National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026
Kelly Treloar
Treloar.k@gmail.com
1 June 2026
Submission to the Senate Community Affairs
Legislation Committee
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment
(Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026
Introduction
The National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future
Generations) Bill 2026 proposes significant amendments to the National Disability Insurance Scheme Act 2013. The government has framed these amendments as necessary to ensure the long-term sustainability of the Scheme. This submission does not accept that framing as sufficient justification for changes that will cause serious and foreseeable harm to some of the most marginalised people in Australia, and that have been developed without genuine engagement with those most affected.
This submission is made in a personal capacity. The views expressed are my own and do not represent any organisation, committee, or body I am associated with.
This submission was also prepared within an extremely compressed timeframe. The time allowed for public submissions on amendments of this magnitude was insufficient for many people with disability to engage meaningfully with the process. This barrier was acute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people with disability, particularly those in remote communities, where access to information, connectivity, and support to navigate formal submission processes can be very limited. The committee should be aware that some of the voices significantly affected by these amendments are likely the least represented in submissions received.
I am a disabled person and the parent of disabled adult children. I bring both lived experience and lived expertise to this submission: the personal, embodied knowledge of navigating disability as an individual and as a parent, and the expertise developed from combining that experience with years of engagement in disability rights, policy and advocacy.
I am also Aboriginal. The nature of my connection to my Aboriginal heritage means I do not have the lived experience of growing up in culture or the ability to speak to culture personally. My perspective in this submission is therefore informed by my experience as a disabled Aboriginal person and my professional engagement in the First Nations disability
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space, rather than by any personal cultural authority. I recognise that experience as distinct from, and not a substitute for, the voices of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people with disability who have grown up in culture and community.
Professionally, I have worked extensively in disability policy and project operations, including leadership and governance roles within Disability Representative Organisations and Disabled Peoples Organisations. I have a particular focus on intersectionality, including the compounding disadvantage faced by people whose disability intersects with being Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander and geographic remoteness.
My work in the First Nations disability space spans direct community engagement, national policy development, and organisational capacity building. This has included the Disability Royal Commission across urban, regional and remote communities; organisations entering NDIS service provision in regional and remote areas; leading the development of a national Disability Sector Strengthening Plan to embed disability supports within Aboriginal Community Controlled services; and leading national capacity building initiatives to strengthen the sector’s ability to deliver culturally safe disability supports. This work has given me direct insight into the structural barriers Aboriginal people face in accessing disability supports.
Background and framing
While this submission focuses on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in remote communities, the absence of any intersectional lens in this Bill is a broader failure. The Bill does not consider how its provisions land differently for people whose disability intersects with race, gender, LGBTIQASB+ identity, socioeconomic disadvantage, geographic isolation, or any other dimension of identity and circumstance. First Nations people in remote communities are a critical example of that failure, but they are not the only one.
The barriers Aboriginal people face in accessing disability supports have been extensively documented by Aboriginal researchers and scholars. This includes Professor Scott Avery’s foundational work on intersectional disadvantage and cultural inclusion, Professor John Gilroy, whose extensive body of research documents systemic exclusion, cultural safety, and the structural barriers Aboriginal people face across disability systems, and Puszka et al.’s systematic review on the need to decolonise disability services. This body of work consistently demonstrates that Aboriginal people with disability are marginalised within both disability and First Nations policy frameworks simultaneously, and inadequately served by either.
This submission does not attempt to address every provision of the Bill. It focuses on a specific and serious gap in the Bill’s design: the absence of any lens that accounts for the experiences of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people with disability, particularly those living in remote communities.
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That absence is clearly not a drafting oversight. It reflects a failure to apply the foundational principles of both the Australia’s Disability Strategy 2021-2031 (ADS) and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) before legislating changes that will disproportionately harm people already experiencing compounded disadvantage.
The ADS explicitly recognises that disability intersects with other dimensions of identity and circumstance to compound disadvantage. It commits to intersectional approaches and acknowledges that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people with disability face barriers that are qualitatively different from, and greater than, those faced by the broader disability population. The CRPD requires that legislative changes do not constitute retrogression in the rights of people with disability, and that affected communities are genuinely consulted in the development of laws that concern them.
The measures in this Bill that most significantly affect Aboriginal people in remote communities were not directly consulted on with those communities. The Disability Royal Commission recommended a dedicated First Nations Disability Forum in 2023, a formal shared decision-making mechanism through which First Nations people with disability could shape disability policy and reform. It remains unresourced and unestablished. Its absence means that when legislation of this magnitude is introduced, there is no formal structure through which First Nations people with disability can respond to it.
It is well documented that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people with disability experience significantly lower NDIS access rates and poorer outcomes than the non Indigenous population. These amendments do nothing to address those existing failures, and will compound them.
This submission calls on the committee to recommend that the Bill not proceed in its current form. It must be redrafted in collaboration with the disability community, and critically, with disabled people who hold intersecting marginalisations.
The question of consultation
The explanatory memorandum points to the NDIS Review and the Registration Taskforce as the basis for the government’s consultation obligations under Article 4(3) of the CRPD. This claim does not withstand scrutiny when examined from a First Nations perspective, and the measures in this Bill that most significantly affect Aboriginal people in remote communities were not consulted on with those communities.
The explanatory memorandum does not identify any direct engagement with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people or communities in developing these amendments. This submission asks the committee to examine what genuine, culturally safe consultation occurred with the people most affected. Furthermore, even accepting the government’s own framing, that the NDIS Review and Registration Taskforce satisfy its obligations under Article 4(3) of the CRPD, neither process constitutes genuine co-design with Aboriginal and
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Torres Strait Islander people on amendments that will specifically and disproportionately affect them.
This is a critical point as the provisions examined below, as with all the other aspects of the Bill do not operate in a neutral context. They operate in communities where government systems, such as health, welfare and child protection, are experienced through the lens of colonisation, dispossession and ongoing systemic racism. Legislation that does not account for that context will cause harm that is both predictable and preventable.
The risk of accessing supports
A significant gap in this Bill is its failure to take into account the relationship between disability diagnosis, the child protection system, and the lived reality of Aboriginal families.
Research documents that many Aboriginal families actively avoid seeking disability diagnoses for themselves or their children because of well-founded fear that engagement with government systems will trigger child protection involvement and risk family separation. This fear is not irrational, but is grounded in the lived reality of the Stolen Generation, in ongoing rates of Aboriginal child removal that remain vastly disproportionate to the general population, and in documented experiences of Aboriginal parents who avoid seeking help precisely because they fear it will be used against them.
A 2023 qualitative meta-synthesis of Indigenous experiences of disability support services found that many parents are apprehensive to seek support on behalf of their children with disability specifically for fear of removal, alongside broader mistrust of government services. This finding is consistent with Gilroy et al.’s (2016) identification of mistrust of government as a core barrier to Aboriginal participation in disability services. Human Rights Watch (2025), in a report on Aboriginal child removal in Western Australia, documented that parents avoided some government services out of fear that authorities would use that contact as grounds to remove their children.
The Bill’s treatability provisions, functional capacity assessment, and tighter eligibility requirements all assume that people will willingly engage with diagnostic and clinical processes. For many Aboriginal families, that assumption is wrong. The Bill does not consider this barrier, nor does it account for it in the design of eligibility and assessment processes.
For many Aboriginal families, engaging with health and government systems to obtain a diagnosis is not a neutral act. It carries the risk of triggering exactly the kind of system involvement they have learned, across generations, to avoid.
The result is that Aboriginal people may be unable to access the NDIS not because they do not have a disability, or indeed require supports, but because the process of establishing that disability carries risks that are specific to their community and their history.
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Specific provisions: examples of what happens without the intersectional lens
The following are but two examples of provisions that, without an intersectional lens applied, cause undeniable harm to Aboriginal people, including those in remote communities. As an individual submitter I did not have the capacity within the limited timeframe allowed to document each one , but it is clear that this absence of lens runs throughout each of the Bill’s amendments.
Treatability and section 25A(2)
The Bill requires that a person exhaust all appropriate treatment before their disability can be considered permanent and therefore eligible for NDIS access. Section 25A(2) is explicit in that a person’s geographical location and financial circumstances are not relevant to whether a treatment is appropriate. If a treatment exists somewhere in Australia, it may be considered available to that person.
For Aboriginal people living in remote communities, this provision is not merely inadequate; it is undeniably discriminatory in its effect. Accessing specialist treatment routinely requires travel to regional centres or capital cities, extended time away from Country, family and community support networks, and significant financial cost.
It appears that the only exemption is medical. There is no exemption for cultural reasons, community obligations, or the absence of culturally safe care, only a future rule-making power that may, at some point, include such circumstances. A future rule-making power that may or may not ever include these circumstances is not a substitute for rights protection.
It conflicts with CRPD Article 25, the right to health without discrimination, and does so in a way that falls hardest on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people least able to access treatment.
Plan suspension and section 40A
The Bill allows the NDIA to suspend a participant’s plan if reasonable attempts to contact them have been unsuccessful. There is no requirement to consider why a person may be unreachable before suspending their plan. Once suspended, the participant must make contact and respond to information requests within defined timeframes or risk losing participant status entirely.
Remote communities regularly experience unreliable mobile coverage, road and community closures due to flooding and extreme weather. Furthermore people within those communities need to engage in periods of cultural obligation including Sorry Business (which can involve travelling) , and other circumstances that make contact with a government agency impossible for extended periods. None of these are considered in the Bill.
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Written notice of suspension is required, sent to a person who may have no fixed address, no reliable mail delivery, and no awareness that a clock has started running against them. Even for those who have overcome significant barriers to access the NDIS, this provision creates a direct pathway to losing supports entirely through no fault of their own.
The power to remove someone from the Scheme entirely, without a risk assessment and without ensuring continuity of support is simply unacceptable. For Aboriginal people in remote communities particularly, where inaccessibility of correspondence is a predictable and documented reality, there is no safeguard in between unreachability and loss of supports.
This provision conflicts with the ADS commitment to trauma-informed approaches and the Safety, Rights and Justice outcome. It also conflicts with CRPD Article 19, the right to live independently and be included in the community. That right cannot be exercised when supports are suspended without any consideration of why a person could not be reached.
Both these example provisions, and the Bill’s amendments more broadly, constitute retrogressive steps under Article 4(2) of the CRPD. Australia is obligated not to move backwards in the realisation of the rights of people with disability, even in the name of sustainability. They also conflict with the ADS commitment to person-centred approaches and the principle that people with disability are experts in their own lives.
The amendments, in their current form, will cause immeasurable harm to some of the most marginalised people in Australia. Reform of this magnitude requires genuine co design. At minimum it requires consultation. What this Bill demonstrates is that there is an unconscionable lack of consideration of how these amendments will impact those whose disability intersects with other experiences of marginalisation.
Recommendations
This submission calls on the committee to recommend:
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That the Bill not proceed in its current form and be redrafted in genuine partnership with disabled people, particularly those with intersecting marginalisations.
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That no amendments to eligibility, assessment or supports proceed until genuine, culturally safe consultation has been conducted with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people with disability and their communities.
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That the assessment tool to be used for functional capacity assessments be independently validated for cultural appropriateness for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people before any eligibility changes commence.
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That the Bill be amended to require consideration of cultural circumstances, geographic location and accessibility of services in all decisions affecting participants, including treatability assessments and plan suspension.
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That no person be removed from the Scheme without a documented risk assessment and confirmed continuity of support.
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That the First Nations Disability Forum recommended by the Disability Royal Commission in 2023 be funded and established as a prerequisite to further reform, and that its membership reflect the genuine diversity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people with disability, including people from remote and very remote communities, people with a range of disability types, and representatives from across different community controlled and advocacy organisations.
References
Avery, S. (2018). Culture is Inclusion: A narrative of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people with disability. First Peoples Disability Network Australia, Sydney.
Gilroy, J., Donelly, M., Colmar, S., & Parmenter, T. (2016). Twelve factors that can influence the participation of Aboriginal people in disability services. Australian Indigenous Health Bulletin, 16(1), 1–9. https://healthbulletin.org.au/wp content/uploads/sites/8/2016/03/bulletin_original_articles_Gilroy.pdf
Human Rights Watch. (2025). “All I Know Is I Want Them Home”: Disproportionate
Removal of Aboriginal Children from Families in Western Australia. https://www.hrw.org/report/2025/03/26/all-i-know-i-want-them-home/disproportionate removal-aboriginal-children-families
James, M.H., Prokopiv, V., Barbagallo, M.S., Porter, J.E., Johnson, N., Jones, J., & Smitherson, T. (2023). Indigenous experiences and underutilisation of disability support services in Australia: a qualitative meta-synthesis. Disability and Rehabilitation, 46(8), 1438–1449. https://doi.org/10.1080/09638288.2023.2194681
Puszka, S., Walsh, C., Markham, F., Barney, J., Yap, M., & Dreise, T. (2022). Towards the decolonisation of disability: A systematic review of disability conceptualisations, practices and experiences of First Nations people of Australia. Social Science & Medicine, 305,