SUBMISSION TO THE SENATE STANDING COMMITTEE ON

COMMUNITY AFFAIRS

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

Submitted by: Alyce Svensk Founder and Director, The OT Coach Australia Occupational Therapist 1 June 2026

About This Submission

I welcome the opportunity to make a submission to the Senate Standing Committee on Community Affairs about the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026.

I am an occupational therapist registered with AHPRA since 2012, and the founder and director of The OT Coach Australia, a professional development and coaching platform for occupational therapists and allied health professionals across Australia. Over the past year alone I have directly mentored more than 164 therapists, and supported hundreds more through workshops, a nationally recognised podcast, and peer learning communities. My work gives me direct insight into how NDIS policy translates to practice at the ground level, for participants, for families, and for the practitioners who serve them.

Prior to founding The OT Coach Australia, I operated Sensational Start, a paediatric occupational therapy practice in NSW, for seven years from 2017 to 2024. At its peak the practice employed a team of 15 therapists delivering NDIS-funded supports directly to children and families. Sensational Start closed in 2024, not because of poor clinical outcomes, but because of the compounding pressures of NDIS pricing caps, workforce

Parliamentary Scrutiny and Transparency

A two-week consultation period for a 109-page Bill of this magnitude is not adequate.

The Australian Government Guide to Policy Impact Analysis recommends a minimum of

30 days. More importantly, the disability sector has already contributed years of

substantive reform work, including the Independent Review of the NDIS (2023), which

heard from more than 10,000 Australians and produced 26 recommendations, and the

Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with

Disability (2023), which delivered 222 recommendations across 12 volumes. This Bill

does not reflect that body of work. Compressing consultation to a fortnight, on

legislation that will determine whether Australians with disability can access support,

disrespects that contribution and prevents genuine scrutiny.

Recommendation: Extend the consultation period to a minimum of 30 days. Ensure

future NDIS legislative changes are grounded in the existing body of sector evidence

rather than developed alongside it.

Functional capacity cannot be assessed in isolation

Functional capacity is contextual, dynamic, and shaped by the environment in which a person operates. Across all age groups and disability types, a person may present as managing adequately in a quiet, structured clinical setting and struggle significantly in the complexity of daily life. Conditions including autism, acquired brain injury, psychosocial disability and progressive neurological conditions do not produce consistent, linear presentations across settings or across time.

The Bill moves toward assessing a single eligible impairment and removes existing provisions that acknowledged environmental factors and whole-of-person context. This is a regression. It replaces holistic assessment with a framework that risks missing the complexity of disability as people across all life stages actually live it.

In my work with occupational therapists across Australia, point-in-time assessment has always been a clinical limitation to navigate carefully. A person assessed on a calm morning in a low-demand setting may appear to function well within normal limits. That same person later in the day, under the cumulative cognitive, sensory, or physical demands of real life, may present very differently. Neither snapshot is wrong. Neither is the whole picture. Clinical accuracy requires both.

What this means for participants

Consider a child with autism whose sensory and self-regulation needs are significant, but who has learned to mask effectively in structured settings. In a clinical assessment, this child presents as capable. At home, without the NDIS-funded supports that have been carefully built around them, the family’s day involves multiple hours of dysregulation, unsafe behaviour, and exhausted parents who cannot work, sleep, or care for other children. A point-in-time functional threshold does not capture what holds this family together.

Consider a child with a progressive neurological condition who is currently achieving developmental milestones because early intervention is working. A functional assessment captures the stability, not the trajectory. It does not ask what happens in 12 months when the condition progresses and the early intervention that maintained this

• progress is no longer funded. By the time the answer becomes visible, the window for effective intervention has closed.

Consider a child in regional NSW or rural Queensland whose family has spent two years navigating the NDIS to build a therapy plan that works. Under this Bill, that child may be reassessed against a threshold that does not yet exist, using a tool that has not been validated, with limited ability to challenge the outcome. The replacement system their family is pointed toward, Thriving Kids, will not be at scale until January 2028.

These are not edge cases. They are the everyday reality that therapists across Australia describe to me. The same logic applies to adults. Consider an adult with psychosocial disability who is stable and functioning because their NDIS supports are working. A point-in-time functional assessment captures that stability. It does not capture what created it, or what will happen when those supports are removed and the person decompensates. By the time the consequences are visible, they are appearing in emergency departments and crisis services. The participants most at risk of falling through a tighter functional threshold are precisely those for whom early or preventative support is making the difference between stability and crisis.

The threshold is being legislated before it has been defined

The Bill creates the legal framework for a functional capacity threshold that has not yet been determined. A Technical Advisory Group will be established to advise on an appropriate threshold commencing mid-2026. Parliament is being asked to pass legislation that grants significant powers based on criteria that do not yet exist.

The threshold will determine whether a person qualifies for the NDIS. Setting it too high will exclude people with genuine, significant needs, people who have planned their lives, employment decisions, and care arrangements around funded support. The consequences are not administrative. They are personal, profound, and in some cases life-altering.

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The permanence requirement raises unresolved questions

The Bill introduces a requirement that a person exhaust appropriate treatment options before being deemed eligible. For conditions that are by definition permanent, whether autism, intellectual disability, degenerative neurological conditions, or acquired disability, this adds an evidentiary burden without clinical basis. These conditions do not become permanent only after treatment is exhausted. They are permanent from the point of acquisition or diagnosis.

There are no safeguards for people who cannot access treatment due to cost, geography, or wait times. A family in rural Australia waiting 18 months for a paediatrician appointment, or an adult waiting years for specialist mental health or neurological services, is not refusing to exhaust treatment options. They are waiting in a system that cannot serve them. Requiring them to wait longer before accessing NDIS support does not reflect the reality of how services are distributed across this country.

Recommendation:

Do not legislate a functional capacity threshold until the Technical Advisory Group has completed its work, the threshold has been validated across the full range of disability presentations including fluctuating, episodic, and progressive conditions across all age groups, and the community has had genuine opportunity to respond. Remove the requirement to exhaust treatment options unless robust safeguards account for geographic, financial, and systemic barriers to access.

3. The I-CAN Assessment Tool: Validation Is Not Optional

The Bill introduces the Instrument for Classification and Assessment of Support Needs (I-CAN) as the primary tool for determining functional capacity. This tool has not been validated for use across the full range of presentations it will be applied to.

For occupational therapists, assessment tool validity is a professional and ethical requirement. A tool must accurately measure what it claims to measure, across the populations it will be used with. A point-in-time standardised assessment applied to a person with a fluctuating or episodic presentation may produce a result that does not reflect that person’s actual support needs on any given day.

There are also significant concerns about cultural appropriateness.

First Peoples people with disability have consistently reported that standardised western assessment frameworks do not capture their experience of disability or their support needs. Applying an unvalidated tool to this population risks entrenching existing inequity in access to the.scheme.

Recommendation: Do not proceed with I-CAN as the assessment tool until it has been independently validated across all relevant disability presentations across all age groups, including fluctuating, episodic, and progressive conditions, and demonstrated to be culturally safe and appropriate for First Peoples people with disability.

4. Ministerial Power to Cut Funding Without Parliamentary Oversight

The Bill grants the Minister broad power to reduce funding across support categories through a disallowable instrument, without requiring parliamentary debate. The announced reductions, a 50 per cent cut to social, civic and community participation budgets and a 10 per cent cut to capacity building daily activities from October 2026, create a mechanism for significant harm to participants with no meaningful avenue for challenge.

For participants across all age groups, community participation and capacity building supports are not discretionary. They are what fund the therapy, the group programs, the skill-building activities that allow people to develop, connect, and participate in community life. A 50 per cent reduction to community participation funding is not a budget adjustment. For a child whose therapy sessions represent the difference between developmental progress and regression, or an adult whose supported community access represents the difference between social connection and isolation, it is the removal of something that cannot simply be replaced.

The downstream cost does not disappear. It moves to families, to schools, to paediatricians, and to emergency departments. Families, particularly mothers, reduce or exit paid work to absorb the care that funded supports previously provided. That cost is real. It is simply invisible to the scheme.

What Is Consistently Underestimated

What is consistently underestimated in this conversation is what NDIS supports make possible for the whole family unit, not just the child.

Across the families I have worked with and the practitioners I support, one of the most frequently reported outcomes of funded support is this: parents are able to work. Parents are able to function. Families are able to stay connected to their communities, their employment, and each other.

When NDIS supports are removed or significantly reduced, that burden does not disappear. It is absorbed by the family, and disproportionately by mothers. A parent or carer who reduces to part-time work or exits the workforce entirely to manage the needs of a family member without funded support is not a neutral outcome. It is a family removed from economic participation, from community connection, and from their own wellbeing. That parent’s mental health, financial security, and capacity to care sustainably are all placed at risk.

Pushing support responsibility back to families does not protect the scheme. It shifts the cost invisibly onto the people least resourced to absorb it, and places both the participant and their family unit at serious risk. The removal of unspent fund carry-over compounds this further, penalising families who plan carefully across plan periods for high-cost items.

There is an assumption embedded in the framing of these changes that families can partially bridge the gap through private therapy or self-funded supports. In a cost of living crisis, this is not a realistic expectation for the majority of Australian families.

Private allied health services carry costs that reflect the genuine value of that work, but for families already stretched thin, those costs are simply out of reach. Waitlists are long. Gap fees are real. There has been commentary about family contribution as a reasonable baseline expectation. For many families it was never achievable, and it is less achievable now than it has ever been.

What this creates in practice is a tiered system. Families and individuals with financial resources will access private therapy and maintain some level of support. Families without those resources will not. Disability does not discriminate by income. A person with disability from a family experiencing financial hardship has the same clinical need

as a person from a family that can afford to bridge the gap. A funding model that

produces different outcomes based on a family’s financial position is not an equitable

scheme.

This inequity is compounded by a reality rarely acknowledged in policy discussions: many families have multiple children or family members accessing the NDIS. A household with two or three participants does not face a 50 per cent cut to one plan. They face cumulative reductions across multiple plans simultaneously, while absorbing the unpaid care burden for each person. The impact on a single household in that situation is not linear. It is overwhelming.

Recommendation: Require all funding reductions to be subject to independent review, with mandatory advance notice to affected participants and independent appeal rights before any reduction takes effect. Restore the carry-over of unspent funds for participants saving for high-cost items.

5. Supports Being Cut Before a Replacement System Exists

The October 2026 commencement date for support budget reductions precedes any functional replacement system. Thriving Kids, the primary alternative for children exiting the NDIS under tighter eligibility thresholds, is not expected to be at scale until January 2028. Foundational supports for other participants have no confirmed implementation date.

Reducing supports before an equivalent alternative is in place is not a reform. It is a gap. Gaps in support do not resolve themselves. For children, developmental time cannot be recovered. A child who loses funded therapy and waits 15 months for a replacement system to come online is not in the same developmental position when that support eventually arrives. For adults, the consequences are equally serious. A person with psychosocial disability, an acquired injury, or a progressive condition who loses supports during that gap does not emerge unchanged. Crisis, hospitalisation, loss of housing, loss of employment, and deteriorating family relationships are the documented outcomes of unsupported gaps in care.

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The state-based systems that Thriving Kids depends on have historically been under- resourced and inconsistent across jurisdictions. A child in regional NSW does not have access to the same services as a child in inner Sydney. The assumption that state- delivered services will absorb what the NDIS drops is not supported by the evidence of how those systems have performed.

There is a further system that will absorb this cost, and it is already at capacity: schools. When a child loses NDIS-funded therapy, behaviour support, or allied health input, that child still attends school. The needs do not resolve. They arrive in the classroom, where teachers are already managing significant unmet needs with limited resources, no clinical training, and no additional funding to compensate for what the NDIS no longer provides. Schools are not a backup system for the NDIS. They are not funded, staffed, or structured to be. Treating them as the default safety net for children who fall out of NDIS eligibility places an unfair and unsustainable burden on educators, and it does not serve the children.

Recommendation: No reduction to NDIS supports should take effect until a funded, oprational, and independently verified replacement is in place and accessible to all participants who will be affected. The full downstream impact, including on schools, mental health services, hospitals, housing, and unpaid carers, must be explicitly modelled before any changes to eligibility or support levels are implemented.

6. The Right to Appeal Is Not Optional

The Bill restricts participants’ rights to challenge decisions about supports and eligibility, makes funding reductions unreviewable, and removes review rights for automatic plan renewals.

This is one of the most dangerous elements of the Bill, and it is one that practitioners on the ground understand in a way that is difficult to convey through policy language. Plan errors are not rare. They are a routine feature of the current system. Funding that was approved is not carried across. Incorrect names/ages/numbers/At funds are frequently incorrectly translated into a plan. Supports that a treating team has carefully justified

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are reduced or removed without explanation. Families contact their therapists in crisis because a plan has been renewed automatically and a line item that kept their child safe has disappeared.

These are not administrative inconveniences. In some cases, the funding that has been cut or erroneously removed is the funding that keeps a participant safe. It funds the support work hours, the behaviour support, the equipment, or the therapy that prevents a crisis. When that funding disappears with no avenue for challenge and no backup plan in place, families and participants are left to manage alone while they navigate a review process that this Bill makes harder to access, or in some cases, removes entirely.

Plans are also frequently underfunded from the outset. Therapists regularly advocate for participants whose plans do not reflect their assessed need, not because the need is not there, but because the system has not accurately captured it. The ability to request a review, to challenge a decision, to bring clinical evidence to bear on an inadequate plan, is not participants misusing the scheme. It is the scheme working as intended.

Removing that mechanism does not reduce inappropriate use. It removes the correction process that ensures people receive what they actually need.

A system that makes decisions affecting a participant’s safety, independence, and wellbeing, then removes the right to challenge those decisions, is not a fair system. It is not a safe system. And it is not consistent with the original intent of the NDIS.

Recommendation: Restore full independent review rights for all decisions affecting NDIS eligibility, funding levels, and plan content. Introduce a ‘no harm’ safeguard ensuring that no participant loses access to supports without equivalent alternatives confirmed in place, and that all plan changes, including automatic renewals, carry a right of review. No funding reduction should take effect while a review is pending.

7. Personal Impact as a Health Professional

As an occupational therapist and sector educator, I have spent more than a decade helping therapists navigate the gap between what good clinical practice looks like and what a system will fund. That gap has always existed. This Bill makes it wider.

I closed a paediatric practice because the system became unviable. The pricing did not reflect the cost of delivering quality care. The workforce could not be sustained. The policy environment created uncertainty that made long-term planning impossible. The children and families we served did not receive less because the clinical need diminished. They received less because the structural conditions that support quality practice were eroded.

I now support the therapists who are still in those practices, still trying to serve those families. They are skilled, committed professionals who are being asked to do more with less, to document more to justify the same, and to operate in a policy environment that treats their work as a cost to be reduced rather than an investment in people’s lives.

There has been commentary suggesting that the allied health workforce will simply shift and adapt as NDIS funding changes. I want to challenge that assumption directly.

Specialist clinical expertise is not transferable by assumption. Paediatric occupational therapy is a distinct and demanding discipline built over years of deliberate practice, clical supervision, and accumulated experience with complex presentations. I have spent the better part of a decade training others to become skilled paediatric clinicians. That expertise does not sit in a generic workforce pool waiting to be redeployed. It exists in specific practitioners who have chosen this work, invested in it, and built something that takes years to develop.

Suggesting that a paediatric OT can simply redirect their practice to a different population or setting is a bit like asking an early childhood teacher to move into high school teaching. The professional registration may be the same. The skills, the knowledge base, the clinical reasoning, and the therapeutic relationships are not. When specialist paediatric practitioners leave the sector because it is no longer viable, that expertise leaves with them. It cannot be recalled. And the children and families who needed it most are left without practitioners who actually know how to help them.

What I fear losing is the coherence between what we know about disability and human flourishing, and what the law allows us to do about it. The NDIS, at its best, was built on the principle that people with disability deserve individualised, evidence-based support

Conclusion

The sustainability of the NDIS matters. This submission does not dispute that. The

scheme must remain viable for current and future generations of Australians with

disability. Reform is necessary and I welcome it. What I am asking for is reform that is

fair, clinically grounded, and determined in a way that considers the participant and their

support system as a whole.

There is an important principle from allied health best practice that is directly relevant

here: good intervention is not about doing things for people indefinitely. It is about

building capacity within the person, within the family, and within the natural supports

around them. That is the goal. But building that capacity takes time. It requires

consistent, funded therapeutic input over a sustained period before independence is

achievable. Cutting supports prematurely does not reflect a family that has built

capacity. It removes the scaffolding before the structure can stand on its own. And the

evidence is clear that well-funded, well-timed capacity building reduces long-term cost

to the scheme. The Bill’s approach runs counter to that evidence.

Reform that works looks different from this Bill. It is built on a validated, whole-of-person

assessment framework. It defines thresholds before legislating them. It ensures

• replacement systems are operational before removing existing supports. It preserves the right to appeal because it acknowledges that systems make errors. It considers the cumulative impact on participants, on families, on carers, on schools, and on the broader systems that absorb unmet need. And it is co-designed with the people it will affect, not imposed on a two-week timeline.

Sustainability achieved by making the scheme harder to access, cutting supports before alternatives exist, removing the right to challenge decisions, and codifying undefined thresholds into law is not genuine reform. It transfers risk from the scheme onto the participants and families the scheme was built to protect.

The sector has invested years of effort in building the evidence base for reform that is fair, effective, and sustainable. That body of work includes the Independent Review of the NDIS (2023), led by Professor Bruce Bonyhady and Lisa Paul, which heard from more than 10,000 Australians, received nearly 4,000 submissions, and produced 26 recommendations and 139 supporting actions specifically designed to place people with disability back at the centre of the scheme. It includes the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability (2023), which ran for four and a half years, heard from nearly 10,000 people, and delivered 222 recommendations across 12 volumes. Both processes were among the most comprehensive Commonwealth reviews in Australia’s history. Both produced clear, evidence-based direction for how the NDIS should be reformed. This Bill does not reflect that direction. It should.

I urge the Committee to recommend significant amendments to this Bill before it proceeds.