Securing the NDIS for future generations bill 2026

My name is Sarah K Reece, I am a recipient of the NDIS, as are three of my children. I also run a small team of support workers many of whom have lived experience of disability or as carers of people with disabilities. We assist other NDIS participants in their homes with domestic and personal life tasks.

I therefore wear multiple hats in this space and speak from multiple perspectives. I am a participant of this scheme – how it is funded, who is allowed onto it, and how we are presented to the public directly impacts my life – my capacity to be included, to work, to raise my children, to participate as an Australian. It directly impacts me as a parent of children with disabilities. My three children receiving NDIS support have vastly different needs and the individualised funding and our choice and control are key to being able to tailor services and get the best possible outcomes for each child. This impacts me as a member of the workforce – both in that we are discussing the funding for my job, the funding for the jobs of the employees I’m responsible for supporting, and the funding that provides for the essential needs of the participants we care for, worry about, and try to protect.

I oppose the Bill as it has been presented, from every perspective I have. The stress on each of these communities is so high, and the framing of the bill, the NDIS, participants, carers, and providers has been harsh, undignified, and unfair. I have clients who are afraid that their funding means other people in need may go without and who are therefore refusing essential services. I have exhausted and overwhelmed clients who are attempting to take buses for hours to reach services because they are afraid they are about to lose funding, afraid of putting pressure on staff already struggling with the cost of living crisis and the fuel crisis, and trying to find a way to ethically function inside a system that keeps telling them they are a waste of resources, and that every resource they use basically steals it from someone else in need. This is creating anguish and despair in the community. I have clients who are terrified they will be kicked off the scheme and who cannot find any kind of alternative services that will meet their basic life needs. We are spending support hours trying to crisis plan funding losses instead of meeting other essential needs. I have staff who are cracking under the pressure of having to watch clients already lose funding they need, and who still have to turn up to work to witness the harm as it predictably unfolds.

The moral injury and vicarious trauma are significant weights and high risks of this work. I have staff who themselves receive NDIS funding, including myself, which helps them maintain their capacity to work who are afraid that every gain they’ve made in the past couple of years is about to be taken away. The conversation in the public has been brutal and people are suffering.

Whenever a resource is created that is actually meeting a need there is a risk of the resource becoming inundated and that is the language surrounding the NDIS and the budget. What is being presented as evidence of failure or mismanagement can also be seen as evidence of how valuable and effective the scheme is. We are the envy of most of the rest of the world for this approach to disability care. Rationing it using blunt instruments such as the proposed 50% cut to social and community participation funding from October 2026 is going to devastate people and puts many at risk. The category doesn’t mean what you think it means. It’s being presented as a luxury item, the feel good but not strictly ‘necessary for life’ part of

Funding Cuts Under The National Disability Insurance Scheme

funding where people get to go to the movies or out for coffee and cake. The theory is one of austerity – there’s not enough to go around, so let’s tighten the belt. It’s one that makes sense at the level of micro economics. When funds are tight we do less nights out to dinner, see fewer movies, stay home and eat home made more. It has a rationality to the public.

However, that category of funding is used for everything that ever involves leaving the house. Many of these are necessary for life tasks. They are taking people to doctors, dentists, psychologists, speech pathologists, emergency departments. They are buying groceries from the shops, picking up medications from the chemist, attending independent living centres to trial the correct size wheelchair. This is not the media image of social and community participation. It’s not the common understanding of that phrase. Nor is it how that concept would be applied to any non-disabled person. The rest of Australia do not think of visiting their dentist as a ‘social visit’ or part of ‘accessing their community’. But in this sector, that’s how it’s been framed, and those essential access needs are now being targeted as a luxury to be cut.

The economics don’t stand up to scrutiny, for example, the cost of home visits by allied health professionals is extremely high. We frequently organise locations closer to their offices or take participants to meet at their offices to protect small capacity funding from waste. Without social and community funding we can’t do this.

The framing of the NDIS as a “budget blowout” treats every dollar spent as a dollar lost. That isn’t how this spending behaves. The scheme is labour-intensive — most of it becomes wages for support workers, allied health professionals and the small businesses that employ them. Those wages are taxed, spent in local communities, and they free up family carers to return to paid work. Independent modelling by Per Capita estimated the scheme returns about $2.25 in economic value for every dollar spent. Treating it as a cost on one side of the ledger ignores the employment and revenue it generates on the other.

But the more important point is that cutting these supports does not remove the underlying need – it shifts the cost elsewhere on the public ledger: to emergency departments, hospitals, mental health services, the justice system, and to carers who leave the workforce. If the need actually goes unmet, the participants simply suffer and in some cases, die. Unless this Bill is accompanied by whole-of-government cost accounting showing where those needs will be met, the projected savings are not a saving. They are a transfer of cost to systems far less equipped to absorb it, or they are simply abandoning people to try and cope with the unmet needs.

You have promised the changes won’t affect support “essential to the critical care and daily living needs of participants.” If we can’t get people to the doctor, people are going to get sicker, injuries will go unattended, medications will have schedule gaps. These are critical care and daily living needs. There will be suffering and there will be deaths. We know exactly what the outcomes can be when people with disabilities are hidden away in their homes, because Ann Marie Smith suffered that back in 2020. Her death was caused by severe neglect that only went unnoticed because of her severe social isolation. She had paid NDIS supports, but she didn’t have any community care. Safety and safeguarding for disabled

• People relies partly on community access, on those links to health, family, friends, faith, and other communities who know, regularly meet and care about people. It relies on multiple eyes on someone vulnerable to notice changes and call out concerns.

There used to be infrastructure that allowed more care in home but it no longer exists. I cannot call a home nurse to come and rub a medicated cream into my client’s back. If I drop my injured client who is terrified of medical settings to an ED and I don’t sit with him through the 10 hour wait, feed him, calm him, and help him communicate, he will simply leave 5 minutes after I do. There isn’t another way to get these needs met. So the assurance that these changes ‘will not impact supports essential to the critical care and daily living needs of participants’, demonstrates a profound failure to understand what those care needs are and how they are funded.

I urge the Committee to recommend that the Bill not proceed in its current form. Specifically: than the proposed reduction to social, civic and community participation funding be abandoned, since this funding pays for essential access to health care, food, medication and the human contact that keeps isolated people safe. I request that no reduction to any funding category proceed until the Government publishes whole-of-government cost accounting showing where the displaced needs and costs will fall; and that individualised funding, and participants’ choice and control, be protected.