Submission Date: 1 June 2026
Dear Community Affairs Legislation Committee,
Senate Inquiry: National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS
for Future Generations) Bill 2026
I appreciate this opportunity to provide a submission to the Community Affairs Legislation Committee as part of the Senate Inquiry into the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 (the Proposed NDIS Bill).
While I agree to have my submission uploaded to the website for public view, I do not agree to have my name listed as I have shared personal information and am concerned about NDIA retaliation. However, sharing my words may help others and so I am making this submission.
I am a middle aged woman who is a National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) participant with multiple permanent invisible disabilities, both physical and psychosocial, and whose sole income is the Disability Support Pension. I worked fulltime for almost 15 years until such time that the impact of my disabilities became so severe that I was no longer able to work. I have been unable to work for an income since 2015.
The Proposed NDIS Bill is deeply harmful to disabled people, will remove participants from the NDIS with nowhere for them to go, and will not save costs, but instead shift them to other parts of our community and systems. The Proposed NDIS Bill will not address alleged fraud, or rorts, or any of the stated intentions of the Bill. Instead the Bill will transform the NDIA from a disability support scheme to a compliance and enforcement body entirely driven by cost at disabled people’s expense.
The Proposed NDIS Bill must be rejected in full.
Insufficient time to consider the Proposed NDIS Bill
I first want to address the deeply inappropriately short time period given to the disability community to provide feedback and our responses to the Proposed NDIS Bill.
We are a cohort of vulnerable people, whose disabilities impact us in material ways that require accommodations and supports to engage with the world. At the best of times, we need flexible accommodations and supports in order to be able to participate (hence the need for an NDIS to meet Australia’s obligations under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities).
Timeframes that might suit abled people cannot be accessible to most of us. However, this 13 business day (including the extension) timeframe is too short for even abled people and large organisations to properly consider the long Proposed NDIS Bill and consider the immense impact these changes will have on people’s lives. These are not administrative changes, the Bill is a wholesale recharacterisation of the entire NDIS. It is impossible to provide proper consideration to the several hundreds of pages including the first reading, second reading, explanatory memorandum, transcript of speeches, and proposed amendments (all required to understand the scope of the Proposed NDIS Bill) in a 13 business day period.
I also note that the submission process is inaccessible for many, and the website access is poorly designed and likely inaccessible for screenreaders, and certainly confusing and difficult for those with intellectual disabilities, cognitive disabilities or other attention limiting disabilities.
For disabled people like me, the short time pressure has forced me to push well beyond my safe capacity, and my medical team has prepared for the next month to provide crisis and emergency support to me to deal with the aftermath. I am pushing beyond my limits in the knowledge that I will pay for this in many ways, including further reducing my ability to eat and 1 of 4
move from a prone state. However, the impacts of the Proposed NDIS Bill on me are so dire that my medical team and I collectively decided it was necessary for me to take this harmful step of preparing this submission.
The Proposed NDIS Bill must be opposed in its entirety, but at the very least the Inquiry period must be extended for at least three more months to allow for safe engagement with the disability community.
How the Proposed NDIS Bill affects me
The Proposed NDIS Bill cuts affect me. They’ve already affected me, just like so many NDIS participants across Australia, because there is a stark difference between the law and the written NDIS rules and how the National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA) implements those written rules. In fact, what Labor have been trying to do in reliance on the guidance of the Redbridge Reports in 2023 is reshape public perception of the NDIS and disabled people more generally to pave the way for the extreme cuts to the NDIS set out in the Proposed NDIS Bill. The government is attempting to put into law what the NDIA have been doing internally for some time now: and I have already been a victim of this internal process.
I want to bring to your attention to the provisions of the Proposed NDIS Bill that aim to: ● Reduce access to “unscheduled” plan reassessments ● Restrict the powers of the Administrative Review Tribunal and other external legal bodies to remove their ability to assess plan efficacy on a line by line basis ● Rely on one off standardised functional capacity assessments carried out by people without relevant professional experience to assess eligibility and make planning decisions ● Entrench the illogical approach of identifying a “primary disability” and disregarding impacts of comorbid disabilities, against all professional evidence showing that this is not how disability or impairments work ● Ignore the whole person, including the inextricable nature of comorbid disabilities and the related increase in impairments, and the critical relevance of personal circumstances and environment
There are many other items in the Proposed NDIS Bill that could be listed here but I do not have the capacity to itemise all that relate.
My disabilities cause severe impairments that are dynamic and fluctuating, and are energy and attention-limiting. I cannot leave my home without supports to do so. If you see me on a day when I have been able to leave the house you see me on a day when I’ve overcome all the barriers to be able to present myself to society as a functioning human. But what you will not see are the hours it takes to get myself awake and dressed and clean and out of the house, the help I need to do these things that others take for granted, the hours and sometimes days of recovery I need for each of these basic human tasks. You won’t know that I can only shower once a week at most because it’s too exhausting physically for me to do it more regularly. You won’t know that I forget to eat and often survive on one meal a day most of the time and then only if someone else has reminded me and provided it to me. You won’t see that every week I am trapped inside my home, unable to leave the house. You won’t see that.
But the NDIA should. They’ve got the 100s of pages of reports from my over THIRTEEN independent medical specialists and treating professionals setting out exactly what my life is like, and exactly what I can’t do, and let me tell you, reading those reports is hard on the
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soul, and getting those reports is thousands of dollars disabled people have to borrow from community to afford. Almost every NDIS participant is on the NDIS because we have jumped through every hoop, obtained every possible report, and done so for years before we even get access.
According to current law and NDIS rules, our plans are developed based on what our treating professionals confirm in writing we need as necessary and reasonable supports. However that is not how the NDIA implements the law.
Just this year, the NDIA cut my funding for therapies I need. They’ve cut funding entirely to physiotherapy and exercise physiology despite my having a recognised and permanent physical disability that requires this treatment. The NDIA claimed their basis for cutting these specific therapies is that I do not have a recognised physical disability recorded with them. I requested evidence of the disabilities they recognise, and the Local Area Coordinator confirmed in writing that the NDIA has recognised my physical disability of Hypermobility Ehlers Danlers Syndrome (hEDS): the disability for which I require physiotherapy and exercise physiology. Despite this, these supports remain cut from my plan.
The NDIA has also cut funding for my psychologist treatments with a stated intention from the NDIS planner to “wean me off them” despite my having several recognised permanent psychosocial disabilities and demonstrated evidence that I require fortnightly appointments for the rest of my life in order to stay alive. The NDIA planner told me in February 2026 that their internal approach is to assume that psychosocial disabilities can be cured in three years with treatment - even though to get access for psychosocial in the first place we have to prove over years that our disabilities are permanent and that we have exhausted all treatment methods (which I have).
And the NDIA just let me know in February 2026 (years into my plan) that they’ve completely refused to recognise the impacts of my Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) physical disability with no reason given at all.
In addition, the NDIA have completely ignored the second Functional Capacity Assessment by my occupational therapist, a 71 page report they required I use my NDIS funding for in my first plan, which showed clearly how seriously impacted I am by my disabilities and how my funding supports were already drastically below what I need, including my supports to help me eat, clean, just try and live an ordinary life. And what did they do with this information? They cut my plan even more.
The NDIA also miscalculated the apportionment of my funding for the supports they decided to fund, at the same time as they unilaterally introduced strict three month funding periods without evidence or my consent. This meant I ran out of funding in the first funding period and was unable to access therapies I need to stay alive that were still listed in my plan and approved for this time period. This error was immediately raised directly with the NDIA and was shunted to the Local Area Coordinator who does not have the authority to fix the error and responded saying so. This error remains with no response from the NDIA.
There are many other errors in my new plan, including assumptions recorded by the NDIA as the basis for cuts that are not found in any treating professional reports. I have not been provided with any evidence to support the cuts made.
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I have submitted my internal review to challenge all these decisions because they don’t match the law or NDIA rules, and the time period for the NDIA to respond has yet to expire. Like so many others before me, it is likely that the NDIA will reject my review, and under the current law and rules I would then need to go to the Administrative Review Tribunal to get the supports that my entire team of treating professionals say in writing that I need.
However, if the Proposed NDIS Bill passes, the majority of the above cuts to my plan will become legal and my right of appeal removed.
The reasoning for these proposed changes was outlined by Disability Minister Mark Butler at his National Press Club address on 22 April 2026 when he said: “Decisions in the Federal Court and Administrative Review Tribunal have restricted the Agency’s ability to implement scheme changes.” Similar statements are included in the Bill’s explanatory memorandum.
It is very clear that the NDIA and government know that the way they have been implementing the law and NDIS rules has been unfair, illegal and harmful, but instead of addressing the matters revealed in the decisions of external legal bodies, their approach is to rush through the Proposed NDIS Bill to remove participants’ rights to appeal to those legal bodies at all.
And I know why: because how frustrating must it be for the NDIA to have spent over $70 million on lawyers just in the last 2 years to fight these cases against individual disabled people, and the Courts have found in the disabled person’s favour over 70% of the time. What a waste of money by the NDIA.
The right to appeal decisions is a safeguard against abuse, against harm, and against bad decisions and any part of the Proposed NDIS Bill that attempts to water down or remove that right entirely from participants must be opposed entirely.
I do not have capacity to provide further statements regarding the severe impacts of the Proposed NDIS Bill.
I need the Committee to understand that if this Bill passes, people who are eligible, who are deserving, who require supports, and who can contribute to society with those supports, will be removed from the NDIS with nowhere to go. I have no access to safe informal supports; formal supports are my only option. Removing them will leave me isolated, my conditions dramatically deteriorating, and at risk of death. Disabled people are sounding the alarm because it is already happening. The Proposed NDIS Bill must not pass.
Yours faithfully
[Name Withheld]
NDIS Participant
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