Submission 395
Submission 395
Preliminary Statement
Advocacy for Inclusion welcomes the referral of the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee for inquiry. The referral is appropriate given the scale and significance of the reforms proposed. We urge the committee to conduct its inquiry with the rigour and depth the Bill demands, and to seek meaningful input from people with disability and their representative organisations before reporting.
The Bill raises serious concerns for people with disability, families, carers and the organisations that support them. This submission sets out those concerns in detail and calls on the committee to examine them with the care they deserve.
About Us
Advocacy for Inclusion incorporating People with Disabilities ACT is an independent organisation delivering reputable national systemic advocacy informed by our experience in individual advocacy and community consultation. We provide dedicated individual and self advocacy services, training, information and resources in the ACT.
As a Disabled People’s Organisation, the majority of our organisation, including our Board of Management, staff and members, are people with disabilities. Advocacy for Inclusion speaks with the authority of lived experience and operates under a human rights framework, upholding the principles of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD).
Executive Summary
The Bill is not a minor administrative adjustment or an integrity package. It is a structural redesign of access, planning, funding, provider regulation, pricing, automation, and review pathways within the NDIS. The government’s own modelling confirms the scale of that redesign: hundreds of thousands of people with disability will be removed from or denied access to the scheme by 2031. That is not a sustainability measure. It is a fundamental contraction of who the scheme serves.
The government has framed this Bill substantially around fraud and the need to restore the scheme’s social licence. That framing does not survive scrutiny of the government’s own figures. The overwhelming majority of projected savings do not come from fraud and integrity measures. The projected savings come from cutting supports for people already on the scheme and tightening who can access it in the future. The government’s public justification and its own financial modelling are not telling the same story, and the committee should examine that gap carefully.
Advocacy for Inclusion is particularly concerned about a systemic risk that runs across multiple provisions of the Bill and that has received insufficient attention in public debate: the interaction between the scale and speed of reassessments and funding changes now possible through increasingly automated systems; the risk that assessment settings become calibrated
2
Submission 395
primarily around savings targets rather than individual need; and the simultaneous weakening or narrowing of review, appeal, and safeguard mechanisms. Taken together, these create conditions in which erroneous, arbitrary, or unsafe outcomes could occur at scale – potentially with limited human oversight or correction mechanisms – before problems are even fully visible. This is not a theoretical concern. It is a structural feature of the Bill’s design that the committee should examine carefully.
We are also concerned that the Bill’s most consequential decisions are not in the legislation itself. They are deferred to NDIS Rules, ministerial determinations, and future instruments that have not been written, consulted on, or agreed. The committee is being asked to assess broad powers whose full practical effect will not be known at the time of passage.
The cumulative effect of these reforms – taken together rather than in isolation – may produce a scheme that is less individualised, less flexible, harder to navigate, and more focused on financial control than on real-world support needs. The people most likely to bear that cost are those with psychosocial disability, fluctuating or episodic conditions, co-occurring impairments, and those without strong advocacy, legal, or informal support networks.
Advocacy for Inclusion calls on the committee to recommend that this Bill not proceed in its current form, and that further investigation be undertaken into how the serious risks identified in this submission will be mitigated before any legislative reform is considered.
Contents Political and Policy Context ………………………………………………………………………………………. 4 Core Concern: Sequencing and the risk of false savings …………………………………………………. 4 Key Systemic Concerns ……………………………………………………………………………………………. 6 A Systemic Risk: Automation, savings calibration, and weakened review ………………………… 7 Detailed Analysis of High-Risk Provisions …………………………………………………………………….. 8 Access and Eligibility ……………………………………………………………………………………………. 8 Planning, Reassessment, and Funding Controls ………………………………………………………… 9 Compliance and Administration ……………………………………………………………………………. 10 Governance and Oversight …………………………………………………………………………………… 11 Automated Decision-Making ………………………………………………………………………………… 12 Who Bears the Cost: Cohort impacts ………………………………………………………………………… 13 Human Rights Obligations ………………………………………………………………………………………. 14 Risk Assessment …………………………………………………………………………………………………… 14 Recommendations ……………………………………………………………………………………………….. 15 Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 16
3
Submission 395
Political and Policy Context
The Bill has been introduced in a highly charged policy environment. The NDIS is under sustained political pressure due to concerns about growth, cost, fraud, and inconsistent decision-making. The government’s political argument is clear: the scheme must be protected for future generations, growth is exceeding what can be sustainably funded, fraud harms participants, and some supports have been funded beyond the scheme’s original intent.
Advocacy for Inclusion does not accept these framings as a sufficient basis for the reforms proposed.
The “original intent” framing also deserves scrutiny. The Joint Standing Committee on the NDIS’s own decade-long record shows that the scheme was designed around two principles – “reasonable and necessary” supports, and “choice and control” – and that it was never intended as a substitute for community and mainstream services.1 But the reason the NDIS became that substitute was not participant overreach or fraud. It was a systematic failure by governments – Commonwealth and state – to fund and maintain the surrounding ecosystem of supports. The Joint Standing Committee documented this failure repeatedly, identifying unresolved “boundary issues” across health, housing, education, justice, and transport as a persistent problem spanning multiple parliaments and governments.2
The scheme did not drift from its original intent because participants asked for too much. It drifted because the ecosystem governments promised never arrived. The Bill now proposes to fix that by cutting the NDIS first and building the ecosystem later. We do not accept that this restores original intent. It repeats the original mistake.
The political risk is that the Bill allows the government to claim it is protecting the scheme while moving substantial financial, administrative, and human risk onto participants, families, and underfunded state and territory systems. A reduction in NDIS expenditure alone should not be interpreted as evidence of improved social outcomes or reduced long-term public cost.
Core Concern: Sequencing and the risk of false savings Our central concern is sequencing. Changes to NDIS eligibility, participation funding, and support access are proposed before alternative systems are designed, funded, operational, or tested. This is not a theoretical risk. It is written into the Bill’s own commencement structure.
Restrictions on unscheduled plan reassessments take effect within days of Royal Assent. Cuts to social and community participation budgets are expected from October 2026. The functional capacity assessment framework that will determine who remains on the NDIS does not commence until January 2028. The Inclusive Communities Fund, framed as a partial
1 Joint Standing Committee on the National Disability Insurance Scheme (2024). General Issues – Annual
Report No. 1 of the 47th Parliament. Chapter 3 – a decade of committee oversight of the NDIS. 2 Ibid., p. 40.
4
Submission 395
replacement for participation supports being cut by 50 per cent, remains in contingency reserve and is not yet operational.3
The Foundational Supports picture does not resolve this concern. The National Agreement on Foundational Supports has been signed by all jurisdictions including the ACT, and we acknowledge that as a genuine commitment.4 However, the National Agreement is a framework document. What operationalises it in the ACT is the bilateral agreement between the Commonwealth and the ACT Government – and that agreement has not yet been finalised. Without it there is no binding funding commitment, no agreed milestones, and no accountability mechanism.
Even where agreements exist, the implementation reality is stark. The ACT Government’s own Thriving Kids Implementation Plan is due for publication by the end of May 2026.5 Service design does not begin until June 2026. First (state-run) services are targeted for October 2026 – less than five months away. Full rollout is not expected until January 2028. States and territories across the country are in the same position: working to understand what Foundational Supports will look like in practice, with bilateral agreements still being negotiated and design work barely started.
There is no jurisdiction in Australia where a properly designed, adequately staffed, and operationally ready system of Foundational Supports will exist by October 2026. That is not a criticism of intent. It is administrative reality. The sequencing problem is not simply that alternatives don’t exist on paper. It is that they cannot be built and delivered in the time available.
It is also essential to be precise about who Foundational Supports will currently cover. Thriving Kids is the only cohort for which Foundational Supports have been designed, funded, and committed to in any concrete way, and it is limited to children aged 8 and under with low to moderate support needs. The National Agreement’s vision nominally encompasses all people with disability under 65, including General and Targeted Supports. However, the Agreement is explicit that future cohorts beyond Thriving Kids will be subject to separate negotiation between First Ministers and agreed through bilateral agreements.6 No future cohort has been defined, no funding has been allocated beyond the Thriving Kids contribution, and no bilateral agreements for any other cohort exist or are imminent. For adults, older children, people with high support needs, and people with psychosocial or other disabilities, the framework exists on paper but the commitment – in terms of defined services, allocated funding, and agreed implementation – does not. For the large majority of people affected by this Bill, there is no designed, funded, or operational alternative within the Foundational Supports architecture.
We are also concerned that projected NDIS savings may represent cost transfer rather than genuine reductions in public expenditure. Reducing disability supports does not remove disability-related need. Unmet need reappears elsewhere – in emergency departments, public mental health systems, homelessness services, family violence systems, justice systems, child protection systems, aged care, and crisis community organisations.
3 Australian Government (2026). Budget 2026-27, Budget Measures: Budget Paper No. 2. Part 2: Payment
Measures, p. 108. 4 National Agreement on Foundational Supports 2026-2031 5 ACT Government (2026) The Thriving Kids Program in Canberra. Accessed 15 May 2026. 6 National Agreement on Foundational Supports 2026-2031, Part 4, clauses 49(b), 49(c) and 50 (p.10).
5
Submission 395
This is particularly acute in the ACT. Specialist homelessness services in the ACT assisted approximately 4,200 clients during 2024-25, with around 47 per cent of people accessing those services having a current mental health issue.7 Demand for homelessness assistance involving mental health has increased significantly in recent years. Housing affordability pressures are severe. Psychosocial support systems already face high demand. Community services operate within finite capacity.
The Bill repeatedly relies on assumptions that mainstream systems will respond, that Foundational Supports will exist, and that participants will transition safely between systems. In the ACT, the evidence does not support those assumptions. The committee should carefully examine whether projected NDIS savings will create greater pressure and cost across other public systems before these changes commence.
Key Systemic Concerns
Before turning to specific provisions, we identify six headline concerns about the Bill’s overall architecture.
-
The Bill shifts the NDIS towards fiscal control as a central organising principle. There is a serious risk that “sustainability” becomes the dominant lens through which disability rights, support needs, participation, and inclusion are assessed – displacing the individual need and rights framework the scheme was built on.
-
The Bill narrows multiple pathways into and within the scheme simultaneously. Each individual reform may be presented as modest or technical. Taken together, tighter access, tighter permanence, restricted reassessment, a direct impairment test, and broad funding determination powers may produce a cumulative narrowing significantly greater than any single measure suggests.
-
The Bill concentrates administrative power. Greater authority flows to Ministers, the NDIA CEO, legislative instruments, ministerial determinations, and automated administrative processes. This raises accountability and transparency concerns, particularly where decisions are not subject to merits review.
-
The Bill moves away from individualised planning. The scheme was built around individualised support. Several reforms move towards standardised, system-wide controls – plan renewal by operation of law, broad support determinations, and functional capacity thresholds set by rules rather than determined through individual assessment.
-
The Bill will increase demand for advocacy while advocacy remains critically underfunded. The reforms will generate confusion, disputes, access issues, reassessment problems, and participant distress. The NDIS Appeals program has been funded for only two years at a moment when demand will almost certainly spike
7 ACT Government (2025) Housing and Homelessness Wellbeing Indicators; ACT Shelter (2025). Housing,
Homelessness and Mental Health in the ACT.
6
Submission 395
significantly. The $15.9 million Disability Representative Organisations allocation over four years is the entire envelope for community engagement on a reform of this scale and complexity. Advocacy services will carry a significant part of the implementation burden with no commensurate resourcing.8
- The Bill assumes other systems can absorb unmet need. As set out above, this assumption is not supported by the evidence in the ACT context.
A Systemic Risk: Automation, savings calibration, and weakened review Advocacy for Inclusion draws the committee’s attention to a systemic risk that cuts across multiple provisions of the Bill and has received insufficient attention in public debate. It is not reducible to any single clause, which is precisely why it requires explicit identification.
The Bill simultaneously enables three things: the scaling of automated and semi-automated administrative processes that can affect large numbers of participants rapidly; the setting of assessment thresholds and funding parameters through rules and ministerial instruments that may be calibrated primarily around savings targets rather than individual need; and the weakening or narrowing of review, appeal, and safeguard mechanisms that would ordinarily provide correction when decisions go wrong.
Each of these changes raises concerns in isolation. Together, they create a structural condition in which errors – or deliberate policy settings that produce systematically harsh outcomes – could propagate at scale before they become visible, and before affected participants have meaningful recourse.
This risk has a precedent that the committee should take seriously. The Robodebt scheme demonstrated what can happen when automated administrative processes affecting vulnerable Australians are implemented without adequate transparency, human oversight, legal foundation, and accessible review.9 We do not suggest the NDIS reforms are equivalent to Robodebt in their design or intent. However, the structural parallels are real: large-scale automated decision-making, compressed review pathways, and a policy environment in which savings targets create pressure on assessment settings. The Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme found that the absence of effective review mechanisms was not incidental to the harm caused – it was central to it.
The specific features of the Bill that create this systemic risk include: the explicit enabling of computer programs to take administrative action in relation to participant plans; the validity saving clauses that preserve the legal effect of automated decisions even where safeguard requirements have not been met; the deferral of assessment thresholds and methods to rules and instruments set outside Parliamentary scrutiny; the restrictions on participant-initiated reassessment that reduce the ability of individuals to seek correction; the support determination power that allows broad funding reductions across categories without individual
8 Disability advocacy organisations nationally have raised concerns regarding increased review complexity, reassessment demand and implementation pressures associated with recent NDIS reforms. 9 Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme (2023). Report: Volume 1. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia.
7
Submission 395
review or merits appeal; and the plan suspension and revocation powers that can remove supports from participants who do not respond – the very participants least able to advocate for themselves.
The cumulative design is one in which the capacity to make decisions affecting large numbers of people rapidly is expanded, while the capacity of individuals to understand, challenge, or correct those decisions is reduced.
The committee should ask the government to demonstrate, with specificity: what human oversight mechanisms will exist at each stage of automated decision-making; what monitoring systems will be in place to detect erroneous or systematically harsh outcomes at scale; what the correction pathway is when such outcomes are identified; and how the validity-saving clauses interact with participants’ review rights in practice.
Detailed Analysis of High-Risk Provisions
Access and Eligibility
Functional Capacity
The Bill introduces a definition of functional capacity and allows future NDIS Rules to prescribe methods, criteria, classifications, and thresholds for assessing it. Functional capacity is to be assessed in relation to a person’s ability to undertake activities without assistance from other people, assistive technology, or modifications, and in a setting that excludes, as far as possible, the impact of environmental and personal circumstances.
This represents a major conceptual shift. For many people with disability, functioning cannot be meaningfully understood outside context. The impact of disability is shaped by housing, family support, poverty, trauma, communication access, community attitudes, and environmental barriers. A person may appear to have higher functional capacity in one setting and very low capacity in another. A person may function with stable supports but deteriorate without them. A person may be able to perform a task once but not repeatedly, safely, reliably, or sustainably.
Critically, the thresholds and methods that will determine whether someone meets the functional capacity test are not in the Bill. They will be set through Category A NDIS Rules requiring agreement from all states and territories, commencing no earlier than January 2028. The decisions that will most affect participants are not before the committee. They are yet to be made. We believe core eligibility safeguards – including how fluctuating, episodic, and psychosocial disabilities will be assessed – must be addressed in primary legislation or at minimum resolved through genuine co-design with the disability community before any Rules are agreed.
The parliament’s own record is relevant here. When the previous government proposed changes to how eligibility and funding levels were assessed, the Joint Standing Committee found opposition near-universal. When the committee reported, it was explicit: any future change to the eligibility gateway must be built through genuine co-design centred on people with lived experience, with particular attention to how fluctuating, episodic, and less visible disabilities
8
Submission 395
are handled.10 That co-design has not occurred here. The concerns identified then remain unaddressed in this Bill.
“All Appropriate Treatment” and Permanence
The Bill tightens the meaning of permanence, introducing the concept that impairments may not be considered permanent until all appropriate treatment has been undertaken. This risks creating a treatment gateway before disability support is recognised – particularly for people with psychosocial disability, chronic illness, neurological conditions, trauma-related disability, and conditions where treatment may reduce symptoms but not remove disability.
People may be pressured to pursue treatment before receiving support. Treatment availability varies significantly by geography, income, and service access. Public waitlists may delay NDIS access. People may be penalised for declining treatment that is invasive, culturally unsafe, retraumatising, or ineffective. For people with psychosocial disability, this is particularly harmful: recovery-oriented practice must not become a reason to deny support.
Eligibility Based on Access to Other Service Systems
The Bill requires decision-makers to consider whether a person may be eligible for support through other service systems. However, a legal boundary does not create an actual service, and this approach risks pushing people with disability between systems that are not designed or resourced to work together to meet their needs. If the NDIS refuses access because another system is theoretically responsible, but that system does not respond, the person is left with nothing. We consider this a major systems risk, particularly in a jurisdiction where health, housing, and mental health services are already under significant pressure.
Planning, Reassessment, and Funding Controls
Restrictions on Participant-Initiated Reassessment
The Bill restricts participant-initiated reassessments, requiring evidence of significant and ongoing changes in support needs. Support needs can change because of health deterioration, family breakdown, informal support collapse, housing instability, violence, school transition, or sudden life events. Where participants cannot obtain timely reassessment, they may present to hospitals, crisis services, or homelessness systems. That does not save public money. It shifts costs and increases harm.
The interaction between reassessment restrictions and automated plan renewal is also significant. If plans are renewed by operation of law and reassessment is restricted, a participant whose circumstances have materially changed may have no practical pathway to have their plan reflect their actual needs. This is a structural gap in the Bill that the committee should examine explicitly.
Direct Link Between Eligible Impairment and Support Need
The Bill requires supports to arise directly from impairments for which the person meets disability or early intervention requirements. Many people with disability do not experience neat
10 This is echoed in the Independent NDIS Review. See, Final Report, Working together to deliver the NDIS, ‘Foundations for successful implementation,’ p. 269-280.
9
Submission 395
impairment categories. Their support needs arise from the interaction of multiple impairments, health conditions, trauma, environment, and social circumstances. A direct link test risks being clinically and socially unrealistic, creating a significant new category of disputes about causation rather than focusing on what support a person actually needs to live safely and participate in community.
Reasonable and Necessary Supports
The Bill places greater emphasis on scheme affordability and funding boundaries in reasonable and necessary decision-making. The concern is that the Bill shifts this balance further towards fiscal control and away from individualised need – potentially approving supports while funding them at levels that make them inaccessible in practice.
Support Determinations and Funding Reductions
The Bill allows the Minister to make legislative instruments reducing funding component amounts for specified groups of supports in old framework plans. These determinations apply broadly rather than through individual plan decisions, and the Explanatory Memorandum indicates they would not be subject to merits review. This is one of the strongest examples of the Bill moving from individualised planning to system-level funding control, and one of the clearest illustrations of the systemic risk identified above: broad funding reductions can be made rapidly, across large numbers of participants, without individual review, and without a meaningful correction mechanism if the settings prove wrong or harmful.
Social and community participation supports are particularly vulnerable. These are not optional extras. They are the supports that allow people to leave the house, maintain mental health, build safety through community connection, reduce long-term crisis risk, and participate as equal members of their communities. Broad determination across these categories, without merits review, risks removing supports that are poorly understood in public debate but essential in individual lives.
Plan Renewal by Operation of Law
The Bill replaces administrative plan continuations with a legislative plan renewal process, generally for 12 months, with unspent funds not rolling over in the same way. Underspending does not always indicate lack of need. It may indicate no providers were available, the participant experienced crisis, the participant was in hospital, the participant lacked support coordination, or culturally safe services were inaccessible. A renewal system that treats underspending as surplus to be removed may punish people for system failure rather than lack of need.
Compliance and Administration
Plan Suspension and Revocation
The Bill allows plans to be suspended where reasonable contact attempts have been made and the participant has not responded, and revoked after 90 days. Non-response is not always disengagement. It may be a sign of disability, crisis, homelessness, family violence, hospitalisation, cognitive impairment, mental distress, language barriers, or fear of the system. People most in need may be most likely to lose contact. Plan suspension or revocation may
10
Submission 395
remove supports from people precisely when they are least able to advocate for themselves, creating serious safeguarding risks that sit in direct tension with the findings of the Royal
Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability. We
recommend that mandatory escalation to advocacy, safeguarding, or welfare check pathways be required before any suspension or revocation can take effect.
Ninety-Day Claim Timeframe
The Bill requires claims for NDIS amounts to be made within 90 days of support being provided. Many participants, nominees, small providers, and plan managers already struggle with administrative complexity. Strict timeframes without disability-related exceptions – for hospitalisation, crisis, family violence, bereavement, system outages, or lack of accessible information – will create financial risk for participants and providers, particularly in thin markets.
Fraud, Compliance, and Civil Penalties
The expanded compliance powers in Schedule 2, whilst allowing further action against organised fraud, may have significant consequences for participants navigating a highly complex scheme. Anti-fraud reform must carefully distinguish between organised fraud, provider misconduct, participant exploitation, administrative error, disability-related difficulty, and ordinary confusion within a highly complex system. The scheme must target fraud without treating participants as suspects.
Governance and Oversight
Pricing Governance
The Bill makes the Minister the final decision-maker on NDIS prices. Ministerial discretion over pricing decisions does not constitute genuine transparency or accountability for people with disability, who are not easily able to hold government accountable for these decisions, particularly at the individual level. If pricing restraint becomes a cost-control mechanism, providers may withdraw from low-margin or complex supports, thin markets may worsen, and participants with complex needs may become harder to serve. Support is not meaningful if no provider can deliver it at the price set.
Plan Management Changes
The Bill prevents plan management providers from providing other NDIS supports and introduces a panel arrangement for registered plan managers. The conflict-of-interest rationale is legitimate. However, transition to new arrangements risks disrupting participants who rely on trusted plan managers with relational knowledge of complex plans, particularly in thin markets where provider choice is already limited.
Delegated Power and Parliamentary Oversight
The Bill relies extensively on legislative instruments, NDIS Rules, ministerial determinations, standard operating procedure instruments, and future implementation design. Parliament may pass broad powers without knowing their full practical effect. For reforms of this scale, core safeguards must be in primary legislation, not deferred to future rules. This concern is amplified by the systemic risk identified above: where assessment thresholds, automated decision making parameters, and funding determination powers are all set outside primary legislation,
11
Submission 395
the combination creates a policy environment in which consequential decisions can be made and scaled rapidly, with limited Parliamentary visibility or democratic accountability.
The committee’s attention is also drawn to Schedule 5 of the Bill, which grants the Minister a transitional rule-making power with significant scope. The Minister may, by legislative instrument, make rules that modify how provisions of the NDIS Act itself have effect during the transition period – without those modifications being subject to Parliamentary debate or approval. Rules must be made within 12 months of commencement and automatically expire 12 months after they are made. The power cannot be used to create offences, impose taxes, or directly amend the text of an Act, and the Explanatory Memorandum describes it as a “failsafe” to address unforeseen transitional issues.11 A similar power was included in the Getting the NDIS Back on Track Act and subsequently used, so it is not without precedent.
However, we are concerned about the interaction between this power and the sequencing risk identified throughout this submission. The transition period from 2026 to 2028 is precisely the period during which the most consequential and contested changes will be taking effect: participation support cuts from October 2026, functional capacity assessments from January 2028, and Foundational Supports that are not yet designed or operational. It is also the period during which the consequences of the Bill’s design – including any erroneous or systematically harsh outcomes from automated decision-making – are most likely to become visible. If problems emerge during this period, the transitional rule-making power means the Minister can respond by modifying how the Act operates, by legislative instrument, for up to 12 months, without returning to Parliament. In a Bill that already delegates an unusually large amount of policy detail to rules, instruments, and ministerial determinations, this further extends the pattern into the implementation period itself.
The practical effect is that the operation of the NDIS during its most significant period of change could be shaped substantially by ministerial instruments rather than by Parliament. The committee should seek from the government a clear account of how the transitional rule making power is intended to be used, what parliamentary notification or oversight mechanisms will apply when it is exercised, and how it interacts with the merits review and appeal rights of participants affected by any modifications made under it. We recommend that any exercise of the transitional rule-making power that affects participant entitlements, eligibility, or plan funding be subject to a requirement of prior parliamentary notification and a disallowance period, so that Parliament retains meaningful oversight during the period when it matters most.
Automated Decision-Making
The Bill allows greater use of computer programs to take administrative action, and provides that failure to comply with certain automation safeguards does not necessarily affect the validity of the administrative action.
Automation can improve speed and consistency. It can also scale errors, hide bias, reduce transparency, and make it harder for people to understand or challenge decisions. This is
11 Explanatory Memorandum, National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for
Future Generations) Bill 2026, p. 151.
12
Submission 395
particularly sensitive in the NDIS, where decisions affect daily life, safety, dignity, housing, communication, care, and independence.
As set out in the systemic risk section above, the concern here is not automation itself but the combination of automation with weakened review mechanisms and assessment settings that may be calibrated around savings targets. The validity-saving clauses are particularly concerning: they risk making human oversight nominal rather than genuinely substantive, and they interact directly with the reassessment restrictions and merits review limitations elsewhere in the Bill to reduce the practical ability of participants to seek correction when automated processes produce wrong or harmful outcomes.
Who Bears the Cost: Cohort impacts
The cumulative effect of these reforms will not fall evenly. Advocacy for Inclusion identifies the following cohorts as facing the highest risk of disproportionate impact.
Cohort Primary mechanisms of harm
Permanence test, treatment gateway, functional capacity People with psychosocial assessment, reassessment restrictions, plan suspension for disability non-response, automated decision-making
People with fluctuating or Functional capacity assessed at a point in time, reassessment episodic conditions thresholds, direct impairment test
People with co-occurring Direct impairment test may artificially separate interacting impairments conditions
Tighter access and permanence settings may delay early Children and young people intervention
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Treatment access barriers, cultural safety issues, housing Islander people instability, distrust of government systems
Culturally and linguistically Information barriers, difficulty responding to contact, navigating diverse people reassessment
People in poverty, housing Least able to comply with administrative requirements, gather instability, or family evidence, or request reassessment violence
People without advocacy Every measure in the Bill increases complexity; automated support decisions at scale will be hardest to challenge without support
We note that people with psychosocial disability face the most acute cumulative risk. More than 65,000 NDIS participants nationally have psychosocial disability as a primary category, while
13
Submission 395
substantial unmet psychosocial support need also exists outside the scheme.12 The permanence test, treatment gateway, functional capacity framework, reassessment restrictions, and plan suspension provisions may interact particularly harshly for this cohort. Rigid or standardised assessment approaches are likely to fail to capture the realities of variable functioning, crisis periods, trauma interaction, unstable support environments, and episodic deterioration that characterise psychosocial disability. The systemic risk of automated decisions at scale is also acutely relevant here: a person with psychosocial disability who loses contact with the NDIA during a crisis period may have their plan suspended or revoked through an automated process before any human oversight or welfare check is triggered.
Human Rights Obligations
The Bill should be assessed against Australia’s obligations under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, particularly the principles of dignity, autonomy, full and effective participation, equality before the law, and independent living and inclusion in the community.
A rights-based approach does not require unlimited funding. It does require that funding controls remain fair, proportionate, transparent, and accompanied by meaningful safeguards. Several provisions in this Bill – including the support determination power, automated decision making, plan suspension and revocation, and the deferral of core eligibility criteria to future rules – raise genuine tension with these obligations. The systemic risk identified in this submission – of erroneous or unsafe outcomes occurring at scale before correction mechanisms can operate – is also directly relevant to Australia’s CRPD obligations around equal recognition before the law and access to justice. The committee should assess each of these provisions explicitly against Australia’s CRPD commitments and seek the government’s response to those concerns.
Risk Assessment
The following table draws together the key risks identified across this submission to assist the committee in prioritising its scrutiny. Three points bear noting. The risks are not independent – many interact and compound each other in ways that make the cumulative effect greater than any single risk suggests. The likelihood ratings reflect the ACT context specifically, based on existing evidence about local service system capacity and the direct experience of our member organisations. And several of the highest-severity risks may not be immediately visible – harm from automated decisions, miscalibrated assessment settings, or plan suspensions during crisis periods may materialise before it registers in data or complaints systems. The committee should ask the government what early warning and monitoring systems will exist during the implementation period, and what the correction pathway is if these risks materialise.
12 NDIA Quarterly Report to Disability Ministers; Productivity Commission and mental health policy analysis relating to unmet psychosocial support need.
14
Submission 395
Risk Likelihood Impact
People with psychosocial disability face greater access barriers High High
Participants with fluctuating conditions are misclassified High High
Reassessment restrictions delay support and increase crisis High Highescalation
Automated decisions at scale produce erroneous or High Highsystematically harsh outcomes before correction mechanisms operate
Assessment settings become calibrated around savings targets High Highrather than individual need, with limited review
Other systems fail to absorb shifted demand in the ACT High High
Support determinations reduce participation and capacity Medium- Highbuilding supports without merits review High
Plan renewal penalises underspending caused by market or High Medium-system failure High
Bilateral agreement delays mean Foundational Supports not High Highoperational before cuts commence
Advocacy demand increases sharply with no commensurate High Highresourcing
Provider withdrawal in thin markets Medium HighRecommendations
Having considered the serious risks identified throughout this submission, Advocacy for Inclusion calls on the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee to recommend that this Bill not proceed in its current form. Further, we call on the committee to recommend that the government undertake further investigation into how the risks identified in this submission – to access, individual rights, participant safety, system capacity, and democratic oversight – will be meaningfully mitigated before any legislative reform of this scale and nature is brought before parliament.
The detailed concerns set out in this submission should not be read as an invitation to pass the Bill with minor amendments. The cumulative architecture of the Bill – the concentration of power, the weakening of review, the sequencing of cuts before alternatives, and the deferral of the most consequential decisions to future instruments – represents a fundamental reshaping of the scheme that requires far more rigorous scrutiny and genuine co-design with people with disability than has occurred to date.
15
Submission 395
Conclusion
Advocacy for Inclusion supports the committee’s inquiry and thanks the committee for the opportunity to make this submission. We welcome the referral of the Bill and urge the committee to examine it with the rigour and depth it demands.
The scheme needs to be protected for people with disability – now and for future generations. That protection requires that any reform be sequenced responsibly, co-designed with people with disability, and evaluated not by what it saves but by whether people with disability are safer, better supported, and able to live with dignity, independence, and choice. The Bill as introduced does not meet that standard.
The committee has an important role to play in ensuring the NDIS does not go down the wrong path. We stand ready to assist the committee’s work in any way it can, including through appearing at public hearings if invited to do so. Please contact our Acting Head of Policy, Dr. Jo
Luetjens or Chief Executive Officer, Nicolas Lawler
, if you wish to discuss this submission further.
Regards,
Dr. Jo Luetjens
Acting Head of Policy
Advocacy for Inclusion
28 May 2026
16