National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026

Submission 3848

Submission to the Community Affairs Legislation Committee

From:

Regarding: National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026

I am a non-disabled person. I have disabled family members who do not use NDIS. While the proposed changes to the scheme do not impact me or my family members directly, I am deeply disappointed at the Federal Government’s proposed decimation of services. They will make the lives of many NDIS participants harder and lonelier, and directly and/or indirectly compromise their physical and/or mental health. They will also detrimentally affect family members who are carers, with most of that hardship being experienced by women.

Many of the proposed changes relate to aspects of the NDIS that I don’t have first hand experience of; so I wish to focus my submission on just three themes.

• Changes to social and community participation may reduce people’s ability to connect, work and be part of the community

I have about 8 friends, ranging in age from 8 to 56 years, who currently use NDIS funded services, and several others who hope to be assessed as eligible in the near future. All of these people are significantly disabled by their cities’ inaccessible infrastructure and hostile environments. Social supports are critical to their participation in community life – and indeed to them leaving the house at all.

I am deeply concerned that the Federal Government has allowed conservative media to dominate the discourse on the issue of social support. Often, NDIS participants do not

National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026

Submission 3848

need their carers to socialise with them. Rather, they need carers for physical assistance and transport so that they can participate in leisure activities, work and volunteer. The idea that this is somehow a luxury, rather than a fundamental aspect of dignified living, is a fundamental misunderstanding of paid carers’ roles and Disabled life in this society.

• People with less visible or fluctuating disabilities may be harder to assess under standardised tools

While I am not fundamentally opposed to the idea that eligibility for NDIS should be based on functional assessment, it is critical that functionality be assessed on the basis of people’s worst days, not their best. Further, there needs to be inbuilt flexibility, to ensure timely and appropriate responses to changes in capacity or individual circumstances – not only in “exceptional circumstances”. As with the provision of any government-funded services, there also needs to be a right to review.

• Any changes to the scheme must be guided and deeply informed by the voices and lives experience of disabled people.

Clearly, NDIS is not perfect. The silo approach to health and welfare in this country does not serve us well and there are many inefficiencies that stem from that. It is very evident from the concerned and upset response of the disabled community to the proposed changes that they are not currently seen by the Government as having agency. The very same attitudes that are disabling in the first place are being used as tools against disabled people.

I encourage the Government to step away from these proposed changes and embark on a collaborative process to maximise the effectiveness of NDIS spending. Further, I would endorse expenditure reviews in other areas – most notably fossil fuel subsidies and defence spending – in order to find public goods such as health and welfare.