Public submission for Senate Inquiry regarding:
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026
Dear Honourable Senators,
I write because I find myself currently filled with a sense of genuine dread, which I haven’t experienced since the last horrendously extensive term of the former LNP Fed Govt.
I hoped I’d never feel this way again, especially under a Labor Fed Govt which I had voted for, to literally save my life from the privately profitable, politically enforced, dehumanizing cruelty which the Morrison LNP Govt was about inflict upon around 5 million involuntarily poor and disabled citizens, aka the privatized Cashless Debit Card pogrom.
However now, it seems to be Fed Labor’s turn to choose to potentially deliberately harm its most vulnerable citizens. I myself am not on the NDIS, however I am close to people who are.
Fed Labor’s proposed NDIS cuts appear exceedingly inhumane and unjustified. I don’t understand why, when its been various private providers who have been proven to have rorted the NDIS, that you seek instead to punish 160,000 - 240,000 of the very people who are merely trying to just survive their lives, with a wide variety of life-limiting disabilities.
I note the specific mention made of people with Schizophrenia, as just one example. Seeming to infer that because they can physically feed, wash and dress themselves etc., that they may have enough “functional capacity” and are therefore not deserving of any other forms of support.
This could not be more wrong.
Have any relevant ministers ever met anyone suffering severe Schizophrenia? Likely not, I’d guess.
I have been a voluntary support person and friend of a man suffering Schizophrenia for the past 18 years, so I am speaking from extensive observational and personal experience when I tell you that cutting someone like him off from his current NDIS support, just because he is not eg: physically disabled, would be condemning him back to instant homelessness, increased self-medication with illicit substances, crimes of desperation, and a guaranteed early death.
He is currently living in NDIS subsidized and supported accommodation because his involuntary poverty and severe and verifiably incurable Mental Health disability makes it impossible for him to be employed, or to obtain any private rentals, or to be a healthy cohabiter of any share-house type accommodation, whatsoever.
He is currently on a prescribed fortnightly injection of an anti-psychotic medication which he is consistent in obtaining from his GP, however it does not “cure” his condition, it merely eases it very slightly and very temporarily. There are absolutely NO other known verifiably helpful “treatment options” nor “alternative support systems” for his severe Mental Health Condition.
His mother died in a car accident when he was only 5 years old, his father (who has also recently died) abandoned him and his sister. He suffered various unmentionable abuses before he was officially diagnosed at around 18 yrs old.
He also suffers from extreme trust issues as a direct result of his past abuses, and has never been able to form any helpful theraputic relationship with any Mental Health professional in all the years ive known him.
His remaining relatives are totally unable to understand, cope with, let alone live with his often very unstable mental health and psychotic episodes, and neither can I as his closest friend, believe me I’ve tried.
A magistrate recently commented to him (and to myself) during a court case resulting from a psychotic episode he had, during which he trespassed on a private property (looking for his ‘voices’ which he thinks are real people hunting and abusing him 24/7), than his current NDIS supported accommodation “is a protective factor” in his life.
Yes, the learned magistrate is absolutely correct, it is.
His life was far more chaotic and a direct causation of him being far more troubling to society and to the Justice System, when he was homeless.
And yet your Fed Govt would potentially seek to return him and so many like him to abject homelessness, hopelessness, crimes of poverty and desperation, the guaranteed increase in self-medicating with drugs, and the inevitable revolving door in and out of the prison system - at a public cost of $100k per inmate per year for such regular incarceration?
Till he ends up terminating his own life in some horrible fashion as a direct result of his utterly involuntary waking-nightmare of a psychiatric condition, and, as a result of this Fed Labor Govt’s potentially policy-directed enforcement of his homelessness and hopelessness?
It really is far more humane, safer and cost effective to society to keep severe MH sufferers like him under the auspices and protection of the NDIS, than to cut him off his NDIS support and throw him onto the street again (like trash?) because he, and others like him, genuinely have nowhere else to go, except into a further living-hell.
All the unmet needs of such severe Mental Health sufferers, if removed from their current NDIS support systems, will always reappear elsewhere eg: hospital ERs, public homelessness, manifestly underfunded and overburdened Public MH systems, DVA, Criminal Justice systems, Crisis systems etc. All of which are merely temporary bandaids, which have no capacity whatsoever to provide any of the stability and certainty which their current NDIS supports, do.
There is a neuroscience study in existence which states that there is a direct correlation between how much money and power a person gains, and a resulting decrease in their empathy for their fellow human beings.
Has this already happened to the Ministers of our once socially fair and supportive Fed Labor Party?
Are Fed ALP now choosing to become more like the Fed LNP and focus only on supporting the exploitations, greed and profits of various huge multinational corporations over and above the genuine need of Australia’s most impoverished and vulnerable citizens?
Is it really necessary for Australia to follow down some of the destructively cruel chosen public-austerity paths of the US Trump regime and of the Blair Institute and Labour in the UK?
Nothing beneficial to any society can ever come of such forcibly inflicted inhumanities upon people who have never caused any of the alleged “NDIS fraud” claims themselves, and have never personally chosen their disabilities or their poverty, and are least able to resist such systemic and politically engineered cruelty.
This Bill removes the NDIS from a humane and helpful rights-based scheme, to a more insensitive, automated, and cruel rations-based scheme, where decisions about disabled peoples’ right to life and to quality of life will be determined solely by money, steady of by genuine need.
There are already myriad abject failures of State based community support provisions for disabled people who don’t qualify for the NDIS.
Apart from the ‘Thriving Kids’ program, can this Fed Govt absolutely 100% guarantee us that there will be all necessary fully-funded State-based commensurate alternative Foundational Supports already in place and operational, by the time 160,000 - 240,000 derestately vulnerable Australians are removed from their current vital and essential, life-sustaining supports?
Thank you for reading my most genuine and desperate plea for this Fed Labor Govt to please not abandon it’s humanity altogether, like the Trump regime in the US and Labour in the UK most definitely, have.