Submission on the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future
Generations) Bill 2026
Trigger Warning – My submission contains some mentions of harm, death and suicide.
I am an NDIS participant with psychosocial disability. There is often significant stigma around mental illness, so it might feel easy for some people to write off my concerns about the Bill. Please don’t. I know that many NDIS participants with psychosocial disability are not able to make a submission to this inquiry, or even follow the progress of the Bill, because it causes them harm to do so. Please don’t dismiss the few of us that currently do have the capacity to contribute. Our concerns are real. There have been multiple experts quoted in the media saying that psychosocial participants, are one of the cohorts that will be disproportionately affected by some of these amendments. For those of us who do currently have capacity to contribute, please know that it does still cause harm, there will be consequences that we are, and will, experience from this process. For myself over the past few weeks, it is my trusted and consistent supports, funded by the NDIS, that have helped me mostly keep it together during this time.
I wish that the Government, and the Opposition, understood what this process does to us, how distressing the past few weeks have been to many of us, as we try to understand these massive changes in such a rushed way, as we are put under all this pressure. Some of that distress is from hearing how the government and the media talk about us, as we are increasingly being framed as a burden, undeserving of support, fraudulent, and a budget problem to be fixed for the greater good (where, from the budget, the greater good seems to be AUKUS and gas companies). And we have been going through this on repeat for years now.
Living in that constant state of anxiety, dreading what the next change will be, wondering if we will be in the next group to be targeted, or for those of us who already are, how long will it end up being until we are kicked off onto non-existent “foundational supports”, or have our funding significantly cut, thinking about losing our trusted supports, and having to try to make plans for what we will do when that happens, is a horrible way to live. For those of us with psychosocial disability, it can significantly increase thoughts of suicide and self harm. It has had that impact on me.
The events and processes around the passing of the 2024 Bill caused me harm and took me a long time to recover from. Trying to participate in the process, then seeing the Bill pass, and the way it was done, was awful. I disengaged for a while. I didn’t want to go through it again, I wanted to try to ignore it this time, but I can’t, because I can’t just let everyone else carry the burden, it wouldn’t be fair. And yet I have no expectation that us telling you how the Bill will affect us, how much harm it will cause, will make any difference at all, because there is no way that those who wrote this Bill, and those who vote in favour of it, would be ignorant of the fact that it will cause harm, both physical and mental, and people will die because of it, through neglect and improper care, or to suicide, or accessing VAD either at all or earlier than they might otherwise. I would be surprised if there wasn’t some modelling in the bottom of an office drawer somewhere with the number of lives you expect to lose. If there is, I have now come to honestly believe that you wouldn’t care what those numbers were.
I have Bipolar Disorder. At present I am not manic or hypomanic and I am not psychotic. I am however depressed, and this Bill and the ones before it, and when I think about what will come in the future for me and my family, and for the wider community, also makes me anxious as heck. Any concerns I express towards the Bill, and distrust of those who conceived it, the Government, and to the NDIA who will carry out the new regulations, are based on examining the information, and following the processes over the past 3 or 4 years, at times watching Senate Estimates hearings, reading submissions, attending some community forums, learning what I can from what DROs publish, from other participants, as well as my own and my family’s experiences interacting with the system. It is also informed by negative experiences interacting with other government systems and the health system. Do not write off my, or others, concerns as just fear of
change as the Government has often done. I am well educated, and well informed (as much as I can be when things are so rushed). Please, don’t be condescending towards those with legitimate concerns.
As well as a participant, I am also the carer of children with Autism. One of whom (an adult) also has psychosocial disability, although wasn’t granted access for that. The reasons given were absurd, but I won’t cover that here. I would have appealed, but I did not have the spoons, and I figured the Minister wants to get rid of us anyway. They are all over 9, and so not destined for the as yet non-existent Thriving Kids program. But knowing the current minister, and the previous one, seems to have a particular dislike of autistic individuals and their carers, it still causes me stress, as I try to prepare for what will likely happen.
More time needed for submissions
We have been given just 2 weeks to make submissions to this Senate Inquiry. This is not nearly enough time. There are hundreds of pages in Bill and the Memorandum, and many of the proposed changes are massive, with what will be devastating consequences for hundreds of thousands of participants, prospective participants, and the people who support them. Please extend the time for submissions so more people can have a say in their futures.
The Bill is hard to read, it does not make sense when read on its own. It is full of omit x, substitute y, add z. To understand it, the Act and the Bill need to be integrated so we can see what the legislation would actually be changed to if the Bill passes, something that is not available to the disability community, or the wider public. I think most people, like me, who aren’t lawyers, would struggle to understand the consequences of some of the changes, and the way different sections of the Act will interact with each other. So the only way for many of us to understand the Bill is to rely on DROs and other organisations who are able to do this and wait for them to put out their summaries and position statements and then attend any community information meetings we are able to. Their position statements will differ as they often concentrate on just what they see as the most important points, because the Bill is so far reaching there is too much to cover at once, and the impacts will not be uniform across participants with different disabilities or circumstances. And while you may say we don’t need to read the Bill because there is the Explanatory Memorandum, I do not trust it (and it is still over 100 pages). What you claim are your intensions, are not the same as legislation, and will not include unintended consequences (or the intended ones that you would just rather not tell us about right now).
It took some organisations a week to get information out, some did not have their final position statement out by the end of last week. If we are dependent on them, that leaves us with very little time to work out what is most important for us, and to work out how our own lives, and those we care for, and the wider community, might be affected by this Bill. You gave us just 2 weeks, but for those of us reliant on others to understand the Bill first, it is more like 1 week, if that. And some of us already find these things harder because of our disabilities. It’s almost like the government doesn’t want to give us a chance to respond and they want to rush it through before people realise how dangerous and harmful the legislation is. It feels like we are being silenced. Please extend the time for submissions for this inquiry, but also please stop doing this to us over and over again.
And so, I, like many others, have not had enough time to fully digest the amendments in the Bill. I am doing my best to write this submission in the small amount of time we have been given. It will not cover all the points about the Bill that I want to make, or be well written, and I will make mistakes along the way, but hopefully my intent is clear enough.
I will outline some of my concerns about particular aspects of the Bill below, but my ultimate position is that I request that the Bill be withdrawn. Any changes to the NDIS Act need to be done carefully, it can’t be rushed, it is way too important. And it must be done WITH the disability community, not TO us.
Proper Parliamentary Debate
Please also extend the Senate Inquiry itself, give the committee the time to properly consider all the submissions, and leave adequate time for proper debate within parliament. Do not try to stifle debate with a “guillotine” motion. That was done in bad faith with the 2024 amendment, and I was appalled. It showed a complete lack of respect for those affected by the Bill. If the government is so sure that this is what is needed to “return the NDIS to its original intent”, then allow public scrutiny, stop trying to hide from it.
Genuine Community Consultation
The minister (and the previous minister) keeps saying everything will be done with consultation, yet the DROs, participants, the wider disability community, and even the states who are expected to create the as yet non-existent foundational supports, have been continually kept in the dark with announcements sprung on us time and again. Yet the minister used the phrase “Nothing about us, without us” during his Press Club speech 22/4/26, after describing how he will kick people off the scheme and carve the core values of reasonable and necessary from the NDIS. That was insulting. Stop trying to gaslight us.
The Explanatory Memorandum, on page 5, regarding community consultation yet again trots out that there was consultation for the NDIS review, which the government has never provided a full response to. It only consulted with people up to 2024, none of that was after any of the legislative changes. And by using the recommendations from the review, does not mean you are using the views of people consulted for the Review, because the Review may have come to a different view on its own that did not represent people’s concerns. The Review was also tainted because they had viewed the Redbridge Report before the Review was finalised.
It lists some other small consultations to do with prover definitions and registrations. It then lists consultations it plans to do at a later date, after this Bill would have already become legislation. And now we are being given just 2 weeks to respond to the Bill. That is not good enough.
You cannot keep using that one consultation period for the Review and claim that covers your responsibility for community consultation for every change you want to make for years and years to come. If you asked those same people now, who may have been in favour of some of the NDIS Review’s recommendations back then, whether they agree with effectively getting rid of R&N, kicking hundreds of thousands of people off, automated decision making, reduced ability to appeal decisions, and increased ministerial power, would those same people have responded with approval?
Legitimate consultation for legislation, needs to be based on the actual legislation.
This Bill should not be passed without genuine consultation first, and time for debate.
This Bill is NOT about Fraud
The Government talks about the need to reduce the spending on the NDIS because it has lost its “social license”. The thing is, it has been the Government, through years of sowing distrust in the scheme, and in participants, that has been the one to trash the NDIS’s social license. They asked Redbridge how to get people to accept the “unpalatable” reforms, and they were told they could sell those ideas by saying they were all necessary because of fraud. The Government has consistently pushed those talking points. Now they have successfully done that, and they are using that as the excuse to cut funding, cast people out and restrict access and supports.
There is fraud within the NDIS, and it needs to be addressed. But this Bill is not about fraud. It does not significantly address fraud. This Bill is about taking supports away from people who need them to give the
government “savings” in the budget. The minister admitted as much in his interview with The Saturday Paper recently.
“Mark Butler is not denying that the fraud regularly cited as justification for a further overhaul of the National Disability Insurance Scheme represents only a small fraction of the proposed deep cuts.
Asked whether the scale of fraud is being exaggerated, the minister for Health and the NDIS tells The Saturday Paper he’s been careful not to do so. “It’s not a huge part of the growth in the scheme,” Butler says. “The big growth in the scheme is not coming from that in terms of the taxpayer expenditure.”
TSP - Butler slashes NDIS to protect ‘social licence’ https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/politics/2026/05/18/butler-slashes-ndis-protect-social-licence
Modelling the costs of harm and death
Has the government counted the potential costs, in terms of harm and loss of life, that could occur if this Bill is passed?
There is a number that governments, including the Australian Government, use to give our lives a dollar value, and from that a value for each year of life, to use for cost benefit analysis. I’m not saying I’m good at statistics or understand how these are derived and the variations of the methods to obtain those values, I don’t. But I know they exist. I find it disturbing to say the least.
From The Office of Impact Analysis (4/2/2026), “Value of a Statistical Life”. https://oia.pmc.gov.au/resources/guidance-assessing-impacts/value-statistical-life
“The value of a statistical life (VSL) is an estimate of the value society places on reducing the risk of dying. By convention, the life is assumed to be the life of a young adult with at least 40 years of life ahead. It is a statistical life because it is not the life of any particular person.
A related concept is the value of a statistical life year (VLY), which is an estimate of the value society places on a year of life.”
“Based on international and Australian research a credible estimate of the value of statistical life is $5.87 million and the value of statistical life year is $253,000 in 2025 dollars.”
There also exists the value of a quality adjusted life year (VQALY).
Q. Does the Government have figures on the rates of death from inadequate care, of harm (self-inflicted or otherwise), and of suicide for those with disability within and outside the NDIS compared to those without disability?
Q. Has the Government, as part of writing this Bill, or for other NDIS Bills including and since 2024, done any modelling using VSL or any other method of quantifying harm or death that this Bill or the previous ones, might cause? This includes the impact of Access being restricted, and people being removed from the scheme entirely, and for those who remain having their reasonable and necessary supports removed or cut. And we know they will be cut below what even the Agency itself considers to be necessary, because it has
been written that the decreases the Minister can enact across categories, will reduce funding below what has been already decided and allocated in plans as Reasonable and Necessary by the Agency.
Is the Senate Inquiry Committee able to make a request under FOI for any modelling or consideration of issues around potential harm, including death, for this Bill and for the NDIS in general? If so then I would request this be done, please.
The ability to suspend and cancel access if participants are ‘uncontactable’.
There was always anxiety around Access requests, planning meetings, and reassessments, but that has been dialled up to 11 the past few years. Any interaction with the Agency feels fraught now. When there are multiple people in a house with disabilities who are participants, there are more of those planned interactions, but the Agency can also just decide to reassess at will, and you won’t know when that could be. There are so many stories now of people having funding unexpectedly slashed after an unexpected brief “check-in” phone call, even if they specifically ask and are then reassured it is not a planning meeting and nothing will
change, so the anxiety around it all is almost constant. The Agency needs to stop trying to ambushparticipants. How many people have become anxious about answering their phone, especially calls from a private number, since this practice became common? I know I have.
It is widely known that the Agency regularly contacts people by phone who are not able to take voice calls, for example those who are deaf. Also people may have a preference, because of their disability, for written correspondence, as I do. They also don’t leave voicemail messages if you can’t answer the phone, so you won’t even know you missed a call from them.
Yet in this Bill, the Agency will be given the power to decide that they made a reasonable attempt to contact the participant, even though they were unable to take the call, or know they were called in the first place, and their funding could be suspended and then they could be removed from the scheme altogether. Cutting off supports like that will put people in danger.
This amendment to the Act should not be allowed.
Trust
If this bill is getting the NDIS back to its original intent, why is one of the changes the Bill makes to the Objects and Principles of the bill, which literally describe the intent of the NDIS Act?
When challenged on unintended consequences of changes made in previous bills, the Government said but we wouldn’t use it in that way. I watched them in a Senate estimates say that funding periods would only be used in particular circumstances, we wouldn’t use it other than that. That isn’t what happened though, was it? One of my family members had a planning meeting a few days after funding periods started. They were put on 3-month funding periods for no reason, we were just told by the planner that they had just been to a training course, and that was how it was to be done for everyone now.
I do not want to hear ‘but we aren’t intending to use it that way’, when there is an opening in the legislation for them, or others in the future, to do just that. There needs to be limits explicitly stated in the legislation. There are so many things in the Bill that are undefined and will depend on Rules we know nothing about, or future decisions to be made by the minister. You are essentially saying, trust us, it will be fine. I don’t trust you, that trust was shattered long ago. And I don’t think I am alone in feeling that way.
Safeguards should not just be based on some concept of trust that the people in positions of power, not just now, but in every future government, will have our best interests at heart, and would never harm us for the benefit of their other goals (like balancing the budget, paying for AUKUS, appeasing the Gas companies).
Safeguards need to be properly legislated. We live in a democracy, power like the new bill suggests, which give god-like powers to one person, should never be acceptable.
Powers to cut supports by categories
The planned cuts to social participation have been said to be 50%. It is horrible to contemplate what that will mean for some people, how isolated they may become, how they may lose access to vital things like being able to get to the doctor, and yes, being able to do this others take for granted, like being taken to get their hair cut, and maintaining social contact. But there is nothing in the legislation that says the day after it comes into force the minister can’t just decide a 70% or 80% cut suits him better. Or if not him, then someone after him, a year, 2 years, or more down the track.
One of the main reasons the Minister has given for the need to cut social participation supports is that he has heard of some support workers being on their phones while a participant falls out of their wheelchair. Yes, that is a horrible situation, and the support worker and their company needs to be held to account for that, maybe providers need more training. But that is in no way justification for cutting participant’s social participation budgets by 50%, just because some workers are letting people down.
I have seen some bad doctors and health professionals in the past. Would anyone consider that because some doctors didn’t do their job properly, Medicare rebates need to be cut by 50% for everyone, or the number of times you can see a doctor be limited? It is a ridiculous argument.
Cutting Capacity Building budgets by 10% will also have serious consequences for people. I rely on mine. My plan doesn’t cover all of the therapy I need to access to maintain or build my capacity, I pay for the remainder privately. If my funding was cut by 10% below what the Agency considered R&N, I couldn’t make up that shortfall too. Without those supports, things go backwards very quickly. I have had that happen before (prior to being on the NDIS). And again, who is to say it will only be by 10%, and not 20% or 30%, or removed altogether.
I saw a media article that stated that while cuts were being made to social and community participation and capacity building, it said no cuts were being made to personal care. But we don’t know that. While the minister has not stated that he intends to cut it at this stage, the power to do so, at whatever percentage he wants, will be in the legislation.
In an interview, the minister justified needing to make cuts now, to make the scheme ‘sustainable’, because otherwise in the future a government of ‘a different persuasion’ might come in and get rid of the scheme. Yet if he is so worried about that happening, why embed the axe that future governments, of any ‘persuasion’, different or not, can wield to cut the scheme to ribbons with no oversight, into the very Act itself?
Functional Capacity Assessment
Having one assessment for everyone, no matter what their disability, is a bad idea. Letting people who are not trained Allied Health workers carry out assessments is only ever going to lead to poor outcomes for disabled people, and some cohorts will be more severely impacted than others. Making those decisions not fully able to be appealed, should not be allowed. People should have the right to appeal. People with disability are supposed to be able to have the same rights of appeal as anyone else. This Bill seeks to suppress those rights, not just for assessments, but in other areas too. We need to retain the right to be able to appeal the NDIA’s decisions.
I think the tool that might be used it I-CAN. To expect that everyone will be able to be present with a stranger and speak about their disabilities in a 3-hour interview, someone they do not trust and does not understand them, or their situation, and may have no understanding of their particular disability at all, and in that time the assessor will gain a sufficient understanding of their needs, is unrealistic. It is far from a trauma informed
approach. Psychosocial and Autistic participants with especially struggle with this. Our current supports, people we have developed trust with and understand us, are in the best position to assess what we can or cannot do, what supports are essential.
I don’t want to talk to a stranger about thing to do with my disability for 3 hours. That thought alone makes me anxious. How can I trust them? Has I-CAN even been validated for psychosocial disability? Can it account for fluctuating impairments? I may appear well, especially if I don’t, or can’t, tell them what is bad, or if they don’t ask questions that get to the issues. I could appear ok in the room, because I hide it, because I am embarrassed, anxious or scared. Or maybe it is a day when things are not too bad but I fall apart at home afterwards. But a lot of my issues are on the inside of my head. If you are trying to judge me by how I look, mostly you can’t. I think the I-CAN is done with questions about the past month? That may not be representative for a fluctuating condition. And I know that I struggle to remember how I have been outside of how I feel that particular day, or few days. I often could not tell you how I have been over the past weeks, or month. I lose that perspective, especially when most unwell. But the assessor, who may not understand mental illness, wouldn’t know that.
Reassessments being driver of cost
One reason for people requesting an unscheduled plan reassessment, is because the NDIA has not done their scheduled plan reassessment. When they have been rolling plans over, some people’s for years, when there are degenerative disabilities, or children’s needs change as they grow, they may need more supports, more funding.
If a participant’s plan has reached the end date, they may have already told the Agency they need a proper reassessment, yet they still get the letter from the Agency, without speaking to them or their care team or support providers, that they think their supports are adequate and they will be continuing their plan. By not holding planning meetings and giving those participants the opportunity to submit support letters for the funding they need, people are not receiving the support they need. They will therefore need to request a review.
Over time prices go up, yet the NDIA holds the price guides static for years at a time, not keeping up with inflation, or with the market. Another reason may be because they have been given a new plan (often unexpectedly after a “check-in”), with funding drastically reduced from the previous one, that has not met their needs.
Fighting for reviews is incredibly hard. To go through the ART is worse, and most participants represent themselves against the governments contracted lawyers. No one does that if they don’t truly require the additional funding. People asking for the reviews are in genuine need.
The increase in funding from unscheduled reviews has been called unnecessary. How can this be? The funding in a person’s plan is not decided by the participant or their providers. We may provide the evidence for disability, but it is NDIA planners who decide what the funding will be. If you feel they are not coming up with the right numbers, perhaps that is an internal NDIA matter, not something participants should be punished for? Or it might be the ART or Federal Court, who are scrutinising all the evidence against the legislation. Surely any of those show that the increase in those reassessed plans was actually necessary?
The new bill gives the Agency the right to endlessly renew plans, and then takes away the right to ask for an internal review for that decision, or to right to appeal at the ART if needed to make sure the participants needs are met.
If your plan is meeting your needs, the relief of not having to go through the incredibly time consuming, raining and stressful process of collecting evidence to prove yet again you are still disabled, is massive. But
for those who have said they need their scheduled review, only to be told they can’t have one, starts a battle they need to fight. There should be a genuine choice as the whether your plan is reviewed at the plan’s end date or if you are happy to go with the Agency’s decision to renew it without any reassessment.
If a plan is for 1, 2 or 3 years, and has and end date, the agency should not be able to do the plan meeting before that date without good reason, providing evidence that they have a good reason to suspect the participants circumstances have changed enough to warrant it, for example after transitions such as if they have started school, or finished school. When you have, for example, a 1-year plan, and you are told what that funding will be, you are planning your supports around that timeframe, thinking you have those supports and can relax and start planning your life, and how it will be better, during those 12 months at least. But the agency can choose to review your plan, for any reason, at any time. Your 12-month plan may end up being a 6 or 9-month plan. Even when a scheduled review takes place sometime before the end date, your new plan starts then, not at the end of your current plan, and funding can be increased, or often decreased instantaneously. There is no certainty for people. Please think about what that is like. Minister Shorten had promised longer plans, more certainty for people. What happened to that? Imagine what it is like for people to constantly wonder if their supports will be take away, to not be able to plan for the future, because you don’t know what life might be like.
Automation and RoboNDIS.
Automation without oversight, without transparency, and without the means to appeal those decisions, must not be allowed.
When questions have been raised about automation, the Minister has said that the government has learned the lessons of Robodebt. What specific lessons would those be though? When we hear that they have learned the lessons, we may assume they share our values, that it must mean they have learned that they can’t treat vulnerable people in that way. But is that the lesson they learned? I don’t think they have stated it specifically? Because they are saying this at the same time as they are increasing their ability to both use automation and punish people by raising debts and introducing penalties, while decreasing the ability of people to appeal those decisions. Staff who were responsible for the architecture of Robodebt were moved across to the NDIA at one point.
I unfortunately think that the lesson the government learned was not that you should not act in abhorrent immoral ways to vulnerable people leading to people’s deaths, by making them repay debts they never owed in the first place. I think that the lesson they have learned is that if you want to act in immoral ways to vulnerable people, you first need to spend YEARS, publicly disparaging them, like making disabled people the new ‘dole bludgers’, get the media to regurgitate all of your messaging and abandon fact checking, avoid providing reports and information to the Senate when requested, until the public thinks that disabled people are the problem, not that the systems set up to support them are causing harm. But most importantly make sure you put the methods for that harm solidly into legislation first, so the harm becomes legal, so you won’t be held accountable for it (although the perpetrators of Robodebt didn’t do that and got off anyway). That is what this Bill does. It seeks to make the harm legal.
90 days to claim for supports is not enough
How does limiting the time to claim for supports to 90 days (down from 2 years) save money anyway. The money has been allocated. If we don’t claim straight away the money sits in government accounts. Do you not make or save interest on that like a person would with a bank account? I don’t think you would lose out by having to pay us back later on?
I struggle with organisation. Admin can be difficult, especially during periods when I am most unwell. Sometimes it takes me a while to put in a claim. You would be penalising people for their impairments. The
only benefit I can see to the budget by reducing the time to 90 days is if the aim is that when people can’t get their receipts for legitimate supports together in time, you can reject them and not have to pay for the supports that person has been promised. The aim is to make things harder to deliberately cause that to happen. Am I wrong here?
Permanence and Appropriate treatments
The Prime minister defended not going to a means tested model recently. He made it sound like he was in support of those with disability. But this bill is far more inequitable.
Because of the changes in the permanence test, that will require people to have all treatment no matter what, it is the reverse of means testing, where those with the least money, those living in poverty, those without the family support to help them get the appropriate treatments, will be excluded from the scheme. Those with invisible disabilities, those with rare disabilities, where treatment is less available, those with psychosocial disabilities where responses to treatment vary, will be impacted the greatest.
There is more I wish I could say here, but I can’t get it together in time to submit.
Certainty
The NDIS was supposed to give those with disability and their carers the certainty that they would be looked after during their lifetime. But there is no certainty even year to year, let alone past that. What does happen to my child when I am no longer able to look after them? When I can’t be the buffer between them and the systems meant to be supporting them. Who will make sure they are able to access the supports they need? Do you know what it is like to have to live with that uncertainty? To know their supports could be removed on a whim, and you will have to try to find the reserves to make things work on your own somehow? People deserve better than this.
Lack of transparency
The minister said that the scheme will continue to grow each year. But over the next few years it will only be by 2%, which is lower than inflation. That is not growth. That is deceptive.
The government has not been forthcoming with modelling. It now looks like 160,000 people will be closer to 241,000 people on the scheme being kicked off (although many realised it would need to be more than 160,000 because new people would come onto the scheme, even if a must smaller number than currently).
When you talk about the numbers, what do they account for? Is the increase in the budget with or without inflation? Does it account for increases in wages?
Economics is far from something I understand well, but I know that today’s money is not worth the same as it will be in 5-10 years’ time. I suspect you are looking just at the number, and not what the number means in real terms. What is the increase in real terms?
Do the increase in the numbers of participants account for the increase in population?
Are your figures based on the amount of money allocated in people’s plans, or are they based on plan utilisation, which is quite a bit lower? I understand the budget needs to include the amount that is in people’s plans. But surely the amount of money actually used by participants is the value that should be used when assessing, and telling the general population, that the NDIS “costs too much”.
There are no foundational supports. Thriving kids is a thought bubble so far. And now the government is saying access for kids under 18 will be reduced. 9-18 year olds don’t even have a name for their non-existent supports. Psychosocial participants do not have supports outside the scheme either. There already aren’t enough for those people who are outside the NDIS, to dump more people and expect there will be any available supports from any existing, already stretched, organisations or systems, is unrealistic at best.
Increased role of Carers
Primarily women. Often have multiple children with disability to look after. Many are disabled themselves. If I burn out, I cannot look after my kids as well as I need to, or myself. Things go badly for all of us. Do you wait for us to get to crisis point, until we are more disabled to then consider giving help (if we can manage to get an application together for Access when things are bad). Or do you just watch us drown, or turn away, and point out how much money you have “saved” in the next budget.
Cost shifting
The proposed changes to the NDIS, and the cuts that the Government wants to make, are not saving money.
They will cause real harm to people. People will bear the costs including to their health and wellbeing. But it will also just result in costs being shifted to other government services. In the long run, as people continue to have their needs unmet, the costs to society will increase.
I have so many other thoughts about this, and I haven’t even been able to go through the Bill properly or fix what I have already written. But I know that so many amazing people will have contributed their submissions, and I trust that someone would have already raised similar concerns to those I didn’t have time for.
Please do not pass this Bill.