Submission 3341 — Mr Timothy Lachlan — NDIS Future Generations Bill | External submission

Submission to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation

Committee

Inquiry into the National Disability Insurance Scheme

Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026

29/05/2026

Content Warning

This submission discusses:

disability discrimination,
institutionalisation,
abuse and neglect,
restrictive practices,
domestic violence,
threats of violence,
suicide,
filicide involving disabled children,
carer exhaustion,
medical trauma,
and the psychological impact of disability support insecurity. Reader discretion is advised.

Executive Summary

This submission argues that proposed restrictions and reductions to NDIS supports will have severe human consequences for disabled Australians, carers, and families.

Drawing from lived experience as a disabled person, allied health worker, advocate, and family member, this submission outlines how adequate disability supports:

keep people alive,
prevent institutionalisation and unnecessary hospitalisation,
reduce long-term healthcare costs,
support employment, education, and independence,
protect families from collapse,
and reduce the risk of abuse, neglect, suicide, and social isolation. This submission highlights:
the realities of 24/7 disability support needs,
chronic carer exhaustion,
inconsistent funding decisions,
barriers faced by people with multiple disabilities,
the high cost of disability-related supports and equipment,
the importance of Supported Independent Living and community participation funding,
and the ongoing harms caused by segregation, restrictive practices, and anti-autism rhetoric.

The central message is simple: the NDIS does not merely fund services. It keeps disabled people alive, connected to their communities, and able to live with dignity.

Personal Background

I am writing this submission as both a disabled person and someone who has spent years supporting and advocating for other disabled people and their families.

I have autism, ADHD, spina bifida, and Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. Despite having multiple disabilities that impact my daily functioning, I am only supported through the NDIS for spina bifida.

This reflects a broader issue within the disability system: people are not one-dimensional. Many disabled people live with multiple diagnoses, overlapping impairments, and complex support needs that cannot be neatly separated into isolated categories.

I am deeply concerned about the direction of proposed NDIS reforms and the real-world consequences further cuts or restrictions will have on disabled Australians, carers, and families.

I need the Committee to understand that these decisions are not abstract budget measures. They determine whether people live safely, remain with their families, maintain independence, or end up institutionalised, hospitalised, abandoned, or dead.

The Reality of High Support Needs

My best friend and his fiancée both live with significant disabilities and require high levels of daily support. Without 24/7 care, they would not survive safely in the community.

If their funding is cut, I will likely be forced to leave my own life to care for them myself. My fiancé also has a disability and relies on me for support, and I rely heavily on them for support. I would be placed in an impossible position no person should ever face: choosing between supporting my childhood best friend or my fiancé.

Morally, I could not knowingly abandon people I love when their safety and survival depend on support.

Cuts to disability supports do not simply reduce “services.” They split families apart, destroy relationships, exhaust carers beyond human limits, and force disabled people into dangerous and degrading situations.

Go to a care facility and spend a single day supporting disabled people with high physical support needs. See the reality of what is required simply to keep people alive, safe, and healthy.

Things many Australians take for granted — getting out of bed, going to the bathroom, shifting weight during sleep to avoid pressure sores — are life-or-death matters for many disabled people.

My best friend and his fiancée require specialised beds with positioning supports to prevent pressure injuries and the serious medical complications that follow.

If their power wheelchairs break, they will be confined to bed. If their specialised beds break, they can be forced into hospital purely because the supports required to safely remain at home no longer function.

That means hospital beds become occupied not because of acute illness, but because disability supports and equipment systems have failed.

You cannot expect family members and friends to absorb these responsibilities alone without destroying people in the process. Families and carers need support too.

Carer Exhaustion and System Failure

In my work as an allied health professional, I saw firsthand what happens when adequate supports are denied.

One of my clients had CMV and lissencephaly and experienced constant seizures requiring continuous supervision and medication management. His mother stayed awake caring for him almost every hour of every day, often surviving on approximately two hours of sleep per night. She would frequently pass out from exhaustion.

Despite the obvious risks to both mother and child, requests for 24/7 support were denied.

I watched a family collapse under pressure that should never have been placed entirely on them in the first place.

The reality is that unpaid carers are already running on fumes. Many are physically and psychologically breaking under the weight of responsibilities that should be shared by a properly functioning disability support system.

I have also personally seen disabled people forced to share or pool supports simply to survive.

My best friend shares a support worker with his fiancée, despite both requiring 1:1 support to remain safe. If one needs to leave the house, the other must remain home without support.

That is incredibly dangerous, particularly if an emergency occurs while no support worker is present. There is no way for my friends to safely self-evacuate.

I personally transported my best friend’s old MASS-funded powered wheelchair from South East Queensland to Northern Rivers, New South Wales for a young girl with giant axonal neuropathy, a terminal condition. She is not expected to survive beyond her teenage years.

She had been left for years without a suitable wheelchair. During that time, her condition progressed unnecessarily and she lost function and quality of life she will never regain.

Disabled people should not have to rely on informal charity and second-hand equipment passed between families simply to access basic mobility and dignity.

Disability Is Part of the Human Condition

No one chooses to become disabled. Disability is part of the human condition.

Any person can become disabled through illness, injury, genetics, ageing, or accident. None of us are immune.

The NDIS should exist not only to support disabled people, but to prevent deterioration, crisis, institutionalisation, and avoidable long-term costs to taxpayers.

When people lose supports, they do not magically stop needing care. They end up in hospitals, aged care facilities, emergency departments, mental health systems, or trapped in unsafe homes.

Preventative support is both morally right and economically responsible.

Funding Inconsistencies and Complex Needs

I have also personally witnessed significant inconsistencies in funding decisions between participants with very different support needs.

For example, my best friend, who has cerebral palsy, was allocated more NDIS funding than his fiancée, who lives with spinal muscular atrophy, a severe degenerative neuromuscular condition requiring extremely high levels of physical support.

I do not raise this to argue that one disabled person deserves support more than another. Both require significant assistance and both deserve appropriate support.

I raise it because it demonstrates how inconsistent, confusing, and non-transparent the system can feel for participants and families trying to navigate it.

Funding decisions must accurately reflect a participant’s real functional capacity, complexity of support needs, long-term prognosis, and day-to-day risks. Too often, disabled people and their care teams are left feeling that outcomes are arbitrary or disconnected from clinical reality.

The NDIS Creates Independence

The NDIS has changed lives for the better when supports are provided appropriately.

My best friend was not expected to finish high school or ever maintain employment. Today he has completed TAFE, works two jobs, and is paying off his first home with his fiancée.

He works in both retail and hospital administration. He is proud of what he has achieved, and I am incredibly proud of him.

But none of this happened because his disability disappeared. It happened because he finally had adequate supports.

He still requires assistance with dressing, transport, and personal care in the workplace. Without those supports, his ability to work would collapse.

The NDIS did not create dependence in his case. It created independence.

The same is true for my sister.

Before receiving appropriate supports, she was unable to live independently and experienced significant behavioural distress. Today, through Supported Independent Living and appropriate disability supports, she communicates using a combination of speech and an AAC device, makes video calls, shops for groceries, washes her own dishes and clothing, and lives with a level of dignity and independence I never dreamed possible.

Supported Independent Living gave her the opportunity to become an adult with autonomy and stability.

I cannot bear the thought of seeing that progress reversed.

Before my own physical condition deteriorated, I also hosted skate meet-ups for disabled people where I voluntarily taught mobility and adaptive skating skills with assistance from a support worker.

These gatherings were not simply recreational activities. They provided disabled people with opportunities for physical activity, skill development, social connection, confidence building, and community participation in environments where many had previously experienced exclusion or isolation.

Programs and supports that enable community participation are often treated as optional or non-essential when funding cuts are discussed. In reality, they are fundamental to independence, mental health, social inclusion, and quality of life.

Without support workers and community participation funding, many disabled people lose access not only to sport and recreation, but also to education, employment, social connection, volunteering, and participation in the wider community.

Isolation causes harm. Participation builds independence, confidence, and belonging.

The NDIS should support disabled people to participate meaningfully in society, not merely survive behind closed doors.

Disabled people were once segregated and trapped in institutions. We cannot go back to that indignity and violation of human rights.

Autism, Segregation, and Abuse

I am also deeply concerned by ongoing anti-autism rhetoric in public and political discourse.

For more than twenty years, public conversations around autism have too often framed autistic children as burdens rather than human beings deserving support and dignity.

I survived segregated schooling, ABA, and restrictive practices that often resembled carceral restraint practices more than education or support.

Children with disabilities and learning difficulties do not thrive when they are neglected, restrained, excluded, or denied support. They deteriorate.

Reducing supports while branding disabled children as “thriving” does not change the reality of what those children experience.

In 2006, my father publicly threatened to give my sister and me up on national television as part of a media campaign involving burnt-out parents of autistic children.

Behind closed doors, our home life involved severe emotional and physical abuse.

My father threatened to kill us on multiple occasions.

“I’ll kill you” is still burned into my memory.

The lack of disability supports did not just affect our family financially. It destroyed our family psychologically.

I genuinely believe that without supports, I may not have survived childhood.

A lack of disability support increases the risk of abuse, domestic violence, neglect, institutionalisation, foster care placement, suicide, and family breakdown.

We are already seeing cases where disabled children are killed by overwhelmed parents or caregivers. This should be treated as a national warning sign, not an inevitability to be accepted.

Weakening disability supports risks increasing these tragedies.

Children should not be institutionalised, segregated unnecessarily, or forced out of mainstream education because adequate supports are unavailable.

The NDIS has helped prevent these outcomes for many families. Weakening it risks recreating the same crises that existed before its introduction.

Disability Royal Commission

I also ask: why did Australia hold a Disability Royal Commission if the lessons identified are not being meaningfully implemented?

Over 200 recommendations were made regarding abuse, neglect, exploitation, violence, segregation, and systemic failure experienced by disabled Australians.

Disabled people are still telling government the exact same things.

The Financial Burden of Disability

I also want to highlight the enormous financial burden many disabled people already carry simply to survive.

For me personally, continence-related disability supports cost approximately $65 per day.

It costs approximately $7.75 every time I catheterise to empty my bladder, which I must do at least four times daily. My bowel care routine costs approximately $36 each time it is performed.

This amounts to more than $25,000 per year simply to use the bathroom.

These products are mass-produced disposable plastic medical items, yet are priced at levels that place enormous pressure on disabled people and funding systems alike.

The same issue exists with assistive technology.

My power wheelchair cost approximately $45,000 — more than the average car.

There is no reasonable justification for equipment made up primarily of motors, copper wiring, actuators, joysticks, cushions, and positioning supports to cost this much.

Disabled people do not control these prices, yet we are often blamed for rising disability costs while suppliers and systems profit from a captive market.

These costs are unavoidable and directly related to disability.

I could not afford the support and supplies I need without the NDIS.

Psychological Impact of Funding Uncertainty

Even writing this submission has had a significant emotional impact on me.

The constant uncertainty surrounding disability supports creates ongoing fear and psychological strain for disabled people and carers alike.

I have spent nights overwhelmed by the fear of becoming a burden, losing essential supports, or watching people I love deteriorate without care.

This system is not merely administrative for us. It determines whether we are safe, whether we can participate in society, and whether our families remain intact.

Disabled Australians should not have to live in constant fear that the supports keeping them alive, independent, and connected to their communities may disappear.

Conclusion

Ministers and Committee members, I am asking you to understand the reality facing disabled Australians and carers.

The NDIS has kept people alive. It has kept families together. It has prevented abuse, neglect, institutionalisation, and deterioration.

Carers and families are already exhausted.

Further restrictions, cuts, or barriers to accessing support will not eliminate need. They will simply shift the burden onto families, hospitals, emergency systems, and exhausted unpaid carers until people break.

I urge the Committee to protect the core principles of the NDIS:

individualised support,
dignity,
independence,
early intervention,
and meaningful community participation. Disabled Australians deserve the opportunity not merely to survive, but to live safely, meaningfully, and with dignity in the community.