Submission 3157 — Name Withheld — NDIS Future Generations Bill | External submission

Submission to the Senate Standing Committees on Community Affairs

Inquiry into the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the

NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026

Submitted: 10 July 2026 CONFIDENTIALITY REQUEST: I request that my name and contact details be withheld from publication and that this submission be published anonymously. It concerns the health information of my child, a minor.

WHO I AM

I am the mother and primary carer of a fifteen-year-old NDIS participant in Perth, Western Australia. My daughter has diagnoses of Autism Spectrum Disorder (Level 3), ADHD, Complex PTSD, anxiety, and emerging Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder (EUPD). I write as a parent whose family depends on the NDIS every single day, and who has direct, current experience of exactly the assumption on which this Bill rests — that other service systems can absorb what the NDIS steps back from. I can tell the Committee from lived experience, supported by an independent audit released three weeks ago: in Western Australia, that assumption is false.

OUR CIRCUMSTANCES

My daughter requires round-the-clock care and supervision. Between 30 January and 9 July 2026 our family recorded 27 mental-health-related incidents in a contemporaneous register maintained with her clinical team and NDIS support coordinator — an average of one every six days for more than five months. Thirteen required clinical treatment, including seven emergency department presentations (two overnight, two by ambulance) and six urgent care or GP presentations. She has had two psychiatric inpatient admissions this year, totalling approximately two weeks in hospital, following two admissions in 2025.

What stands between my daughter and further hospitalisation is her NDIS plan. Her support team — a support coordinator, a positive behaviour support specialist, an occupational therapist, support workers and a mentor — provides the structured supervision, behaviour support and community connection that keep her safe at home rather than in an emergency department. Her support workers are not a social program; they are, in practice, the supervision layer that allows two exhausted parents to sustain 24/7 care. I am on indefinite medical leave from my employment: my treating practitioners have assessed that my own diagnosed PTSD, arising in significant part from sustained secondary trauma, leaves me without the capacity to perform the requirements of my role. My husband is a veteran whose own PTSD has been retriggered. The NDIS is not one support system among several available to this family. It is the only one currently functioning.

THE STATE SYSTEM THIS BILL ASSUMES EXISTS

The Bill allows decision-makers to take into account a person’s access to other service systems, and the broader reform package assumes that “foundational supports” and mainstream systems — principally state health and mental health services — will meet needs the NDIS no longer funds. The Committee should understand what that looks like on the ground for an adolescent with complex mental health needs in Western Australia:

Community Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) provides approximately one hour per week of clinical contact. Acute admission means one of 20 psychiatric beds at Perth Children’s Hospital serving every child and adolescent in a state of over three million people — a crisis-containment model, not treatment; one of my daughter’s own discharge summaries noted the risks of future admissions may outweigh their benefits.
The only intensive day-therapy program for adolescents with emerging EUPD in the State — Touchstone, at Bentley Hospital, an evidence-based program shown in peer-reviewed research to reduce self-harm and emergency department presentations — is paused, with no timeline for reinstatement. My daughter was referred after eighteen months of advocacy, accepted for assessment, and then told the program is not taking young people through.
On 17 June 2026, the WA Auditor General tabled Report 19 of 2025-26 on the Infant, Child

and Adolescent Mental Health System Transformation Program. Four years after the WA

Government committed to all 32 recommendations of its own Ministerial Taskforce, one has been completed. The Auditor General found the Mental Health Commission has “no credible plan or pathway” to deliver the reform, and warned it may “never be delivered as intended… let alone by the targeted timeframe of 2031.”

This is the “other service system” that the Bill would permit decision-makers to weigh against my daughter’s NDIS supports. If NDIS supports are reduced on the premise that the state mental health system will pick her up, that premise is not merely optimistic — it is contradicted by the State’s own independent auditor. Children like my daughter will not transition to another system. They will fall into the space between two systems, each pointing at the other, and they will surface in emergency departments.

SPECIFIC CONCERNS WITH THE BILL

Consideration of other service systems (Schedule 1). Any provision allowing eligibility or funding decisions to rest on access to other service systems must be based on evidence of what is actually available, operating and accessible to that person — not on the theoretical existence of a system. A paused program, a waitlist, or a system under audit for failed delivery is not an available support.
The “directly from impairment” nexus. The Bill funds supports only where the need arises directly from the impairment for which the participant met access criteria. My daughter’s needs arise from the interaction of Level 3 autism, ADHD, trauma and an emerging personality disorder. No clinician can cleanly attribute her supervision needs to one diagnosis. A strict direct-link test invites assessors to attribute needs to whichever condition sits in someone else’s system — autism to the NDIS, mental health to the states — and co-occurring participants will be the casualties of that sorting exercise. The nexus test must explicitly accommodate needs arising from co-occurring and interacting impairments.
Cuts to participation and capacity building budgets from 1 October 2026. For my daughter, social and community participation supports are not recreational — they are clinical risk management. Her clinical team has documented that peer connection is a protective factor for her; her support workers’ presence in the community is precisely what enables safe participation. These budgets will be cut by 50 per cent (and capacity building daily activities by 10 per cent) from October this year, while the foundational supports meant to replace them are not designed, not funded and not

operating in any Australian jurisdiction. A single one of my daughter’s emergency department presentations costs the health system more than weeks of the community support that prevents it. Cutting the cheap, preventive layer before any replacement exists does not save money; it moves the cost to the most expensive end of the system and prices the risk in children’s safety.

Plan rigidity: legislated end dates, no rollover, limits on participant-requested reassessments, expanded suspension powers. Our incident register shows how fast complex needs escalate — from stable to hospitalised within days. Families in that position need responsive plans and accessible reassessment. Limiting participant-initiated reassessments, extinguishing unspent funds at plan end, and expanding the circumstances in which plans can be suspended each transfer risk onto participants whose needs are episodic and escalating — which describes most adolescents with psychosocial disability.
Review rights and automated decision-making. Our family has direct experience of NDIS review processes, including a matter before the Administrative Review Tribunal. Even with professional support, the evidentiary burden on families is heavy; we carried it while managing a child in recurrent crisis. Provisions that narrow review pathways, raise procedural barriers, or automate decisions affecting supports will disproportionately harm the families least able to fight back — those already consumed by care.

That no reduction in participant supports commence until replacement foundational supports are operational, independently evaluated, and demonstrably accessible in the participant’s own state or territory.
That any consideration of “other service systems” in access or planning decisions be required, in the primary legislation, to be based on evidence of actual current availability and accessibility to the individual — not the nominal existence of a program.
That the “directly from impairment” nexus be amended to expressly include needs arising from the interaction of co-occurring impairments, so that participants with autism and psychosocial disability are not divided between systems neither of which will fund them.
That accessible participant-initiated reassessment be preserved for children and for participants with episodic or escalating needs.
That full, timely and practically accessible merits review be retained for all decisions, including any made with the assistance of automation.

CLOSING

I do not dispute that the NDIS must be sustainable. But sustainability achieved by shifting children with complex needs onto state systems that an Auditor General has just found to be failing is not sustainability — it is cost-shifting with a time delay, paid for in emergency department presentations, hospital admissions, carer breakdown, and children’s futures. My daughter is bright, warm, and wants to become a paramedic. The supports this Bill puts at risk are the reason that future is still possible.

I would be willing to provide further information to the Committee, or to give evidence at a hearing, subject to appropriate protections for my daughter’s privacy.

Name and contact details provided to the Committee separately — publication withheld as requested above.