Submission to the Senate Standing Committee on Community Affairs

National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Dr Sophie R. Reid-Singer | NDIS Participant | 10 August 2026

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. This document is a resubmission of what was previously provided on the 1st of June 2026. The extension to the 14th of August was fought by the disabled community in an agreement with the government and the Greens pushing back on the ‘ridiculous and disrespectful’ original two-week consultation period. The Standard Timeframes for Legislative Projects document, prepared by the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, recommends at least four weeks for public consultation to be effective.

I share concerns today raised by People With Disability Australia (‘PWDA’), 10th of August 2026, that the government is not taking over 6000 adverse submissions seriously and moving forward with proposed changes regardless. PWDA has asserted that the Bill doesn’t ‘fix the institutions responsible for administering and safeguarding the NDIS’ but instead ‘makes people with disability pay the price for the Government’s decision to cut supports instead of fixing the system.’ Over 6000 submissions is a profound volume. Of these submissions, the Australian Human Rights Commission (‘AHRC’) calls for this Bill not to be passed ‘until it fixes serious problems with people’s rights, accountability and consultation’. In a recent interview with News24, Minister for the NDIA Jenny McAllister belittled the consultation period, equating a right to be heard with ‘real [budgetary] harms that arise from delay’, stating that ’I think it’s time for the Parliament to get onto this.’ This is troubling as the central mantra of the disability rights movement is ‘nothing about us, without us.’ The proposed changes directly impact the rights and interests of 774,456 participants of the Scheme, including myself. We have voiced our concerns, now it’s time for the government to listen. Put this Bill in the bin.

1 National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 (Cth) (‘Bill’); National Disability Insurance Scheme Act 2013 (Cth) (‘NDIS Act’). 2 Evan Young and Nas Campanella, ’Disability advocates welcome extension after ‘ridiculous and disrespectful’ NDIS inquiry’ ABC NEWS (online, 23 June 2026) <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-23/ndis-bill-senate- inquiry-extended/106818164>. 3 Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Standard Timeframes for Legislative Projects (Australian Government, 2024). 4 ’“Rip it up”: PWDA urges Parliament to reject NDIS Bill and start again’ PWDA (online, 10 August 2026) <https://newshub.medianet.com.au/2026/08/rip-it-up-pwda-urges-parliament-to-reject-ndis-bill-and-start- age/165572/>. 5 George Taleporos, ‘Media Release: Human Rights Commission delivers damning verdict on Government’s NDIS Bill’ Every Australian Counts (online, 6 August 2026) <https://everyaustraliancounts.com.au/media- release-human-rights-commission-delivers-damning-verdict-on-governments-ndis-bill/> ; ‘Inquiry into the NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026’ AHRC (online, 28 May 2026) <https://humanrights.gov.au/our-work/submissions/disability-rights/inquiry-into-the-ndis-amendment-securing- the-ndis-for-future-generations-bill-2026>. 6 Andrew Clennell, ‘TV interview with Minister McAllister, News24 – 9 August 2026’ Australian Government Health (online, 9 August 2026) <https://www.health.gov.au/ministers/senator-the-hon-jenny- mcallister/media/tv-interview-with-minister-mcallister-news24-9-august-2026?language=en>. 7 ‘The NDIS in each state’ NDIS (online, 31 March 2026) <https://www.ndis.gov.au/contact/find-us/ndis-each- state>.

I want to outline the harm this Bill will cause if it passes parliament.

This 100-page amendment is too far-reaching to pass as it stands.

Recommendations

I urge the Committee to recommend the following before this Bill proceeds:

1. Remove provisions that allow ministers to alter eligibility thresholds and funding rules by instrument without parliamentary debate (Schedule 1 Parts 1, 4 and 8; Schedule 3).

2. Restore and protect the right to challenge funding decisions, including decisions arising from plan renewals and reassessments.

   Continued: Clarify, in legislation, the respective responsibilities of the Health and Disability portfolios so that participants do not fall into the gap between them.

3. Require the NDIA to bear an evidentiary burden when cutting or reducing supports—the current asymmetry, where participants must prove entitlement, but the agency need not prove change, is unjust.

4. Commission an independent accessibility audit of the i-CAN tool before it is used to determine participant eligibility or funding.

5. Abandon the proposed 50 per cent cut to community participation supports.

6. Preserve participant choice and control, rather than imposing blanket mandatory registration on providers.

Problem 1: Less money, more power

The Bill allows ministers to change who gets NDIS support and how much funding people receive by signing an instrument, without returning to parliament. The rules that will determine critical eligibility thresholds have not yet been written. This Bill will bypass the requirement that changes to legislation require parliamentary debate and public scrutiny. Decisions will be made that impact the lives of participants, including whether they still qualify for the NDIS and what supports they can access. A central element of responsible government is public confidence, and bypassing this accountability measure does not inspire confidence. Under the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (‘CRPD’), to which Australia is a party, states are required to actively consult with disabled peoples in the development of policies affecting them. Signing instruments in private is the opposite of that obligation.

A timeline of intended major changes was released by the Health Minister Mark Butler on 13 May 2026. It is hard not to view these changes as anything other than budgetary cuts continuing from the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Getting the NDIS Back on Track No. 1) Bill 2024. In July 2024, Bill Shorten held a joint news conference with Pauline

• Hanson12 to promote the last changes to the NDIS, promising to tackle fraud and save the taxpayer squillions of dollars, all while otherwise insisting to the media ’this is not a cut.’13 If these are not cuts, what are they? A ham sandwich?

Problem 2: Removing the right to challenge bad decisions

My main grievance with the new Bill is that it changes the rules for existing NDIS participants, making it harder to challenge decisions about supports and funding. It restricts when participants can request a reassessment, removes review rights for automatic plan renewals, and makes funding reductions unreviewable.14 This terrifies me. Engaging with the NDIA about my needs and circumstances is, in my experience, not unlike talking to a brick wall.

Becoming a NDIS participant required proving that all that could be done to cure my disability through medical intervention had been explored. On my second access request in 2021, an employee told me that while my congenital bone disease was permanent and significant, I had not done enough to cure or stabilise my disability to reach a baseline where my functional capacity could be assessed. This was a bad administrative decision. On the face of the evidence I had supplied, I was obviously eligible. I live with a congenital bone disease called spondylometaphyseal dysplasia (Kozlowski type) – starting from a mutation in the growth plate of my spine, my entire skeleton has been deformed. I ambulate using canes but can only walk short distances due to significant pain and chronic fatigue. A physiotherapist treating me through a Medicare subsidised Chronic Health Plan wrote reports to recommend my access to the NDIS. He argued the public health system was inadequate to support me in weekly appointments he believed would improve my functional capacity and lead to better independence and pain management. The NDIA employee didn’t consider my evidence in the context of lifelong care and argued I needed to complete my physiotherapy before the agency would consider if I needed it. The issue with this decision is that support is not intended to cure me, but to help me maintain my current level of function for as long as possible – and that I will require support for the rest of my life. When I requested access to the NDIS I needed that support, not scepticism and instruction from someone to try harder at curing my genetics. Nevertheless, I challenged the rejection and won access.

The last round of cuts had a direct impact on me. In January 2026, an NDIA delegate upheld a October 2025 decision to cut the capacity building funding from my plan by 75%: funding I relied on weekly to maintain mobility, reduce pain and preserve independence. I was not afforded a chance to respond or provide contrary evidence before the decision was made. A complaints officer confirmed the cuts were a consequence of the previous legislative changes, which reclassified allied health therapies between the Health and Disability portfolios.15 The internal decision simultaneously claimed I had a general health condition and that the therapies were not value for money because I would not get better. The ordinary reader of this submission is unlikely to have heard of my disability: because it is so rare. This is not the experience of every Australian.

I was able to recover that funding through the appeals process. In discussion prior to case conference before the Administrative Review Tribunal, the committee agreed with me and the NDIA made an offer to reinstate my funding on 27 May 2026. During this entire process, the NDIA was never required to provide any evidence that I no longer required the supports or that my circumstances had changed. I, on the other hand, spent months collating evidence from treating professionals at my own expense, while simultaneously paying for the supports that had been cut. This was especially frustrating because throughout the appeals process the NDIA maintained that I should access services available through Medicare, like the subsidised appointments available through a Chronic Health Plan as a substitution. The outcome of the appeal proved what was obvious from the beginning: that I have a significant and permanent disability for which the public health system is ill-equipped to fund or maintain.

For the most part, the alternatives the NDIA and government point to simply do not exist. I fear this is the reality for many participants who are told to seek alternatives to the NDIS—like Thriving Kids. While the program is set to launch in October, QLD (where I live), remains the only state that has not signed the intergovernmental agreement.16

This Bill will also remove ability to use my funding for treating therapists to write reports on my behalf. This sucks because I am not permitted to speak for myself about my goals and aspirations; I must pay [someone] who has never met me, and who cannot pronounce my disability, thousands of dollars to say exactly what I could have said for free. There is an erroneous belief, promoted by the Labor Party itself, that participants are funded for therapies they do not need.17 I ask the reasonable reader to contemplate what parent is sending their child to speech therapy for fun. I am not going to physiotherapy because I sprained my ACL at touch footy. I am going because I have a degenerative bone disease and am fighting a losing battle against my own body. It is frustrating that even though eligibility for the NDIS requires permanence, the continued impact of my disability is endlessly denied by the NDIA itself. I am very small and don’t have a lot of money, so you can imagine the stress I am under.

Procedural fairness for disabled peoples cannot be achieved through systems which silence and discredit us. Making it impossible to challenge the bad decisions of NDIA employees is not consistent with a view that participants are autonomous agents, entitled to choice and control over decisions impacting our bodies and place in society. It muzzles us.

Continued: What does the Minister for Disability actually do?

Throughout my recent dispute with the NDIA, I was told repeatedly, in official correspondence, that the Minister for Disability cannot change decisions about participants’ plans. The Minister cannot intervene; the Minister cannot direct the agency. This was even after the assistant Minister for Social Security, Hon Ged Kearny, and the speaker of the house, Hon Milton Dick, wrote the Minister for Disability letters asking her to help me.

I am left wondering what the Minister for the NDIA actually does for participants. The most Minister Jenny McAllister could offer in a Sky News interview was to state that ’the NDIS costs too much.’18 That is not disability policy. That is a budget complaint.

This Bill will grant the Minister enormous new power over the scheme’s architecture, while retaining no obligation to intervene when that architecture crushes individual participants. That is not the accountability required by notions of responsible government.

Mark Butler is the Minister for Health. The NDIS sits under a separate portfolio. And yet it was the reclassification of disability-specific therapies as ‘mainstream health services’ (a consequence of policy originating in the Health portfolio) that stripped funding from participants like me. The practical effect is that both ministers point the finger at each other while disabled peoples drown in bureaucracy. This Bill does nothing to resolve that ambiguity, if anything, it deepens it, by allowing ministers to redraw the boundary between mainstream and disability supports by instrument, in private, without scrutiny.

Problem 3: The i-CAN assessment tool sucks

The named assessment tool, the Instrument for Classification and Assessment of Support Needs (‘i-CAN’) is a rebranded ‘Independent Assessment’ model.19 The i-CAN model requires a three-hour verbal conversation over video call to identify a participant’s needs and funding.20 The i-CAN instrument scores support needs across 12 categories of impairment including mobility, domestic life, and self-care. In other words: it measures what you can’t do, at a single point in time, with a person who has never met you before and will never meet you again.

I think it is a good thing the government is hiring more staff, but I’m concerned how those resources will be applied. In 2024 the NDIA employed 9,127 people servicing over half a million participants, rising to 11,052 in 2025.21 The Bill will supersede the advice of treating medical practitioners in place of the i-CAN assessment model. The Minister has suggested this is due to the cost of the reports to participants.22 This contradicts previous statements that agency staff simply ‘can’t read’ the detailed reports submitted by treating health professionals.23 The problem has never been the cost or existence of treating health evidence; it is an agency which refuses to allocate the resources required to read it. Favouring a Salesforce ‘tick-and-flick’ exercise over clinical evidence is an administrative shortcut, and it is disingenuous to say otherwise.

Problem 4: Cutting community participation supports is counterintuitive

From 1 October 2026, the government has announced that funding for social, civic and community participation supports will be cut by 50 per cent, and capacity building for daily activities by 10 per cent, for all participants.

I think it is counterintuitive to cut precisely these supports. Cutting community participation supports contradicts the original intent of Parliament as defined in 2012 by the then-Prime Minister Julia Gillard to support ‘the independence and social and economic participation of people with disability’ and ensure ‘participants receive what is necessary to ‘take part in the community.’ The previous system was said to have failed precisely because it was crisis- driven and rationed support through arbitrary budget allocations rather than real human needs.By slashing funding for social and civic participation, these cuts undermine the statutory

Problem 5 & 6: Mandatory provider registration will destroy choice and control

The proposed requirement that all NDIS providers register threatens one of the foundational principles of the scheme: that participants have choice and control over who supports them.

I am self-managed and all of my support workers have been unregistered. This is a deliberate choice. I struggle. I need support in my home. I need someone who knows where the mugs go when the dishwasher is done. That sounds trivial, but it’s not. It represents months of building trust with another person; trust that does not transfer when an organisation sends a different worker each week because their rostering does not accommodate my preferences. My home is not a shift. It is my life. It is also genuinely hard for me to ask for help. That difficulty does not disappear when a stranger arrives. It compounds. The value of support work is inseparable from the relationship. Forcing plan and agency managed participants into registered, agency-managed arrangements does not make them safer, it makes them less supported.

While the government has signalled a transition toward mandatory registration for higher-risk settings (beginning with Supported Independent Living (SIL) and digital platforms), the government has indicated it intends to extend mandatory registration to providers of personal care, daily living supports, and supports in closed settings. Registration currently costs providers several thousand dollars, involves ongoing audits, and requires sustained administrative engagement with the NDIA, an agency that, as I have outlined in this submission, is not known for making processes easy. Small providers and independent support workers will not register. They will simply stop seeing NDIS participants. The government will have achieved a reduction in provider numbers without once asking whether that reduction serves participants.

Page 8

The NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission already had power to investigate fraud for both registered and unregistered providers — but it’s rarely exercised. Of over 7,000 fraud reports lodged with the Commission, only 0.22% led to prosecutions.

All prosecutions have been registered providers, so there’s no correlation between this and effective fraud prevention. The NDIS Integrity and Safeguarding Act was passed in 2025 and already introduced mandatory electronic claim forms, enhanced Commission powers, and pre-payment evidence requirements.

The primary objective of this new Bill is to tighten eligibility and remove over 240,000 people from the Scheme, and I think the government should be upfront about this intent instead of framing it to the media as fraud prevention.

Registered providers have, in my experience, prioritised throughput over relationship, and billing over support. Writing for the Australian Human Rights Institute, Helen Dickinson of UNSW points to a structural reason for this: in privatised care markets, without adequate safeguards and accountability mechanisms, providers tend to optimise for revenue rather than outcome.

Mandatory registration doesn’t fix that problem, it simply determines which providers are permitted to operate within it.

The Taskforce led by Natalie Wade (now NDIS Quality and Safeguards Associate Commissioner) consulted with more than 2,200 disabled peoples and explicitly recommended that not all providers should be required to register.

The Taskforce also proposed a dedicated Self-Directed Support Registration category, designed for participants, their guardian or legal representative, who contract all of their supports directly, including through direct employment and independent contractors.

Under this model, the participant holds the registration, not the worker and co-designs the audit process. The Taskforce heard directly from the disability community that mandatory registration for all providers would impact choice and control, drive smaller providers out of the market, and stifle innovative models of support.

The current consultation framework does not appear to reflect these findings. The proposed changes under this Bill are not supported by the government’s own commissioned findings. This is not unlike how the NDIA disregards reports from participants. Reading and accepting the findings of such evidence would save the government and agency a lot of time and money.

Mandatory blanket registration is not a safeguard: It is a mechanism to consolidate the market, reduce choice, and call it reform. Who supports me in my home is nobody else’s business but mine. Every participant should have control over that choice.

This Bill discriminates against disabled peoples, and there’s nothing I can do about it

These concerns do not exist in a vacuum. I have previously made a formal submission to the Attorney-General’s Department concerning the alignment of the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 with the CRPD. A central argument of that submission is that the statutory authority exemption under s 47 of the DDA shields discriminatory decision-making by agencies like the NDIA from accountability. This Bill will exacerbate that problem by concentrating decision- making power in ministerial instruments that are immune from parliamentary scrutiny and under current law, immune from challenge under the DDA.

Under art 12 of the CRPD, Australia must ensure that disabled peoples enjoy legal capacity on an equal basis with others. Removing the right to challenge funding decisions, including decisions made by an unproven algorithmic assessment tool, is not consistent with that obligation. Nor is concentrating eligibility-setting power in ministerial hands, without co-design, without transparency and without recourse.

The government has framed this Bill as ‘securing the NDIS for future generations.’ From where I sit, that language looks a lot like shifting every burden (financial, evidentiary, emotional) onto the people the Scheme was designed to help and calling it sustainability. True sustainability cannot be achieved through administrative shortcuts and forced exclusion. The NDIS was built on the principle that disabled peoples are the experts on their own lives. I urge the Committee to recommend that this Parliament reject the Bill in its current form and return to meaningful, genuine co-design with disabled peoples.

Conclusion

I am a human being, not a budget line. My independence is worth it.

Dr Sophie Ruby Reid-Singer NDIS Participant 10 August 2026

41 Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (Cth) (‘DDA’), s 47. 42 CRPD, art 12; Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, General Comment No 1 (2014) on equal recognition before the law, UN Doc CRPD/C/GC/1.