Submission to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee
Inquiry into the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment
(Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026
Jane Wardlaw
I wish to acknowledge disability advocacy leaders and the sector’s allies. They have worked tirelessly and generously sharing their perspectives and deep work to defend and restore the integrity of the foundation for the NDIS. In shaping my submission, I have attended workshops, read some submissions, consulted with contacts and drawn on my own experience.
Summary of Recommendations
This submission makes seven recommendations. The table below sets out each recommendation, the relevant Bill provision, and what is being asked for. The full argument is set out in Parts One to Three.
Rec Bill provision What this submission asks for
Rec Repeal of s 31 (Sch 1, Part Restore individualisation principles. The new planning framework must retain the
1 6) principles of individualised, choice and control, participant-directed planning.Financial sustainability should be one consideration — not the overriding one.
Rec Self-management (Sch 1, Legislate self-management as a right. Self-management must be protected in primary
2 Part 6) legislation, not left as an administrative option subject to removal by Ministerialinstrument.
Rec s 9B — Functional capacity Align with the WHO ICF framework. Functional capacity must be assessed against
3 definition (Sch 1, Part 1) both impairment and personal and environmental context. A weighted scoringapproach must reflect primary disability and contextual factors.
Rec s 34(1)(g) — Diversion to Protect participants from inadequate aged care diversion. No participant may be
4 other systems (Sch 1, Part redirected to aged care without binding individual evidence that they will be no worse6) off, accounting for existing support arrangements and worker relationships. Rec s 34A — Ministerial budget Require parliamentary oversight and individual review rights. Section 34A
5 cut power (Sch 1, Part 4) determinations must be subject to parliamentary disallowance, mandatoryconsultation with the disability community, and individual merits review where material harm can be demonstrated.
Rec ss 59C–59E — Automated Make automated decision safeguards legally enforceable. Any adverse automated
6 decisions (Sch 3, Part 2) decision affecting a participant's funding, eligibility, or claim must trigger mandatoryhuman review before taking effect.
Rec Whole of Bill Commission an independent CRPD-compatibility assessment. The assessment must7 be conducted with the meaningful participation of people with disability and their representative organisations before the Bill proceeds to a final vote.
This submission was prepared with the assistance of Claude, an AI tool developed by Anthropic. I used it as a drafting aid where I have dictated my prompts, language, ideas, positions, and uploaded evidence. AI is used due to the progressive loss of fine motor function caused by my disability. AI assisted with suggesting structure and grammar edits and parts where I could improve flow.
About This Submission
My name is Jane Wardlaw. I am a person with disability with deep experience in NDIS policy and practice. I was involved in the scheme from its earliest days — through the trial phase in 2013, through co-founding and directing a support coordination business, and through ongoing academic and advocacy work. I am currently a PhD candidate at the University of Tasmania and a member of the NDIS Independent Advisory Council. The views in this submission are entirely my own.
Our nation has underestimated the depth and breadth of disability in our community. I write this submission because the NDIS is worth defending — and worth improving honestly. At the heart of my position is a commitment to self-direction, self-management, and the right of people with disability to exercise genuine choice and control over the supports that enable them to live full lives. We need to put the ‘human’ back into human service — our NDIS.
The Tasmanian Context
Tasmania has operated in a thin disability support market since 2016, serving a participant population whose disability complexity stands out from the rest of Australia. More than 16,000 Tasmanians access the NDIS, with nearly 11 per cent identifying as First Nations — well above the national rate and over-represented among new entrants. Plan budgets are the second-highest in the country, reflecting that complexity — yet utilisation lags: Tasmanian participants are approved for more funding than they can spend, not because the need is absent but because the providers are not there to deliver. Self-management is declining, and only 31 per cent of reassessment decisions are made within the required 21-day timeframe. Cutting approved budgets in a market already failing to meet demand will not save money; it will simply make the gap official. In a system already unable to meet its own timeframes, the Bill’s proposal to extend response windows and restrict reassessment access is not reform (NDIA Quarterly Performance Dashboard, Q2 2025–26).
My opening statements
I support the Minister’s intention to address the financial sustainability of the scheme. The NDIS is treasured. It has transformed lives. It deserves to be protected.
I support stronger fraud controls and provider regulation. I have seen unethical behaviour — from providers and from others who have sought to profit from a scheme designed for people with disability. The evidence is clear: the overwhelming majority of fraud originates with unethical businesses preying on Australians with disability due to system gaps, not participants.
This Bill restricts participant rights and increases the compliance burden on participants. That is not proportionate, and it deepens the damage already done to the scheme’s social licence by years of fraud-focused public framing.
The provisions in this Bill that concern me most are not primarily about cost. They are about power — who holds it, who loses it, and what happens to the people the scheme was built for when that power shifts away from them.
Part One — Personal: The Right to Direct Your Own Life
The NDIS was built on a clear philosophical foundation. People with disability are not passive recipients of services. They are rights-holders, capable of directing their own lives when given the tools to do so. Self-management and self-direction were not incidental features of the scheme. They were its purpose.
Section 31 of the current NDIS Act set this out plainly. It enshrined the principles of individualised, participant directed planning — oriented toward the person’s goals, their life. This Bill repeals section 31 entirely.
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That is not a technical amendment. It removes the philosophical foundation of the scheme without replacing it. The new framework centres financial sustainability, informal support preferences, and Ministerial budget controls. The question is no longer what does this person need to live a full life. It is what is the minimum we can fund before informal supports are deemed sufficient.
The block-funded model that preceded the NDIS did not work. People had no choice, no control, no self-direction. Services were delivered to people, not with them. International evidence — and Australian lived experience — is clear on the power of individualised funding to produce better outcomes at comparable or lower long-term cost.
Self-Management
Preliminary findings from my doctoral research, which focuses on people with degenerative conditions including muscular dystrophy, are instructive. Most respondents were self-managers. They were meticulous about their record-keeping. Many were too cautious to spend funding on supports they were fully entitled to access — not because they lacked need, but because they feared doing something wrong.
Self-managers negotiate directly with support workers and providers. They secure better rates. They run lean budgets. They are, in practice, some of the most cost-effective participants in the scheme.
This Bill does not legislate self-management as a positive right. It exists currently as an administrative option — subject to restriction by Ministerial instrument or NDIS rules at any time, without primary legislation. The additional compliance burden this Bill imposes — shortened claim windows, new record-keeping obligations, civil penalty exposure — will accelerate the decline of self-management in thin markets like Tasmania’s, where there is no registered provider alternative to fall back on.
Recommendation 1: Restore the substance of section 31’s individualisation principles in the new planning framework. Financial sustainability must be one consideration among several — not the overriding principle to which all others are subordinate. A scheme that abandons self determination in the name of sustainability has lost its reason for existing.
Recommendation 2: Legislate self-management as a positive right in primary legislation. Define the limited conditions under which it may be constrained. Require co-design with people with disability before any such conditions are introduced. An administrative option subject to Ministerial removal is not a right.
Part Two — Professional
Section 9B — Defining Functional Capacity
For the first time, this Bill defines functional capacity in legislation. That is welcome. A clear definition is better than none.
However, the definition is too narrow. It only looks at what a person can do without any support, assistive technology, or consideration of where they live and how they live. That is the medical model of disability. It sees the person in isolation. It ignores the world around them.
The World Health Organisation’s International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health — the WHO ICF — offers a better approach. It looks at both the person’s impairment and their personal and environmental context. For someone living in regional Tasmania with no local allied health services and limited transport, that context matters enormously. It shapes what supports people actually need.
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A definition that ignores context produces plans that ignore context. For people with progressive or complex conditions, where one disability can worsen another, a narrow assessment will get it wrong. Plans built on incomplete information will leave people worse off, not better.
Recommendation 3 Amend section 9B to align with the WHO ICF framework. Functional capacity should be assessed across both impairment and personal and environmental context. Introduce a weighted assessment approach: primary disability scored as the principal determinant, with a secondary score for contextual factors affecting participation. Incentivise quality self-management and self-sufficiency outcomes within the framework.
Support Coordination
Effective support coordination is not bureaucratic overhead. It is a clinical and relational practice — the thread that ties a participant’s plan to the supports that actually reach them. In a thin market serving complex participants, a skilled support coordinator is often the only person who knows both the person and the market well enough to bridge them. Without that bridge, a plan is paper.
Support coordination has been inadequately funded since the scheme’s inception and subject to repeated uncertainty. This Bill does not address that. As the system becomes more complex — new rules, new eligibility tests, new claim timeframes, new compliance obligations — a weakened support coordination sector will leave the most vulnerable participants to navigate that complexity alone.
When the System Fails — A Case Study During my years as a support coordinator, I worked with a woman — I will call her Margaret — age 67, who had an intellectual disability. She had a team around her who knew her well. She loved being out in the world. Going to the movies. Shopping. Doing activities with others. She was engaged and thriving.
Margaret was moved into an aged care facility when her family moved to interstate. The facility was not prepared for her. Staff did not have the training her disability required. She was left alone for long periods. The social connection she depended on disappeared.
Margaret died within the early months of being admitted.
Proposed new section 34(1)(g) allows supports to be refused where they would be more appropriately provided by another service system — including aged care. The Aged Care Royal Commission documented the failures of that system at length. Those failures have not been remedied. Redirecting people with complex disability into aged care is not a solution. It is a transfer of cost and risk onto people who can least bear it.
Recommendation 4 No NDIS participant may be redirected to aged care without binding rules requiring individual evidence that the person will be no worse off. That assessment must account for existing support arrangements, existing worker relationships, and the adequacy of the proposed alternative. A theoretical placement is not an adequate alternative.
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Part Three — Political
The NDIS was built as a rights-based scheme. Participants were entitled to what they reasonably needed — determined through an individualised process, subject to independent review. That architecture of rights and accountability was not incidental. It was the point.
The Power Shift
This Bill concentrates significant new power in the Minister’s office and the Department. Section 34A gives the Minister power to reduce funding in any support category by any percentage, by legislative instrument, without individual assessment and without participant merits review. Section 50A introduces automatic plan renewal without participant input, explicitly not a reviewable decision. Proposed sections 59C to 59E permit automated decision-making in planning and claims with safeguards that are not legally enforceable.
Sherry Arnstein’s ladder of citizen participation describes a spectrum from tokenistic consultation at the lowest rungs to genuine citizen power at the highest1. People with disability must be engaged at the level of genuine power — not consulted after decisions have already been made.
No single Minister should have unchecked power to reduce funding in any support category by any percentage. The consequences are direct and real. If a support costs one hundred per cent but the Minister determines to fund it at twenty per cent, people with disability cannot afford the gap. They go without. This is already visible in the low employment participation rates of people with disability. People with disability want to work and contribute. But that requires supports that enable participation — and a cultural shift in how Australian businesses approach employment of people with disability that is slowly happening but is far from complete. Cutting the supports that make participation possible makes that shift harder, not easier.
CRPD Obligations
Australia is a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. These are binding obligations. The Convention requires Australia to ensure people with disability can live independently and be included in the community (Article 19), exercise legal capacity on an equal basis with others (Article 12), and enjoy an adequate standard of living and social protection (Article 28).
A Ministerial power to reduce any support category by any percentage without individual assessment is not consistent with those obligations. An automated decision-making system with unenforceable safeguards is not consistent with those obligations. A planning framework that replaces individualised assessment with cohort-based budget caps is not consistent with those obligations.
Recommendation 5 Section 34A must be subject to parliamentary disallowance, mandatory public consultation with the disability community, and individual merits review rights for participants who can demonstrate material harm. The power to reduce any support by any percentage without these safeguards is incompatible with a rights-based scheme.
1 Arnstein, S.R. (1969) ‘A Ladder of Citizen Participation’, Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 35(4), pp. 216–224 Page 5 of 6
Recommendation 6 The safeguards in proposed sections 59C to 59E governing automated decision-making must be made legally enforceable. Any adverse automated decision affecting a participant’s funding, eligibility, or claim must trigger mandatory human review before taking effect.
Recommendation 7 The Government should commission an independent CRPD-compatibility assessment of this Bill. The assessment must be conducted with the meaningful participation of people with disability and their representative organisations before the Bill proceeds to a final vote.
Closing
Leadership is not found in authoritarian governance. It displaces people. It takes away their human rights. It prevents communities from thriving.
Our nation values democratic principles. That means we are all in this together — people with disability, families, carers, providers, governments, and communities.
Securing the NDIS for future generations cannot be achieved by one Minister acting alone, or by legislation that concentrates power and removes rights. It requires honesty, ambition, and genuine respect for the people this scheme was built to serve.
Jane Wardlaw | Tasmania | May 2026Submitted with consent to publish in full.
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