National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026
Submission 3487
Submission on the NDIS Amendment Bill
Name:
I am a: ☐ Parent of a 54 year old Autistic daughter, and grandparent to a 5 year old Autistic girl
Her main concern about this Bill is:
Loss or reduction of supports Community participation Children / families / early intervention
This Bill may affect me / my daughter and grand daughter because:
Cuts to NDIS supports and increased administrative load would upend her life and ability to contribute to the community hugely. Her daughters primary area of disability-related impairment is not physical capacity, but executive functioning and self-management. She is physically able to complete many tasks; it is essential that NDIA’s assessment focuses not on whether she can physically perform tasks, but the significant cognitive, emotional, and functional cost involved in completing and sustaining them independently.
It is important that her functioning is not assessed solely on isolated tasks or on her best presentation on a particular day. Her disability is variable and largely hidden. She may appear capable in some environments, but this comes at an extremely high cognitive and emotional cost that is not sustainable without support.
A reduction in supports would increase her fatigue, overwhelm, and functional impairment, and reduce her ability to safely maintain employment, parenting responsibilities, nutrition, emotional regulation, and independent living.
Her disability affects her ability to plan, prioritise, organise, initiate, sequence, and follow through with everyday tasks. She requires scaffolding supports to reduce cognitive load and enable her to function safely and consistently. Without these supports, she would experience significant cognitive and emotional fatigue, leading to shutdown, paralysis, missed deadlines, inability to problem solve, and deterioration in her mental health and daily functioning.
Any cuts to support would increased the mental load she must carry each day. As a result, tasks accumulate, important responsibilities are missed, and she becomes overwhelmed. This is not ordinary tiredness. It is a cognitive and emotional shutdown where I remain aware of demands continuing to build, but lose the functional ability to organise or resolve them.
Her NDIS support enables me to maintain employment, parent her child, and participate meaningfully in the community. The supports act as a bridge between her capability and her ability to consistently function in daily life.
My daughter works part time successfully as a teacher, but this requires extensive compensatory strategies. For example, she cannot rely on brief lesson notes or memory alone. I need highly detailed plans with step-by-step sequencing because she cannot reliably hold multiple stages of tasks in her working memory. Tasks that appear simple to
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026
Submission 3487
others often take substantially longer due to losing track of steps, becoming distracted, restarting processes repeatedly, or becoming overwhelmed by decision-making.
Support workers assist her with:
- prioritising and breaking tasks into manageable steps;
- staying on task and reducing distraction;
- organising paperwork and reports;
- managing emails and administrative tasks;
- implementing systems and routines;
- lesson planning and workload management;
- remembering previous decisions so I do not restart tasks repeatedly. Without these supports, I estimate that her work-related tasks would take at least three times longer to complete, resulting in exhaustion, inability to maintain her workload, worsening mental health, and likely loss of employment over time.
Her psychologist provides essential professional support in helping me organise her thoughts, make decisions, regulate emotional overwhelm, and develop practical strategies. The support workers then assist me to implement these strategies in day-to-day life. Both supports are necessary and complementary.
My grand daughter requires individualised at home therapy and this is helping her enormously. I fear that if she was transferred to group therapy, then this would not address her goals and would be too overwhelming and an accessible for her. It would also not allow us to work together as a family, or choose our own therapists.
My daughter and grand daughter have both got significant personal relationships with our their therapists now as well as support worker and we would be greatly disadvantage if they had to change this. They would be hugely disadvantaged by having to change support worker, and I fear that she would not be able to afford the proposed registration fees as an independent sole trader. She is so much better than the people we have had through agencies in the past.
I implore you to not pass this Bill. Please consider the many, many people who have taken time out of there already very challenging lives to contact you with concerns. I understand the NDIS does need to be looked at, however cutting supports from vulnerable people in our society, is not the way forward for a healthy community. Energy should be put towards those providers who rort the system.
Many thanks for your consideration.
Your sincerely,