS service providers is apparently very expensive and is an onerus
process, which deters many providers from applying for registration unless their main
income and clients are NDIS recipients. It is too expensive for providers who have a
mixed clients.
Registration should be made less expensive and less onerous because the providers
who take out registration and whose clients are mainly NDIS clients, charge
massively above the market pay rates for their services They can do this because
there is so little competition because so few are registered, and there is such a huge
number of people needing their services.
Making registration compulsory for NDIS service providers will make the
expenditure in NDIS much higher than it would be if registration was not as
expensive, or onerous, and there were therefore more providers able to apply for
registration.
With these high registration costs it is unwise to make it compulsory for NDIS clients
to use only NDIS registered providers unless the cost of registration is made more
affordable and the process for registration is made less onerous.
4 I understand that some of the big charities provide accommodation for NDIS clients.
The rental that they charge works out to be millions of dollars per client paid under
the NDIS scheme. The government would be able to save money if it bought property
and built special disability accommodation for the clients and allowed the charities to
assist the clients in those properties, instead of paying vast amounts of money in
rental.
Automated decision making
I understand from a newspaper report that
Funding and support plans for national disability insurance scheme
participants will be generated by a computer program and staff will have no
discretion to amend them, under a major overhaul of the NDIS to be rolled out
next year,…(Guardian newspaper 3 December 2025
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/dec/03/ndis-plans
computer-generated)
As a lawyer who worked in the public service, I have serious reservations about this
approach. Automated decision making could be useful and efficient, however in dealing with
the many nuances and variations in individual client circumstances it is imperative that
automated decisions are routinely overseen and reviewed by well trained human staff at
officer level, who should have the power to use their discretion within policy guidelines to
vary the automated decision. This would assist in avoiding injustices. The “Robodebt” fiasco
and suffering it caused is instructive of the dangers of relying on automated decision-making
without human review.
One of the most important safeguard provisions of administrative law is that administrative
decisions should not be made “under dictation” This is fundamental to our democracy, ie the
role of the public service in the three branches of democracy: legislature, executive, and
judiciary. Not “acting under dication” necessitates the exercise of human discretion.
Removal of humans and their discretion from the administrative decision-making diminishes
this democratic safeguard.
Moving NDIS clients to supports outside NDIS
This should be done with great caution, to ensure that the outside supports already exist, are
enduring, are adequate and that the person will meet the criteria for that outside support. This
could result in people “falling through cracks” between the NDIS and the outside support.
Funding decisions to be based on functional capacity and support needs
It is understood that the NDIS eligibility criteria will change to make funding decisions based
more on functional capacity and support needs than on medical diagnosis and specialist
reports. This sounds sensible, however it could be very difficult to demonstrate functional
incapacity and support needs using evidence other than medical diagnosis and specialist
reports.
This would be particularly the case for chronic conditions that fluctuate. The evidence that
will be required to demonstrate functional capacity should be determined with input from the
disability community and determined according to the needs of each disability. The relevant
advocacy and family support groups should be consulted before the required evidence is
decided.
Treatments required for NDIS eligibility
The requirement that a client must have undergone all possible treatments before being
considered to have a chronic condition is unreasonable. This requirement should not be
evaluated using automated decision-making, because in many cases particular treatments
cannot be accessed or may not be available to the client So making the treatments a
requirement for NDIS eligibility needs to have human assessment and flexibility in the
assessment of eligibility when those treatments are not available or can’t be accessed by the
client.
Thank you
Kind regards