Submission 36
My name is Kirsty Wesner and I am submitting this as an individual submission as both an NDIS participant and a disabled parent caring for a child with disability and significant learning needs. I also have a professional background as a Registered Nurse, which has given me insight into both the healthcare system and the broader consequences of delayed support, system fragmentation, and poor policy design.
I am making this submission from both lived and professional experience. I understand firsthand how disability, healthcare access, caregiving responsibilities, financial pressures, and administrative systems often intersect in ways that policy discussions frequently fail to recognise. My concerns with this bill are both personal and systemic. They reflect not only my own experiences navigating these systems, but broader concerns about how these reforms may impact disabled Australians, families, carers, healthcare systems, and community services.
Summary of key concerns
This submission raises concerns that the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 risks shifting the burden of government cost containment onto disabled Australians, families, carers, healthcare systems, and other already overstretched public services. While sustainability and fraud prevention are important goals, these reforms risk increasing exclusion, reducing access to essential supports, and creating significantly higher long term costs elsewhere.
Key concerns raised in this submission include:
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tighter eligibility requirements and functional assessments that may exclude people with complex, fluctuating, or medically complex disabilities
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the inappropriate distinction between health conditions and disability related functional impairment
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treatment exhaustion requirements that delay support and worsen health and disability outcomes
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increased automation and reduced nuance in decision making
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reduced access to support coordination, plan management, and community participation supports
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increased reliance on unpaid family carers and resulting workforce impacts
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cost shifting to healthcare, homelessness, child protection, justice, and mental health systems
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inaccessible consultation processes that exclude many disabled Australians from meaningful participation
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increasing public hostility toward disabled people driven by harmful rhetoric surrounding NDIS spending
Submission 36
I wish to express serious concerns regarding the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 and the broader direction of reforms currently being pursued under the language of sustainability.
A sustainable disability support system is an important and necessary goal. Public confidence in the NDIS depends on ensuring funding is used appropriately, fraud is addressed, and the scheme remains viable for future generations. However, sustainability cannot be achieved by narrowing access to support, increasing barriers to entry, and shifting responsibility for disabled Australians onto other systems that are already under significant strain (or not even developed yet).
A central concern with this bill is the increasing movement toward tighter eligibility requirements, greater reliance on standardised functional assessments, expanded discretion around what supports may be funded, and the growing use of broad legislative language that allows significant future decisions to be made through delegated rules rather than clear protections within primary legislation. This creates considerable uncertainty for participants, families and providers who are being asked to trust systems that have already demonstrated significant inconsistency.
While these measures may appear administratively efficient, disability is rarely linear, static, or easily measured through rigid frameworks. Many people live with fluctuating conditions, overlapping disabilities, rare diseases, psychosocial disabilities, acquired brain injuries, intellectual disabilities, autism, communication barriers, and complex health conditions that do not fit neatly into standardised assessment models. A more restrictive assessment framework creates a very real risk that people with genuine needs will be excluded because their disability does not present in a way that is easily measured by bureaucratic systems.
My concern is that participants with significant functional impairment caused by complex medical conditions may be increasingly excluded through narrow interpretations that categorise their circumstances as purely “medical” rather than recognising the very real and often permanent disabilities that arise from those conditions. This creates a false distinction between health conditions and disability that does not reflect how disability is defined or experienced in real life. Many people live with permanent, fully treated or stabilised medical conditions that continue to cause profound functional impairment and require long term disability support. Reframing these individuals as outside the scope of disability support risks excluding people who clearly meet the threshold for ongoing support simply because their disability does not fit a preferred administrative narrative.
The administrative barriers are particularly significant for people with intellectual disabilities, acquired brain injuries, autism, cognitive impairments, psychosocial disabilities, literacy barriers, and conditions that impact communication, executive functioning, memory, or a person’s ability to navigate complex administrative systems. Many people directly impacted by this legislation may not have the capacity to understand lengthy legislative documents, monitor consultation periods, prepare written submissions, or advocate for themselves within formal policy processes. Others rely heavily on carers, guardians, advocates, interpreters, or support workers
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simply to engage with everyday systems. The absence of these voices should never be interpreted as agreement. In many cases, the people most likely to be harmed by these reforms are the least equipped to participate in consultations about them.
This raises serious concerns about procedural fairness. A consultation process cannot be considered genuinely representative when many of the people most affected face significant barriers to participating in it.
There are also significant concerns regarding the requirement for participants to exhaust treatment options before accessing support. This approach fails to recognise that many treatment pathways are inaccessible, unaffordable, geographically unavailable, contraindicated, or ineffective. It also ignores the reality that disability and healthcare often overlap. A person’s disability does not temporarily disappear because they are attempting to access treatment, rehabilitation, surgery, specialist appointments, or ongoing medical care. Delaying practical supports while people are forced to navigate healthcare systems can rapidly worsen health outcomes and create preventable crises.
The increasing reliance on automation and standardised administrative decision making is also deeply concerning. Disability often requires nuance, context, and human judgement. Automated systems tend to favour straightforward presentations and tick box style documentation, while disadvantaging people with complex lives, fluctuating disabilities, trauma histories, communication barriers, and circumstances that do not fit neatly within rigid processes.
There is also significant concern about the potential downstream impact these reforms may have on support coordination, plan management, recovery coaching, and other navigation supports that many participants rely on to safely engage with both the NDIS and broader service systems. These supports are often misunderstood as administrative expenses rather than essential safeguards.
For many participants, these supports are what prevent service breakdowns, homelessness, health deterioration, safeguarding risks, and unnecessary crisis presentations. They help people secure housing, coordinate healthcare, maintain employment, navigate legal systems, access therapies, and remain connected to their communities. Removing or restricting these supports may create short term savings on paper but will significantly increase long term costs across healthcare systems, homelessness services, child protection systems, mental health services, and the justice system.
The assumption that families will simply absorb these responsibilities is particularly concerning. Many families are already overwhelmed, ageing, financially strained, managing their own disabilities, or are unsafe environments for participants. It also fails to account for the number of people who may be forced to reduce their working hours or leave the workforce entirely in order to provide unpaid full time care to family members or friends when formal supports are removed. This has significant long term consequences for household financial stability, workforce participation, retirement savings, and broader economic productivity. Informal supports should never be treated as an unlimited resource or a substitute for appropriately funded formal
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supports. This is already a significant crisis for many families and informal carers, and these reforms risk severely accelerating that pressure.
There is also insufficient recognition within these reforms of where costs are transferred when disability supports are reduced. Restricting access to support does not remove need. It only shifts responsibility to emergency departments, hospitals, mental health services, homelessness systems, child protection services, family violence services, aged care systems, corrective services, and unpaid carers already operating beyond capacity. These systems are already overwhelmed. Reducing disability supports will and does result in significantly higher long term public expenditure elsewhere.
The impact on families should not be underestimated. Disabled parents may lose supports that allow them to safely care for their children. Families already managing significant pressures may be pushed into crisis. In some cases this may increase unnecessary involvement with child protection systems, not because parents are unwilling to care for their children, but because practical supports that allowed families to function have been removed.
These concerns are deeply personal because many of the risks outlined in this bill reflect barriers I am already experiencing under the current system. I am a significantly disabled parent caring for a child with disability and significant learning challenges who has already experienced exclusion from the education system. Despite the complexity of our circumstances, many requests for support are routinely dismissed under broad assumptions of “parental responsibility,” without meaningful consideration of what disability looks like within families where both parent and child require support, where informal supports may be limited or non existent, and where families are already operating well beyond capacity.
I have also experienced repeated delays, inconsistency, and discrimination within disability systems that are already difficult to navigate. Despite significant mobility impairment, the NDIS has prolonged decisions regarding essential mobility equipment through repeated delays and inconsistent decision making processes. My disabilities involve multiple overlapping conditions, yet assessments are often reduced to simplistic interpretations that recognise only one part of my disability while disregarding specialist recommendations that reflect the full complexity of my circumstances.
If access to community participation supports is further restricted, the consequences for families like mine would be immediate and severe. Community access is often framed as optional or non essential, yet for many people it is what enables attendance at medical appointments, therapies, school commitments, caring responsibilities, and basic participation in community life. Without these supports, I will face increased isolation and significantly reduced capacity to attend my own medical appointments, while also limiting my ability to ensure my child can attend therapies, appointments, educational supports, and social opportunities.
There is also a significant disconnect between disability policy and healthcare realities. Participants are frequently expected to repeatedly prove their disability while navigating healthcare systems that are already overwhelmed and difficult to access. Finding clinicians
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willing to complete detailed NDIS specific reports can take months to years, and often comes at significant personal cost. These repeated reporting requirements create additional financial pressure on people who are already managing the substantial costs of disability and daily living.
They also place unnecessary strain on an already overwhelmed healthcare system by diverting clinicians away from direct patient care and into repetitive administrative tasks that often duplicate existing evidence. This reduces appointment availability, increases wait times, and places additional pressure on healthcare resources that are already stretched for both disabled people and the broader public. It also contributes to hospital bed block and delayed discharges when patients cannot safely leave hospital without appropriate disability supports in place, yet administrative barriers delay access to the very supports required for safe discharge. These systems are deeply interconnected, and policies that ignore that reality simply shift pressure rather than resolving it.
For many participants, the current system already feels adversarial, inconsistent, and exhausting. These reforms risk deepening those problems rather than addressing them.
There is a legitimate conversation to be had about reducing fraud, improving oversight, and eliminating administrative waste. However, disabled Australians should not be made to feel personally responsible for broader government failures in scheme design, regulatory oversight, or budget management. Increasingly, public discourse around the NDIS has framed participants as though they are the primary cause of financial strain, while many disabled people are simply trying to access the basic supports required to live safely and participate in their communities.
This narrative is deeply harmful. It places blame on people who are often already navigating significant disadvantage, while ignoring poor policy design, administrative inefficiency, inconsistent implementation, and the ongoing issue of provider fraud and exploitation that many participants have repeatedly raised. Disabled people should not be expected to absorb the consequences of government mismanagement while fraudulent providers and systemic inefficiencies continue without adequate accountability.
Australia moved away from systems that segregated disabled people into poverty, institutional settings, crisis services, and exclusion because those models were harmful and unsustainable. The NDIS was intended to create participation, independence, dignity, and inclusion. Reforms that make access harder while narrowing supports risk reversing that progress.
These reforms are also occurring within an increasingly harmful public narrative that frames disabled people as economic burdens rather than equal members of society. Repeated political messaging that focuses heavily on “cost blowouts,” participant numbers, and financial restraint without equal emphasis on human rights, inclusion, and systemic accountability has contributed to growing hostility toward disabled Australians. Many people with disability are increasingly exposed to dehumanising rhetoric suggesting they are “wasting taxpayer money,” are “freeloaders,” should be institutionalised, or are somehow less valuable members of society because they require support. This rhetoric is incredibly harmful and it fuels discrimination, social exclusion, abuse, and the dangerous idea that disabled people must justify their
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existence through economic productivity in order to deserve dignity, safety, and participation in society. Public policy should be challenging these attitudes, not reinforcing and creating them.
A future focused NDIS should strengthen safeguards, improve accountability, reduce fraud, and ensure long term sustainability. It should not do so by making disabled Australians feel burdensome, disposable, or increasingly excluded from the very systems designed to support their participation in society.
Recommendations
To ensure sustainability does not come at the expense of disabled Australians, I implore the committee to consider the following recommendations:
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Maintain clear eligibility protections within primary legislation rather than allowing critical access decisions to be determined through broad delegated rules or future ministerial discretion.
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Remove or significantly revise requirements that force participants to exhaust treatment pathways before accessing support where conditions are permanent, stabilised, treatment resistant, geographically inaccessible, financially inaccessible, or where delays may cause harm.
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Ensure participants with disabilities arising from complex medical conditions are not excluded through narrow interpretations that incorrectly separate health conditions from disability related functional impairment.
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Require human oversight and robust appeal safeguards for any automated decision making systems to ensure complex participants are not disadvantaged by rigid administrative processes.
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Preserve access to support coordination, recovery coaching, plan management, advocacy supports, and community participation supports where these services prevent larger system failures and improve long term outcomes.
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Ensure replacement programs such as the Inclusive Communities Fund and Thriving Kids are fully operational, accessible, evidence based, and independently evaluated before reducing existing participant supports.
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Reduce repetitive evidentiary requirements where permanent disability has already been established and create greater recognition of existing specialist reports.
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Introduce stronger oversight and enforcement mechanisms targeting provider fraud, exploitation, and administrative inefficiency before restricting participant supports.
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Ensure disability reforms are assessed against their downstream impact on healthcare systems, homelessness services, child protection systems, justice systems, and unpaid carers before implementation.
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Protect disabled parents from inappropriate assumptions around “parental responsibility” where disability related supports directly impact parenting capacity and family stability.
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Improve access to independent advocacy services so participants with intellectual disability, cognitive disability, psychosocial disability, communication barriers, and limited informal supports are able to engage fairly with NDIS processes.
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Require all future consultation processes to provide Easy Read, Auslan, translated documents, and other accessibility supports at the beginning of consultation periods rather than after they have already commenced.
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Commit to measuring NDIS success through long term participation, safety, inclusion, and reduced crisis system reliance rather than short term reductions in participant numbers or expenditure.
I urge the committee to carefully reconsider these reforms. They do not address the underlying structural issues within the NDIS. Instead, they risk redistributing harm to disabled Australians, families, carers, and already overwhelmed public systems while presenting that harm as fiscal responsibility.