Submission 2973 — Newcastle Social Workers — NDIS Future Generations Bill

Submission to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation

Committee

Inquiry into the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment

(Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026

Newcastle Social Workers

Kurt Walker, Director. Registered Social Worker (AASW)

Newcastle, NSW

7 July 2026

1. About Newcastle Social Workers Newcastle Social Workers is a small, independent, NDIS-registered provider of support coordination in Newcastle, New South Wales, established in 2023 with a single purpose: to deliver high-quality, genuinely independent support coordination to participants in the Newcastle and Hunter region. The service is provided by experienced, qualified professionals. We deliberately do not deliver other NDIS supports. We do not provide supported independent living (SIL), core supports, therapy or plan management, and we accept no referral arrangements that would compromise our independence. Every recommendation we make is made solely in the participant’s interest, because we have no other service line to which a referral could be directed.

2. Summary of our position We support the objectives of lifting quality, accountability and value for money in support coordination. Our concern is that the Bill in its current form will achieve the opposite. The Bill asks the Parliament to legislate the replacement of an entire market, with commissioned plan management panels from 1 October 2027 and a commissioned “support coordination and connection function” from 1 July 2028. We don’t have any details about the design. No selection criteria, no definition of “quality”, no panel size, no payment mechanics and no transition arrangements.1, 2 In the two-year interim, a seven-year price freeze is forcing the independent, registered, locally-based providers (that any quality panel would want to commission) out of the market, while providers that use support coordination as an internal referral channel for their other services remain.3, 4 The sequencing is backwards. Pricing must be corrected and mandatory registration brought forward first, so that the Agency has a viable market and proper oversight of it before any commissioning model is designed. On

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the current timeline, the panel of 2028 will be selected from whatever remains of the market, not from its best.

3. What the Bill proposes and what it does not say The Bill gives effect to the reform package announced by the Minister for Health, Disability and Ageing, the Hon Mark Butler MP, at the National Press Club on 22 April 2026. The Minister announced that intermediary services will be commissioned from a list of “accountable, quality providers”; that government aims to reduce spending on support coordination and plan management by 30%; that a commissioned plan management panel will begin from 1 October 2027 with a six-month transition; and that a “new, more efficient support coordination and connection function” will be commissioned from 1 July 2028.2 Schedule 3 of the Bill also transfers NDIS pricing decisions from the Agency to the Minister, enabling differentiated pricing by registration status, remoteness and qualifications.1

Beyond those dates and the single phrase “accountable, quality providers”, providers and participants have been told almost nothing. It is not known what criteria will govern entry to the approved list. Will “quality” be measured by registration history, audit outcomes, workforce qualifications, participant outcomes or simply organisational scale? How many providers will be commissioned in each region? How will they be paid? What happens to existing provider-participant relationships at transition? The NDIA’s own Annual Pricing Review for 2026-27, released on 25 June 2026, does not mention the commissioned panel model once: no transition pricing, no design signal, even though it describes the very market being legislated out of existence.3 The amendments the Government agreed with the Australian Greens on 23 June 2026 leave the intermediary commissioning provisions entirely unchanged.4, 5

We ask the Committee to recognise this for what it is: Parliament is being asked to authorise a market redesign whose every feature will be decided later, and largely out of public view. The Committee’s interim report has already identified, consistently across more than 4,000 submissions, that the pace of reform is being driven by budget timelines rather than readiness.5 A 30% savings target has been announced for support coordination before the model that is supposed to deliver both the savings and the quality has been designed.

4. The market is being hollowed out before commissioning begins The commissioned panel model depends on a pool of quality, viable providers still existing when panels are formed in 2027 and 2028. Current pricing policy makes that assumption untenable. The NDIS Pricing Arrangements and Price Limits 2026-27 left support coordination price limits (Levels 2 and 3) unchanged for the seventh consecutive year; they have not moved since 2019-20.3 Over the same period providers have absorbed every cost increase applying to the rest of the sector: successive Fair Work Commission increases under the SCHADS Award, Payday Super obligations from 1 July 2026, and portable long service leave levies of 1.7 to 2.2% of gross wages in New South Wales and four other jurisdictions.3 One side of the ledger has been held flat for seven years while the other rises every year. This is squeezing quality independent providers out of existence.

The NDIA’s own evidence explains the problem. This year’s Annual Pricing Review finds a “material gap” between the role support coordinators actually perform (cross-system

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navigation, crisis response, intensive capacity building and substantial non-billable work) and the pricing basis that assumes a far narrower function, yet defers any action to a new twelve month pilot.3 Meanwhile, growth in provider numbers shows distress rather than health: of 11,129 active support coordination providers in the six months to December 2025, more than 5,600 supported five or fewer participants, with average payments between $2,000 and $10,300. Those are the figures of experienced practitioners leaving unviable businesses and coming back as sole traders, not of a confident market.3

Operating an independent, registered, appropriately staffed support coordination service on 2019 prices, with 2026 wages, superannuation, insurance, registration and audit costs, leaves margins so slim that each year of the freeze is a year closer to closure, for us and every business like us. The providers that can endure this are, overwhelmingly, those for which support coordination is not the business but a business development function used to generate internal referrals to SIL, core supports or therapy services within the same organisation. The current settings are a filter that removes independent providers and retains the conflicted teams and unsupervised sole traders. If nothing changes before 2028, the “approved quality providers” list will be drawn from a market in which independence has already been priced out. If the government is not going to place any value on unconflicted, NDIS-registered, independent NDIS support coordination when it comes to commissioning the service, we need to know.

5. The right sequence: fund it properly, then register it, then reform it I’ve been saying this for years now. If the Government wants to improve the quality of support coordination, two things must happen, in order. First, pricing must be corrected: an immediate indexation to restore the seven years of foregone increases to a defensible baseline, followed by a permanent, predictable indexation mechanism. Second, mandatory registration of support coordination providers should be brought forward as fast as possible. Registration gives the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission and the Agency genuine oversight of the market: visibility of who is practising, enforceable practice standards, audits, and a compliance history on which any later commissioning decision could actually be based. This is consistent with the NDIS Review’s recommendation of a graduated, risk proportionate regulatory model covering all providers,6 with the advice of the NDIS Provider and Worker Registration Taskforce, which identified support coordination as a priority for mandatory registration precisely because of its intermediary position and conflict-of-interest risk,7 and with the Disability Royal Commission’s findings on the need for stronger provider regulation.8

The order matters because registration imposes real costs (audit, systems and compliance staffing) that providers on frozen 2019 prices cannot absorb. Asking providers to pay more to remain registered in a market the Government has announced it intends to replace is a double burden that will accelerate the exit of exactly the wrong providers.3 Priced properly and registered soon, the market would give the Agency most of what commissioning promises, quality assurance, accountability and integrity, without destroying participant choice or local markets. The Government has not shown why a single government-selected panel would deliver better outcomes than a properly priced and regulated open market.

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6. Choice and control Choice and control is not an optional design feature of the NDIS. It is written into the law itself as one of the scheme’s core purposes. Section 3 of the NDIS Act makes enabling people with disability to exercise choice and control in the planning and delivery of their supports an object of the scheme, and section 4 provides that people with disability have the same right as other members of Australian society to determine their own best interests, including the right to exercise choice and control.9 Article 19 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities protects the right to choose services on an equal basis with others.10

Restricting participants to a government-vetted list necessarily reduces that choice. How severely depends entirely on the unpublished design. A deep panel with strong regional coverage restricts choice modestly. A thin panel of large national organisations (a 30% savings target hints at this being most likely) restricts it drastically. Support coordination is a relationship built on trust. It often requires assertive outreach, as well as local knowledge of an area’s community organisations, health services, housing system and providers. A panel weighted toward scale and national reach would replace that local, relational model with call centre navigation, and participants would receive lower-quality services. If commissioning proceeds, the legislation or rules must guarantee a genuine choice among multiple providers in every region, including small and medium locally-based providers, and protect continuity of existing relationships at transition.

7. Conflicts of interest, including supported independent living Where the same organisation provides a participant’s support coordination and other funded supports, the coordinator’s employer has a direct financial interest in the referral decisions the coordinator makes. In our observation of the local market, that conflict is poorly managed in practice. Support coordination is increasingly used to gather internal referrals, and participants are not reliably offered the highest-quality options for their needs.

The conflict is most acute in supported independent living. SIL is typically the largest single item in a participant’s plan, and the largest SIL providers have built internal support coordination arms whose practical function includes protecting the SIL arrangement that pays their wages. A support coordinator employed by a participant’s SIL provider cannot independently monitor the quality of that SIL, cannot credibly recommend a change of provider, and cannot advocate against their own employer’s interest when supports fail. The Disability Royal Commission’s group homes hearing documented residents living with violence, neglect and a profound absence of choice and control, and its Final Report addressed at length the risks created when providers hold concentrated power over the lives of the people they support.8, 11 The NDIS Review’s Final Report likewise recommended structural separation in housing and living supports specifically to remove conflicts of interest and providers’ capacity to exert power and control over participants.6 The same logic applies to support coordination. SIL and support coordination should not be provided to the same participant by the same organisation or related entities, whether under the current arrangements or any commissioned model (Recommendation 4).

One final issue. Among the large organisations best positioned by scale, tender capability and balance sheet to win commissioned contracts are providers whose treatment of people

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with disabilities was the subject of adverse case-study findings and evidence before the Disability Royal Commission.8 A commissioning process that measures “quality” by organisational scale and tender-writing capacity, rather than by verified practice history, independence and workforce qualifications, risks entrenching at the centre of the scheme the very organisations the Royal Commission was called to examine, while independent providers with clean records, strong local networks and specialist professional workforces have been priced out before the process begins.

8. Recommendations Recommendation 1. The intermediary commissioning provisions should not proceed until the Government has published, and consulted publicly on, the full design of the commissioned model. This would include the selection criteria, the definition and measurement of provider quality, panel size and regional coverage, payment mechanics and transition arrangements.

Recommendation 2. Support coordination pricing must be fixed first. The Committee should recommend an immediate, evidence-based correction to support coordination price limits after seven years without indexation, and a permanent, predictable indexation mechanism, consistent with the findings of the NDIA’s own Annual Pricing Review.

Recommendation 3. Mandatory registration of support coordination providers should be brought forward, following the pricing correction, to give the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission and the Agency genuine oversight of the market before any commissioning decision is made, consistent with the NDIS Review and the NDIS Provider and Worker Registration Taskforce. The majority of the individual sole traders would immediately align themselves with a registered provider, which would quickly increase oversight whilst reducing overall provider numbers.

Recommendation 4. Providing supported independent living and support coordination to the same participant by the same organisation or related entities should be prohibited, with a narrowly drawn exception for very remote areas where no alternative provider exists.

Recommendation 5. Any ‘approved provider’ criteria must give weight to independence (the absence of conflicting services), locality and local knowledge, registration and compliance history, and workforce qualifications and experience, not organisational scale. Participants must retain a genuine choice among multiple providers in every region, including small and medium locally-based registered providers, with continuity protections for existing provider relationships.

Recommendation 6. Providers with adverse findings arising from the Disability Royal Commission or substantiated NDIS Commission compliance action should be ranked well below providers with clean records in any commissioning process (if not excluded entirely).

Recommendation 7. Interim viability measures should apply until the commissioned model is designed and consulted on. Some possible measures could be: no new or increased registration costs for currently registered support coordination providers, a premium paid outside of participants’ plans to independent, registered SC providers until pricing has been adjusted, and transition support sufficient to ensure that quality independent providers still exist when panels are formed.

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I’d like to thank the Committee for the opportunity to make this submission and for the

extension of the inquiry, which has allowed small providers such as ours to contribute. |

I would welcome the opportunity to give evidence at a public hearing.

Kurt Walker

Newcastle Social Workers

Director. Registered Social Worker (AASW)

Newcastle, NSW

7 July 2026

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References

1. National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026, introduced 14 May 2026 and referred to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee; Bill and Explanatory Memorandum, Parliament of Australia (aph.gov.au).

2. The Hon Mark Butler MP, Address to the National Press Club, 22 April 2026; ‘Securing the NDIS for future generations’, Department of Health, Disability and Ageing (health.gov.au).

3. NDIS Pricing Arrangements and Price Limits 2026-27, NDIA, effective 1 July 2026; NDIA Annual Pricing Review 2025-26; Disability Intermediaries Australia, media release, 25 June 2026 (intermediaries.org.au).

4. Disability Intermediaries Australia, media release, 25 June 2026: analysis of the effect of the 23 June 2026 amendments on intermediary commissioning provisions.

5. Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee, Interim Report: NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026, tabled 23 June 2026 (aph.gov.au).

6. NDIS Review, Working Together to Deliver the NDIS: Final Report, December 2023 (ndisreview.gov.au), including recommendations on a graduated risk-proportionate regulatory model and on structural separation in housing and living supports.

7. NDIS Provider and Worker Registration Taskforce, Advice to Government, 2024 (dss.gov.au).

8. Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability, Final Report, September 2023 (disability.royalcommission.gov.au).

9. National Disability Insurance Scheme Act 2013 (Cth), ss 3 and 4.

10. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, art 19.

11. Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability, Report on Public hearing 3, The experience of living in a group home for people with disability (Melbourne, December 2019).

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