Submission to the National Disability Insurance
Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for
Future Generations) Bill 2026
Attention: Committee Secretary, Senate Standing Committee on Community Affairs
Submitted by email: community.affairs.sen@aph.gov.au
Date: Wednesday 8th July 2026
I welcome the opportunity to make a submission to the Senate Standing Committee
on Community Affairs about the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment
(Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026.
I am an NDIS provider, and carer of an NDIS participant, as well as currently
supporting another family member through an access request.
I want to outline the harm this Amendment Bill will cause if it passes Parliament. This
Bill is too far-reaching to pass as it stands. I believe the Bill requires further scrutiny
and amendment before it proceeds.
Parliamentary Scrutiny and Transparency
The initial consultation period for the Amendment Bill was two weeks, which is
insufficient to allow for appropriate consultation, considering accessibility and
communication needs. The Australian Government Guide to Policy Impact Analysis
says consultation should occur for a minimum of 30 days where possible.
A two-week consultation period disadvantages the most vulnerable members of the
disability community, including people with intellectual and psychosocial disability,
First Nations people with disability, and those from culturally and linguistically diverse
backgrounds, who need more time to access information in accessible formats, seek
advice from advocates and family, and prepare a considered response. The short
timeline impacts me by placing extra pressure and strain on me at an already busy
time of year, as a business owner and a carer of a PWD. Only with the extension
have I been able to consider making this submission.
Recommendation: Ensure all consultation periods are the best practice minimum of
30 days, preferably longer to allow time for the most vulnerable people to access
information and respond.
Key decisions left to ministerial instruments, not law
The issue: The Bill allows Ministers to change who gets NDIS support (Schedule 1
Parts 8 and 9) and how much funding people receive (Schedule 1 Part 4; Schedule
- by signing an instrument, without going back to Parliament. The rules that will determine critical eligibility thresholds (Schedule 1 Parts 1, 8 and 9) have not yet
been written.
How this affects participants: The decisions that shape the lives of participants,
whether they qualify for the NDIS and what supports they can access, could be
changed without parliamentary debate or public scrutiny. Participants may not know
supports or eligibility rules have changed until their plan is affected.
I have seen and experienced first-hand the distress that fast, unexpected and poorly
considered decisions have on NDIS participants and carers, who do not have the
capacity to respond, whether that be because they are mentally burnt-out, or they do
not understand the impacts until it is too late.
Recommendation: Require that all decisions affecting NDIS eligibility and funding
levels be made through primary legislation subject to full parliamentary scrutiny, with
mandatory advance notice to affected participants before any changes take effect,
and consideration given to what impacts the participant will experience and who will
support them with that.
2
Existing participants face narrower criteria and fewer rights to challenge decisions
The issue: The Bill changes the rules for existing NDIS participants and makes it
harder to challenge some decisions about supports and funding. It also restricts
when you can request a reassessment, removes review rights for automatic plan
renewals, and makes funding reductions unreviewable (Schedule 1 Parts 1 and 8).
Combined with restrictions on reassessment requests (Part 2), automatic plan
renewals without review rights (Part 5), and unreviewable funding reductions (Part
4), existing participants face narrower criteria with significantly fewer avenues to
challenge decisions about their supports.
How this affects participants: This does not protect participants already on the
NDIS, who could be reassessed under stricter rules. If someone’s funding is reduced
or their plan renewed automatically, they may have limited or no ability to challenge
that decision. This could make it harder for people to get extra support when their
circumstances or disability change.
Participants with fluctuating, episodic or complex support needs, and those without
family or advocates to help them track regulatory changes, are least able to prepare
for or contest eligibility rules that can change without warning. These are consistently
the people most likely to be pushed out of the Scheme or left without adequate
supports.
Recommendation: Require a “no harm” safeguard ensuring no current participant
loses access to supports unless equivalent supports are in place, with independent
review rights before any exit decision and access to unscheduled reassessments
preserved.
3
Unreviewable ministerial power to cut funding across all support categories
The Minister can reduce funding for any support or group of supports by a specified
percentage through an instrument that cannot be challenged (Schedule 1 Part 4).
This applies across all budget categories. Unspent funds will no longer carry over at
plan renewal (Schedule 1 Part 5).
How this affects participants: A participant’s community participation, capacity
building or assistive technology funding could be cut without warning and without any
right to appeal. Participants who save unspent funds across plan periods for high
cost items will lose that ability entirely.
Capacity building funding is where most participants access dietitians and other
allied health professionals who support essential daily living needs such as safe
eating, swallowing and nutrition. An unreviewable power to cut this funding by
ministerial instrument puts participants with dysphagia, tube feeding needs or
complex dietary needs at direct and immediate risk, with no avenue to appeal a
decision that could affect their basic health and safety.
Recommendation: Require that unspent funds carry over at plan renewal for
participants saving for high-cost items and require independent review rights before
any funding reduction takes effect.
Requirements to exhaust treatment options before eligibility
The issue: A person with disability will need to exhaust treatment options before
they can be eligible for the Scheme (Schedule 1 Part 8). There will also be a removal
of whole-of-person assessment, replaced by single eligible impairment consideration
(Schedule 1 Part 3). The note that previously acknowledged environmental factors
and other ineligible impairments could affect support needs will be removed
(Schedule 1 Part 3).
4
How this affects participants: People with disability will need to prove their
impairment cannot be treated before they access the NDIS. Once in the scheme,
their supports will only be assessed against a single eligible impairment rather than
their whole experience. A person’s individual circumstances will not be considered,
including ability to pay for treatment, where they live or whether treatment is actually
available to them.
This requirement disadvantages participants who cannot afford private treatment,
live in rural or remote communities with no local specialists, or face long public
waitlists, effectively making access to the NDIS conditional on wealth and postcode
rather than need.
I have recently experienced a family member’s access request be denied, despite all
documentation including specialist reports, GP letter and Functional Capacity
Assessment stating that their impairment is permanent and there are no available
treatment options. In the denial, there was no specification given for what treatment
options the NDIS delegate felt were available, and why they felt the professional
opinions of the specialist, GP and Occupational Therapist were not valid.
Recommendation: Do not proceed with a requirement to exhaust “appropriate
treatment” options – there are no safeguarding measures around participant harm
due to side effects or complications, a participant’s financial ability to pay, or their
geographic capacity to access treatments. Treatment options should be left up to
treating specialists alone, based on their holistic view of the person. It should never
be within the rights of anyone besides a medical specialist, or appropriately qualified
health practitioner to make such determinations.
Unvalidated functional capacity assessment tool risks misidentifying need
The issue: The Bill shifts assessment from whole-of-person consideration to a single
eligible impairment (Schedule 1 Part 3). Read together with the eligibility thresholds
5
in Parts 8 and 9, the tool used to conduct functional capacity assessments must be
capable of sufficiently identifying whether a person meets the threshold for that
single impairment.
The named assessment tool is the Instrument for Classification and Assessment of
Support Needs (I-CAN). I-CAN requires validation to ensure it will sufficiently identify
the needs of all people with disability, including those whose needs may be
fluctuating or episodic and may not be captured through a point-in-time assessment,
and to ensure it is culturally appropriate for First Peoples with disability.
How this affects participants: If the assessment tool does not accurately capture
the full extent of a person’s disability, including needs that fluctuate or vary over time,
a participant may be found ineligible or have their supports undercounted, with no
guarantee the result reflects their actual experience.
An unvalidated, point-in-time tool risks systematically under-identifying the needs of
participants whose disability is not visible in a single assessment, including people
with psychosocial disability, autism and First Nations participants, who are already at
greater risk of being found ineligible or under-funded.
Recommendation: Do not proceed with I-CAN as the functional capacity
assessment tool unless it has been demonstrably validated to identify the needs of
all people with disability, including those with episodic or fluctuating disability, and
demonstrated to be culturally appropriate for First Peoples with disability.
Supports cut before replacement system is ready
The issue: From 1 October 2026, the government has announced funding for social,
civic and community participation supports will be cut by 50 per cent and capacity
building daily activities by 10 per cent for all participants, reductions that will be
implemented through the ministerial instrument power in Schedule 1 Part 4. The
Foundational Supports system intended to fill that gap has no confirmed
implementation date and is not yet operational.
6
How this affects participants: Supports that help participants connect with their
community, build skills and maintain independence may be cut before anything
exists to replace them, leaving carers and families with greater responsibilities and
no additional support. These supports are often what help people stay visible,
connected and safe.
The same 1 October 2026 timeline applies to the 10 per cent cut to capacity building
daily activities, the budget that funds dietitians and other allied health professionals.
Cutting this funding before Foundational Supports exist leaves the most medically
vulnerable participants, including those who rely on dietetic support for safe eating
and swallowing, with nowhere else to turn. The State Governments de-funded
disability health supports at the outset of NDIS so no services exist to fill this gap
anymore.
Recommendation: Require that no reductions to community participation or
capacity building supports take effect until Foundational Supports and/or State
Government funded health services are fully operational, adequately funded and
demonstrably able to meet the needs of those who will lose NDIS supports.
Cuts to dietitian and nutrition support put the most vulnerable participants at risk
The issue: Dietitian and nutrition supports are funded through the Capacity Building
budget, which is subject to the 10 per cent cut to capacity building daily activities
from 1 October 2026, implemented through the ministerial instrument power in
Schedule 1 Part 4. Government has also flagged maximum-intensity caps on
dietitian therapy supports from the same date. This comes on top of a separate NDIA
pricing decision cutting the hourly rate paid to Accredited Practising Dietitians by $10
from 1 July 2026, following a $5 cut last year, and several years of price freezes
before that.
7
How this affects participants: Dietitians support one of the most fundamental
activities of daily living: eating and drinking safely. For participants with dysphagia,
tube feeding needs, complex feeding issues such as ARFID, or specialised diets
such as those required by people with Inborn Errors of Metabolism or epilepsy,
reduced access to dietetic support carries a real risk of malnutrition, dehydration,
choking and hospitalisation. These risks fall hardest on participants who are already
the most vulnerable and least able to self-advocate, including children, older
participants and people with severe or complex disability, including those with an
alternate decision maker such as a Public Guardian.
How this affects providers: Dietitians Australia reports that dietitians are already
reducing disability caseloads, limiting home visits and travel, and withdrawing
services in rural and remote areas because current pricing does not cover the cost of
delivering safe and quality care. Further funding caps and price cuts risk pushing
more providers out of the NDIS market altogether, leaving participants, particularly
those outside metropolitan areas, with even fewer options and longer waits for
essential nutrition care.
As a dietitian who worked in disability services prior to the NDIS, it saddens me to
see the regression of the NDIS back to the bare minimum services we had a decade
ago. These services were chronically underfunded and had extensive waitlists. I was
personally responsible for providing services to a large geographical area of Eastern
NSW, with several hours travel between sites, and was only funded to provide this
service in a 1-day/week capacity. My small business now currently supports several
hundred participants with disability, across the same geographical area. These
services didn’t exist before, PWD just went without.
The previous cuts from 2025 have already cost my small business over $100,000,
and as we head into another year with further cuts, the future is grim. I have 13
employees, all women, whose jobs are now at risk, many of whom are also carers of
family members with disability. My small business is able to provide them flexibility to
8
work around their caring needs, while providing high-quality care to PWD across
regional and rural areas.
Without dietitians, the NDIS is opened up to huge risk around management of High
Intensity Supports, part of the NDIS Commissions Practice Standards. Dietitians are
responsible for or play key roles in the management of participants requiring:
- Complex bowel care – dietitians are highly skilled in the dietary management of complex bowel issues, and work in collaboration with doctors and other
AHPs to provide multidisciplinary support. Dietary management reduces the
cost of all other supports for complex bowel care.
- Enteral feeding – dietitians are the only professional able to prescribe, modify and monitor an enteral feeding regimen, and are responsible for
documentation of all Enteral Feeding Plans.
- Severe dysphagia management – whilst Speech Pathologists are responsible for the diagnosis and treatment of dysphagia, dietitians are responsible for
translating the Speech Pathologists recommendations into nutritionally
adequate dietary plans, as part of the Mealtime Management Plan process.
- Urinary catheter management – dietitians are responsible for assessing a persons daily fluid requirements which are often very different for PWD, and
supporting people to manage their intake to help maintain their catheter,
alongside a multidisciplinary team.
- Complex wound management – nutrition is recognised as one of the biggest factors affecting wound healing time, and dietitians play a key role in not just
managing wounds once they develop, but can also aid wound prevention
through weight management (preventing pressure areas), and through
optimising nutrition in people at high risk of wounds.
Recommendation: Exempt therapeutic supports that manage high risk services,
including dietetic and nutrition supports, from blanket percentage-based funding
reductions and intensity caps, and require an independent, evidence-based pricing
review, developed in consultation with Dietitians Australia and the allied health
9
sector, before any further changes to dietitian pricing or capacity building budgets
take effect.
10