SUBMISSION
Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment
(Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026
SECURING THE NDIS REQUIRES GOOD GOVERNANCE
Market Stewardship, Safety and the Profound Disability Cohort
Submitted by 7 July 2026
Executive summary I am the mother and full-time carer of , a 27-year-old man with Angelman syndrome and profound intellectual disability. I have cared for him for 27 years and have lived through both the state-based disability system and the evolution of the NDIS.
I support the NDIS, strong action against fraud, reform where supports have moved beyond the intended purpose of the Scheme, and the objective of securing the NDIS for future generations.
My concern is that sustainability is being considered too narrowly. Financial sustainability is essential, but a disability scheme is only truly sustainable if the system required to deliver it is safe, capable, resilient and able to continue supporting people with the highest needs.
What does the Commonwealth reasonably expect the NDIS market to provide, and what does government accept responsibility for stewarding itself?
This submission asks the Committee to examine five linked issues:
whether sustainability is being treated too predominantly as a problem of expenditure control rather than governance; the unresolved allocation of responsibility for stewardship of the NDIS market; whether the scale and fragmentation of the provider market inhibit effective regulation, safeguarding and long-term investment;
whether stronger fraud and compliance powers are being accompanied by sufficient scrutiny of upstream governance and prevention failures; and whether policy and pricing reforms are separately stress-tested for participants with profound intellectual disability and complex support needs.
I use the July 2026 Short Term Accommodation pricing changes as a live case study in pricing governance and implementation. I also ask Parliament to consider whether alternative purpose-led market structures—including ideas associated with the ‘Capitalism 2.0’ approach—deserve serious examination.
My central submission is simple: securing the NDIS for future generations requires clarity about who is responsible for the health of the system itself.
- Sustainability is a governance question The Bill strengthens powers relating to pricing, fraud, compliance and provider regulation. These may all be necessary.
However, they are predominantly mechanisms for controlling activity within the Scheme. My concern is that Parliament may be strengthening control of the NDIS without adequately addressing responsibility for the health of the system itself.
Who is responsible for ensuring Australia has:
a skilled disability workforce; specialist expertise for people with complex and profound disability; adequate provider capacity; specialist respite infrastructure; investment in training and research; capital investment in disability services; and a resilient provider market capable of operating over decades?
If the answer is the market, Parliament should ask what evidence demonstrates that the market will reliably provide these things.
If the answer is government, responsibility must be clearly allocated. Is it the
NDIA? The NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission? The relevant
Commonwealth department? State and territory governments? If responsibility is shared, who is accountable for ensuring the pieces come together?
A critical function in a national disability system should have an identifiable owner. If nobody clearly owns responsibility for the long-term health of the NDIS market, that is a governance gap.
- Market stewardship remains unresolved The Independent Review into the NDIS has already identified this problem. Its analysis found that poor market outcomes partly reflected a lack of a clear, coherent and transparent strategy to steward the NDIS market. It also found that governments - the NDIA, NDIS Commission, Department of Social Services and states and territories - had not implemented clear roles and responsibilities to develop the NDIS market.[1]
This is significant. The NDIS does not simply fund services. It depends upon a market to create and deliver those services. That market is therefore part of the infrastructure of the Scheme.
If the objective of this Bill is to secure the NDIS for future generations, I respectfully submit that Parliament must ask whether strengthening controls over the market is sufficient while responsibility for stewardship of that market remains unclear.
Regulation and stewardship are not the same thing.
Regulation responds to rules, standards and breaches. Stewardship asks whether the system we have created is capable of delivering what Australians with disability will need in five, ten and twenty years.
Who is actively asking where specialist markets are failing, where the future workforce will come from, which providers can invest in specialist expertise, where disability infrastructure is required, and what happens when the market does not create a service because it is expensive, specialised and serves a relatively small cohort?
These are not peripheral questions. They are questions of sustainability.
- Is the current provider market governable? I am concerned that the structure and fragmentation of the NDIS provider market itself may inhibit effective regulation and stewardship.
The Australian National Audit Office found that the NDIS Quality and Safeguards
Commission was only partly effective in exercising its regulatory functions and did not have full visibility of the market it regulates.[2]
This should concern Parliament.
My concern is not that unregistered providers are inherently poor providers. Many provide excellent support. My question is structural.
Is a regulator being asked to regulate a market whose scale, fragmentation and uneven visibility have made effective oversight extraordinarily difficult?
Registered providers are required to meet detailed standards and undergo audit and oversight. At the same time, a very large unregistered provider market has developed.
If Parliament is strengthening provider regulation and compliance powers, it should also examine whether the architecture of the provider market allows those powers to be used effectively and consistently.
More regulation does not necessarily create better governance if the regulator cannot adequately see, understand and assess the market it is responsible for regulating.
A seed: examine the structure of the market itself One model that has influenced my thinking is the ‘Capitalism 2.0’ approach proposed by Michael Traill AM and others. I do not present this model as a complete or singular solution to the challenges facing the NDIS. I raise it because it asks a question I believe has been largely absent from NDIS reform:
Can the structure of the market itself be redesigned to produce better outcomes?
The current debate can sometimes appear to offer two choices: greater government control or continued reliance on a highly fragmented private market. I do not believe these are the only choices.
Alternative models could bring together well-governed, purpose-led organisations at sufficient scale to invest in workforce development, training, technology, research, specialist expertise and physical infrastructure. Capital could be used to build long-term capability, with governance structures and the use of surplus aligned to the social purpose of the Scheme.
Australia has already demonstrated through Goodstart Early Learning that scale, institutional capital and social-purpose governance can be used to reshape a fragmented essential-service market. Social Ventures Australia describes Goodstart as a model in which social and commercial issues were considered together to build a viable and sustainable financial model.[3]
I am not asking the Committee to endorse a particular model through this Bill. I am asking Parliament to plant a seed:
If the structure of the existing NDIS market is contributing to fraud, regulatory difficulty, inconsistent quality and inadequate long-term investment, should market structure itself become a legitimate subject of reform?
Structural reform will inevitably affect existing interests. That cannot, in itself, be a reason to avoid examining it.
The NDIS provider market has grown rapidly and now represents a significant economic constituency. I understand the political difficulty of proposing reforms that may be opposed by people whose businesses or livelihoods are tied to the current structure.
However, at what point does preserving the existing market structure become more important than examining whether that structure is producing the safest, most sustainable and most economically responsible Scheme?
Political difficulty is not evidence that reform is wrong.
Participants and families are repeatedly asked to accept difficult reforms in the interests of Scheme sustainability: pricing changes, funding reforms, new planning arrangements, stronger compliance and changes to what the Scheme will fund.
If participants are expected to tolerate uncomfortable reform to secure the NDIS for future generations, the structure of the provider market should be open to the same scrutiny.
If alternative market structures could reduce fraud, strengthen safeguarding, improve investment in workforce and infrastructure and deliver better value for public money, they deserve rigorous examination on their merits.
The lives of people with disability and the sustainability of the NDIS are too important for structural questions to remain unasked simply because the answers may be politically uncomfortable.
We should not assume that the market architecture created during the early years of the NDIS is the only market architecture available to us. Securing the NDIS for future generations may require us to be as willing to redesign the market as we are to redesign the rules that operate within it.
- Fraud: enforcement must be accompanied by examination of governance failure I strongly support action against fraud. Every dollar stolen from the NDIS is a dollar taken from people like my son.
However, I am concerned that fraud is too often framed primarily as a failure of dishonest participants and providers.
The ANAO found the NDIA’s management of claimant compliance only partly effective. It reported that, prior to 2024, the NDIS lacked basic prevention controls for claim fraud and non-compliance and identified deficiencies in the frameworks and processes used to manage claimant compliance.[4]
This raises an important question:
Before Parliament grants further downstream enforcement powers, has it sufficiently examined the upstream governance weaknesses that allowed fraud and non-compliance to proliferate?
Fraud should be prosecuted. But prosecution occurs after failure.
Good governance also asks how the conditions for widespread fraud developed and why preventative controls were inadequate. If the answer to fraud is simply more compliance after the event, we risk treating the symptom while leaving the architecture that enabled it largely untouched.
I support the fraud and compliance objectives of this Bill. I ask the Committee to ensure that accountability flows in both directions.
Participants and providers must be accountable for their conduct. The institutions responsible for designing, administering and safeguarding the Scheme must also be accountable for the effectiveness of the systems they create.
- Can Australia demonstrate that the most vulnerable participants are safer? My son cannot independently assess provider quality.
He cannot read an audit report. He cannot understand a conflict of interest. He cannot reliably identify grooming, financial exploitation or systemic neglect. He has limited capacity to communicate abuse.
He is entirely dependent on other human beings behaving ethically and on the systems around those human beings being strong enough to detect when they do not.
For , safeguarding is not an administrative concept. It is the difference between safety and vulnerability.
The Disability Royal Commission examined the nature, extent and impact of violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation in disability service provision, including the roles and responsibilities of the NDIA and NDIS Quality and Safeguards
Commission.[5]
More than a decade after the introduction of the NDIS, I ask:
Can the Commonwealth demonstrate, through robust and comparable longitudinal evidence, that participants with profound intellectual disability particularly those with limited or no capacity to identify, communicate or report abuse - are safer from violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation?
I am not asserting that abuse has increased under the NDIS. I am asking whether we can reliably demonstrate that it has decreased.
If we cannot measure this, how are we measuring the success of the safeguarding architecture?
The Bill strengthens provider regulation and compliance. The Committee should ask what safety outcomes these powers are expected to achieve and how Parliament will know whether they have achieved them.
Financial sustainability can be measured. Participant numbers can be measured. Scheme expenditure can be measured. Fraud investigations can be counted.
The safety of people like my son must also be measured.
- The profound-disability cohort must be separately stress-tested One of my greatest concerns is that NDIS policy is increasingly designed across an extraordinarily diverse participant population without adequately stress-testing its impact on people at the extreme end of support need.
is one of those people.
Before the NDIS, the state-based disability system was far from perfect. Services were rationed. Choice was limited. Families fought for support.
However, in my experience, specialist respite for people with profound disability was recognised as a specific public need.
My son accessed specialist respite accommodation. It was purpose-built for people with significant disability. In Queensland, my experience was of an allocation of respite nights each year for those with the highest support needs. Respite was understood not simply as a collection of support-worker hours but as part of the infrastructure required to sustain families providing lifelong care.
The NDIS changed the model. Individual participants were funded to purchase supports from a market. The assumption appears to have been that the market would create the services and infrastructure participants required.
Has that assumption been adequately tested for people with profound disability?
People like are a small cohort. But they are the cohort for whom system failure carries the greatest consequence.
A policy may work for the majority of NDIS participants and still create serious risk for people with the fewest alternatives. Those people must not become an unintended consequence of reform.
- Short Term Accommodation: a live case study in pricing governance The July 2026 changes to Short Term Accommodation provide a current example of my concern.
I understand the intent of the reform. I agree that participants should only claim for supports they actually receive. I am also aware of concerns that Short Term Accommodation has, in some cases, been used in ways that resemble holidays rather than disability-related respite.
I support reform where the original purpose of a support has been lost.
However, a reform that addresses misuse in one part of the Scheme must be tested for unintended consequences in another.
My son’s provider operates respite from a permanently rented house. It is not a purpose-built specialist facility. The provider rents an ordinary house and does everything possible to make it work for people with significant disability. Other providers use hotels and short-term rental accommodation.
What does the NDIA reasonably expect the market to provide?
The 2026–27 Annual Pricing Review recommended separately pricing Short Term Accommodation and new support items based on actual hours of support delivered.[6] A pricing schedule can place a price on accommodation and
support. But a pricing schedule cannot, by itself, create a national network of specialist respite infrastructure.
Who is responsible for ensuring Australia has adequate specialist respite capacity for people with profound disability?
If it is the market, what evidence demonstrates that a fragmented provider market will invest in expensive, specialised, long-term infrastructure for a relatively small and highly complex cohort?
If it is state and territory governments, where is the clearly articulated division of responsibility?
If it is the Commonwealth, which agency owns the responsibility?
My concern was heightened by the implementation of the recent pricing changes.
My son’s provider sought clarification from the NDIA several times and reported receiving different answers. She also sought advice from plan managers and support coordinators who were uncertain about the new arrangements.
This provider was not attempting to exploit a loophole. She was trying to comply.
Yet the burden of interpreting a significant pricing reform appeared to fall onto the frontline.
Would a well-governed reform not aim for consistent guidance, worked examples, sector-wide education and confidence that the same question will receive the same answer?
Pricing governance is not only the power to set a price. It is also the responsibility to understand the consequences of that price, communicate the reform clearly and ensure it can be consistently implemented.
For participants with profound disability, I believe major pricing and policy changes should be subject to specific cohort-based impact assessment before implementation.
A policy designed to stop inappropriate use of Short Term Accommodation may be entirely justified. But Parliament should still ask whether every stone was turned over.
What evidence was gathered about participants with profound disability? What modelling was undertaken on providers carrying permanent property costs?
What impact was assessed on specialist respite capacity? What happens if the market responds by withdrawing from high-complexity respite?
These are not arguments against reform. They are the questions good governance should ask before reform is implemented.
- Sustainability must be measured beyond expenditure I understand why government is concerned about the financial trajectory of the NDIS. I share the desire to preserve the Scheme.
But I respectfully ask Parliament not to define sustainability only through expenditure growth.
A sustainable NDIS should also be able to demonstrate:
that participants are safer; that quality of support is improving; that the provider market is resilient; that specialist services remain available; that critical disability infrastructure exists; and that informal family care is sustainable.
Family carers are part of the economic architecture of the NDIS whether the Scheme formally recognises this or not.
For 27 years I have provided care to my son. Respite has allowed me to continue.
If policy changes make specialist respite less available or financially inaccessible to participants with profound disability, the cost does not disappear.
Risk is transferred.
It transfers to providers. It transfers to participants. It transfers to families. Eventually, it may transfer back to government through crisis, carer collapse and the need for more intensive formal care.
A sustainable Scheme must understand where risk is being transferred, not simply where expenditure is being reduced.
Recommendations
I respectfully ask the Committee to consider recommending that:
-
Major NDIS pricing and policy reforms be subject to published cohort-specific impact assessments, including a distinct assessment of participants with profound intellectual disability and complex support needs.
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The Commonwealth establish and publish a clear NDIS market stewardship framework allocating responsibility between the NDIA, the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission, the relevant Commonwealth department and state and territory governments for workforce capability, specialist infrastructure, thin markets, specialist service capacity and market failure.
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Major pricing reforms be accompanied, before commencement, by authoritative guidance, detailed worked examples and a coordinated sector education and implementation strategy.
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The NDIS report against non-financial sustainability measures, including participant safety, quality, provider-market resilience, specialist service capacity, critical infrastructure and the sustainability of informal care.
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Parliament formally examine whether the scale, fragmentation and structure of the NDIS provider market inhibits effective regulation, fraud prevention, safeguarding, capital investment and long-term service capacity, and consider alternative purpose-led market structures capable of aligning scale, capital, governance and social purpose.
Conclusion
I have cared for my son for 27 years.
I do not want the NDIS weakened.
I do not want fraud tolerated.
I do not believe every service or practice that existed previously should be preserved simply because it existed before.
I want the NDIS to survive.
But securing the NDIS for future generations requires more than controlling expenditure and strengthening enforcement.
It requires clarity about who is responsible for the health of the system itself.
If the market is expected to care for some of Australia’s most vulnerable citizens, Parliament must ask whether that market is being deliberately stewarded or merely regulated after failure occurs.
Participants and families are being asked to accept difficult reform for the sustainability of the Scheme.
Government must be equally willing to ask difficult questions of the architecture it created.
What does government reasonably expect the market to provide?
Who is responsible when the market does not provide it?
Is the structure of the market itself contributing to the problems we are now trying to regulate?
For participants like my son, these questions are not theoretical.
Their safety, dignity and continuity of care depend on the answers.
References
References
[1] NDIS Review, “The role of pricing and payment approaches in improving NDIS market outcomes”, section 2, “What tools do governments have to address market challenges?”, Independent Review into the National Disability Insurance Scheme, 2023. The Review states that poor market outcomes reflect in part a lack of a “clear, coherent and transparent strategy to steward the NDIS market” and that governments and relevant agencies had not implemented clear roles and responsibilities to develop the market.
[2] Australian National Audit Office, Effectiveness of the NDIS Quality and
Safeguards Commission’s Regulatory Functions, Auditor-General Report No. 2
of 2025–26, audit conclusion, paragraph 6. The ANAO concluded that the Commission was “partly effective” and “does not have full visibility of the market it regulates”.
[3] For Purpose Investment Partners, “FPIP – News & Updates”, material describing Michael Traill AM’s Capitalism 2.0 approach as bringing private-sector capital and capabilities into businesses and projects to create significant social impact; and Social Ventures Australia, “Goodstart: a story of impact investing”, which states that the Goodstart transaction required both realistic and achievable social impact and a viable and sustainable financial model.
[4] Australian National Audit Office, National Disability Insurance Agency’s
Management of Claimant Compliance with National Disability Insurance Scheme
Claim Requirements, Auditor-General Report No. 48 of 2024–25, 25 June 2025, audit conclusion, paragraph 6. The ANAO concluded that the NDIA’s management of claimant compliance was “partly effective” and that, prior to 2024, the NDIS “lacked basic prevention controls for fraud and non-compliance”.
[5] Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability, Final Report, Volume 10: Disability services, 29 September 2023. Volume 10 examines the nature, extent and impact of violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation in disability service provision and considers the roles and responsibilities of the NDIA and the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission.
[6] National Disability Insurance Agency, Annual Pricing Review for 2026–27
prices, 2 June 2026, p. 58, Recommendation 3 (Short Term Accommodation); and NDIA, NDIS pricing schedule effective 1 July 2026.
Official inquiry
Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee, National Disability Insurance
Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026.