Submission 3440 — Ms Rebecca Young — NDIS Future Generations Bill

Submission to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee

Inquiry into the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment

(Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026

Submitted: 31 May 2026

Submitted by: Rebecca Young, Melbourne, Victoria

Publication: I consent to this submission being published.

Summary

I write as a person living with disability who currently receives no support from the NDIS. I live with dyslexia, ADHD and rheumatoid arthritis. My conditions affect my daily functioning, my capacity to manage administrative demands, and the energy I have available for activities most people take for granted. I am not writing to represent my own funding interests. I am writing because I have watched the disability community fight for basic recognition for years, and I believe this Bill will cause serious harm to people who are already carrying an enormous load.

I ask the Committee to recommend significant amendments to this Bill before it proceeds any further. The provisions relating to participant compliance, ‘not contactable’ status, and automated decision-making are particularly concerning and should not become law in their current form. If the Government’s genuine goal is a sustainable, well-functioning NDIS, this Bill does not achieve it. It increases the burden on the people least able to bear it, while the structural problems driving scheme costs remain unexamined.

My Lived Experience

I live in Melbourne and work as a senior communications professional. I am also a person who lives with disability. My conditions include dyslexia, ADHD and rheumatoid arthritis.

None of these conditions is static. Rheumatoid arthritis is a systemic autoimmune disease with unpredictable flares. ADHD affects my executive function, including my ability to manage paperwork, track deadlines and respond to correspondence under pressure. Dyslexia adds another layer of difficulty to processing dense written material, including the kind of administrative documentation the NDIA routinely sends to participants.

I do not currently receive NDIS support. But I understand intimately what it means to live with disabilities that are invisible to others, that vary from day to day, and that make administrative complexity genuinely difficult to navigate. Many NDIS participants live with far greater complexity than I do. This Bill asks more of them, with less flexibility, and with consequences that can result in supports being paused or lost.

Key Concerns

1. Compliance requirements will harm people who are least able to comply The Bill increases the administrative burden on participants and introduces tighter timeframes for responses and communication. This is presented as a reasonable expectation of engagement. In practice, it is a design that will disproportionately affect people whose disabilities make compliance harder. The scheme currently supports more than 774,456 Australians1, a significant proportion of whom live with conditions that directly affect their capacity to manage correspondence, meet deadlines, and navigate formal processes.

Consider what this means for someone managing a mental health condition, a fluctuating physical disability, or a cognitive impairment that affects executive function. These are not exceptional cases. They describe a significant proportion of the current NDIS participant cohort. Asking those people to respond faster, more formally, and within tighter windows is not a neutral administrative change. It creates a system where a person’s ability to hold onto their supports depends on their ability to perform administrative tasks that their disability may directly compromise.

This is a fundamental design flaw, not a minor concern to be addressed in implementation. The Bill should be amended to require the NDIA to make reasonable adjustments for participants whose disability affects their capacity to communicate or respond, and to place the burden of inquiry on the Agency, not the participant.

2. The ‘not contactable’ provisions are dangerous The Bill includes provisions that allow supports to be paused, reviewed or affected when a participant cannot be contacted within required timeframes. This could apply to people who are in hospital, experiencing a mental health crisis, unable to communicate due to disability, or experiencing housing instability.

This is an extraordinary design choice. The people most likely to be temporarily unreachable are also the people who most need their supports maintained. A person in a psychiatric ward is not being negligent by not returning a call. A person experiencing a severe flare of a physical condition is not failing their obligations by not answering correspondence. A person without stable housing may not have reliable access to mail, email or a working phone.

To build a system where those circumstances can trigger a reduction or pause in supports is to punish people for being unwell. It is not a safeguard. It is a trap.

I ask the Committee to recommend that the ‘not contactable’ provisions be removed or fundamentally rewritten, and that any mechanism for pausing supports require a substantial, active review process with human oversight, rather than an automated or administrative trigger.

3. Reduced flexibility in plan reviews will cause real harm The Bill proposes more structured and restricted reassessment processes, with limits on when changes can be made. For people whose disability is stable and well-understood, this may cause only minor inconvenience. For people whose conditions fluctuate, this is a serious problem.

Rheumatoid arthritis does not follow a schedule. ADHD does not get easier to manage because a plan review is six months away. Mental health conditions, chronic pain conditions, neurological conditions and many others can change significantly over short periods. A system that limits when a participant can seek a change to their plan is a system that will regularly leave people without appropriate support.

The existing system has significant problems with how it handles plan reviews. The answer to those problems is not to reduce access to reviews. It is to improve the quality of decision-making and the Agency’s responsiveness. This Bill does the former without addressing the latter.

4. Automated and standardised decision-making is not appropriate for individual needs The Bill increases reliance on standardised, system-driven decision-making. This concerns me deeply for a reason that is well documented but rarely acknowledged in the government’s public narrative about NDIS reform.

In February 2025, NDIA CEO Rebecca Falkingham acknowledged at Senate estimates that Agency staff often do not have time to read the medical reports submitted by participants. That statement deserves serious weight. The Government is now proposing to increase automation and standardisation in a system where human reviewers are already failing to read the evidence in front of them.

Automated systems make decisions based on patterns and categories. Disability does not fit neatly into patterns and categories. The NDIS was designed around the recognition that disability is individual, that needs vary, and that a person-centred approach is not just good practice but a legal and ethical obligation. Increased automation moves the scheme in the opposite direction.

Before any expansion of automated decision-making is legislated, the Government should be required to demonstrate how those systems will protect the rights of participants whose needs do not conform to expected patterns, and how human review will be guaranteed as a meaningful check rather than a rubber stamp.

5. The broader reform context requires transparency This Bill sits alongside other reforms that are still being developed or progressively implemented. The picture of what they will actually deliver remains unclear. Thriving Kids, the program intended to support children with autism and developmental delay outside the NDIS, begins rolling out in October 2026, though serious questions remain about whether it can replicate the individualised support those children currently receive. Foundational Supports, the broader community-based system intended to sit beneath the NDIS, remains in development with no confirmed operational date.²

The Government has stated publicly that its reforms will reduce NDIS participant numbers by around 160,000 by 2030. Internal departmental modelling tabled in the Senate puts that figure at 241,000 exits by mid-2031.³ That discrepancy between what the Government has told the public and what its own modelling shows is a transparency concern in itself. These projections also rest on an assumption that alternative support systems will be in place and capable of absorbing displaced need. For Foundational Supports, that assumption is not yet justified by evidence.

People with disability and their families deserve to understand the full picture and have a say in what is being built before any part of it becomes law. Legislating structural changes while key elements of the surrounding system remain undesigned is poor governance, regardless of the policy intent behind it.

6. Removing neurodivergent children is likely to cause harm Children with autism and developmental delay now account for 45% of all NDIS participants and 75% of participants under 18.⁴ The Government has framed this growth as a scheme design problem. In my view, it is more accurately understood as a reflection of growing community awareness and unmet need that existed long before the NDIS.

Awareness of neurodiversity has increased substantially over recent decades. More families are seeking assessment. More clinicians are equipped to identify conditions that were historically missed, particularly in girls, older children, and those from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. These are not signs of a scheme being rorted. They are signs of a society catching up with a reality that was always there.

The Government’s response is to divert children with low to moderate support needs into Thriving Kids. The core problem is not the existence of that program but what it replaces. NDIS funding is individualised. Thriving Kids delivers support through community health, GPs and schools. Families have raised legitimate concerns this will mean generic, group-based care rather than the therapies that have worked for their children, and that a classification of moderate autism on paper can obscure severe and fluctuating needs that do not fit neatly into a category. Delayed or inadequate early intervention does not reduce those needs. It defers and compounds them.

There is a specific concern that deserves direct attention: the gendered impact of needs-based classification. Girls with autism are significantly more likely to mask their symptoms in ways that present as coping, and are already more likely to be underdiagnosed and assessed as less impaired than their male counterparts. A needs-assessment based eligibility system will replicate this inequity. Girls who mask

effectively will be classified as low to moderate needs and lose individualised support. The damage will accumulate quietly, as it always has.

I write this as someone who should have received support as a child and did not. I was not diagnosed with ADHD until adulthood, and those years without support had real consequences for my education, my confidence, and my understanding of my own capabilities. The NDIS represented a genuine attempt to change that story for the next generation. Children identified early and supported appropriately go on to have better outcomes in education, employment and life. That evidence is not contested. What is contested, apparently, is whether those outcomes are worth the cost.

People with disability already face a significant employment gap. The labour force participation rate for Australians with disability sits at 60.5% compared to nearly 85% for people without disability.⁵ Early intervention is one of the few mechanisms with evidence behind it for narrowing that gap. Reducing children’s access to individualised support is not a savings measure. It is a decision to entrench disadvantage and pass the cost on to the children themselves.

I ask the Committee to consider what it means to tell a generation of children with disability that the support their older peers received is no longer available, not because the need has diminished, but because the cost was inconvenient.

I ask the Committee to consider my lived experience when reviewing this Bill.

What I Am Asking For

I ask the Committee to recommend the following:

• That the provisions relating to ‘not contactable’ status and support pauses be removed or fundamentally rewritten to ensure supports cannot be paused as a result of a participant being temporarily unable to communicate due to their disability, illness or crisis.

• That the increased compliance and administrative burden provisions be amended to require the NDIA to make genuine reasonable adjustments for participants whose disability affects their capacity to engage with administrative processes.

• That the provisions reducing flexibility in plan reassessment be removed or substantially modified to protect the rights of participants with fluctuating or complex conditions.

• That any provisions expanding automated or standardised decision-making be suspended until the Government can demonstrate, with independent evidence, that such systems can meet the NDIS principles of individualised, person-centred support.

• That no child be removed from NDIS early intervention supports until equivalent replacement services are fully operational, independently evaluated, and confirmed to meet the same level of need.

• That the Bill not proceed in its current form.

Closing

The NDIS was built on a recognition that disability is a natural part of human life, and that Australians with disability deserve genuine support to live full lives. That principle has not changed. What has changed is the willingness of governments and agencies to honour it.

I do not write this submission as an opponent of reform. I write it as someone who understands what it is to live with conditions that fluctuate, that are invisible, and that make administrative complexity genuinely hard.

I write it for the people in this community whose conditions are far more complex than mine, and who have far fewer resources to advocate for themselves.

This Bill, in its current form, makes their lives harder and their rights weaker. The Committee has an opportunity to put that right. I ask it to take that opportunity seriously.

References

1. NDIS, ‘The NDIS in each state’, ndis.gov.au (current as of 16 February 2026): 774,456 people benefiting from the NDIS. Available at: https://www.ndis.gov.au/contact/find-us/ndis-each-state

2. Ross Joyce, CEO, Australian Federation of Disability Organisations, quoted in Croakey Health Media, ‘Wrapping changes to NDIS and aged care and responses’, 24 April 2026. Available at: croakey.org/wrapping-changes-to-ndis-and-aged-care-and-responses/

3. Guardian Australia, ‘New NDIS eligibility rules will cut 241,000 participants from scheme in four years, documents reveal’, 28 May 2026. Available at: http://theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/may/28/ndis-eligibility-rules-cuts-participants

4. Maathumai Ranjan, ‘Understanding autism prevalence’, ANU Crawford School of Public Policy, Working Paper 17/2023. Available at: http://crawford.anu.edu.au/sites/default/files/2025-02/complete_wp_m_ranjan_nov_2023.pdf

5. ABS Survey of Disability, Ageing and Carers 2022, reported by People with Disability Australia. Available at: pwd.org.au/australian-bureau-of-statistics-releases-new-disability-statistics/