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Concerns over transferring care burden to unpaid carers and women (Individual advocacy)

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Submission 373

Submission 373

  1. Executive Summary The National Council of Women Victoria Inc. (NCWV) submits this response to the Senate inquiry into

the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations)

Bill 2026. This submission is prepared by Sarah Barnbrook in her capacity as Human Rights Adviser, Regional and Rural Women Adviser, Youth Adviser, and ICT and Social Media Adviser to the NCWV, and as Founder of Away from Keyboard Inc. (AFK), a not-for-profit focused on digital safety and ethical technology.

We recognise the genuine importance of a financially sustainable NDIS. A scheme that cannot function is a scheme that fails people with disability. We do not oppose reform. We oppose reform that achieves sustainability by transferring risk, labour, and financial burden away from government systems and onto unpaid carers, women, rural families, and people with disability themselves.

Sustainability cannot be achieved by making invisible the cost of care that is simply moved into households. The Bill must be examined not only for what it saves, but for where that saving lands and on whose body it falls.

This submission raises serious concern across five interlocking areas:

  • The Bill’s proposed reforms to eligibility, functional capacity assessment, and support reduction will not eliminate support needs. They will transfer those needs onto unpaid carers, the majority of whom are women.

  • The introduction of automated administrative decision-making, standardised functional capacity scoring, and digital-first processes creates significant risks of algorithmic exclusion, particularly for people in regional areas and those with complex or fluctuating disability.

  • The tightening of permanence criteria, the introduction of ‘all appropriate treatment’ requirements, and increased gatekeeping through other service systems will disproportionately affect women with disability, neurodivergent people, and those with episodic conditions.

  • Children and young carers will face increased exposure to adult caring responsibilities as formal support is reduced, with serious consequences for their education, development, and wellbeing.

  • Rural and regional participants face compounded harm because the reforms assume service alternatives that simply do not exist outside metropolitan centres.

This submission calls for a human rights impact assessment before the Bill is passed, for mandatory consultation with affected communities, and for specific protections to prevent the transfer of care burden onto women, unpaid carers, and children.

  1. About the National Council of Women Victoria, Away from Keyboard Inc., and the Submitter

The National Council of Women of Victoria is a peak advocacy body representing women across Victoria. The NCWV advocates for equality, human rights, social justice, and the wellbeing of women, families, and communities. It engages with national and international human rights frameworks, including through the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women and Universal Periodic Review processes.

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Submission 373

Away from Keyboard Inc. (AFK) is a registered not-for-profit charity founded by Sarah Barnbrook, focused on digital safety, ethical technology, and the prevention of harm in online environments. All of Sarah’s work through AFK is undertaken on an unpaid basis. AFK advocates nationally and internationally on digital inclusion, technology-facilitated harm, online safety, and the unintended consequences of automated and digital systems on vulnerable people. This digital expertise directly informs the analysis in this submission regarding how administrative and technological systems can either protect people or quietly compound harm when accountability, accessibility, and human oversight are missing.

Sarah Barnbrook is an unpaid carer supporting multiple household members who rely on the NDIS.

She brings  direct  lived experience  of navigating NDIA planning, reassessment, safeguarding

processes, and digital systems in a regional setting where workforce shortages and service gaps are part of daily reality. Her caring role involves managing high and complex care needs in the home, filling critical gaps when systems are slow or local supports are unavailable, and doing so while sustaining a permanent physical injury caused by that caring role.

Sarah serves as Human Rights Adviser, Regional and Rural Women Adviser, Youth Adviser, and ICT

and Social Media Adviser to the NCWV, and as Programme and UN Liaison for Soroptimist International Melbourne. In these roles she connects local lived experience with national and international human rights frameworks, including engagement with United Nations processes. Much of her advocacy, research, and writing is undertaken from home, alongside her caring responsibilities. Her experience demonstrates the importance of systems that recognise unpaid carers not only as providers of support, but as people with expertise, insight, and the right to contribute, belong, and maintain a sense of self.

This submission draws on prior NCWV submissions, including the Inquiry into the Integrity of the NDIS and the Inquiry into the Administration of the NDIS, and is grounded in lived experience, human rights law, and direct engagement with the Bill and its Explanatory Memorandum. It is made not to seek individual remedy, but to provide lived-experience evidence that can strengthen the administration and safeguarding of the NDIS, particularly for those who are injured, isolated, digitally excluded, or otherwise unable to speak for themselves.

  1. Human Rights Framework

3.1 Australia’s International Obligations

Australia ratified the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) in 2008. This is the primary international human rights instrument governing disability policy. It is not aspirational guidance; it is a binding legal framework under which Australia must justify its legislative choices. The most directly relevant articles to the Bill’s provisions are:

  • Article 5 requires equality and non-discrimination. Reforms must not produce discriminatory outcomes even where rules appear neutral on their face.

  • Article 6 affirms that women with disability experience multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination, and that states must take specific measures to protect their full enjoyment of human rights.

  • Article 7 requires that the best interests of children with disability are a primary consideration in all decisions affecting them.

    National Council of Women Victoria and Away from Keyboard Inc. | NDIS Senate Submission | May 2026 | Page 3

Submission 373

Submission 373

  1. Reduction of Supports and Participant Removal 4.1 What the Bill Proposes

Schedule 1 of the Bill introduces a range of measures designed to tighten eligibility and reduce support costs. These include:

  • A new statutory definition of ‘functional capacity’ anchoring eligibility to measurable thresholds (Schedule 1, Part 1).

  • Restrictions on unscheduled plan reassessments, limiting participants’ ability to seek support adjustments when their circumstances change (Schedule 1, Part 2).

  • A requirement that supports be directly linked to eligible impairments, potentially excluding support for conditions that interact with but are not themselves the primary disability (Schedule 1, Part 3).

  • A Ministerial power to reduce funding for specified groups of supports across the Scheme (Schedule 1, Part 4).

  • Introduction of plan renewals replacing plan continuations, requiring reassessment against the new framework (Schedule 1, Part 5).

  • Revised reasonable and necessary support criteria, lifting new parameters into the Act (Schedule 1, Part 6).

  • A tightened definition of permanence requiring evidence of ‘all appropriate treatment’ before a condition is considered permanent (Schedule 1, Part 8).

  • Eligibility consideration of whether participants can access support through other service systems before NDIS access is granted (Schedule 1, Part 9).

4.2 The Real Effect of These Reforms

NCWV and AFK submit that the central policy effect of these reforms, taken together, is not the elimination of support need. It is the official reclassification of those needs as something the NDIS is no longer responsible for.

Disability does not diminish because funding is reduced. Support needs do not disappear because a

plan  is  not renewed. People  with  disability  will  still  require assistance  with personal  care,

communication, mobility, safety, and daily living. Where formal supports are withdrawn, that work will continue to be performed, invisibly, without recognition, compensation, or protection, by unpaid carers.

Our prior submission to the Inquiry into the Administration of the NDIS documented this mechanism in detail. When funded supports do not meet actual need, the gap is absorbed by carers’ bodies, time, and health. That submission described the physical injury sustained by an unpaid carer performing manual handling tasks the Scheme’s funded supports did not cover, including a left hip labral tear surgically repaired in 2019 and subsequent degeneration requiring a total hip replacement. This is not an anecdote; it is evidence of what happens systemically when needs exceed funded coverage.

Carers are not an infinite resource. When administrative settings effectively rely on unpaid labour to fill structural shortfalls, the Scheme shifts its burden onto bodies and households. Most often, those are women’s bodies, without acknowledgement, compensation, or protection.

4.3 The ‘All Appropriate Treatment’ Requirement

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The Bill’s introduction of ‘all appropriate treatment’ as a prerequisite to establishing permanence is one of the most concerning provisions in Schedule 1. This requirement means a person’s condition may not be treated as permanent, and therefore may not meet the disability requirements, unless they have undergone all treatment appropriate to their condition.

The following populations are put at significant risk by this requirement:

  • People with fluctuating or episodic conditions such as multiple sclerosis, lupus, Crohn’s disease, complex PTSD, or treatment-resistant depression, where ‘all appropriate treatment’ may be indefinitely ongoing.

  • People with genuine barriers to treatment access, including geographic isolation from specialists, cost barriers, waitlist times, or disability-related barriers to treatment itself.

  • People whose conditions are managed at baseline through support, where disrupting that support to pursue further treatment creates its own risks.

  • Neurodivergent people, particularly autistic individuals, for whom a ‘treatment’ framing mischaracterises the nature of the condition and for whom intervention aimed at normalisation may be harmful.

    The CRPD explicitly rejects the requirement that people with disability undergo treatment or

normalisation as a condition of accessing rights. Article 25 affirms the right to the highest attainable standard of health without discrimination and does not require treatment compliance as a gateway to other rights. In effect, this provision creates a treatment compliance requirement as a prerequisite to NDIS access, which is inconsistent with Australia’s obligations.

4.4 Other Service System Gatekeeping

The requirement under Schedule 1, Part 9, that the NDIA consider whether a participant is eligible for support through other service systems assumes those systems are capable of adequately meeting the need. This assumption does not hold in practice, particularly in regional areas.

Health systems, mental health services, housing services, and aged care systems are already under significant strain. Directing people toward those systems as an alternative to NDIS access does not create capacity where none exists. It creates a cycle of referral that leaves people with disability without support from any system.

  1. The Gendered Impact on Women and Girls

5.1 Who Provides Unpaid Care in Australia

Unpaid care is not gender-neutral. The Australian Bureau of Statistics consistently finds that women provide the majority of informal care in Australia, including care for people with disability, and that they do so for longer hours and at greater personal cost than men. Women who provide informal care are more likely to:

  • Withdraw from paid employment or reduce hours to accommodate caring responsibilities.

  • Experience superannuation disadvantage, with lower lifetime savings and higher poverty risk in retirement.

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Submission 373

  • Sustain physical injury from manual handling, lifting, and high-care personal support tasks performed without adequate training or equipment.

  • Experience social isolation, mental health deterioration, and loss of professional identity.

  • Have fewer formal supports available to them, particularly in regional areas.

  • Be unable to challenge NDIA decisions due to time constraints, exhaustion, and cognitive load.

Every NDIS reform that reduces formal support shifts care work toward this population. The current Bill does not assess, acknowledge, or mitigate this transfer. It is silent on the gendered distribution of unpaid care and on the implications of increasing reliance on that care.

5.2 Women with Disability

CRPD Article 6 recognises that women with disability experience multiple and intersecting forms of

discrimination on the basis  of both gender and  disability. The  Disability Royal Commission

documented significant evidence of violence, exploitation, and neglect of women with disability, including in supported accommodation and in the home.

Tightening eligibility and reducing support for women with disability increases their exposure to:

  • Dependence on family members, including those who may pose a risk to them.
  • Financial insecurity and housing instability when supports are withdrawn.
  • Isolation from community services and peer supports that protect against violence.
  • Pressure to demonstrate ‘all appropriate treatment’ compliance in ways that may be inappropriate or harmful.

The Bill does not include a gender impact assessment. We submit this is a fundamental omission, given Australia’s obligations under both the CRPD and CEDAW, and in light of the National Strategy to Achieve Gender Equality.

5.3 Invisible Labour and the Hidden Cost of Reform

One of the most important issues unlikely to receive adequate attention in most submissions is the transfer of administrative labour into households alongside the transfer of care labour. As the NDIS becomes more compliance-heavy, with expanded record-keeping requirements, new evidence obligations, tighter reassessment windows, and digital-first processes, the work of navigating those systems must be performed by someone.

That someone is almost always a woman. The administrative burden of NDIS participation, including uploading evidence, managing portals, preparing for reassessments, responding to compliance correspondence, tracking plan budgets and expiry dates, correcting automated errors, and pursuing appeals, falls predominantly onto female carers and family members. This is unpaid digital labour, and it is invisible in every cost analysis applied to the Bill.

Integrity measures must not create systems of continuous administrative demand on unpaid carers. The Scheme’s compliance architecture has a gender. We need to name it.

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Submission 373

  1. Technology, Automation, and Algorithmic Governance 6.1 What the Bill Introduces

Schedule 3, Part 2 of the Bill explicitly allows for the automation of administrative action within the NDIS. The Explanatory Memorandum references ICT system enhancements as a core component of the reforms and frames automated decision-making as an efficiency gain. These provisions have not received the scrutiny they deserve.

Automated administrative action within the NDIS is not a neutral technical upgrade. It restructures who makes decisions, on what basis, with what transparency, and with what avenues for challenge.

6.2 The Problem with Functional Capacity Scoring

The Bill introduces a statutory definition of ‘functional capacity’ and provides for the assessment of thresholds of functional capacity (Schedule 1, Part 1). Taken together with the automated decision

making provisions,  this creates the conditions  for a scoring-based  eligibility system  in which

algorithmic thresholds determine access to essential support.

This approach carries serious risks for people with episodic or fluctuating conditions whose functional capacity varies day to day or week to week, since scores taken at any single point may not reflect genuine support needs. It also disadvantages people who mask disability, particularly autistic women and neurodivergent people, who may present functional capacity that does not reflect the real cost of maintaining that performance. People who have developed compensatory strategies or who rely on existing supports to maintain function are similarly at risk. Scoring based on current capacity, without accounting for support dependency, will misrepresent what happens when those supports are removed.

The Explanatory Memorandum explicitly states that functional capacity assessment will assess domains of capacity ‘excluding environmental and personal circumstances.’ This is a decisive policy choice with profound consequences. Environmental and personal circumstances, including where a person lives, who supports them, their access to transport, the stability of their housing, their history of trauma, and their digital literacy, directly shape whether a person can function safely in the real world. Excluding them from assessment does not produce a more objective result. It produces a less accurate one that systematically disadvantages people whose disability intersects with social and geographic disadvantage.

A functional capacity assessment that excludes environmental and social context is not a neutral measurement. It is a policy choice to treat those with the most complex circumstances as if that complexity were irrelevant.

6.3 Automation Bias and Administrative Harm

When systems  classify  risk, suggest funding  levels,  identify  inconsistencies,  or recommend

outcomes, human decision-makers risk treating those outputs as inherently accurate. This is known as automation bias, the tendency to defer to algorithmic outputs even when those outputs are based on incomplete or inaccurate inputs.

Automation bias is particularly dangerous in a system dealing with safety-critical supports, where the stakes of error are not administrative inconvenience but personal harm, physical injury, or placement

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Submission 373

Submission 373

  1. Regional and Rural Impact 7.1 The Assumptions Embedded in the Bill

Many of the Bill’s provisions assume the existence of service alternatives. The requirement to consider other service systems before granting NDIS access assumes that those services exist and are accessible. The functional capacity framework assumes that scoring accurately reflects real-world support needs regardless of geography. The digital-first compliance architecture assumes reliable connectivity. None of these assumptions hold in regional and rural Victoria, or in much of regional Australia.

7.2 Service Deserts and the Reality of Regional Care

In many regional areas, provider choice is not limited; it is absent. Workforce shortages mean that

even funded supports cannot be sourced.  Allied health professionals capable  of conducting

assessments may have months-long waitlists. Support workers may cover enormous geographic areas, leading to unreliable attendance. Emergency care gaps mean that when a carer becomes ill or injured, there is no ready alternative.

When the Bill proposes redirecting participants toward ‘other service systems,’ it is essential that the Senate understand what those systems look like in regional contexts: under-resourced health services, disability services operating on referral waitlists, and mental health services with acute triage thresholds that exclude all but the most severely unwell. Reducing NDIS support on the assumption of alternatives that do not exist does not achieve sustainability. It achieves the invisible transfer of crisis to regional households and regional carers.

7.3 Geographic Disadvantage and Functional Capacity Assessment

The functional capacity framework’s exclusion of environmental and personal circumstances is especially problematic in regional contexts. A participant’s functional capacity in a well-serviced metropolitan environment with accessible transport, nearby allied health, and abundant provider choice is not comparable to functional capacity in a rural area with none of those conditions. Standardised scoring cannot capture this, and it should not be used as though it can.

7.4 Women Carrying Regional Care

Women in regional areas are disproportionately the primary carers for family members with disability. They are more likely to have withdrawn from employment to provide care, less likely to have

professional networks  that  support advocacy, and more exposed  to  the consequences  of

administrative error because there is no buffer; no backup provider, no nearby specialist, no digital support service.

In prior submissions, we documented that rural women carers are not holding the line briefly while the system adjusts. They are sustaining unsafe arrangements indefinitely because there is nowhere else for the care to go. The current Bill’s reforms make that situation worse, not better.

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Submission 373

  1. Young People and Young Carers

8.1 Children as Invisible Risk Absorbers

Our submission to the Inquiry into the Administration of the NDIS identified a safeguarding concern that is rarely named clearly in NDIS policy debate: when formal supports are insufficient, children living in households with disability are drawn into caring roles that are inappropriate for their age, developmental stage, and wellbeing.

This does not occur because families are irresponsible. It occurs because when the alternative is leaving a person with disability unsafe, and when no formal support is available or funded, someone in the household must respond. In many households, that person is a child. The current Bill’s reforms, reducing support eligibility, limiting reassessment rights, and tightening access to the Scheme, will predictably increase the frequency and intensity of this informal transfer of care onto children. The Scheme does not measure this. It does not report it. It does not recognise it as a safeguarding failure. we submit that it must.

8.2 Young Carers: Hidden, Unprotected, and Unacknowledged

Young carers, children and young people who provide regular care, assistance, or emotional support to a family member with disability or chronic illness, are among the most underserved populations in Australian policy. They are not recognised within the NDIS framework as people with their own needs and rights. Their caring role is rarely documented. Their contribution is treated as ‘family support’ rather than as a form of labour that carries educational, developmental, and health costs.

CRPD  Article 7 affirms that the best interests of children with  disability must be a primary

consideration. NCWV and AFK submit that this obligation extends to children in households with disability, requiring that the Scheme consider its impact on children who carry care responsibilities as a result of support shortfalls. Reduced NDIS support without alternative services increases young carers’ exposure to:

  • Disrupted education, including missing school to provide care and reduced participation due to caring-related stress.

  • Social isolation through inability to participate in age-appropriate activities due to caring commitments.

  • Physical risk from exposure to manual handling, personal care tasks, and medical situations for which they have no training.

  • Emotional and psychological harm, including anxiety, depression, and premature exposure to adult responsibility.

  • Normalisation of crisis, where children grow up believing that instability and system failure are ordinary life.

8.3 Young People with Disability

Young people with disability who are NDIS participants in their own right face specific risks from the reforms in this Bill. Tightened eligibility, reassessment restrictions, and functional capacity thresholds may affect young people during critical developmental periods, particularly transitions from school to work, from family to independent living, and from children’s services to adult services.

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Submission 373

Australia has long-documented failure at the transition from NDIS children’s services to adult services. The current Bill does not address this. Young people and their families have insufficient certainty about what support will be available as they age, particularly given that reassessment thresholds may shift.

  1. Safeguarding and Risk Transfer

9.1 Safeguarding Is Not Only Regulatory

The Bill’s second key pillar addresses fraud and strengthens safeguarding. NCWV and AFK support robust protections against exploitation of NDIS participants. The Disability Royal Commission documented profound failures of safeguarding, including violence, abuse, and neglect in supported accommodation and in the home.

However, the Bill’s safeguarding framework focuses predominantly on regulatory safeguarding, detecting and penalising provider misconduct, while creating the conditions for systemic safeguarding failure through inadequate support. Safeguarding failure does not only occur through the actions of bad actors. It occurs when a person with disability is left without adequate support and exposed to risk as a result. It occurs when an exhausted, injured carer continues to provide care beyond their capacity because no alternative is available. It occurs when a child is drawn into adult caring responsibilities because the Scheme’s supports do not cover the actual need.

Reducing supports without establishing clear safety nets for the gaps that will result is not a neutral administrative choice. It is a policy decision that increases safeguarding risk while simultaneously reducing the formal safeguarding apparatus available to respond.

9.2 Procedural Safeguarding vs. Outcome Safeguarding

Our prior submissions have consistently raised the distinction between procedural safeguarding, completing required steps, generating records, holding meetings, and outcome safeguarding, actually preventing foreseeable harm. The evidence submitted shows the NDIA can be procedurally complete while failing on outcomes.

The Bill’s automation and compliance measures risk entrenching this problem. Where systems flag compliance actions, generate automated correspondence, and close administrative items without human review of whether underlying risks have been resolved, procedural completion becomes a mask for outcome failure. Safeguarding integrity requires that the system be measured not only on

what processes  it has completed, but on what harm  it has prevented, including harm caused by

inaction, underfunding, and the transfer of care burden into households.

9.3 Carer Safety Is Participant Safety

An unpaid carer who is physically injured, emotionally depleted, or exhausted cannot provide safe care. The safety of people with disability is directly linked to the safety and sustainability of the people who support them. This relationship is not currently reflected in the Bill’s safeguarding framework, which focuses on provider conduct rather than household sustainability.

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Submission 373

We recommend that the Senate give specific attention to whether the Bill’s combined effect, reducing support funding while increasing administrative complexity, creates foreseeable conditions for carer burnout and consequential safeguarding failure for NDIS participants.

  1. Critical Gaps in the Bill’s Methodology

10.1 Sustainability Modelling Does Not Account for Transfer Costs

The Bill’s financial case is built on the goal of reducing annual NDIS cost growth to 5 to 6 per cent as agreed by National Cabinet. This goal is presented as self-evidently beneficial. The modelling underlying it, however, does not appear to account for the costs generated elsewhere in the system when NDIS supports are withdrawn.

When NDIS participants lose support, the consequences appear in increased emergency health

presentations and  hospitalisation, increased aged care and  residential care placements  for

participants who could have remained in the community, increased demand on carers whose own health deterioration eventually creates further system demand, increased pressure on mental health services, housing services, and family violence services, and decreased workforce participation by carers, with consequential impacts on tax revenue and superannuation sustainability. These costs do not appear in the NDIS budget. They are real costs that transfer to other budgets, other systems, and other bodies. The Bill’s financial case is incomplete without this accounting.

10.2 Consultation Has Been Inadequate

The Explanatory Memorandum references extensive consultation conducted as part of the NDIS Review in 2023. That consultation occurred in a different legislative environment and in response to different proposals. Citing it as justification for this Bill conflates two distinct exercises.

The reforms in this Bill, including automated decision-making, functional capacity thresholds, ‘all appropriate treatment’ requirements, and ministerial power to reduce support categories, are significant and contested. They required fresh, specific, targeted consultation with people with disability, carers, advocacy organisations, and communities before legislation was introduced. CRPD Article 4(3) requires that states closely consult with and actively involve persons with disability and their representative organisations in the development and implementation of legislation and policies. The introduction of this Bill without adequate fresh consultation is inconsistent with that obligation.

10.3 No Independent Human Rights Impact Assessment

We are not aware of any independent human rights impact assessment published alongside this Bill that examines its combined effect on the rights of people with disability, unpaid carers, women, children, and people in regional areas. The Impact Analysis equivalents referenced in the Explanatory Memorandum are not public human rights assessments.

In the absence of such assessment, the Senate is being asked to legislate significant changes to Australia’s largest disability support system without evidence about the rights implications of those changes. This is not consistent with good legislative practice or with Australia’s international obligations.

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Submission 373

10.4 The Fraud Frame Risks Mischaracterising Complexity

The Bill presents fraud as a key driver of NDIS cost growth. NCWV and AFK do not dismiss the evidence of fraud within the Scheme. However, framing cost growth primarily through a fraud lens risks mischaracterising legitimate support needs as irregularities and creating a culture of suspicion toward high-needs participants and complex households.

People with complex, high-needs disability may have support arrangements that appear unusual in data. They may use funding flexibly across categories, have multiple providers, or generate high claim volumes. These characteristics can trigger compliance algorithms without indicating any wrongdoing. If the system is designed to detect anomaly, it must be equally designed to recognise legitimate complexity. We are not satisfied that the current Bill adequately establishes that distinction.

  1. Recommendations We respectfully submit the following recommendations to the Senate Committee.

  2. Conduct a mandatory, independent human rights impact assessment. No provision affecting participant eligibility, support levels, functional capacity assessment, or automated decision-making should be enacted without an independent, published assessment of its impact on Australia’s obligations under the CRPD. The assessment must specifically examine gendered impacts, impacts on children, and impacts on people in regional and rural areas.

  3. Require fresh, specific consultation with affected communities. Consultation conducted for the 2023 NDIS Review cannot substitute for targeted consultation on the specific provisions of this Bill. The Senate should not proceed without evidence of direct consultation with people with disability, carers, and advocacy organisations about the measures in this legislation.

  4. Reject or substantially amend the ‘all appropriate treatment’ permanence requirement. The requirement that impairment be established as permanent only where ‘all appropriate treatment’ has been exhausted is inconsistent with the CRPD and will disproportionately harm people with episodic conditions, people with barriers to treatment access, and neurodivergent people. It should be removed or substantially redrafted with specific safeguards.

  5. Require that social and environmental context is retained in functional capacity assessment. The functional capacity framework must not exclude environmental and personal circumstances. Assessment must account for geographic context, social support conditions, housing stability, and other factors that directly determine whether a person can function safely in their actual environment, not in a standardised hypothetical one.

  6. Establish substantive, not merely formal, safeguards for automated decision-making. Automated administrative action must include mandatory notification to participants when their matter has been automated, accessible human review rights that do not require digital literacy or persistent advocacy, and independent oversight of automated systems including publication of error rates and demographic impact data.

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Submission 373

  1. Conduct a gender impact assessment of the Bill’s combined effect. The Bill must be assessed against Australia’s commitments under CEDAW and the National Strategy to Achieve Gender Equality. The gendered distribution of unpaid care, the administrative labour transferred into households, and the specific impact on women with disability must be independently assessed and publicly reported.

  2. Protect children and young carers from the consequences of support reduction. The Bill must not be enacted without protections preventing children from substituting for formal supports. The NDIA should be required to assess household composition and caring arrangements during reassessment, and a referral pathway to young carer support services should be established where children are performing caring roles.

  3. Establish regional equity standards. The Bill must not be applied uniformly to regional contexts without recognition of service scarcity. The NDIA should be required to assess provider market capacity before reducing support in areas with documented workforce shortages, and other service system gatekeeping cannot apply where those services are not genuinely accessible.

  4. Include full social cost accounting in the Bill’s financial case. The financial modelling supporting the Bill must account for transfer costs to other budget areas, including health, aged care, mental health, housing, and family violence services, as well as the economic cost of reduced workforce participation by carers. Sustainability modelling that ignores these flows is incomplete.

  5. Ensure no participant loses essential supports solely due to cost-containment measures. The Ministerial power to reduce support categories across the Scheme must be subject to mandatory human rights impact assessment, public consultation, and parliamentary scrutiny before being exercised. No participant should lose essential supports without individual assessment and genuine review rights.

  6. Conclusion The National Council of Women Victoria does not oppose a sustainable NDIS. We support a Scheme that can function effectively for current participants and future generations. We submit that the Bill before the Senate does not achieve that goal. It achieves a version of sustainability that measures success by reduced government expenditure while externalising the true costs into households, communities, and bodies.

The labour of caring for people with disability does not disappear when formal support is withdrawn. It moves. It moves into the unpaid hours of women who are already injured, already exhausted, and already invisible to the systems that should support them. It moves into the daily lives of children who should be in school, not managing continence care or providing physical assistance. It moves into regional communities that have no services to substitute for what the NDIS is no longer funding.

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Submission 373

This is a women’s equality issue. It is a rural equity issue. It is a child welfare issue. And it is a human rights issue. It requires the Senate to look past the financial framing of the Bill and ask where the cost actually goes when it leaves the NDIS budget.

The sustainability of the NDIS must not be achieved by shifting care, risk, and responsibility onto those least equipped to absorb it. A sustainable Scheme must also be a humane, equitable, and rights-based Scheme. We call on the Senate to ensure this Bill meets that standard before it passes.

We reaffirm its commitment to the dignity, participation, equality, safety, and inclusion of people with disability, their carers, and their families. We thank the Committee for the opportunity to contribute to this inquiry.

Elida Brereton Sarah Barnbrook

Elida Brereton Sarah Barnbrook

President, National Council of Women Founder & CEO, Away from Keyboard Inc.

Victoria Inc Advisor, National Council of Women

Victoria Inc.

Digital Safety Futures Co-Lead,

Soroptimist International Australia

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Submission 373

  1. References and Sources All sources are listed alphabetically.

Submission 373

  • NDIS Provider and Worker Registration Taskforce. Final Report (2024). Chaired by Ms

Natalie Wade. https://www.ndis.gov.au/about-us/governance/provider-and-worker-

registration-taskforce