Submission 3332 — Name Withheld — NDIS Future Generations Bill

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1. Introduction 1. My name is . I make this submission in a personal capacity, as a participant in the National

Disability Insurance Scheme and as a parent within a family that the Scheme has worn to the edge of what it could survive.

2.   I live with multiple disabilities and chronic health conditions, spanning physical, sensory, neurological and

psychosocial impairments. I am the mother of two children, the younger of whom is a participant in the Scheme in his own right. My husband lives with chronic, immune-mediated illness. All four members of our household live with disability. There is no well, non-disabled adult among us.

3. We do not have an informal support network. My extended family of origin lives in Adelaide. Between my son’s needs and my own, we have managed to fly down as a family twice since he was born in 2020. Last October my father became critically ill with a pulmonary embolism at the top of both lungs. He was airlifted to the Royal Adelaide Hospital in a critical condition. I sat helplessly in Brisbane. To fly down would have required arranging additional support for my son so my husband could manage at home, and additional support for me to manage the flight and the days at my parents. None of it was possible in the time we had. That is what “reasonable to expect from family” looks like in our household. There is no spare adult to send. My husband’s parents live nearby. Both are in their late seventies, both have their own severe health conditions, and they help where they can, which is on a Sunday. The only place in our week where I am among people who understand is the waiting room of my son’s allied health clinic, and now our paid support workers. That is our village. It is not a network the Scheme can lawfully assume into existence. I say this at the outset because it is central to everything that follows: our family is precisely the kind of household this Bill does not appear to have been written for, and cannot account for.

4. Between 2021 and 2024 our family was the subject of two separate merits-review proceedings against the National Disability Insurance Agency. The first concerned my own plan. It was lodged with the

Administrative Appeals Tribunal in April 2022, after the Agency reduced my plan by 25% of its previous value, and by 66% of what the Agency’s own Local Area Coordinator had recommended following a change in my circumstances. The internal review left that reduction undisturbed. It resolved by consent on 22 December 2022, fourteen months after the funding was first cut. Seven days earlier, on 15 December 2022, the Agency had cut my son’s plan to $28,710.52 over two years, with no core supports funded at all, for a non-verbal child who could not walk, spanning physical, cognitive, neurological and sensory impairments, and who had multiple active specialist treating teams. My family did not have a week between the end of one proceeding and the start of the next. My son’s case was lodged in January 2023, ran for close to two years, and did not conclude until a final decision was handed down on Christmas Eve 2024.

5.   I want to be clear about what I am bringing to this Committee. I am not a lawyer. In both proceedings, the

   Agency was represented by external commercial law firms and a barrister. I was not. I prepared the

evidence, wrote the responses to the Agency’s legal statements, corrected the Agency’s own errors in its documents, and carried both cases at the same time, from a hospital bed. I am not a medical expert. I am not a systems analyst. I have, across the past four years, been required to become functionally competent at all three: to read the Act, to interpret my own and my son’s medical records, and to navigate the Scheme’s own internal architecture. None of that work was going to be done for my family by anyone else.

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What I bring to this Committee is none of those things in their proper sense. It is something the Committee cannot obtain from the Agency, from the Department, or from any other government agency: a complete, dated, documentary record of how the Scheme actually treats a complex family when that family asks for what it needs.

6. This matters because of what the Bill is, and what it claims to be. The Bill is presented as a measure to secure the Scheme for future generations, to protect participants, and to safeguard the integrity of the Scheme. My submission is that the Bill does the opposite. It takes the mechanisms by which my family was worn down, mechanisms that two tribunals examined and, in our favour, declined to endorse, and writes them into the primary legislation, where they will be harder to question and harder to escape. I am not speculating about how the Bill might operate. I have already lived through a version of it. My son’s hearing alone ran for five sitting days across four months in 2024. Midway through those four months, the governing legislation was amended: the tribunal itself was abolished and replaced, and the Agency was directed to re-argue its position under amended provisions while we were still in the middle of fighting it.1 This Bill would make that experience ordinary.

7.   I have structured this submission to be read alongside one central document. Attachment A is a crosswalk:

a single table that maps each of the nine Parts of Schedule 1 of the Bill against a specific, dated event from our two proceedings. It is the evidentiary spine of everything I argue here. The body of this submission explains, Part by Part, what the Bill changes, what it would have meant for my family, and what I ask the Committee to recommend in response. Every factual claim is drawn from documents on the tribunal record or in our family’s possession. I have not named the individual officers, planners or legal representatives involved; my submission concerns the conduct of a system, not of individuals. I have not named my children.

8.       I make this submission knowing how the Scheme responds to participants who challenge it.  I make it

anyway, because silence is exactly what the absence of a safe, independent complaints process has trained participants to choose. I would ask the Committee to receive this submission in that light.

2. Executive Summary

3.   I make this submission as a participant in the National Disability Insurance Scheme, and as the mother and

former litigation representative2 of a second participant, my young son. Between 2021 and 2024 our family was the subject of two separate merits-review proceedings against the National Disability Insurance Agency, one concerning my own plan, and one concerning my son’s. Both were resolved in our favour. Both took years. I am therefore not writing about what this Bill might do. I am writing about what the Agency has already done to my family under the current, less restrictive law, and what this Bill would make lawful, ordinary, and harder to challenge.

1 WQSW and Chief Executive Officer, National Disability Insurance Agency, ART file 2023/0486, decision of Senior Member J Collins, 24 December 2024, at para [14] “On 3 October 2024 and prior to the completion of this review the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Getting the NDIS Back on Track No 1) Act 2024 (‘the Amending Act’) made a range of ‘amendments’ to the NDIS Act” 2 In merits-review proceedings concerning a minor, the parent or guardian acts as the participant’s litigation representative for procedural purposes; the child remains the legal applicant.

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10. My central submission is this: the Bill is not what it claims to be. It codifies into primary legislation the same denial mechanisms two tribunals have already examined and found wanting in our cases. Every

substantive change  in Schedule 1 has a documented precedent  in our  evidentiary  record. The

accompanying crosswalk (Attachment A) maps each of the nine Parts of Schedule 1 against a specific, dated incident from those proceedings.

11. I want to begin with the Bill's own arithmetic, because it frames everything else. The Government has

stated that the reforms are designed to reduce projected NDIS spending from over $70 billion to $55 billion by 2030, a difference of approximately $15 billion per year. The Parliamentary Library’s Bills Digest observes that the participant-number target implies around 174,000 fewer people in the Scheme than are in it today.3 A Bill whose measure of success is a smaller number of disabled people receiving support deserves the Committee’s closest examination. ‘Securing’ a scheme and contracting it are not the same thing, and this submission asks the Committee not to treat them as if they were.

12. Four features of the Bill require the Committee’s particular attention. Each has a documented counterpart in my family’s two proceedings, and each would, if enacted, make that experience harder to challenge in future.

13. First, the Bill reaches backwards. The new statutory definition of “functional capacity” (proposed s9B) applies to decisions made on or after commencement, in the Bill’s own words, whether or not the person was a participant before commencement. The rewritten reasonable-and-necessary framework applies, by Item 76 of Schedule 1, to any review decision made after commencement even where the original decision predates it. In our own case, the legislative framework was changed once mid-proceedings, the Tribunal itself was replaced, and the Agency was directed to re-argue our son’s case under amended provisions while we were still in the middle of fighting it. This Bill would make that experience the rule rather than the exception, and would expose hard-won consent decisions to fresh reassessment under criteria that did not exist when they were made.

14. Second, the Bill assesses disability in a vacuum. Proposed s9B defines a person’s functional capacity as their ability to undertake an activity “without assistance from other people, assistive technology or modifications” and in a context that excludes, as far as possible, their environmental and personal circumstances. It instructs decision-makers to disregard exactly the lived context that every clinician, every carer statement, and both tribunals in our matters found essential to understanding what our family actually needed.

15. Third, the Bill prioritises procedural compliance over genuine care. The clearest example is proposed s34A, which gives the Minister power to reduce funding for whole groups of supports below their actual cost. The Bill also adds a power to suspend plans for participants the Agency deems ‘not contactable’ (proposed s40A) and to revoke participant status altogether (proposed s30(1A)), and a treatment-gate on the test for permanence that expressly disregards whether treatment is in fact accessible (proposed s24(5) and s25A). These provisions fall hardest on participants whose disabilities are most complex, and whose lives are least able to absorb another layer of administrative demand.

3 National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026, Bills Digest No. 65, 2025–26, Parliamentary Library, 25 May 2026. The Digest records the Government’s stated aim of reducing projected NDIS spending to around $55 billion by 2030, and notes that the participant target would mean approximately 174,000 fewer participants than the Scheme currently supports.

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16. Fourth, the Bill rests on an assumption that does not hold for families like mine. The reasonable- and-necessary provisions retain, and rely on, the principle that funding takes account of what it is reasonable to expect families, carers and informal networks to provide. That principle assumes every participant is surrounded by an informal support network: a parent, partner, or sibling who is available and able to absorb the care the Scheme declines to fund. In our household, all four family members live with disability. There is no well, non-disabled adult held in reserve. When the Scheme measures a participant’s needs against what is reasonably expected of any parent, it measures my family against a family that does not exist.

17. Families like mine are not rare, and they are not invisible to the Agency’s data. In response to a freedom- of-information request I made in 2025, the Agency disclosed that more than 10,700 children in the Scheme have a parent who is also a participant, and approximately 360 children have two parents who are both participants.4 But when I asked, in the same request, how many of those families have a complex case manager or similar role assigned to coordinate planning across the family, the Agency answered that the data could not be produced. Its FOI decision states that ‘complex case managers are assigned to individual participants and not families,’ and that while the Agency can record whether one or more family members are part of its ‘complex case stream,’ it holds no data on whether they share the same case manager. The coordination role I was asking about does not exist. The Agency can count the families. It has not built a way to see them. That is the assumption this Bill leaves undisturbed: that behind every participant there is someone well enough to hold the whole picture together. In my family, there is not, and the Scheme has no role that does.

18. I want to place one fact on the record at the outset, because it captures what this Bill protects. After two

years of proceedings concerning my son, a Senior Member of the Tribunal expressly urged the Agency to exercise its discretion to update his recorded diagnosis, so that I would not have to re-prove it in future. The Agency did not act on that urging. A Freedom of Information response later confirmed that the Agency spent approximately $165,422.51 in legal costs contesting my son’s supports, to resist a plan ultimately valued at $142,391.24, a plan which the Agency itself ultimately accepted.5 That figure is, if anything, an underestimate: it captures the legal costs disclosed to me, but not the Agency case officer present at every conciliation and hearing, not the Tribunal’s own time, not my son’s therapists’ time, and not a single hour of my own. I have since been informed that, because of the Harman undertaking, none of the evidence produced across those two years has ever been placed on my son’s participant record. As a result, as of today my son still has Global Developmental Delay recorded as his primary disability, even though his cerebral palsy, his brain injury and his rare genetic syndrome were not in dispute in the proceedings. I cannot safely lodge a change of circumstances, because doing so risks his plan being cut to nothing again.

4 National Disability Insurance Agency, FOI decision 24/25-1124, 11 April 2025, and the section 17 data document released with it. The released data records, by State and Territory, the number of child participants with one parent who is a participant and the number with both parents participants. State totals: ACT 185 / NSW 2,412 / NT 52 / QLD 2,773 / SA 1,052 / TAS 211 / VIC 3,315 / WA 778 (one parent); ACT <11 / NSW 62 / NT 0 / QLD 96 / SA 67 / TAS <11 / VIC 98 / WA 33 (both parents). The Agency advised that data could not be produced in response to the third element of the request, concerning complex case management across families, because complex case managers are assigned to individual participants and not to families. 5 The legal-cost figure is drawn from the Agency’s responses to the author’s Freedom of Information requests concerning expenditure on her son’s tribunal matter (WQSW, ART file 2023/0486), including FOI 24/25-1292 (decision dated 3 October 2025). The released invoices include fees from the Agency’s solicitors, counsel, hearing transcription, and an independent occupational-therapy assessment. The figure is necessarily incomplete: the Agency withheld the itemised totals of its solicitors’ invoices under s 47G of the FOI Act, and confirmed in its Statement of Reasons that it does not track the hours worked by its own staff and case managers on tribunal matters, so no figure for internal staff time exists. The true cost is therefore higher than the figure stated.

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19. There is a further cost to the way these proceedings are structured, and it bears on my ability to make this submission at all. Evidence obtained through a tribunal proceeding is subject to an implied undertaking: it may not be used outside that proceeding, and the obligation continues even after the matter has ended.6 I am bound by that undertaking. I was never told it existed. It is set out in a practice direction written for lawyers; it appears nowhere in the participant-facing material on either the Agency’s website or the Tribunal’s. A self-represented parent who gathered evidence about her own child, and who now wishes to speak about what happened to her family, is bound by a restriction she had no way of learning about and may breach simply by speaking. That is why this submission may need to be lodged without my name attached. A participant should not have to weigh whether testifying about her own child is lawful. That is the integrity problem the Bill claims to address. It is, in fact, the integrity problem the Bill protects.

20. The last proceeding nearly cost me my life.

21. This is the system as it operates now, under the current law. The Bill would entrench it.

22. I do not ask the Committee to take my account on trust. Every factual claim in this submission is drawn

from dated documents on the tribunal record or in our family’s possession. My recommendations are set out in full at Section 5.

23. The Minister has described this Bill as a measure to protect participants and to safeguard the integrity of the Scheme. I ask the Committee to weigh that word carefully. A system does not have integrity because it says so. It has integrity when a participant who is harmed by it has somewhere independent to go: a complaints body outside the Agency’s own chain of command, with the power to impose a real consequence. No such body exists. When a participant is wronged by an Agency officer, the only doors open to them lead back to the Agency itself. Participants know this, and so we do not complain. We self censor, out of a wholly rational fear: that the people we would complain about are the same people who hold our funding, our plans, and our children’s supports in their hands. A Bill cannot legislate integrity into a system while leaving that fear in place.

24. I want to end on something larger than a list of objections. This Bill is written as though the only question

worth asking is how little can be given, to how few, for the lowest cost. I am asking the Committee to consider a different question. What if a needs assessment were not an exercise in finding reasons to fund less, but a genuine attempt to understand what a person needs to live with dignity? What if the measure of the Scheme were not how much it could withhold, but whether it gave disabled people the support to live as independently as they can, and to take their place in their community? And what if disability inclusion were built into the foundation of laws like this from the start, rather than added as an afterthought? That is the Scheme the NDIS was promised to be. This Bill moves us further from it. I urge the Committee to recommend against Schedule 1 in its current form. A Scheme cannot be ‘secured’ for future generations by being made unreachable for the participants it already has.

6 The implied undertaking (referred to in legal commentary as the Harman undertaking, after Harman v Home Office; see Hearne v Street (2008) 235 CLR 125) restricts the use of documents obtained through a tribunal’s compulsory processes to the proceeding in which they were obtained. It is set out in the Administrative Review Tribunal’s Common Procedures Practice Direction 2026, which provides that the undertaking continues after a proceeding is finalised and that a party must apply to the Tribunal to be released from it. The obligation does not appear in any participant-facing guidance published by the National Disability Insurance Agency or the Administrative Review Tribunal.

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3. What the NDIS Made Possible, and What Is Now at Risk
4. Before I turn to the specific provisions of the Bill, I want to be clear about something the public debate has almost entirely lost. The National Disability Insurance Scheme, when it is allowed to work as it was intended, works. It worked for my son, and, at times, it has worked for me. But the barriers are real and the burden relentless. I am not writing to this Committee because the Scheme is wrong in principle. I am writing because the Scheme succeeded, visibly, measurably, in the body and the voice of my son. This Bill puts that success at risk.

What early intervention achieved

26. My son began allied health therapy at sixteen weeks of age. By then he was already a failure-to-thrive infant under the care of a private children’s hospital feeding and speech team. He entered the National Disability Insurance Scheme at eight months of age. I want the Committee to register that timeline carefully, because it matters to how this Bill is being sold. My son did not drift onto the Scheme from some other system he should have stayed in. He did not bypass a mainstream pathway. He was a medically complex baby, and the Scheme, alongside therapy my husband and I were already paying for ourselves, was his early intervention. It was the Scheme operating exactly as its original intent describes.

27. What followed is the clearest evidence I can offer this Committee of what the Scheme is for. With NDIS- funded early intervention, my son, who has cerebral palsy, periventricular leukomalacia, a rare genetic syndrome, hypotonia, and global developmental delay,7 was supported to hold his head up, to sit, to crawl, to chew, to stand, to walk, and to run. The same team is now helping him to write, to dress himself, to manage a drink bottle, to use a toilet, to use cutlery, to jump, to understand pain, and to communicate. They do not only treat him. They help the world around him understand him.

28. The single most important support my son has ever received is his communication device. The device is how he reaches a world his own mouth cannot yet reach for him. My son used that device to tell me that he loved me before he could form the words with his voice. The Tribunal that heard his case recorded the clinical version of the same fact: that in or about March 2024 he started using a communication device and is now able to put some word combinations together.8 The human version and the clinical version describe one thing. A child was given his voice. The Scheme did that. It is precisely what the Scheme was promised to do.

There is no boundary, only a family routing care across every system

29. The Bill, and the Department’s own material explaining it, places considerable weight on the boundary between the NDIS and mainstream services: the idea that participants should be supported by mainstream systems wherever possible. I want to tell the Committee what that boundary actually looks like from inside a family that lives across it every week.

7 WQSW and Chief Executive Officer, National Disability Insurance Agency, ART file 2023/0486, decision of Senior Member J Collins, 24 December 2024, at [32]: the Tribunal recorded that the diagnoses of cerebral palsy, ERF-related craniosynostosis syndrome, hypotonia, periventricular leukomalacia and global developmental delay were undisputed. 8 Ibid, at para [38]

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30. There is no boundary. There is a family making continuous, expert decisions about which system can best help my son, or help my husband and me with our own disabilities, and moving between them accordingly. Sometimes the answer is a mainstream service. Sometimes it is a NDIS-funded support. Very often it is a clinician we pay for entirely ourselves. This is not a choice between the NDIS and the mainstream. It is a constant act of triage across all of them at once.

31. Let me show the Committee what my family funds privately, out of our own pocket, for my son. His ophthalmologist. His ENT specialist. His gastroenterologist. His continence team. His sleep and lung specialist. His paediatrician and geneticist. His hearing aids and his audiology care. The release of his tongue and lip tie at five months of age. The chiropractic care that began as a clinical condition of that release and which we have continued because it helps manage his spasticity and intracranial pressure. His dietitian, except for six funded sessions. The private hospitals where he has had surgeries. The brain MRI he had as a private patient within a public hospital. This is not an exhaustive list. It is enough to make the point. The boundary the Bill wishes to reinforce is one my family has been paying to cross for my son’s entire life.

32. We do not do this by preference. We do it because the public system, repeatedly, could not hold a child as complex as my son, or a family situation juggling as much as ours. The Tribunal that heard his case found that dietician services were most appropriately funded through the Scheme precisely because mainstream public-health services were not, in practice, available to him within a clinically safe time.9 And where mainstream services could be accessed, they discharged him because he was beyond their scope. The Child Development Network discharged him back to his NDIS-funded therapists. The paediatric neurological rehabilitation service did the same. Behavioural outreach and community health services did the same. The Scheme did not pick him up because the mainstream was untried. The Scheme picked him up because the mainstream had been tried, and had said no.

33. Where the public system did not discharge him, it could not reach him in time. After my son’s brain MRI in late 2023, he was referred for a neurosurgical opinion, to determine whether he required cranial surgery. The waiting time we were quoted was, in writing, ‘unknown.’ We waited. Months passed with no appointment and no update. Eventually we paid to see a neurologist privately. Even then, the first appointment was not until the middle of the following year. A three-year-old child with diagnosed brain damage, a pre-birth stroke and cerebral palsy waited the better part of a year for neurological review, and got there only because his family paid. This is the mainstream alternative the Bill points to. I would ask the Committee to weigh what “reinforcing the boundary” means for a family already standing in that queue.

Where the integrity problem actually sits

34.   The Bill is presented to the public as a measure of integrity and value for money.  I want to give the

Committee one illustration, from my son’s own plan, of where the real problem in this Scheme actually sits, because it is not where the Bill is looking.

9 WQSW and Chief Executive Officer, National Disability Insurance Agency, ART file 2023/0486, decision of Senior Member J Collins, 24 December 2024, para [268]: the Tribunal found that mainstream dietitian services in the public health system were “not suitable for WQSW as they are unable to be accessed within this critical developmental period,” and that the support was therefore most appropriately funded through the Scheme; Para [266-277] details the comparative assessment of ‘appropriateness’ test

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35. Almost all of my son’s plan is self-managed. Self-management is the cheapest arrangement available to the Commonwealth, and it places the entire administrative and oversight burden on the participant’s family. I choose to carry that burden. I audit every invoice. I check every charge. When errors occur, I find them. The one support in my son’s plan that is not self-managed, his behaviour therapy, is agency managed: administered directly by the Agency rather than by me. It is the most expensive support in his plan, and it is the least transparent. I am not sent the invoices. There is no confirmation provided to me that the service was delivered, or that my son was kept safe. The plan is simply charged, and I am asked to trust that what was billed was provided. For the most expensive and least visible support my son receives, I am extended none of the verification this Bill insists the Scheme needs everywhere else.

36. I am told that I may request a copy of an invoice, or ask for clarification of a charge, after the fact. But

oversight that depends on the participant asking, after the money has been spent, is not oversight. That is precisely the point. When a family self-manages, the oversight burden sits with the family, and we carry it. When the Agency manages a budget line, the oversight should sit with the Agency. That is the reason agency management exists, and the reason it costs more. Instead, the one part of my son’s plan the Agency administers directly is the part with no proactive oversight at all. A Bill that calls itself an integrity measure, while the funding the Agency manages directly is the least accountable line in the plan, has not identified the integrity problem. It has looked past it.

What a tribunal found when it finally looked

37. I do not ask the Committee to take any of this on my word alone. My son's case was heard by the

Administrative Review Tribunal across five sitting days in 2024, and the Senior Member who decided it made findings I would ask this Committee to weigh carefully, because they go directly to the assumptions on which this Bill is built.

38. The Agency, in that proceeding, relied on an independent occupational therapist who recommended against funding a support worker for my son, on the reasoning that support for a child of his age is primarily the responsibility of his parents, and that declining the support aligned with the broader objective of fostering independence. That reasoning is, almost word for word, the logic this Bill would reinforce. The Tribunal did not accept it. The Senior Member found that the provision of additional support-worker assistance to his parents ’would not improve their physical functional ability to fulfil their parental responsibilities,’10 and that the arrangement under which our family had been left to manage was ’unrealistic and unsustainable.’11 It accepted that my husband had, in the six months before the hearing, been hospitalised three or four times after losing his breath while chasing our son12. It accepted that by late afternoon each day, my own fatigue left me reliant on a wheelchair.13

10 WQSW and Chief Executive Officer, National Disability Insurance Agency, ART file 2023/0486, decision of Senior Member J Collins, 24 December 2024, at [209]. The Tribunal rejected the recommendation of the Agency’s occupational therapist that a support worker for the child was not reasonable or necessary, finding that the provision of further support-worker assistance to the parents “will not … improve their physical functional ability to fulfil their parental responsibilities.” 11 Ibid at [208]: the Tribunal found that the arrangement under which the child had no funded support worker “is physically draining for both parents and compromises their own health both mentally and physically … It is also unrealistic and unsustainable.” 12 Ibid at [80], and accepted as a finding at [208]. 13 Ibid at [196] and [208]

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39. The Senior Member described my husband and me as “honest and credible witnesses,” and our evidence as “measured and without exaggeration.”14 I place those words before the Committee not out of pride, but because they matter to the question in front of you. For years, the Agency treated the care my family provides as the ordinary responsibility of any parent. A Commonwealth tribunal, having heard all of the evidence, found otherwise. It found our account of our own lives to be the truthful one. The mechanisms this Bill would entrench are the same mechanisms that produced the conclusion the Tribunal had to overturn.

What going back would mean

40. I want to end this section by telling the Committee, plainly, what is at stake for my family if the supports

we have fought for are reduced.

41. The risks are not hypothetical and they are not rhetorical. They are set out in the carer impact statement I provided to the Tribunal, and the Tribunal accepted them.15 If the supports are withdrawn, the primary carers, my husband and I, both of us living with serious health conditions of our own, will deteriorate. That deterioration leads to hospitalisation. When a carer is hospitalised, a disabled child loses the people who keep him safe. I wrote, in that statement, a sentence I will repeat here because it remains true: were our children to end up in foster care or group homes, the cost to the Commonwealth would far exceed the cost of funding support workers in our own home.

42. I want to give the Committee one further fact about what the process itself has cost, because it goes to

the human price of the system this Bill would expand. During the final year of my son’s proceedings, after my family had by then spent close to three years inside merits review across both our cases, I began experiencing stroke-like episodes: slurred speech, difficulty swallowing, blurred vision, and an inability to stand or walk. They occurred, at their worst, almost daily. In May 2024, mid-proceeding, the symptoms were serious enough that a doctor ordered brain imaging under a formal stroke protocol to exclude a stroke.16 The imaging found no stroke and no structural lesion, but the episodes were real. They were witnessed by emergency clinicians, by my psychologist, by my psychiatrist and by my support workers, and they were understood by those clinicians as a progression of my neurological condition under sustained and extreme carer burnout. My treating psychologist has documented, in writing, that the process of seeking support for my son through the Agency itself significantly exacerbated my own health.17 I put this before the Committee because it is the harm cycle made physical. A system that requires a family

14 WQSW and Chief Executive Officer, National Disability Insurance Agency, ART file 2023/0486, decision of Senior Member J Collins, 24 December 2024, at [50] (of the applicant’s mother, found to be “an honest and credible witness” whose evidence was “measured and without exaggeration”) and [97] (of the applicant’s father, whose evidence was found “honest, truthful, measured and without exaggeration”). 15 WQSW and Chief Executive Officer, National Disability Insurance Agency, ART file 2023/0486, decision of Senior Member J Collins, 24 December 2024. The Tribunal accepted the parents’ evidence as to the impact of their caring responsibilities, finding the existing arrangement “physically draining for both parents,” that it “compromises their own health both mentally and physically,” and that it was “unrealistic and unsustainable” (at [208]); that the mother was experiencing “extensive carer burnout” and “extreme levels of stress” (at [221]); and that the father’s health had on occasions required hospitalisation in the context of caring for the child (at [197], [208]). 16 MRI brain (stroke protocol), Lumus Imaging, 15 May 2024, on file with the submitter. The clinical history recorded “new onset perioral paraesthesia and dysphasia.” The imaging excluded infarct, mass lesion and demyelination. 17 Treating clinical psychologist’s progress report dated 31 October 2025, on file with the submitter. The report records that the submitter’s functioning over the period of intervention “has continued to have been negatively impacted by the significant health and disability-related concerns for her husband and sons, and ongoing difficulties with accessing suitable supports,” and notes “episodes of significant decline” managed during that period; standardised assessment (WHODAS 2.0) recorded overall disability in the severe range with extreme-range impairment across self-care, life activities and participation.

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to fight for years does not leave that family as it found them. The fight has a cost, and in my case that cost was measured, in a hospital, under a stroke protocol.

43. The cost was not only physical, and it was not only mine. A fight conducted at this intensity, for this long, does not stay inside the participant it is about; it moves through the whole household. My husband and I had begun discussing marriage counselling, not because the marriage had failed, but because the years of medical, legal and NDIS administration had left us with no capacity for the ordinary work of communicating with one another. My eldest son moved out of home during this period. I do not attribute that to any single cause, but the prolonged strain on our household, and the demands the Agency placed on me, were part of it. And in the worst stretch, my husband and I were actively discussing, seriously, whether we would be able to continue caring for our younger son at home if adequate support did not arrive. That is a conversation no parent should be driven to, and one we were driven to not by his needs but by the Scheme’s response to them. I place this before the Committee because the harm a process like this causes is not captured in a plan figure or a hospital record. It is also measured in the relationships that do not survive it.

44. There has also been public discussion of participant co-payments. I want the Committee to understand what a co-payment would mean for a household like mine. My income is a disability support pension of approximately $420 a fortnight. On that income, a co-payment is not a contribution. It is a forced forfeiture of support. I want to be precise about the form that forfeiture would take, because it is the truest sentence I can give this Committee: a co-payment would mean choosing between my son’s therapies and my own. That is the choice. Not an inconvenience, not a tightened belt. A parent deciding which member of the family goes without the support, the therapy, the medication or the surgery that keeps them safe and functioning. I would choose my son. What would you choose? I do not need to ask the Committee to imagine the answer. I have already made that choice, repeatedly, with my own body. Across the period of these proceedings I have deferred my own surgeries, my own treatment, and my own therapy hours in order to keep my son’s in place. The co-payment the Bill anticipates is not a hypothetical to me. It is a description of what I have already been doing. And so the co-payment would not save the cost of my support. It would simply move that cost, into a hospital, where I spent the better part of nine months in 2019, before the supports that now keep me out of one.

45. This is what the Scheme made possible. This is what is now at risk. With that in mind, I turn to the specific provisions of Schedule 1.

46. Schedule 1, Part by Part

47. This section addresses the nine Parts of Schedule 1 in turn. For each, I set out briefly what the Bill does, what it would have meant in my family’s two proceedings, and what changes for participants once it commences. The clause references are to the Bill as introduced on 14 May 2026. The detailed mapping is provided at Attachment A, the crosswalk; this section is the argument that accompanies it. I have not attempted to address every provision of the Bill. I have addressed the provisions I have lived.

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Part 1: Defining functional capacity (proposed s 9B)

47. Part 1 inserts a statutory definition of functional capacity. Proposed s 9B defines a person’s functional capacity, in relation to an activity, as their ability to undertake it “without assistance from other people, assistive technology or modifications,” and in a context that excludes, “as far as possible,” the impact of

their environmental and  personal  circumstances.18  In my  son's proceedings, the Agency's own

commissioned assessment already recorded a non-verbal child of almost three who returned “Never” or “Not Able” across communication, community use, functional pre-academics and most of home living; who did not register pain; who woke through the night; who required two-person nappy changes. The Agency’s own independent occupational therapist had never assessed my son in person.19 Her opinions, including her recommendation against a support worker, were formed remotely and on the papers. She conceded in evidence that his eating and drinking needs were high, and that she could see a need for a support worker in the community — concessions she made only once she had heard the actual facts at the hearing.20 That is the assessment framework the Bill would now make harder to look behind. That assessment was devastating with his supports and environment included. The new definition does not change my son’s functional reality. It changes the baseline the Agency may use to deny the supports built around him. And the application provision for Part 1 states expressly that the new definition applies to decisions made on or after commencement, whether or not the person was a participant before commencement, so it reaches backwards into the circumstances of every existing participant.21

Part 2: Limiting unscheduled plan reassessments (proposed s 48A; s 32B(2A))

48. Part 2 confines participant-requested reassessments through new conditions in proposed s 48A, and gives the Agency, by proposed s 32B(2A), the ability to convert a reassessment request into a full new-framework plan.22 I want the Committee to place this against November 2021, when a vaccine injury left my left upper limb clinically non-functional and a change-of-circumstances request was met not with more support, but with less: my plan was reduced by 25% of its previous value, and by 66% of what the Local Area Coordinator had recommended at my review. It was the period my family remembers as the Christmas I had $135 left. The mechanism that eventually carried me to the Tribunal was the reassessment pathway. Under this Bill, a future functional cliff of that kind — a sudden loss, an acute episode, a cluster of hospitalisations — must clear new statutory conditions before a reassessment can even proceed. A crisis would compound before the system was required to answer it.

18 National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026, Schedule 1 Part 1, proposed s 9B. 19 WQSW and Chief Executive Officer, National Disability Insurance Agency, ART file 2023/0486, decision of Senior Member J Collins, 24 December 2024, at [152] (the Agency’s independent occupational therapist did not assess the child in person) and at [167]–[168] (her further opinions in respect of the child’s dietary needs and his brother’s suitability as a carer were given without the witness having met the relevant person, and were based on a review of the papers). 20 Ibid at [167]–[170]. 21 National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026, Schedule 1 Part 1, application provision. 22 National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026, Schedule 1 Part 2, proposed s 48A (conditions on participant-requested reassessments) and proposed s 32B(2A) (conversion of a reassessment request into a new-framework plan).

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Part  3: Strengthening the  link between impairment and support (proposed amendment to s

34(1)(aa))

49. Part 3 amends s 34(1)(aa) so that a funded support must address needs arising “directly” from an impairment that meets the disability or early intervention requirements.23 The Department’s own explanatory material states that this provision is a deliberate response to decisions of the courts: it is intended to overturn the position that a causal or contributory link between a support and an impairment is enough.24 This sounds technical. Its effect is not. In May 2024, coming out of my son’s hydrotherapy session, my support worker was at the pool gate when my son slipped through it and ran toward the road. She hesitated, because she is engaged to support me, and if I were to fall while she went after him, the liability would be hers. I understood her hesitation, but as I told the Tribunal, that is my child. As I put it in my evidence: a support worker engaged for me is, in practice, told, “you’re there for , but while you’re there, do you mind looking after him as well; and if anything happens, you just have to deal with it.” And that is not okay. That moment, an able-bodied adult held in place by an impairment-link rule while a non-verbal child ran toward a road, is exactly the human cost of writing a “directly” test into the statute.

50. That incident was documented in a contemporaneous support-worker incident report placed before the Tribunal,25 and the Tribunal accepted the structural problem it revealed: that a support worker funded for one member of a household cannot be tasked with the safety of another without compromising the support the first person is entitled to.26 Disability does not divide itself neatly between two people in one household. The Bill draws a clean administrative line, “directly,” exactly where lived disability refuses to draw one, and families with more than one disabled member fall through the gap it creates.

Part 4: Ministerial power to reduce funding (proposed s 34A; s 33(2EA))

51. Part 4 creates, in proposed s 34A, a power for the Minister to determine by legislative instrument a percentage by which the funding for a specified group of supports is reduced across a class of plans; and, in proposed s 33(2EA), a power to set maximum funding amounts, maximum support intensity, or maximum worker-to-participant ratios for classes of supports.27 The Bill is explicit, in a note to the relevant provisions, that these powers apply regardless of whether the resulting funding meets the cost of the supports. A reduced or capped amount can therefore lawfully fall below what a support actually costs. I would ask the Committee to consider this against what happened after my own consent decision. That decision was a legally binding Tribunal outcome. When the Agency implemented it, the implementation

23 National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026, Schedule 1 Part 3, amending s 34(1)(aa). 24 Explanatory Memorandum, National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026, in relation to Part 3 of Schedule 1. 25 WQSW and Chief Executive Officer, National Disability Insurance Agency, ART file 2023/0486, decision of Senior Member J Collins, 24 December 2024, at [173]: incident report of the applicant’s mother’s support worker, recording that during community access in May 2024 the child “took off running” and the support worker, although engaged to support the applicant’s mother, felt she had no option but to run after the child to secure his safety. 26 Ibid at [93]: the Tribunal recorded the applicant’s mother’s evidence that her natural instinct to request her support worker to chase her son in such circumstances “compromises her support worker’s responsibility to her and leaves M vulnerable and at risk on the basis that she is unassisted by her support worker,” and accepted that ultimately “M’s needs are not met by her support worker who is instead obliged to assist with WQSW’s impulsive behaviours.” See also at [225]: the Tribunal found that, with dedicated support-worker funding for the child, the applicant’s mother “will not have to forfeit support from her support worker for the safety of her child.” 27 National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026, Schedule 1 Part 4, proposed s 34A (Ministerial power to reduce funding for groups of supports by legislative instrument) and proposed s 33(2EA) (maximum funding amounts, maximum support intensity, and maximum worker-to-participant ratios).

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contained errors, every one of them in the Agency’s favour, which I calculated at $42,187.60. I found each one myself. I pursued the Agency, and recovered $38,960.92 of it. I abandoned the remainder, not because it was not owed, but because by then I was running my son’s case and did not have the capacity to keep fighting for the rest. That is the pattern the Committee should sit with: the Agency’s error becomes the participant’s loss, because the participant is the only person doing the unpaid work of catching it, and a participant’s capacity runs out before the Agency’s does. A power to reduce or cap supports below their real cost, with no hearing, no individual decision, no negotiation, does not need to be misused to cause harm. It simply makes the shortfall lawful and routine rather than an error to be corrected.

52. A power to fund supports inconsistently is not a hypothetical risk to me. It is the documented pattern of my own plans. In my plan dated 27 November 2024, the Agency funded a powered wheelchair for me at a cost of $28,835.04, and in the same plan declined the home modifications that would allow me to use that wheelchair inside my own house, or to get it out of the house, on the stated basis that my neurological condition was not progressive enough to warrant them. The Scheme funded the equipment and then declined to fund the means of using it. The Agency issued that plan twelve days before my son’s final tribunal hearing, and while I was bedridden, recovering from major surgery. The same contradiction runs through my vehicle modifications. They were funded in a plan in 2019 and then removed three months later in a new plan, leaving me unable to drive. For seven years I have been required to make the same argument again, each cycle, commissioning fresh occupational therapy reports and justifications simply to have an item re-approved that had already been approved before. I would ask the Committee to weigh the arithmetic of that. The money spent on occupational therapy reports and Agency staff time, across seven years of re-arguing those two items, would by now have paid for both the home modifications and the vehicle modifications outright. This is the integrity problem the Bill does not see: at every turn the participant is burdened and penalised for presenting as disabled, then told they are not disabled enough, and made to try harder, and pay more, to re-prove the very same thing. Proposed s 34A and s 33(2EA) would give that pattern the force of law rather than the character of error.

Part 5: Plan renewals (proposed s 50A and the new ‘end date’ provisions)

53. Part 5 replaces the administrative practice of plan continuations with a statutory concept of “plan renewal,” and requires that every renewed plan satisfy afresh the full funding-component, total-funding and funding period requirements of s 33.28 The Department’s own material confirms this is intended to replace “rollovers.“29 I want the Committee to understand what the carrying of unspent funds actually does for a participant whose disability fluctuates, because the public framing treats unspent funds as evidence of over-funding, and for a family like mine that is precisely backwards. My disabilities are not static. I live with bipolar disorder and complex PTSD alongside erythromelalgia, a fluctuating progressive neurological condition, and my support needs rise and fall accordingly. The ability to carry unspent funds within a plan is what let me match my support to my condition: during a mental health episode, when I needed more care, I could direct more of my plan toward support workers; when I stabilised, I could scale that back. The funding flexed to fit a life that does not move in a straight line. A rigid, spend-it-or-lose-it logic assumes

28 National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026, Schedule 1 Part 5, proposed s 50A (plan renewal) and the new plan end-date provisions. 29 Explanatory Memorandum, National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026, in relation to Part 5 of Schedule 1, confirming that the statutory renewal mechanism replaces the administrative practice of plan rollover.

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every participant needs the same support in every fortnight of the year. For a person with an episodic disability, that assumption is not merely inaccurate, it is unsafe, because it leaves nothing held in reserve for the week the crisis comes. My family has learned, across two tribunal cases, a sentence I would ask the Committee to take seriously as a design principle: our lives do not fit in neat spreadsheets.

Part 6: Rewriting reasonable and necessary supports (proposed amendments to s 34, incl. s 34(1)(g))

54. Part 6 lifts and reshapes the reasonable-and-necessary criteria in s 34. Among other changes, it inserts a new s 34(1)(g): a support is not reasonable and necessary if it would be more appropriately provided or funded by another scheme or by an existing government service system.30 I would ask the Committee to consider what that test will mean in practice, against what it already means in practice. In my son’s proceedings, the Agency originally disputed thirty-eight supports. For nearly twenty months — through expert reports, further submissions, and every form of evidence we could produce — the Agency’s position did not move. On the morning of the first day of the hearing in August 2024, the Agency conceded that thirty-one of those supports were reasonable and necessary after all.31 The position the Agency had held for nearly two years was not a position the evidence supported. It was a position the Agency abandoned the moment a tribunal was about to test it. The Tribunal’s final decision was handed down four months later, on Christmas Eve 2024. The plan that gave effect to that decision was not generated until February 2025 — and even then, only after I identified and corrected further errors in the Agency’s figures and management-stream allocations. From the original cut in December 2022 to a lawful plan in February 2025, my son waited twenty-six months. He was two when it began and four when it ended. I place this before the Committee because s 34(1)(g) does not change the evidence. It changes only how easily the Agency can hold a position the evidence does not support, by routing the refusal through a different scheme or government service. Part 6 gives that approach firmer statutory footing, and s 34(1)(g) turns the deflection to other systems, the deflection my family met again and again, into an explicit criterion of the reasonable-and-necessary test itself.

55. I want to raise one further matter under Part 6, because it concerns the most complex participants the

Scheme exists to serve, and the Bill does not appear to have considered them. The Department’s reform material describes a more standardised, evidence-based approach to assessing need. The criteria for whether a support is effective and beneficial already direct decision-makers, through the Supports Rules, to the evidence of effectiveness “for others in like circumstances,” including published and refereed literature. A more standardised assessment model, reasoning from a participant’s recorded diagnosis to the functional profile the literature predicts for that diagnosis, works only where the participant resembles a studied population. My son does not. He has a rare genetic syndrome — ERF-related craniosynostosis, a confirmed pathogenic variant — and, separately, a brain injury: periventricular leukomalacia, which his neurologist has documented as unrelated to the genetic syndrome and as the cause of his cerebral palsy.32

30 National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026, Schedule 1 Part 6, proposed s 34(1)(g). 31 WQSW and Chief Executive Officer, National Disability Insurance Agency, ART file 2023/0486, decision of Senior Member J Collins, 24 December 2024, at [8] (the Agency conceded that thirty-one of the thirty-eight supports initially in dispute were reasonable and necessary). The remaining supports were either withdrawn by the applicant before determination (ibid at [9]) or determined by the Tribunal at hearing (ibid at [10]) 32 Report of Dr Adriane Sinclair, paediatric neurologist, tendered in evidence in the same proceeding and summarised in the decision at [45]– [49]. The decision records at [32] that cerebral palsy and periventricular leukomalacia are among the applicant’s son’s undisputed diagnoses.

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His geneticist has been explicit that he cannot predict how the brain injury will interact with the syndrome, because he has never seen the two together in one child.33 His paediatric rehabilitation consultant has expressly recorded that the brain injury “may not account for all his motor delays and would not account for his communication and behavioural challenges” — a picture with multiple independent drivers that cannot be reduced to a single cause.34 There is no body of literature about a child like my son, because, as far as his own treating specialists can tell, there is no other child like my son. An assessment model that ranks generalised literature above the treating clinicians who actually know the child is not merely imperfect for a participant like him, it is structurally incapable of seeing him. It would assess the label, not the child. I ask the Committee to ensure that whatever assessment framework follows from this Bill cannot rank generalised evidence above the individual evidence of treating clinicians, because for the rarest and most complex participants the individual evidence is the only evidence that exists.

56. There is a structural mechanism that makes the Part 6 changes more dangerous than they first appear, and I would ask the Committee to understand it. When a participant fights the Agency at a tribunal, the evidence produced and the concessions made are governed by an implied undertaking: material produced for a proceeding may be used only for that proceeding.35 In practice, for an NDIS participant, this means the evidence that wins a tribunal case does not flow back into the participant’s administrative record. The Agency may concede a point at a hearing; the concession resolves the case but leaves no trace on the file. I would note, in passing, that this is an obligation participants are bound by but are not taught: it is set out in the Tribunal’s practitioner-facing procedural directions, and is not explained in plain language anywhere on the participant-facing pages of the National Disability Insurance Agency or the Tribunal. This is why my son, today, still has Global Developmental Delay recorded as his primary disability, despite two years of proceedings in which his cerebral palsy, his genetic syndrome and his brain injury were never in dispute.36 The evidence exists. It simply never reached his file. The result is a one-way valve: the participant bears the full burden of proof at every planning cycle, while the Agency’s concessions never accumulate into the record. Part 6 rewrites the test that governs that burden of proof, and because of the implied undertaking, a participant cannot rely on having discharged it once. I would ask the Committee to consider how evidence established in a participant’s tribunal proceeding can be required to update that participant’s administrative record, so that families are not made to re-prove, indefinitely, what has already been proved.

Part 7: Plan suspension and revocation (proposed s 40A; s 30(1A))

57. Part 7 allows the Agency, by proposed s 40A, to suspend a participant’s plan where the Agency has made “reasonable attempts” to contact the participant and the participant “is not contactable”; during

33 Report of Professor David Coman, clinical geneticist, paediatrician and metabolic physician, tendered in evidence in WQSW and Chief Executive Officer, National Disability Insurance Agency, ART file 2023/0486. Professor Coman’s evidence in respect of the rarity of the applicant’s son’s condition is summarised in the decision of Senior Member J Collins, 24 December 2024, at [42]–[44]. 34 Paediatric rehabilitation consultant’s letter and hip-surveillance report (Dr K McLennan, Queensland Paediatric Rehabilitation Service), 3 October 2024, on file with the submitter. 35 The implied undertaking (referred to in legal commentary as the Harman undertaking, after Harman v Home Office; see Hearne v Street (2008) 235 CLR 125) restricts the use of documents obtained through a tribunal’s compulsory processes to the proceeding in which they were obtained. It is set out in the Administrative Review Tribunal’s Common Procedures Practice Direction 2026, which provides that the undertaking continues after a proceeding is finalised and that a party must apply to the Tribunal to be released from it. The obligation does not appear in any participant-facing guidance published by the National Disability Insurance Agency or the Administrative Review Tribunal. 36 WQSW and Chief Executive Officer, National Disability Insurance Agency, ART file 2023/0486, decision of Senior Member J Collins, 24 December 2024, at [32]: the Tribunal recorded that the diagnoses of cerebral palsy, ERF-related craniosynostosis syndrome, periventricular leukomalacia and global developmental delay were undisputed.

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suspension no payments are made and no reassessment can be requested; and by proposed s 30(1A) the Agency may revoke a person’s status as a participant where they are not contactable, or where the plan has been suspended for at least ninety days.37 I would ask the Committee to hold this against the lived texture of my family’s two-year fight. Across that period I was hospitalised many times. I managed Agency correspondence, freedom-of-information requests, planning meetings and Tribunal directions through bipolar episodes, through post-surgical recovery, on a few broken hours of sleep a night. Engagement with the Agency was, in those periods, an act of physical bravery.

58. I want to give the Committee a concrete example of what "reasonable attempts" to contact a participant

looks like in practice. In February 2025 I received a letter from the Agency headed “Please contact the NDIS,” recording that the Agency had tried to reach me on two dates and asking me to make contact. The letter arrived by ordinary post, on a rainy day, and was damaged by water; I was fortunate to be able to open it without it tearing. The Agency’s telephone contact is frequently made from a private, withheld number and without notice, and at times when my documented preferred method of contact is email or text message. The letters themselves often do not state the reason for the contact, which participant the matter concerns, the name of a person to ask for, or a direct telephone number to call back. That is the

reality of "contact" for a participant  like me: a withheld-number  call  I cannot identify, against a

documented preference for written contact, followed by a letter that arrived only because it did not quite tear in half, and that did not tell me what the call was about or who to ring. Under the current law, that sequence is a nuisance. Under proposed s 40A and s 30(1A), that same sequence, two attempted calls and a posted letter, becomes the lawful trigger first to suspend a plan, and then, after ninety days, to remove a person from the Scheme altogether. This provision takes the participants least able to respond on the Agency’s timetable, those in hospital, in psychiatric crisis, recovering from surgery, and makes their silence a ground to cut off their support. A system that already demands survival would also demand responsiveness, and punish its absence.

Part 8: The permanence test and ‘all appropriate treatment’ (proposed s 24(5); s 25A)

59.   Part 8 provides, in proposed s 24(5), that an impairment  is not permanent unless the person has

undertaken all appropriate treatment for it and any other treatment is unlikely to materially improve, reverse or alleviate its impact; “appropriate treatment” takes its meaning from a new s 25A.38 I would ask the Committee to examine this provision with particular care, because it rests on an assumption that my own life disproves: the assumption that treatment moves in one direction, toward cure, and that a person still being treated has not yet established that their condition is permanent.

60. My recognised disabilities include erythromelalgia and small fibre neuropathy, progressive neurological conditions for which there is no cure. The autonomic dysfunction they cause has, for years, produced aspiration and regurgitation in my sleep: I wake choking. I have undergone an escalating sequence of major surgical interventions over seven years to manage that, not to cure the underlying neurological disease, which cannot be cured, but to keep its consequences from killing me. The most recent of those

37 National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026, Schedule 1 Part 7, proposed s 40A (suspension where participant not contactable) and proposed s 30(1A) (revocation of participant status). 38 National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 [Schedule 1 Part 8, proposed s 24(5) and proposed s 25A].

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surgeries was in October 2025. The aspiration has recurred since. There is, in my experience, always another procedure. Under proposed s 24(5) and s 25A, the existence of further possible treatment, and there is always further possible treatment, can be read as evidence that a person has not done enough, and therefore that their impairment is not yet permanent. I would put the question to the Committee directly. I have had more than fifty surgeries because of my disability, not to cure it. They include the surgical reconstruction of my lower oesophagus, the removal and bypass of my stomach, and the removal of part of my bowel.39 Does a lifetime of treatment that manages an incurable, progressive condition, but cannot cure it, count under this Bill as treatment not yet completed? On the face of the drafting, it can. I note that the Bill’s own drafting concedes the difficulty: a note to proposed s 24(5) acknowledges that a person may require ongoing treatment for some permanent impairments. The Bill recognises, in its notes, that ongoing treatment and permanence can coexist, and then writes an operative test that invites the opposite conclusion.

61. There is objective evidence of exactly this permanence. My treating psychologist administered the World Health Organization Disability Assessment Schedule, a standardised, validated instrument, in October 2024 and again in October 2025. Across that twelve-month period, with intervention ongoing throughout, my results were stable: an overall disability score at the 99.9th percentile, in the severe range, with several life domains assessed as extreme.40 A year of treatment did not move it, because the condition is permanent. That is what permanent looks like, measured. A test that treats the continuation of treatment as a reason to doubt permanence would, applied to me, reach the opposite conclusion to the validated clinical evidence.

62. The same provision threatens my son from the other direction. Some of his developmental delays are described in clinical material as responsive to therapy. “Responds well to therapy” is not the same as “not permanent”: his cerebral palsy, his genetic syndrome and his brain injury are lifelong. But proposed s 24(5) creates room to treat a therapy-responsive delay as a reason to find an impairment not permanent, and so to question a child’s access to the Scheme. A provision that can be turned against my son for improving, and against me for never being cured, is not a coherent test of permanence.

Part 9: Eligibility and other service systems

63. Part 9 requires that a person’s eligibility for certain other service systems be taken into account when decisions are made about access to the NDIS.41 Section 3 of this submission has already set out what the boundary with mainstream services looks like in practice for my family, public services that discharged my son, and our family’s situation, as too complex; a neurology referral into a waiting list quoted in writing as “unknown.” I add here only that this deflection was already an operational tactic before the Bill: the Agency’s own pre-planning material linked four of my son’s six funding goals back to mainstream healthcare, implying they were not the Scheme’s responsibility. Part 9 takes that tactic and gives it the force of a statutory eligibility consideration. My concern is straightforward: the “other service system” the

39 Surgical record on file with the submitter: more than fifty procedures between 1997 and 2025. 40 Treating clinical psychologist’s progress report dated 31 October 2025, on file with the submitter. The report records standardised World Health Organization Disability Assessment Schedule 2.0 (Self) results administered in October 2024 and again on 30 October 2025: overall disability score 88 (99.9th percentile, severe), with self-care, life activities and participation each assessed in the extreme range. The report notes that results across most domains were stable across the twelve-month period. 41 National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026, Schedule 1 Part 9.

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Bill points to  is frequently not available in any practical sense,  it has either discharged the complex

participant or cannot reach them within a clinically safe time. A test that weighs eligibility against a theoretically available system, without regard to whether that system can actually deliver, does not redirect participants to better-suited support. It removes them from support altogether.

64. Taken together, the nine Parts of Schedule 1 do not, on my reading and on my lived experience, correct the problems this Scheme has. They take the specific mechanisms by which my family was worn down — assessment stripped of context, restricted review, administrative caps, forced re-litigation, a denial formula, and the constant deflection to systems that could not help us — and give each of them the force of primary law. I turn now to what I would ask the Committee to recommend instead.

65. Recommendations

66. This section sets out what I would ask the Committee to recommend. The recommendations fall into two groups: the first responds to Schedule 1 of the Bill; the second proposes the structural reforms that would deliver what this Bill claims to deliver, and at present does not.

Part A, Recommendations on Schedule 1

66. Recommendation 1. That the Committee recommend against Schedule 1 of the Bill in its current form. For the reasons set out in Section 4, the nine Parts of Schedule 1 do not, taken together, correct the problems in the Scheme. They give the force of primary law to the mechanisms by which complex participants are already worn down.

67. Recommendation 2. That, if Schedule 1 proceeds, proposed s 9B be amended so that functional capacity is assessed with regard to a person’s real circumstances, their supports, their assistive technology, and their environment, rather than as an abstract intrinsic capacity. A test that requires decision-makers to disregard the lived reality of a person’s disability cannot produce an accurate assessment of need.

68. Recommendation 3. That the new definition of functional capacity not apply to existing participants, and that the rewritten reasonable-and-necessary framework not apply, under Item 76 of Schedule 1, to reviews of decisions made before commencement. Participants and families settled their plans, and in some cases their tribunal outcomes, under the law as it stood. Re-opening those outcomes under criteria that did not exist at the time removes any certainty the Scheme is able to offer.

69. Recommendation 4. That the conditions on participant-requested reassessments in proposed s 48A be amended so that an acute or sudden deterioration in a participant’s functional capacity is expressly recognised as a ground for reassessment, and so that participants retain practical assistance to make a request. Participants in crisis are least able to navigate a more demanding request process.

70. Recommendation 5. That proposed s 34A and s 33(2EA), the powers to reduce and to cap funding for groups of supports, be removed, or at minimum amended so that funding for a participant’s reasonable and necessary supports can never be reduced or capped below the assessed cost of those supports. A reasonable and necessary support that is not funded to the level required to deliver it is not, in any meaningful sense, funded.

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71. Recommendation 6. That the plan-renewal provisions in Part 5 be amended to preserve, for participants whose disabilities are episodic or fluctuating, the ability to carry unspent funds across a plan period. That flexibility is what allows support to rise during a crisis and reduce during a stable period; removing it imposes a uniform spend pattern on conditions that are not uniform.

72. Recommendation 7. That the assessment framework associated with Part 6 be required to treat the evidence of a participant’s treating clinicians as carrying decisive weight, and never to rank generalised research above individual clinical evidence. For participants with rare or co-occurring conditions, the individual evidence of treating clinicians is frequently the only evidence that exists, and an assessment model that subordinates it is structurally blind to the most complex participants the Scheme exists to serve.

73. Recommendation 8. That proposed s 40A and s 30(1A), the powers to suspend a plan, and to revoke participant status, where a participant is “not contactable”, be removed. A participant’s inability to respond is frequently a direct consequence of their disability, their health, or a crisis. Suspension of supports, and removal from the Scheme, must never be a consequence of a participant being too unwell to answer. At a minimum, no plan should be suspended or revoked without a documented check that the participant is not at risk, and without contact having genuinely been attempted through the participant’s own stated preferred method.

74. Recommendation 9. That proposed s 24(5) and s 25A be amended so that an impairment is not found to be other than permanent on the basis of treatment the person cannot, in practice, access, and so that treatment which manages but cannot cure a progressive condition is not treated as treatment not yet completed. The permanence test must be able to distinguish between treatment that cures and treatment that is simply what living with an incurable disability requires.

75. Recommendation 10. That the eligibility provisions in Part 9 be amended so that a person cannot be found ineligible, or have a support refused, on the basis of a service system that is not, in practice, available to them within a clinically appropriate time.

Part B, The reforms that would actually secure the Scheme

76. The Bill is presented as a measure to protect participants and to safeguard the integrity of the Scheme. The following recommendations address what protection and integrity would genuinely require.

77. Recommendation 11. An independent NDIA complaints commission. That the Committee recommend the establishment of an independent complaints body, separate from the National Disability Insurance Agency and outside its chain of command, with the power to investigate the conduct of the Agency itself and to impose meaningful consequences. I make this recommendation from documented experience. In October 2022 I lodged a formal complaint with the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission. The Commission advised me, in writing, a copy of which I retain, that it could not assist, because complaints about the NDIA, about plans, and about decisions are not within its functions, and directed me back to the NDIA itself, or to the Commonwealth Ombudsman. There is, at present, no independent body a participant can turn to when the Agency causes them harm. The only avenues lead back to the Agency, or to a tribunal process that takes years and exacts the cost this submission has described. A scheme cannot be said to have integrity while the body administering it is, in practice, the only body a participant can

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complain to about that same body. This is the single most important reform I would ask the Committee to pursue, and it is the reform this Bill, as drafted, does not contain.

78. Recommendation 12. Disability inclusion at the foundation of legislation. That the Committee recommend that disability inclusion be treated as a foundational requirement in the development of Commonwealth legislation that affects people with disability, built in from the outset, with the genuine participation of people with disability, rather than added afterwards. A useful model already exists. In the way the model Work Health and Safety laws set a baseline that every other operational decision must satisfy, disability inclusion should set a baseline that legislation of this kind must be tested against before it proceeds. A Bill of this consequence, developed without that participation at its foundation, produces precisely the blind spots this submission has documented: a definition of functional capacity that cannot see context, a reasonable-and-necessary test that cannot see a household where every member is disabled, an eligibility test that cannot see a public system that has already turned a participant away.

79. Recommendation 13. Recognition of the participant’s own labour and the true cost of disability. That the Committee recognise, in its consideration of the Scheme’s costs, two things the Scheme’s

accounts make invisible. The  first  is the substantial unpaid administrative and advocacy labour that

participants and families already perform: preparing evidence, correcting the Agency’s errors, auditing its invoices, and carrying cases the Agency contests. I can describe that labour precisely, because it is my life. I do not get the luxury of clocking off at five o’clock. From the time I wake at 5am until I go to sleep around

midnight or one, unless  I am in an appointment,  I am on a phone or a laptop dealing with medical,

disability and NDIS administration, even while I am mothering my children.

80. The second is the direct financial cost a disabled household carries that neither the Scheme nor private health insurance meets. On a conservative reconciliation of seven years of bank records, Medicare statements and private health claims, my own and my son’s out-of-pocket health and disability spending, excluding all NDIS plan funding, comes to approximately $126,400. Separately, and on a different but overlapping source that I deliberately do not add to that figure, holding private health cover has itself cost this household in the order of $120,200 in premiums and gap payments combined. These figures exclude my husband’s costs and do not yet include our older son’s; the true total is therefore higher. I provide them because the public debate assumes that a family on the NDIS is a family whose costs are met. Ours never have been. Reform that demands still more unpaid labour, and still more out-of-pocket cost, while describing participants as a cost to be managed, has misunderstood who is currently subsidising whom.

81. I turn finally to what the Scheme makes possible when it works, and what is lost if it does not.

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6. Conclusion

7. I want to end this submission where the public debate almost never begins: with what the National

Disability Insurance Scheme makes possible when it is allowed to work.

83. Every NDIS plan contains a small section that asks the participant about their goals: what they would like to work towards, what they hope for, what they might do if they had support. For most of my disabled life, that question would have had an answer I thought people wanted to hear — gardening, painting, sewing, going to the theatre — never the answer I thought I was permitted to give. My days were spent surviving my own body, defending my existence, and fighting for my children. But with the scaffolding the Scheme provides, the supports my family fought through two tribunals to secure, I had, for the first time, begun to answer it. I had begun to think that I might study law. That I might, an hour a day, sporadically, around my disability and my caring, build something of my own. Not a career as the able-bodied define one. Something at the scale a disabled life allows. But something. The Scheme did not make me a burden the country must manage. It was beginning, for the first time, to make me a person with a future I was allowed to imagine.

84. That is what this Bill puts at risk. Not a line in a budget. The first room I have ever been given to dream in.

85. I have set out in this submission the documented record of how my family has been treated by the Scheme

as it currently operates, under a law less restrictive than the one this Bill proposes. I have shown that the mechanisms of Schedule 1 are not new: they are the mechanisms by which my family was already worn down, now written into primary law. I have shown that a tribunal, having heard all the evidence, found that our needs were real, that we had described them accurately, and that the Agency’s reasoning did not hold. I have shown what the Scheme made possible for my son, a child who was given his voice, and what the mainstream systems could not do, because they were never built to hold a child as complex as he is. And I have shown what the process itself has cost: a family’s health, a carer’s body, years that do not come back.

86. The Bill is called “Securing the NDIS for Future Generations”. I would ask the Committee to weigh that title honestly. A scheme is not secured by being made harder to enter, harder to stay in, and harder to challenge when it causes harm. A scheme is not secured for future generations by being made unreachable for the participants it already has. The integrity of a system is not established by the word integrity. It is established by whether a person harmed by that system has somewhere independent to turn, and at present, they do not.

87. I am not asking the Committee to take my family’s word for what this Scheme can do, or for what this Bill

would cost. I have given you the documents. I have given you the tribunal’s own findings. I have given you the crosswalk at Attachment A, which maps every Part of Schedule 1 to a dated event in our record. I have written every word of this submission knowing how the Scheme responds to participants who speak, and I have written it anyway, because silence is what the absence of a safe complaints process has trained participants like me to choose, and because my son, and every child who comes after him, deserves a Scheme that is built to see them.

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88. The NDIS, at its best, is the promise that a disabled life in this country is still a life that can be lived, and built, and dreamed about. That promise is worth securing. This Bill, as it stands, does not secure it. I ask the Committee to recommend the changes set out in Section 5, so that the Scheme can be what it was always meant to be: not a cost to be contained, but a country keeping its word to the people who need it most.

89. Attachment A Attachment A: Schedule 1 Evidence Crosswalk, mapping each of the nine Parts of Schedule 1 to a documented, dated event from the two proceedings described in this submission.

ATTACHMENT A

Schedule 1 Evidence Cross-Walk

Bill: National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026

Proceedings referenced: [NAME WITHHELD] v NDIA (AAT 2022/2950) · WQSW v NDIA (AAT / ART 2023/0486) How to read this table: Each row maps one change in Schedule 1 of the Bill to a documented, dated incident from the two proceedings described in the submission. Columns one to three are the historical record; column four is what changes when this Bill commences. The submission body deliberately withholds the case numbers and the names of the individuals involved; this attachment names neither individuals nor children.

Schedule 1 change (Bill 2026)          Before: what the law allowed           Documented incident on the record                 How the change weaponises that moment

Part 1                                          “Functional capacity” was undefined in the Act. It   6 October 2023: independent OT assessment                            Under s 9B, the child’s capacity is assessed as if he had no supports, no family

Functional capacity                      was decided on the whole evidentiary picture:   The child participant, almost three. Non-verbal. No pain response. No stranger   and no environment.

New s 9B. Capacity assessed without supports,     clinical reports, lived context, and what daily life    awareness. Self-harm and aggression. Two to five night wakings, every night,   But the assessment was already devastating with no scaffolding. The new test

assistive technology or modifications, and in a    actually required.                                        for nearly four years. Two-person nappy changes. Dressing taking 30 to 45   changes nothing about his functional reality. It changes only the baseline the

context  that  excludes  environmental  and   A carer impact assessment, the child participant’s    minutes.                                                           Agency may use to deny the supports built around him.

personal circumstances. Applies to decisions on    daily care timetable, and an adaptive-behaviour   The adaptive-behaviour assessment returned “Never” or “Not Able” across   And the new definition reaches backwards: it applies to decisions about

or after commencement, whether or not the   assessment across all domains were all admissible   communication, community use, functional pre-academics and most of home   every current participant, so settled outcomes become reviewable against a

person   was    a    participant    before    as context for the disability’s functional impact.         living.                                                                                 test that did not exist when they were made.

commencement. This was the child’s functional reality after every core support had already been stripped from his plan.

Part 2                             A reassessment was available where a participant’s   November 2021: the Christmas with $135                          A future  functional  cliff, a sudden  loss, an acute episode, a  cluster  of

Limiting plan reassessments                  situation had changed.                      A vaccine injury rendered the submitter’s left arm clinically non-functional. A    hospitalisations, must clear new statutory conditions before a reassessment can

New conditions in s 48A confine participant-   Support  coordinators  routinely  initiated  and    change-of-circumstances request was lodged.                              even proceed.

requested reassessments; s 32B(2A) lets the    supported reassessment requests for this family.     The Agency reduced the plan by 25% of its previous value, and by 66% of   The Agency also gains the ability to convert a reassessment request into a full

Agency convert a reassessment request into a                                                what the Agency’s own Local Area Coordinator had recommended. By   new-framework plan, re-opening supports the participant did not ask to have

full new-framework plan.                                                              December the household had $135 left, with a partner unable to assist and    re-examined.

two children at home. The 2021 funding cliff would now compound for months before the system The mechanism that eventually carried the matter to the Tribunal was the was even required to answer it. reassessment pathway.

Part 3                                         Plans  could  fund  supports  addressing  the   May 2024: the hydrotherapy pool                                      Under the strengthened link, a support funded under one plan must arise

Strengthening the impairment–support    functional impact of disability across daily  life,   Coming out of the child’s hydrotherapy session, the submitter’s support    directly from that person’s impairments.

link                                           including  where  family  load  or  co-occurring   worker was at the pool gate when the child slipped through and ran toward   The exact crack the family fell through at the pool, a support worker performing

Amends s 34(1)(aa): a funded support must    conditions amplified the impairment’s effect.         the road. The worker hesitated: she is engaged to support the submitter, and   a dual function across two disabled people in one household, becomes

address  needs  arising   directly  from  an                                                                                          if the submitter fell while the worker went after the child, the liability would    structurally harder to fund.

impairment meeting the disability or early-                                              be the worker’s.                                                The Bill draws a clean administrative line exactly where lived disability

intervention   requirements.   Departmental                                                 Recorded in a contemporaneous support-worker incident report before the    refuses to draw one.

material states this  is intended to overturn                                                             Tribunal; the Tribunal accepted the structural problem (decision at [173], [93],

court decisions allowing a contributory link. [225]). A support worker funded for one person cannot be tasked with another’s safety without compromising the support the first is entitled to.

Part 4                                      “Reasonable and necessary” was negotiable on the   26 December 2022 onward: the Boxing Day spreadsheet                   Under s 34A and s 33(2EA), the Minister can reduce or cap these supports by

Ministerial power to reduce funding        evidence. The submitter’s consent decision yielded,   Even after a legally binding consent decision, the Agency’s implementation    legislative instrument, with no tribunal, no consent decision and no negotiation,

New s 34A lets the Minister reduce funding for   among other supports, 56 hours of physiotherapy    contained errors the submitter calculated at $42,187.60, every one in the   and a Bill note expressly allows the result to fall below actual cost.

a group of supports by legislative instrument   and weekend rates for assistance with daily living.    Agency’s favour. She found each error herself, recovered $38,960.92, and   What was an error to be caught and recovered becomes a lawful, routine

across a class of plans; s 33(2EA) sets maximum                                              abandoned the rest because she was, by then, running her son’s case.            shortfall. The documented pattern of inconsistent funding, equipment

amounts, intensity or worker ratios. A note to                                                   27 November 2024: equipment funded, its use denied                      without the means to use it, is given the force of law rather than the character

the provisions allows the result to fall below the                                                The same plan funded a powered wheelchair at $28,835.04 and declined the    of error.

actual cost of the support. home modifications needed to use it, on the basis the submitter’s condition was “not progressive enough.” Her vehicle modifications were funded in 2019 and removed three months later. Seven years of repeat occupational-therapy reports have followed.

Attachment A to the submission of NAME WITHHELD · Schedule 1 Evidence Cross-Walk · Page 1

Schedule 1 change (Bill 2026) Before: what the law allowed Documented incident on the record How the change weaponises that moment

Part 5                                        Plan continuations were administrative. Unspent   Across both plans: an episodic disability that does not move in a straight   A statutory spend-it-or-lose-it logic assumes every participant needs the same

Plan renewals                              funds could be carried within a plan, and supports    line                                                                     support in every fortnight of the year.

Proposed s 50A and new ‘end date’ provisions   could  roll forward without the  participant  re-   The submitter lives with bipolar disorder and complex PTSD alongside a    For a person with an episodic disability that assumption is not merely inaccurate.

replace the administrative practice  of plan    proving need from scratch.                          progressive neurological condition. Her support needs rise and fall. The ability      It is unsafe, because it leaves nothing held in reserve for the week the crisis

continuations with a statutory concept of plan                                                        to carry unspent funds let her direct more of a plan toward support workers   comes.

renewal. Each renewed plan must satisfy afresh                                                     during a crisis, and scale back when stable.                                Every renewal also becomes a fresh evidentiary gate against the full s 33

the full funding-component, total-funding and                                                 The flexibility was not over-funding. It was the funding flexing to fit a life that   requirements, removing the breathing room a continuation once gave

funding-period   requirements   of   s   33.                                                     does not move in a straight line.                                       between hearings.

Departmental  material  confirms   this    is

intended to replace “rollovers.”

Part 6                                      “Reasonable and necessary” was principles-based.   December 2022 to February 2025: the twenty-six-month wait                Those phrases gain firmer statutory footing within s 34. The existing Supports

Rewriting  reasonable  and  necessary   Decision-makers had  discretion  to  weigh  the   On 15 December 2022 the Agency cut the child’s plan to $28,710.52 over two    Rules already direct decision-makers to evidence of effectiveness “for others in

supports                                               clinical evidence about the specific participant.        years, with no core supports. The matter was lodged with the Tribunal in    like circumstances,” including published literature; a more standardised model

Amends  s  34, including new  s  34(1)(g): a                                                      January 2023. For nearly twenty months the Agency disputed thirty-eight    reasoning from that ranking is structurally blind to a participant with a rare

support is not reasonable and necessary if more                                                     supports through expert reports, submissions and further evidence. On the   syndrome and a separate brain injury, for whom no cohort literature exists.

appropriately provided by another scheme or                                                morning of the first day of the hearing in August 2024, the Agency conceded    s 34(1)(g) turns the deflection to other systems, met repeatedly by this family,

government  service  system. The  value-for-                                                           that thirty-one of those supports were reasonable and necessary.                into an explicit criterion of the test.

money and family-supports tests are reshaped                                                 The Tribunal’s decision was handed down on 24 December 2024. A lawful plan   By Item 76, reviews commenced after this Part starts run under the new

within s 34.                                                                          was not generated until February 2025, after the submitter identified and   framework, even where the original decision predates it.

corrected further errors in the Agency’s figures and management-stream allocations. The child was two when the cut occurred. He was four when a lawful plan was finally in place.

Part 7                             A non-responsive  participant’s plan continued.   Throughout 2022 and 2023: the silence cost                         A participant in hospital, in psychiatric crisis, recovering from surgery, or simply

Plan suspension and revocation            They could re-engage when capacity returned.       The submitter was hospitalised many times during this period. Her partner   unable  to  face another Agency  letter, now  risks plan suspension  after

New s 40A lets the Agency suspend a plan                                                    could not reliably relay medical information independently. Her older son, in    “reasonable attempts” at contact.

where “reasonable attempts” to contact the                                                              his final year of school, needed her. She still managed every Agency letter,    After 90 days of silence, participant status can be revoked. No payments are

participant  have  been  made  and   the                                                     freedom-of-information request, planning meeting and tribunal direction,   made during suspension, and no reassessment can be requested.

participant “is not contactable.” No payments                                                   through psychiatric episodes and post-surgical recovery.              A system that already required survival now also requires responsiveness on

and  no   reassessment   requests   during                                               Engagement with the Agency was, routinely, an act of physical bravery.          the Agency’s timetable. Silence becomes statutory grounds for removal.

suspension. Under s 30(1A) participant status

may be revoked where  the person  is not

contactable, or after a suspension of at least 90 days.

Part 8                                   Permanence was assessed on whether there was a   September 2023: a rare genetic syndrome confirmed                      Under s 24(5) and s 25A, the existence of further possible treatment can be read

Permanence   and    ‘all   appropriate   known, available and appropriate treatment likely   The child was confirmed with ERF-related craniosynostosis, a rare condition    as evidence that a person has not yet done enough, and so that the impairment

treatment’                                    to remedy  the  impairment.  “Available” meant    with a confirmed pathogenic variant, separate from the brain injury that     is not yet permanent. For a progressive condition there is always a further

New s 24(5): an impairment is not permanent    available to the person, in their real circumstances.    causes his cerebral palsy. The submitter lives with progressive, incurable    procedure.

unless  the  person  has  undertaken   all                                                        neurological conditions managed by an  escalating sequence of major   A therapy-responsive delay in a child can be reframed as not-yet-permanent; an

appropriate  treatment,  and  any   further                                                          surgeries over seven years. More than fifty surgeries in total.                      adult’s lifetime of surgery can always be presumed insufficient because another

treatment  is unlikely to materially improve,                                                    “Responds well to therapy,” and “more surgery exists,” were never the same as   procedure exists somewhere.

reverse or alleviate  its impact. “Appropriate                                                          “not permanent.”                                               The  Bill’s own note  to  s  24(5) concedes  that ongoing treatment and

treatment” takes its meaning from new s 25A. permanence can coexist, then writes an operative test that invites the opposite conclusion.

Part 9                                      Other-system supports were dealt with in planning   Across both proceedings: “mainstream healthcare” as denial cover         What was an operational tactic becomes a statutory eligibility consideration.

Eligibility and other service systems         to avoid duplication. They did not displace NDIS   Agency pre-planning material linked four of the child’s six funding goals to   The “other service system” the Bill points to is frequently not available in

Requires that a person’s eligibility for certain     eligibility outright.                               mainstream healthcare, implying they were not the Scheme’s responsibility.   any practical sense. A test that weighs eligibility against a theoretically

other service systems be taken into account in                                                The  submitter’s  plans  repeatedly met “most  appropriately funded by    available system, without regard to whether it can deliver, removes complex

decisions about access to the NDIS.                                                            mainstream services” as a denial line.                                          participants from support altogether.

Public services had, in practice, discharged the child as too complex, or could not reach him within a clinically safe time: a neurology referral was quoted in writing with a waiting time of “unknown.”

Attachment A to the submission of NAME WITHHELD · Schedule 1 Evidence Cross-Walk · Page 2