National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026
Submission 3255
Submission on the NDIS Amendment Bill
Name:
I am a: Disabled person ☐ Parent of a 5 year old Autistic girl ☐ My main concern about this Bill is: Loss or reduction of supports Community participation Children / families / early intervention
This Bill may affect me / my child because: Cuts to NDIS supports and increased administrative load would upend my life and ability to contribute to the community hugely. My primary area of disability-related impairment is not physical capacity, but executive functioning and self-management. I am physically able to complete many tasks; it is essential that NDIA’s assessment focuses not on whether I can physically perform tasks, but the significant cognitive, emotional, and functional cost involved in completing and sustaining them independently.
It is important that my functioning is not assessed solely on isolated tasks or on my best presentation on a particular day. My disability is variable and largely hidden. I may appear capable in some environments, but this comes at an extremely high cognitive and emotional cost that is not sustainable without support.
A reduction in supports would increase my fatigue, overwhelm, and functional impairment, and reduce my ability to safely maintain employment, parenting responsibilities, nutrition, emotional regulation, and independent living.
My disability affects my ability to plan, prioritise, organise, initiate, sequence, and follow through with everyday tasks. I require scaffolding supports to reduce cognitive load and enable me to function safely and consistently. Without these supports, I experience significant cognitive and emotional fatigue, leading to shutdown, paralysis, missed deadlines, inability to problem solve, and deterioration in my mental health and daily functioning.
The cuts I have already experienced in my supports has significantly increased the mental load I must carry each day. As a result, tasks accumulate, important responsibilities are missed, and I become overwhelmed. This is not ordinary tiredness. It is a cognitive and emotional shutdown where I remain aware of demands continuing to build, but lose the functional ability to organise or resolve them. For example, I may understand that I have M
My NDIS support enables me to maintain employment, parent my child, and participate meaningfully in the community. The supports act as a bridge between my capability and my ability to consistently function in daily life.
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026
Submission 3255
I work successfully as a teacher, but this requires extensive compensatory strategies. For example, I cannot rely on brief lesson notes or memory alone. I need highly detailed plans with step-by-step sequencing because I cannot reliably hold multiple stages of tasks in my working memory. Tasks that appear simple to others often take me substantially longer due to losing track of steps, becoming distracted, restarting processes repeatedly, or becoming overwhelmed by decision-making.
Support workers assist me with:
- prioritising and breaking tasks into manageable steps;
- staying on task and reducing distraction;
- organising paperwork and reports;
- managing emails and administrative tasks;
- implementing systems and routines;
- lesson planning and workload management;
- remembering previous decisions so I do not restart tasks repeatedly. Without these supports, I estimate that my work-related tasks would take at least three times longer to complete, resulting in exhaustion, inability to maintain my workload, worsening mental health, and likely loss of employment over time.
My psychologist provides essential professional support in helping me organise my thoughts, make decisions, regulate emotional overwhelm, and develop practical strategies. The support workers then assist me to implement these strategies in day-to day life. Both supports are necessary and complementary.
My daughter requires individualised at home therapy and this is helping her enormously. I fear that if she was transferred to group therapy, then this would not address her goals and would be too overwhelming and an accessible for her. It would also not allow us to work together as a family, or choose our own therapists.
My daughter and I have both got significant personal relationships with our therapists now as well as our support worker and we would be greatly disadvantage if we had to change this. We would be hugely disadvantaged by having to change our support worker, and I fear that she would not be able to afford the proposed registration fees as an independent sole trader. She is so much better than the people we have had through agencies in the past.
I implore you to not pass this Bill. Please consider the many, many people who have taken time out of there already very challenging lives to contact you with concerns. I understand the NDIS does need to be looked at, however cutting supports from vulnerable people in our society, is not the way forward for a healthy community. Energy should be put towards those providers who rort the system.
Many thanks for your consideration.