30th May, 2026.
Submission to the Senate Inquiry into the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment
(Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026.
Submitted By: Laura Bruce,
I submit this response as a close friend of a family caring for a young child with a profound and complex disability. I am not a disability professional or policy expert. I am writing as a community member who is witnessing what happens when the NDIS fails a family it was designed to protect. I am deeply concerned that the proposed changes will make that failure more likely, not less.
I write because the families most affected by this Bill are often the least able to engage with a parliamentary inquiry. They are exhausted and stretched with the day-to-day reality of living without support. The very circumstances that make their submissions most necessary are the same circumstances that make finding the time and energy to advocate for themselves nearly impossible. I am writing on their behalf.
The Family I Am Writing About
My friend’s son requires total physical assistance for every daily tasks including feeding, positioning, bathing, movement and emotional regulation. He suffers from regular medical episodes requiring assistance including seizures. The care needs are continuous, physically demanding, and medically complex. This is not a family managing mild developmental delays or ordinary parenting challenges. This is a family where parents are juggling work and care without any real support other than minimal CCS hours used for an at home carer, both parents are at capacity simply trying to keep the household afloat, while also funding private carers entirely out of their own pocket.
Their previous application for NDIS support was rejected. The basis for that rejection was that the care required was classified as normal parental responsibility. A child who cannot attend “normal” regular childcare, won’t attend schooling, needs specialised equipment and constant medical care, and the system’s determination was that this is normal parenting.
If these changes pass without addressing what “normal parental responsibility” means in practice, how it is applied, by whom, against what standard, and with what right of meaningful review then this bill will continue to exclude the most exhausted, isolated, and financially depleted families in the country.
In addition, the new eligibility framework based on substantially reduced functional capacity, assessed through a process yet to be fully defined is highly concerning.
The consequences
The consequence of these cuts and exclusion will have considerable and dangerous knock-on effects that will follow for years to come. The likely mental health deterioration as a direct consequence of the sustained pressure, financial, physical, and emotional due to providing complex care without any systemic support. As a friend, I can see relationships are strained in the immediate and extended family beyond what is safe or sustainable for them. Friendships are impacted and social isolation is likely.
There is an impact and cost of this limited support for each family member and none of it appears in the NDIS sustainability modelling.
The argument that this Bill improves sustainability by reducing the number of people supported is only coherent if those costs disappear. They do not. They transfer. They become someone else’s line item, recorded under a different heading, but they are real, and they are entirely predictable.
The Assessment Process Itself is a Source of Harm
The Bill proposes a new eligibility assessment based on functional capacity. Before the endorsing this approach, it should be understood what the current assessment and review process does to families that need to navigate it.
The process of applying for, being rejected from, and then attempting to challenge an NDIS decision is, for families in complex caring situations, genuinely traumatising. It requires a family that is already operating at the absolute edge of its capacity to compile detailed evidence, navigate unfamiliar administrative processes, engage with the language of legislation and policy, and sustain that effort across weeks or months, all while continuing to provide full-time intensive care without any support only to be rejected and left with nothing.
I urge the consideration of the following:
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The definitions around “normal parental responsibility” as currently applied and proposed is not fit for purpose. It is being used to exclude children with profound, complex, and permanent disability from the scheme, on the basis that all children require care, without any meaningful understanding for the scale, intensity, or medical complexity of that care. This Bill should not proceed without reform to how that test is defined, applied, and reviewed.
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Tightening eligibility further, without reforming the criteria that are already excluding families who clearly need support, will cause serious harm to some of the most vulnerable families in Australia and only transfer their costs, invisibly, to other parts of the public system.
- Whole-of-government cost accounting should be required before this Bill passes. The sustainability argument for this Bill is incomplete without modelling of the costs transferred to Medicare, Centrelink, state health and mental health systems, and housing services when NDIS support is withdrawn or denied.
The family I have described is not an outlier. They are working, taxpaying, contributing members of society who built their lives on the reasonable expectation that a system existed to help them if they faced a disability of this severity. That expectation is not unreasonable and should be the premise of the NDIS.
This review has an opportunity to ensure that the proposed changes do not abandon those it is promising to protect, I ask that it does so.
Thank you for the opportunity to make this submission.