Concerns regarding NDIS reform impacting participants, families, and providers (Provider advocacy)

Submission 405

Submission to the

Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee

Inquiry into the

National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for

Future Generations) Bill 2026

Submitted by:

Green Pathways Disability Support Provider Pty Ltd

ABN: 79 680 514 336  | ACN: 680 514 336

The Mills, West, 6/33 Mackey St, North Geelong VIC 3215

Website: https://greenpathways.com.au

Contact:

Verity Morris

Founder & Director

Date: 26 May 2026 Publication: This submission is public and may be published in full.

Green Pathways Disability Support Provider Pty Ltd  | ABN 79 680 514 336  | greenpathways.com.au

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Submission 405

Executive Summary

Green Pathways acknowledges the need to reform the NDIS to ensure its long-term sustainability. However, we have significant concerns that the Bill, as currently drafted, will harm participants, families, and providers. Our key positions are summarised below.

1. Children aged 8 and under should not be removed from the NDIS No child should lose access to NDIS supports until the Thriving Kids program has been fully designed, legislated, funded, and demonstrated to provide equivalent or superior outcomes. Early intervention is time-critical and cannot be replaced by a policy framework that does not yet exist.

2. The plan management panel model should be rejected Restricting participant choice to a government-curated panel will not fix the quality issues that the existing registration system has failed to address. Reform should focus on separating plan management from other service delivery, removing conflicts of interest, and strengthening enforcement. The Committee should also consider whether the plan management function would be better delivered by the NDIA directly, given the persistent failures of the private market.

3. Mandatory registration should not be expanded under the current system We support registration in principle but oppose its expansion until the audit system is fundamentally reformed. Green Pathways has direct experience of system failure: an auditor (JPS) became insolvent mid-audit, and a second audit is currently being contested through JAS-ANZ for procedural unfairness. We have spent over $12,000 on registration with no successful outcome.

4. The NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission must be properly empowered and resourced Complaints to the Commission are not responded to in a timely manner, allowing abusive and fraudulent practices to continue and putting participants at risk. Expanding mandatory registration is meaningless if the body charged with enforcing standards cannot or does not act. Commission reform, including mandatory response timeframes and stronger enforcement powers, must come before any expansion of registration.

5. Restrictions on plan reassessments must be removed The Bill restricts unscheduled plan reassessments and ends plan rollovers while simultaneously triggering automatic budget cuts at the point of review. Participants will be locked into inadequate plans by a system that punishes them for engaging with it. The underlying planning failures should be fixed; the right to reassessment should not be removed.

6. No single person should hold the powers this Bill creates The Bill hands sweeping unilateral powers to the Minister for Disability and the NDIS—over pricing, budget cuts across whole categories, the design of assessment tools, the composition of advisory bodies, and the commissioning of services—often through legislative instruments that cannot be disallowed by Parliament. The NDIS was created by

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Parliament for the people of Australia. Decisions of this magnitude must remain accountable to Parliament, not delegated to one minister by instrument.

7. True sustainability requires investment in services outside the NDIS People are on the NDIS because no alternative services exist. Removing people from the Scheme without first building and strengthening state-based, community, mental health, early intervention, and aged care services simply shifts the cost onto crisis services, hospitals, and unpaid family carers.

8. The disability support workforce must be protected Reforms that squeeze provider margins ultimately fall on frontline support workers. Without investment in workforce pay, training, and retention, the sector will continue to lose the experienced, qualified staff that participants depend on.

The proposed reforms have already generated widespread anxiety in the disability community. Participants and families fear that engaging with the system will result in less support, not better support. Providers who try to do the right thing watch fraudulent operators continue without consequence. Support workers leave the sector. The Committee has an opportunity to ensure this Bill strengthens the NDIS for the people who depend on it, rather than dismantling the very community of providers, workers, and families who are holding it together.

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1. Introduction This submission is made by Green Pathways Disability Support Provider Pty Ltd (ABN 79 680 514 336), an NDIS provider operating across Geelong, Gippsland, and Melbourne in Victoria. We deliver individualised disability support services including daily living assistance (self-care services), social and community recreation (community participation, skill development, and transport), and short-term accommodation (respite care) to NDIS participants. Our mission is to empower individuals with disabilities to live fulfilling, independent lives through personalised, high-quality support.

Green Pathways was founded by Verity Morris, a support worker with over 10 years’ experience in the disability sector. Verity holds a Certificate III in Individual Support (Aged Care & Disability), a Certificate IV in Disability, and a Diploma of Community Services. She has invested significantly in her professional development and brings deep, hands-on expertise in supporting individuals with complex needs. This submission reflects not only the organisational perspective of Green Pathways, but also the lived professional experience of a practitioner who has dedicated her career to this industry.

Green Pathways is currently unregistered and is in the process of its third attempt at achieving NDIS registration. Our previous two attempts were unsuccessful due to failures within the audit system itself, not due to any deficiency in our service delivery or compliance. Our experience of the registration process is central to this submission and is detailed in Section 4.

We welcome the opportunity to contribute to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee’s inquiry into the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026. While we acknowledge the importance of ensuring the long-term sustainability of the NDIS, we hold significant concerns about several provisions of this Bill and their likely impact on participants, families, and providers.

This submission addresses six key areas of concern:

1. The exclusion of children aged 8 and under from the NDIS, the proposed Thriving Kids program, and the regulatory implications for providers delivering services under that program.

2. The proposed panel model for plan management providers, and alternative reforms including possible reabsorption of plan management by the NDIA.

3. The expansion of mandatory provider registration—which we support in principle but oppose under the current audit and registration system.

4. The inadequate powers and delayed response of the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission, which allows abusive and fraudulent practices to continue.

5. Changes to plan assessment and review that restrict participant access to reassessment and remove human discretion from planning decisions.

6. The concentration of sweeping unilateral powers in the Minister for Disability and the NDIS, with reduced parliamentary oversight.

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2. Opposition to the Exclusion of Children Aged 8 and

Under

2.1 Removing Children Before a Replacement Program Exists

The Bill proposes that children aged 8 and under will no longer be eligible for the NDIS, with their support instead provided through the proposed Thriving Kids program. We oppose this provision in its current form.

The Thriving Kids program has not yet been designed, legislated, funded, or operationalised. It exists as a policy intention, not a functioning service delivery framework. To remove children from the NDIS before a replacement program is demonstrably in place and operational is to expose some of the most vulnerable Australians—young children with disabilities—to a gap in support with no guaranteed safety net.

If the Thriving Kids program is to be administered by state and territory governments, this raises significant concerns about consistency. The NDIS was created in part because state managed disability services produced a “postcode lottery” of inconsistent and inadequate support. Returning responsibility to the states without a nationally consistent legislative and quality framework risks repeating these failures.

2.2 Regulatory Uncertainty for Providers

If children are moved out of the NDIS and into a state-managed program, it remains unclear what regulatory framework will govern providers delivering services under Thriving Kids. Will providers be required to register through a different safeguarding commission or state-based body? Will existing NDIS registration be recognised, or will providers need to undergo separate accreditation? These questions remain unanswered, and the regulatory uncertainty creates a significant barrier for providers who wish to continue delivering early childhood supports.

2.3 The Evidence for Early Intervention

The evidence base for early intervention in disability is unequivocal: support delivered in the earliest years of a child’s life produces the most significant and cost-effective outcomes. Disrupting access to early intervention supports—even temporarily—risks permanent developmental harm that cannot be recovered later.

• Neuroplasticity is highest in early childhood. Delays in support during this critical window cannot be “made up” later. The window for maximum impact is finite.

• Early assessment does not predict long-term need. A child’s functional capacity at age 3 or 5 does not accurately predict their long-term trajectory. Children who appear to have moderate needs early on may, without appropriate early intervention, develop significantly higher support needs as they age. Conversely, children who receive timely support may see their needs reduce substantially.

• Families will bear the cost of delayed support. When children miss the early intervention window, the emotional, financial, and practical burden on families increases significantly. Many families already face enormous challenges navigating the disability system, and removing their access to the NDIS will compound this.

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2.4 Other Groups Whose NDIS Access and Support Should Be

Strengthened

Much of the public debate about NDIS sustainability has focused on who should be removed from the Scheme. We respectfully suggest that the Committee should also consider the groups of Australians whose needs are not adequately met by the current NDIS—and whose access and support should be strengthened, not reduced.

People living with terminal illness, in particular, often fall through the gaps between the NDIS, palliative care services, aged care, and the health system. The supports they need to live their remaining time with dignity—assistance with daily living, complex personal care, transport to medical appointments, and the ability to remain in their preferred environment with the people they love—are not consistently available within or outside the NDIS. The Bill does nothing to address this gap, and several of its provisions (tighter eligibility definitions, restrictions on plan reassessments, removal of human discretion in planning) will make accessing appropriate support more difficult for people in the final stages of life.

People with complex, co-occurring needs are similarly inadequately supported. Where a participant has a disability alongside chronic illness, mental health conditions, behaviours of concern, or other complex needs, current planning frameworks often fail to capture the full picture, and the supports funded fall short of what is required. The shift to a standardised, algorithm-driven assessment under new framework planning, combined with restrictions on plan reassessment, will compound this problem and disproportionately harm the people whose support needs are most difficult to capture in a structured assessment tool.

The NDIS should be expanding the supports available to people with terminal illness and complex needs, not narrowing eligibility and removing the flexibility in planning that these participants rely on most.

2.5 Recommendation

We recommend that the Committee ensure that no child is removed from NDIS eligibility until the Thriving Kids program has been fully designed, legislated, funded, and demonstrated to provide equivalent or superior support outcomes. Any transition should include robust safeguards, independent oversight, and guaranteed continuity of support. The Committee should also recommend that the Government identify and address the gaps in NDIS support for people with terminal illness and complex co-occurring needs, ensuring these groups are not further disadvantaged by the Bill’s eligibility and planning provisions.

3. Opposition to the Plan Management Provider Panel

3.1 A Panel Does Not Guarantee Quality

The Bill proposes establishing a government-appointed panel of plan management providers from 1 October 2027, with participants required to choose a plan manager from this limited panel. We oppose this approach.

From our direct experience operating in the NDIS market, we are aware of numerous registered plan management providers who have failed to meet the existing registration standards and obligations under the NDIS Act and Code of Conduct. These providers are already operating with registration status, yet their service delivery, financial management,

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and compliance standards fall well short of what participants should expect. Problems include, but are not limited to:

• Failure to process claims in a timely manner, leaving participants unable to access their funded supports.

• Inadequate communication with participants and their support networks.

• Poor financial record-keeping and reporting.

• Non-compliance with the NDIS Code of Conduct, including failures in safeguarding participant funds.

3.2 Registration Does Not Equal Quality

The assumption underpinning the panel model is that a government-selected group of providers will deliver higher-quality plan management than the open market. However, if the existing registration process cannot prevent non-compliant providers from entering and remaining in the market, there is no guarantee that a panel selected through the same flawed process will produce better outcomes.

A panel model also reduces participant choice—one of the foundational principles of the NDIS. Participants should have the right to choose a plan manager who understands their needs, communicates effectively, and provides responsive service. Restricting this choice to a government-curated panel undermines the Scheme’s person-centred philosophy.

3.3 Conflicts of Interest in Plan Management

The same structural conflict of interest that undermines support coordination also exists in plan management. Many plan management providers operate within organisations that also deliver other NDIS-funded services. This creates a direct financial incentive to steer participants toward using the organisation’s own services, rather than connecting them with the providers that best meet their needs.

Rather than establishing a panel, we believe the following reforms would be far more effective at improving the quality and integrity of plan management:

• Separation of plan management from other service delivery: Plan management providers should not be permitted to operate within organisations that also deliver other NDIS-funded supports. When the entity managing a participant’s funding is the same entity providing their services, there is an inherent conflict in how those funds are directed. Separation would ensure that plan managers act solely in the financial interests of the participant.

• Prohibition on steering and no-poaching practices: There must be enforceable rules preventing plan managers from directing participants toward affiliated service providers or engaging in anti-competitive practices that limit participant choice. Participants’ funds should be managed impartially, with providers selected based on the participant’s needs and preferences—not the commercial interests of the plan manager’s parent organisation.

• Stronger compliance and enforcement: The NDIS Commission must proactively monitor plan management providers and take enforcement action against those who are failing to process claims in a timely manner, mismanaging participant funds,

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misleading participants, or breaching the NDIS Code of Conduct. The current approach of reactive, complaint-driven oversight is insufficient.

• Reabsorption of plan management by the NDIA: As a further option for the Committee’s consideration, the plan management function could be reabsorbed by the NDIA entirely—including the budget monitoring, fund management, and advisory functions that participants currently rely on plan managers to perform. The NDIA already performs many of these functions for Agency-managed participants. Reabsorption would eliminate the structural conflicts of interest in the private market, redirect administrative fees toward direct support, and place oversight with a single accountable public agency rather than fragmenting it across hundreds of private providers of varying quality. We acknowledge this would represent a significant structural change, but the persistent failures of the private market and the inability of existing oversight to address them suggest it warrants serious consideration.

3.4 Recommendation

We recommend that the Committee reject the proposed plan management panel model. In its place, the Committee should consider the reforms outlined in Section 3.3—the separation of plan management from other service delivery, the prohibition of steering and no-poaching practices, substantially strengthened compliance enforcement, and the possible reabsorption of plan management functions by the NDIA. These reforms address the underlying quality and conflict of interest concerns that the panel model fails to resolve, without unnecessarily restricting participant choice or competition.

4. Concerns Regarding the Expansion of Mandatory

Registration

4.1 Support for Registration in Principle

Green Pathways supports the principle that all NDIS providers should be registered. Registration should serve as a mechanism to ensure quality standards, safeguard participants, and build confidence in the NDIS market. We believe that a robust registration system is essential to protecting the people the Scheme is designed to serve.

However, we oppose the expansion of mandatory registration under the current audit and registration system. The system as it stands is unreliable, inaccessible, and in some cases harmful to the very providers it is intended to regulate.

4.2 The Current System Is Broken

There are many registered providers who have been caught doing the wrong thing— engaging in fraud, delivering substandard care, and breaching participant safety obligations. Registration at this current time does not guarantee quality or safety. If the existing registration process cannot prevent non-compliant providers from entering and remaining in the market, then mandating that more providers undergo the same flawed process will not achieve its stated objective. It will simply impose additional costs on compliant providers while failing to deter those who operate outside the rules.

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4.3 Green Pathways’ Experience: Three Attempts at Registration

Green Pathways is currently on its third attempt at achieving NDIS registration. Our first two attempts were not unsuccessful because of any deficiency in our service delivery, governance, or compliance. They failed because of systemic failures within the audit process itself. Our organisation has spent over $12,000 on registration audits with no successful outcome to date.

First attempt – Auditing company insolvency: We engaged an NDIS-approved auditing company, JPS, to conduct our registration audit. Midway through the audit process, JPS became insolvent. We were unable to recover the fees we had already paid, and the audit work that had been completed was rendered useless. We were left with no audit outcome and no refund, and were forced to start the process again entirely at our own cost.

This raises a fundamental question about the integrity of the audit system: the NDIS currently has no mechanism to identify whether an auditing body or NDIS business is financially distressed or at risk of insolvency. Providers and participants are unknowingly exposed to this risk. The Government requires providers to undergo audits conducted by private, third-party companies, yet there is no oversight or financial assurance framework protecting providers when those companies fail.

Second attempt – Auditor bias and procedural unfairness: We subsequently engaged another auditing company to conduct our registration audit. We are currently contesting the audit report through JAS-ANZ (the Joint Accreditation System of Australia and New Zealand) on the grounds that the lead auditor who conducted the audit demonstrated bias and placed our organisation at a technical disadvantage during the audit process.

This experience highlights a broader concern: there is no independent, accessible, or affordable complaints or appeals mechanism for providers who are subjected to unfair or incompetent audits. The only recourse is through JAS-ANZ—a body that accredits the auditors and therefore has a potential conflict of interest in adjudicating complaints about them.

4.4 Systemic Risks of Expanding Mandatory Registration

Expanding mandatory registration without addressing these systemic failures will produce several harmful outcomes:

• Financial harm to small providers: Audits are expensive. Small providers who fail audits due to auditor incompetence or bias—not their own non-compliance—are forced to pay again. Many cannot absorb these costs and will exit the market, reducing participant choice, particularly in regional and rural areas.

• Market concentration: Mandatory registration disproportionately burdens small and medium-sized providers. Larger providers can absorb audit costs and administrative burdens more easily, leading to market concentration and reduced competition— ultimately harming participants.

• No protection when auditors fail: The JPS insolvency demonstrates that providers bear the full risk when a government-approved auditing company collapses. There is no insurance, no compensation mechanism, and no government guarantee.

• Perverse outcomes: A system that mandates registration but cannot guarantee a fair, reliable, or accessible pathway to registration will disproportionately harm

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compliant, good-faith providers while doing little to deter genuinely non-compliant operators.

4.5 The Audit and Registration System Itself Has Been Privatised

The same pattern of privatisation that has produced poor outcomes elsewhere in the NDIS exists within the audit and registration system itself. The function of auditing NDIS providers —assessing compliance with the NDIS Practice Standards, the Code of Conduct, and the registration requirements—has been outsourced to private auditing companies operating under the JAS-ANZ accreditation framework. The Government does not conduct these audits directly. Instead, providers are required to pay private third-party companies, which the Government has accredited, to conduct the assessments that determine their eligibility to operate.

This privatised model has produced predictable consequences:

• No protection when private auditors fail. As our experience with JPS demonstrates, when a private auditing company becomes insolvent, providers bear the full financial loss with no mechanism for recovery and no recourse.

• Commercial tensions within the audit market. Auditing companies operate as commercial enterprises, competing for provider business, while simultaneously being the gatekeepers of regulatory compliance. This creates structural tensions between commercial viability and regulatory rigour that do not exist in publicly delivered regulation.

• Lack of independent oversight of auditors. The body that accredits auditors (JAS- ANZ) is the same body that adjudicates complaints about them. There is no truly independent oversight of the auditing market, and providers who experience procedural unfairness have no meaningful avenue for review.

• Audit outcomes are a lucky dip. The outcome of an audit depends as much on the particular auditor assigned as on the actual quality of the provider. Different auditors interpret the NDIS Practice Standards and indicators differently, apply different levels of rigour, and bring vastly different levels of understanding of what it means to run a small or medium-sized provider business. A provider can pass an audit conducted by one auditor and fail an identical audit conducted by another. The result is not the regulatory consistency that registration is supposed to deliver—it is a lottery in which a provider’s ability to operate depends on which auditor they draw. This is simply not good enough for a function that determines whether a provider can continue to deliver supports to participants.

• A direct financial incentive to fail providers. The privatised audit market creates a structural financial incentive for auditing companies to find against providers. When a provider fails an audit, they are typically required to engage further audit work—either repeat assessments, follow-up audits to verify rectification of findings, or fresh audits if the original outcome is unable to be remedied—all of which generates additional revenue for the auditing company. There is no structural separation between the auditor’s commercial interest and the regulatory outcome they deliver. In any other regulatory context, a body whose income increases when it makes adverse findings against those it regulates would be considered to have an unacceptable conflict of interest. In the NDIS audit market, this arrangement is the norm.

• No financial remedy when auditors are found to be at fault. Even where JAS- ANZ does find that an auditor has acted improperly or conducted an audit unfairly,

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JAS-ANZ has no power to require the auditing company to refund the cost of the audit to the affected provider. A provider can have a flawed audit, contest it successfully through JAS-ANZ, and still be left bearing the full financial cost of the original audit—often thousands of dollars—and then be required to pay again for a fresh audit with a different auditor. There is no financial accountability for auditing companies that do the wrong thing, and no financial protection for the providers they harm. This is a system in which the regulatory body acknowledges the problem but has no power to remedy it.

• Costs passed on to providers and ultimately participants. The full cost of the privatised audit market is borne by providers, and is ultimately reflected in the cost and structure of services delivered to participants. Public regulatory functions financed through private fees produce both inequity (small providers cannot absorb the cost) and inefficiency (every provider pays a private market rate for what should be a standardised regulatory function).

Just as the persistent failures of private plan management warrant serious consideration of reform, including possible reabsorption by the NDIA, the persistent failures of the privatised audit and registration system warrant the same. If registration is to be the safeguard the Government claims it is, the system that decides who gets registered cannot itself be a private market with the same structural flaws. Bringing audit and registration functions back into the NDIS Commission, or under direct NDIA delivery, would resolve the conflicts of interest, eliminate the financial risk to providers from auditor insolvency, ensure consistency of outcomes, and place public regulatory functions under public accountability.

4.6 Recommendation

We recommend that mandatory registration not be expanded until the audit and registration system has been fundamentally reformed. Specifically:

7. The NDIS Commission should either conduct audits in-house or establish a government-managed auditing panel with strict financial solvency requirements, insurance protections, and auditor conduct standards.

8. A financial protection mechanism should be established so that providers are not left bearing the full cost when an auditing company becomes insolvent or an audit is conducted unfairly.

9. The NDIS Commission should implement solvency monitoring and early-warning mechanisms for all approved auditing bodies.

10. An independent and accessible complaints and appeals process for audit outcomes should be established, separate from JAS-ANZ.

11. The cost of audits should be proportionate and capped, with subsidies available for small providers.

12. Concerns Regarding the NDIS Quality and Safeguards

Commission

5.1 The Commission Is Not Equipped to Safeguard Participants

The NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission is the body charged with protecting participants from harm, investigating complaints, monitoring provider conduct, and taking

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enforcement action against those who breach the NDIS Act and Code of Conduct. In principle, this is the cornerstone of the safeguarding architecture of the Scheme. In practice, the Commission lacks both the powers and the operational capacity to perform this role effectively.

The Bill expands the Commission’s compliance and enforcement powers in some respects, which we support in principle. However, the more fundamental problem—that complaints are not responded to in a timely manner, that investigations are slow or do not happen at all, and that providers who are known to be acting improperly continue to operate without consequence—is not addressed by the Bill. Adding more providers to the Commission’s register, through expanded mandatory registration, will only increase the workload of a body that is already failing to meet its existing obligations.

5.2 Delays in Response to Complaints Put Participants at Risk

Complaints made to the Commission can sit for extended periods without acknowledgement, investigation, or resolution. Participants and their families who muster the courage to make a complaint—often after considerable harm has already occurred—are met with delays, silence, or outcomes that do not address the underlying issue. In the meantime, the conduct that prompted the complaint continues, often with the same provider continuing to serve the same participant or other participants.

These delays are not minor administrative inconveniences. They have real-world consequences:

• Participants remain exposed to harm. When a participant reports abusive, neglectful, or unsafe conduct, every day of delay is another day that participant or others remain at risk.

• Fraudulent and abusive practices continue. When the Commission does not respond in a timely manner, providers operating outside the rules learn that there are no real consequences. This emboldens further misconduct and signals to other providers that the rules can be ignored.

• Participants stop reporting. Families who go through the complaints process and receive no meaningful outcome lose faith in the system. They stop reporting. The Commission then operates on incomplete data, and providers with serious conduct issues fly under the radar.

• Compliant providers are penalised by association. Providers who genuinely care about quality and safety operate in a market where bad actors continue unchecked. This is professionally and morally exhausting for the support workers and providers who are doing the right thing.

5.3 Expanded Registration Without Commission Reform Will Fail

The Bill’s expansion of mandatory registration assumes that registration itself produces quality and safety. It does not. Registration is only as meaningful as the body that enforces the standards attached to it. If the Commission cannot respond to complaints in a timely way, cannot conduct effective investigations, and cannot take swift enforcement action against non-compliant providers, then registration is reduced to an administrative formality. Bad actors will register, continue to operate as they always have, and rely on the well documented delays in Commission response to escape consequence.

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Genuine safeguarding requires three things working together: clear standards, capable providers, and an enforcement body that can act decisively when standards are breached. The Bill addresses the first and seeks to expand the second through registration, but it does little to fix the third. Until the Commission is properly empowered, properly resourced, and held accountable for the timeliness of its responses, no amount of expanded registration will produce the safety outcomes the Bill claims to seek.

5.4 Recommendation

We recommend that the Committee require the following reforms to the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission before mandatory registration is expanded:

12. Mandatory statutory timeframes for acknowledgement, triage, investigation, and resolution of complaints, with published performance data against those timeframes.

13. Substantially increased resourcing of the Commission’s investigation and enforcement functions to ensure complaints are actually acted upon.

14. Stronger enforcement powers that allow the Commission to act swiftly against providers where there is credible evidence of fraud, abuse, or serious non compliance, including interim suspension powers pending investigation.

15. Independent oversight of the Commission’s own performance, including a clear complaints pathway for participants and providers who believe the Commission has failed to act on a matter.

16. Public reporting of enforcement outcomes—including investigations commenced, sanctions imposed, and providers deregistered—so participants, families, and providers can have confidence that the safeguarding system is functioning.

17. Concerns Regarding Changes to Plan Assessment and

Review

6.1 Restricting Access to Plan Reassessments

The Bill significantly restricts a participant’s right to request an unscheduled plan reassessment. Under the proposed changes, which take effect just seven days after Royal Assent, unscheduled reassessments will only be permitted in narrowly defined “exceptional circumstances.”

The Government has justified this change by pointing to the fact that one in five plans is currently subject to an unscheduled reassessment each year, and that plans grow by an average of 20 percent following reassessment. We respectfully suggest that this is evidence of a planning problem, not a reassessment problem. Plans are growing by 20 percent after reassessment because the original plans were 20 percent too low. The correct response is to fix the initial planning process, not to restrict participants’ ability to challenge inadequate plans.

The CEO of the NDIA has publicly acknowledged that NDIA staff often do not have time to read the medical reports submitted by participants. Families are required to fund and provide extensive clinical evidence—occupational therapy reports, functional capacity assessments, psychology assessments, allied health recommendations—only to have that evidence go unread. When the resulting plans are inadequate, participants must seek reassessment to

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correct them. Restricting access to reassessment, while leaving the underlying planning failures unaddressed, locks participants into plans that the system itself has acknowledged are produced without proper review of the evidence.

6.2 Ending Plan Rollovers and Forfeiting Unspent Funds

The Bill ends the practice of plan rollovers and stops unspent plan funds from being carried over into a participant’s next plan. This change creates perverse incentives. Participants who manage their funds carefully, who go without supports during good periods so that they have resources available for periods of greater need, will lose those savings at the end of each plan. The system will effectively punish prudent participants and force unnecessary spending in the final months of each plan to avoid forfeiting funds.

6.3 Budget Resets Triggered by Plan Review

From 1 October 2026, social, civic and community participation budgets will be reduced by an average of 50 percent, and capacity building daily activity budgets by 10 percent. These reductions will be applied progressively as plans are reviewed or renewed. The Government’s stated aim is to reduce average plan size from approximately $31,000 to $26,000.

This is the precise reason participants are already afraid of plan reviews. The act of seeking a review now triggers a substantial automatic reduction in funding for two important support categories. This is not reform—it is a system designed to penalise participants for engaging with it. Participants who genuinely need a review of their plan, whose circumstances have changed for the worse, will face the impossible choice between going without supports or losing existing funding to obtain what they need.

6.4 Removal of Human Discretion Through New Framework Planning

From 1 April 2027, new framework planning will replace the current line-by-line planning conversation with a structured assessment process. The data entered into a support needs assessment tool will be translated, via a budget method, into a plan budget. This shifts decision-making about a participant’s supports away from human planners and toward an algorithmic process.

The Bill also introduces provisions explicitly supporting automated administrative decision making. While automation may improve consistency on routine matters, the supports a participant receives are not routine. They are deeply personal, context-dependent, and shaped by factors that cannot be adequately captured in a structured assessment tool. Removing human discretion from these decisions risks producing inconsistent and inappropriate outcomes at scale—with limited mechanisms for correction, given the simultaneous restrictions on reassessment.

The lessons of Robodebt should be fresh in the Committee’s mind. An automated administrative system, applied to vulnerable people, with limited human review, produced devastating outcomes that took years to acknowledge and remedy. This Bill creates the conditions for a similar failure in the NDIS, despite the Government’s assurances that the mistakes of the past will not be repeated.

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6.5 Recommendation

We recommend that the restrictions on unscheduled plan reassessments be removed, and that the underlying planning failures be addressed instead through mandatory engagement with clinical evidence, training for planners, and accountability for decisions inconsistent with the evidence provided. Plan rollovers and the carry-over of unspent funds should be retained. Budget resets should not be triggered automatically by the act of plan review. And no administrative decision affecting a participant’s supports should be made without human review.

7. Concerns Regarding the Concentration of Power in the

Minister

7.1 A Service Created for the People Must Be Decided by the People

The NDIS was created for the people of Australia. It supports more than 660,000 Australians with permanent and significant disability, their families, their carers, and the workforce that delivers their supports. A service of this scale and significance, established by an Act of Parliament and funded by the taxpayer, must remain accountable to the Parliament that created it. Major changes to how that service operates should be debated and voted on by the elected representatives of the people. No single person should have the power to fundamentally reshape the NDIS by ministerial decree.

The Bill, as currently drafted, hands an extraordinary concentration of power to one office— the Minister for Disability and the NDIS. This is, in our view, the most serious concern raised by the Bill. Whether the current Minister is well-intentioned or not is beside the point. Legislation must be drafted for every future occupant of an office, in every future political context. No person in Australia should hold the powers this Bill creates.

7.2 What the Bill Gives to the Minister

Under the Bill, the Minister will have unilateral or near-unilateral authority over:

• All NDIS pricing decisions. Pricing for every support, currently determined with reference to independent advice, will be set by ministerial legislative instrument. These instruments do not sunset automatically and cannot be disallowed by Parliament. A price set today can remain in force indefinitely, with no further parliamentary review.

• The power to cut whole categories of funding across all participants. The Minister can reduce funding for a category of supports by any percentage, applied simultaneously to every participant in that category. No individual assessment. No consideration of specific needs. No parliamentary vote. Plans then auto-renew with the reduction in place.

• The design of the support needs assessment tool and budget method. The Minister determines how participants are assessed and how their assessment results translate into funding. This is the engine of every plan budget under the new framework, and it is controlled by ministerial instrument.

• The composition of the Technical Advisory Group. The Minister selects the members of the body advising on functional capacity assessment frameworks—

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effectively choosing who shapes the architecture of disability assessment in Australia.

• The commissioning of support coordination providers. From 1 July 2028, the Minister (through the Agency) determines which providers can deliver support coordination. Participants will be assigned providers from the Minister’s panel rather than choosing their own.

• The plan management provider panel. The Minister approves the panel of plan management providers that participants will be required to choose from, effectively removing participant choice from the market.

• Automated administrative decision-making. The Minister sets the parameters within which automated systems can make administrative decisions affecting participants, without a requirement for human review of any individual decision.

• Transitional rule-making powers. Under Schedule 5, the Minister has broad authority to make transitional rules dealing with virtually any matter arising from the amendments.

• Indexation of old framework plans. The Minister determines how existing plans are adjusted over time.

7.3 The Loss of Parliamentary Oversight

Many of these powers are exercised through legislative instruments that do not sunset and cannot be disallowed by Parliament. The structure of the Bill removes the checks that ordinarily apply to executive decision-making. The Minister can set prices, cut budgets, design assessment tools, and reshape provider markets without returning to Parliament for approval. This is a fundamental shift in the constitutional balance of the Scheme. The NDIS was created by Parliament through legislation. Its future direction should remain accountable to that same Parliament.

The Minister, in his second reading speech, stated that the Government will not repeat the mistakes of Robodebt. We respectfully observe that Robodebt was built on exactly this kind of centralised, instrument-based, algorithmic decision-making, applied to vulnerable people, with limited parliamentary oversight and limited individual review. The lesson of Robodebt is not simply that automated systems can produce wrong results. It is that placing too much power in too few hands, with too little scrutiny, creates the conditions for harm at scale.

7.4 Recommendation

We recommend that the Committee require the following amendments before this Bill proceeds:

17. All major decisions affecting participant funding, eligibility, pricing, and assessment methodology should be made through legislative instruments that are subject to parliamentary disallowance.

18. Ministerial instruments setting NDIS prices should include sunset provisions, requiring periodic review and re-authorisation.

19. The power to reduce funding across whole categories of supports should be removed, or at minimum should require parliamentary approval and an independent impact assessment.

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20. Pricing decisions should remain informed by genuinely independent expert advice that the Minister cannot disregard without published justification.

21. The membership and operation of advisory bodies such as the Technical Advisory Group should be governed by transparent appointment processes, not by sole ministerial discretion.

22. The Broader Reform Needed: Sustainability Requires

Investment Beyond the NDIS

Green Pathways acknowledges that the NDIS, in its current form, is not financially sustainable at its current rate of growth. Reform is necessary. However, the kind of structural reform required to make the Scheme genuinely sustainable will take years to implement properly. Rushed legislative changes that strip people of supports before alternatives exist are not reform—they are cost-cutting at the expense of the most vulnerable.

A significant proportion of NDIS participants are on the Scheme because there are no other services available to them. The NDIS was never originally intended to be the sole safety net for every Australian with a disability, mental health condition, or developmental delay. It became that by default, because state-based services, community health services, mental health services, education supports, and aged care interfaces were systematically underfunded or never properly built in the first place. People did not choose the NDIS because it was their preferred option—they accessed it because no other service was available to assist them.

If the Government wishes to make the NDIS sustainable, it cannot simply remove people from the Scheme. It must, in parallel, invest in building and strengthening services outside the NDIS, including:

• State-funded disability services that are reliable, consistent, and adequately resourced, so people with lower-level support needs have somewhere to go that is not the NDIS.

• Community-based and mainstream services that can properly support people with mental health conditions, developmental delays, and chronic illness—many of whom are currently on the NDIS only because no alternative exists.

• Early intervention and family support services through health, education, and child and family services systems, so children and families are supported well before they reach NDIS eligibility thresholds.

• Aged care and disability interface services so that older Australians with disabilities are supported appropriately as they transition out of the NDIS.

Without parallel investment in these external services, removing people from the NDIS does not reduce demand for support—it simply pushes that demand into crisis services, hospitals, the justice system, and onto unpaid family carers who are already at breaking point. The cost does not disappear. It is shifted onto other parts of the system, and ultimately onto families.

True sustainability of the NDIS requires building the surrounding ecosystem of services that the Scheme was never meant to replace. This work will take years. The Bill, as currently drafted, attempts to take shortcuts that those years cannot accommodate.

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9. The Disability Support Workforce The disability support workforce is the foundation of the NDIS. Every day, support workers are the people who turn participants’ plans into actual lived support—assisting with personal care, building skills, supporting community participation, and providing the consistency that participants and families rely on. No legislative reform of the Scheme will succeed without a strong, stable, and well-supported workforce. This submission would not be complete without addressing the workforce issues that sit alongside the changes proposed in the Bill.

The sector is already in workforce crisis. Support workers are leaving the industry due to low pay, high levels of casualisation, inadequate training pathways, and the emotional toll of working in a sector where they often feel undervalued. The participants who suffer most when workers leave are those with complex needs and those in regional and rural areas, where replacements are hardest to find.

Reforms that further squeeze provider margins—whether through price caps, registration costs, or administrative burden—will ultimately fall on frontline workers. Providers operating on tight margins cannot offer competitive wages, invest in professional development, or provide the stable hours that allow workers to build careers in this sector. The Bill, as currently drafted, does not address these underlying workforce pressures, and risks making them worse.

Any genuine reform of the NDIS must include parallel investment in the workforce that delivers it. This includes:

• Fair and sustainable pay rates that reflect the skill, responsibility, and emotional labour involved in disability support work.

• Investment in training and qualifications so that support workers are properly equipped to support people with complex needs and have clear career progression pathways.

• Reduction of casualisation by creating funding structures that allow providers to offer stable, ongoing hours rather than precarious short-shift work.

• Workforce attraction and retention initiatives targeted at regional and rural areas, where workforce shortages are most acute.

• Alignment between NDIS pricing and Fair Work requirements under the SCHADS Award. There is a persistent and damaging disconnect between NDIS pricing arrangements and the wage and conditions obligations that providers must meet under the Social, Community, Home Care and Disability Services Industry Award (SCHADS). NDIS price limits and planning assumptions frequently do not reflect what providers are legally required to pay support workers under SCHADS for matters such as broken shifts, minimum engagement periods, kilometre allowances, sleepover rates, overtime, and shift loadings. The result is that providers must choose between complying with their Fair Work obligations and remaining financially viable. Workers, in turn, are denied entitlements to which they are legally entitled, because providers cannot afford to pay them at the rates the NDIS funds. Any genuine reform of the Scheme must include proper cross-planning between the NDIA, the NDIS Commission, the Fair Work Ombudsman, and the Fair Work Commission so that NDIS pricing keeps pace with the legal cost of delivering supports. This is not a matter of provider profitability—it is a matter of workers being paid what the law says they are owed.

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A reformed NDIS without a supported workforce is not reform at all. It is a system that has cut its costs by cutting the people who deliver it.

10. Conclusion We support the goal of securing the NDIS for future generations. However, the provisions outlined in this Bill, as they currently stand, risk causing significant harm to the very people the Scheme was designed to protect—participants, the workers who support them, and the providers who employ them.

Children should not be removed from the NDIS before a proven alternative is operational. The plan management panel model should be rejected in favour of reforms that address conflicts of interest, with consideration given to the NDIA reabsorbing the function entirely. Mandatory registration should not be expanded until the audit and registration system can guarantee fairness, reliability, and financial protection for providers—and until the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission is properly empowered and resourced to act on complaints in a timely way. Participants must retain the right to request a plan reassessment when their circumstances change, and no decision about a person’s supports should be made without human review. The sweeping new powers concentrated in the Minister must be rebalanced, with parliamentary oversight restored, because no person in Australia should hold the power this Bill seeks to grant. No reform of the NDIS will achieve true sustainability without parallel investment in the services outside the Scheme that should have been built long ago. And no reform will succeed without an equivalent investment in the workforce that delivers it.

11. Personal Statement I wish to add a personal reflection to this submission. I am a support worker who has worked in the disability sector for over 10 years. I have completed my Certificate III in Individual Support, my Certificate IV in Disability, and my Diploma of Community Services. I have invested an enormous amount of time, energy, and personal resources into studying, training, and building my expertise in this industry because I am deeply passionate about supporting people with disabilities to live their best lives.

Despite this commitment, what has happened to our small provider through the registration process has almost pushed me past my breaking point. The financial losses, the procedural failures, the lack of accountability from auditing bodies, and the absence of any meaningful support or recourse for small providers who are doing the right thing—it has been devastating, both professionally and personally.

What makes it all the more exhausting is watching other providers—providers we know are doing the wrong thing, providers who are operating fraudulently—continue to operate and get away with it. The system that is supposed to protect participants is failing to hold bad actors to account, while simultaneously punishing the providers who are trying to do things properly. That is not a system that is working. That is a system that rewards non-compliance and penalises good faith.

Beyond the impact on providers, the proposed changes to the NDIS have caused enormous anxiety across the disability community. Many of our participants are already in crisis. They are already struggling with inadequate supports, long wait times, and a system that is difficult to navigate. The announcement of sweeping legislative changes—without providing

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anywhere near enough information about how they will actually be implemented—has only compounded that distress. The Government has proposed fundamental changes to how the Scheme operates, yet it still does not appear to know the detail of how these changes will work in practice. Participants and their families deserve certainty, not vague promises and policy frameworks that have not yet been developed.

It is also important to acknowledge that significant cuts to participants and their funding are already happening on the ground. Many of our participants and their families are now too afraid to apply for a plan review or to request a Change of Circumstances assessment, even when their needs have genuinely increased. They fear that engaging with the system will result in them ending up with less funding than they currently have, leaving them worse off than before. This fear is well-founded—we have seen it happen. The result is that participants are choosing to go without supports they need rather than risk losing the limited supports they already have. This is not a system that is functioning as it was intended. It is a system that is now actively discouraging participants from seeking help.

The only reason I am still here is because of our participants—people who have no choice over the situation they are in—and the warrior mums, dads, and primary carers who have no choice but to keep pushing on every single day. They do not have the option of giving up. They cannot walk away. For many of them, the alternative is to relinquish the care of their loved ones, and no family should ever be forced into that position.

If this system is driving out the providers who genuinely care—the ones who stay because they believe in the people they support—then we must ask ourselves who will be left. The Committee has an opportunity to ensure this Bill strengthens the NDIS for the people who depend on it, rather than dismantling the very community of providers and families who are holding it together.

Green Pathways respectfully requests that the Committee consider these concerns and recommend amendments to the Bill that protect participants, support compliant providers, and ensure the integrity of the systems intended to safeguard quality and safety in the NDIS.

Verity Morris

Founder & Director

Green Pathways Disability Support Provider Pty Ltd

https://greenpathways.com.au

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