Submission 3114 — Name Withheld — 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

Submitted by: Kristy Hudson 10 July 2026

I am a retired Lieutenant Colonel with 31 years’ service in the Australian Army, where I worked as a professional planner specialising in systems engineering and project management — the same disciplines through which I assess the failures described below. I am current NDIS participant living with Moderate-Severe Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, acquired in 2023, which leaves me unable to move or have normal cognitive function the majority of the time, and requiring assistance with every single aspect of my life, due to the severe health consequences associated with moving or sitting up. I make this submission in a personal capacity.

I do not oppose reform of the NDIS. The Scheme’s cost trajectory is a legitimate matter for Parliament, and I support changes that make it more consistent, better administered and more sustainable. I oppose this Bill in its current form, for the reasons set out below, and I am far from alone: the inquiry has received more than 4,000 submissions, near-uniform opposition was expressed at every public hearing, and the Bill has been opposed by

the Australian Human Rights Commission, Every Australian Counts, Women With Disabilities Australia, Down

Syndrome Australia, the state and territory disability ministers (including five Labor administrations), and the Australian Greens, among many others. My own experience illustrates problems that are, by the volume of submissions alone, clearly systemic rather than exceptional.

The Bill targets the wrong failure The Government frames this Bill as necessary to curb waste and protect sustainability. When viewed as a systems and program management problem, the greatest waste in the Scheme is NOT participant support but the cost of getting decisions wrong the first time. In my personal example, it took approximately two years, from the time I collapsed and was unable to work or care for myself in any capacity until I achieved a positive eligibility decision. The application process came at considerable personal expense, engaging people to prepare paperwork I was too unwell to prepare myself, including the effort and consultation to have an incorrect initial access decision overturned through Internal Review. My initial application was denied because the decision maker believed I had not “proved that I had tried every reasonable treatment” - for a condition which is incurable, and has no treatments. The effort of trying to figure out what information I could possibly achieve the nonsensical task of “proving I had tried treatments that don’t exist” was exhausting. This is such a common occurrence for people with my condition, that the peak body for ME, “Emerge”, has an enduring policy paper about NDIS’ consistent misunderstanding of this illness. During those two years I tried to fund my own care from my disability pension and could not afford enough care. Because my condition can only be managed through rest, the resulting gap in care caused a marked, lasting and permanent deterioration in my health — a cost that now falls on the Scheme for the rest of my life. To put it baldly, as a direct result of the inefficiency of the NDIS, I went from having the muscle mass and body composition of a physically fit Army Officer (albeit one with a debilitating diagnosis) to having a formal diagnosis of severe malnutrition - caused directly by the inability to obtain support to access food. ME has unique care needs that look very different from someone who is for example paralysed, or lacks the capacity to make decisions. I tried using “local support organisations” and found they were so narrowly designed that they focussed on the most “obvious” forms of disability like paralysis or complete loss of motor function, but were explicitly prevented from providing the support needed for someone with ME. During that time, a Freedom of Information request for my own file showed NDIA staff constantly misunderstanding my impairments, making clinically incorrect assumptions that a single clarifying question to me or my doctor would have resolved, using inappropriate, non-clinical references (such as referring to a US commercial website as the source for “what treatments I should have tried”). and, in places, appearing to look for reasons to refuse rather than to establish eligibility. Once this decision was overturned, the support I now receive through NDIS allows me to hire people who specifically understand my medical condition and can adjust their support to my needs. As a result, I can now eat nutritious meals regularly, and have support workers who are able to organise medical appointments for me (which must occur at my home), which I could not do, being unavoidably unconscious much of the time. My story is not unique - but rather is the “standard”, and highlights the inefficiency and lack of clinical expertise within the NDIA. Bungling my (and my fellow ME sufferer’s) application process cost NDIA (by my estimate) hundreds of staff hours, and resulted in my needing more care (at greater expense) for the rest of my life, than I would have needed had the care been provided immediately.

I have also seen first-hand how much more exposed the Scheme is to provider-side risk rather than participant-side risk. I am currently changing plan managers because my current “registered” plan manager approves any invoice submitted, applying no checks or balances, regardless of whether the service was

requested or delivered, without confirming with me. I see this routinely in my community - where the waste comes from providers acting improperly, not by participants acting improperly. In fact, in my community, a huge amount of effort goes into checking “I want to make sure I’m not doing something wrong”, and the community HEAVILY self-polices people who are believed to be (even accidentally) rorting the system. Every NDIS participant I encounter in the NDIS knows that rorting the system hurts everyone and leads to more cuts, and so we actively monitor our own community.

Anecdotally, among participants I know and communicate with regularly, people with materially similar impairments receive markedly different plans depending on who happened to assess them — evidence of an absence of procedural fairness that has nothing to do with how much a person costs the Scheme, and everything to do with how the Scheme is run. And in the case of ME sufferers, the longer someone goes without care, the more support they need for the rest of their life. The NDIS could literally save extraordinary amounts by making the right decisions the first time, and catching people before they deteriorate. Further, these inconsistencies, and the poor information available from NDIS (specifically because we cannot ever access the NDIS directly, only an LAC who is not part of the decision making process and can only offer an opinion, not facts) lead to participants being constantly confused about ‘what is acceptable’, resulting in a massive amount of churn.

None of these failures are addressed by tightening funding around participants. All of them would be addressed by better assessor training, direct accountability for decision quality, clearer, more consistent guidance, and proper auditing of provider and plan-manager conduct. This risk compounds for veterans and others with complex, mixed-liability conditions: the NDIS is meant to operate as funder of last resort (such as where DVA or other organisations don’t or won’t cover a support). Tightening NDIS access and funding without addressing the known gap at the interface with schemes such as DVA risks leaving some people covered by no system at all. In the case of veterans, this issue is known to lead to suicide - as determined by the Royal Commission into Veteran Suicide.

Fluctuating conditions are punished by blunt processes Another issue is that the Bill increases the frequency and consequence of reassessment, at a time when the existing process already struggles to accommodate conditions that vary from week to week. My plan funds both Core funding and Social and Community Participation supports. I use the latter overwhelmingly to reach medical appointments where providers will not come to my home, and to access non-optional government agencies, because I do not have enough support to spend any of it on genuinely social activity. My illness means I can tolerate leaving the house only rarely and unpredictably. However because my funding is metered out in three month increments, I must let it accumulate before I can use it during a rare “good” window. I am afraid this pattern of considered, deliberate saving will be read by a reviewer as proof the funding was never needed, rather than as the only way a person with an episodic illness can use it at all. A process which stops funds rolling over will actively discriminate against a person with my impairments. It is essential that the government grasp that not all disabilities present evenly and consistently over time, and that the disabled need to access the funding when the need arises, not in accordance with a government calendar.

The same fear now stops me acting on a support I have already been assessed as needing. My plan funds an occupational therapy assessment for home modifications that I have not activated, because I am afraid that any contact with the Agency risks triggering a full plan review, in a climate where plans are being reduced or removed. A Bill that increases reassessment risk without first fixing how reassessment is conducted will deter participants from using their own approved supports — not because they do not need them, but because they cannot afford the risk of asking.

Automated decision-making risks a Robodebt-style failure The Bill’s expansion of automated decision-making deserves particular scrutiny. Disability policy is generally written around conditions that are well understood and largely static; a fluctuating, poorly understood illness like mine is, by design, difficult to fit into standardised, rules-based assessment. Automating that assessment without a clinically qualified decision-maker able to exercise judgement, and without a genuinely accessible avenue to challenge a machine-generated outcome, risks repeating the failure of Robodebt: a system that produced unlawful outcomes at scale precisely because no meaningful human check existed before harm was done. The participants most likely to be caught by that failure are those with the most complex presentations — the same people this Bill says it is trying to protect.

Basic reasonable adjustments are still not reliably met I have formally requested written communication because my condition affects my ability to communicate in real time, and I am frequently unconscious during ordinary business hours. The Agency has repeatedly called without warning, insisted on voice contact, and treated missed calls as a mark against me, despite this being

clearly and repeatedly communicated. A Scheme that cannot yet reliably implement a participant’s documented communication needs should not be given wider discretion, or more automation, before it can be trusted to get the basics right.

Recommendations

1. No participant’s funding should be reduced below independently assessed need, and no reassessment- driven cuts should proceed until the Agency can demonstrate its initial decisions are reliably correct — reducing the downstream cost of Internal Review, appeals and deterioration currently caused by wrongly refused support.

2. Require assessors with genuine clinical understanding of complex and fluctuating conditions, and impose a positive duty to seek clarifying information from the participant before an adverse decision is made, rather than defaulting to refusal.

3. Protect accumulated or unevenly used funding for episodic and fluctuating conditions from being treated as evidence of non-need; any review must have regard to the pattern of a participant’s condition, not a flat usage rate.

4. Ensure that activating an already-approved support (such as a funded home modification assessment) cannot itself trigger a full plan review.

5. Make documented communication and access requirements (such as written contact, or advance notice before calls) binding on the Agency and its delegates, and prohibit penalising participants for missed contact that does not meet those requirements.

6. Redirect integrity and fraud measures toward providers and plan managers — for example, mandatory participant confirmation before invoices are paid — rather than tightening controls on participants themselves.

7. Commission an independent audit of decision consistency across comparable cases before any funding- restriction measure proceeds, and reduce reliance on outsourced Local Area Coordination arrangements that add a communication barrier between participants and the Agency without adding decision-making value.

8. Pause the expansion of automated decision-making until the Agency can demonstrate that its existing human decision-making meets a basic standard of accuracy and procedural fairness.

9. Require that any automated or algorithmically-assisted decision be reviewable, on request, by a clinically qualified human decision-maker, through a fast and genuinely accessible appeal pathway — not merely a further round of automated processing. This MUST include genuine independent review through the ART.

The NDIS changed my life when it worked, and nearly broke me during the two years it did not. I ask the Committee to recommend that this Bill not proceed in its current form, and that the substantial evidence before this inquiry — from participants, representative organisations, human rights bodies and disability ministers alike — be given the weight the scale of the response demands.