@@attention: Committee Secretary, Senate Standing Committee on Community Affairs Submitted by email: community.affairs.sen@aph.gov.au Date: 01/06/2026 I am writing to you about the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026.
I am a private personal trainer. I want to be clear about where I stand: I have no professional connection to the NDIS. I am not a provider, I do not bill the Scheme, and I have nothing to gain or lose from how this Bill is decided.
I work privately with a client who is an NDIS participant, and I am writing because what I see in my own work tells me this Bill will cause serious harm to my client. I could not read it and stay silent.
These are the parts of the Bill I am concerned about:
- Forcing people to “exhaust treatment” before they are eligible for funding and support through the NDIS (Schedule 1, Part 8). My entire job is treatment. I can tell you treatment is not a cure. For most of the people I work with, it manages, maintains, and slows decline caused by their disabilities. There is no point where treatment is exhausted and the disability is gone. Building eligibility around that idea misunderstands what care actually does. In practice it will force people through more interventions than they need (often at their own expense, sometimes with real physical risk) just to earn the chance to ask for help. Many will deteriorate while they wait. Some will
give up. Some people will lose their quality of life, and could lose their lives.
Replacing whole-of-person assessment with an eligible impairment (Schedule 1, Part 3). Bodies do not work in isolation. In my work I watch one problem cascade into others, like pain feeds fatigue, fatigue limits movement, lost movement affects mood and independence, and on it goes. Assessing a person against one eligible impairment and ignoring the rest is not how function works. It will systematically miss real, documented need.
An assessment tool (I-CAN) without expert assessors and specificity to the diverse ways disability can show up. I see my client on good days and bad days, and the difference between them is enormous. A single assessment, on a single day, cannot capture how my client functions. If someone is assessed on a good day, they will be put down as needing far less than they need. Using a tool that has not been properly validated yet, potentially in the hands of people without any clinical training, to make decisions this consequential is indefensible.
Cutting capacity-building and community participation supports before anything replaces them (Schedule 1, Part 4). These are the supports that keep people moving, functioning, connected and independent. The things that hold deterioration back. Cut them and people decline, which costs far more later, in money and in their personal lives. It is cruel.
Finally, removing the right to challenge decisions. No safe system removes its own ability to be corrected when it gets something wrong. Making funding changes unreviewable
Assumes that the way the NDIS is set up is without any issues. That does not exist anywhere in healthcare, and it will leave people with no options when a wrong decision damages their health. I see the cost of inadequate support in the bodies of the people I work with. My client is one of them. This Bill passing without changes will be a disaster for the people we should be committed to supporting. I urge the Committee not to pass it as it is, and to give it the consideration it should have always had. Thank you.