Submission to the Inquiry into the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026

10 July 2026

Committee Secretary Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee PO Box 6100 Parliament House Canberra ACT 2600

Re: Submission to the Inquiry into the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026

Dear Committee Secretary,

My name is Dr redacted, MD. I am a board-certified Internal Medicine physician and the mother of redacted, an autistic child. I am writing to make a submission to this inquiry as both a parent and a clinician, to share our family’s experience of accessing diagnosis and support for redacted, and to raise concerns about how the proposed changes in this Bill would have affected — and would affect other families like ours going forward.

My position on the Bill

I do not believe this Bill should pass in its current form. My concern is not abstract. It is grounded in what it actually took, in real terms, for my son to be diagnosed and supported, and in what I now understand about how thin the margin is between families who get through that process and families who do not. The proposed tightening of eligibility criteria, the narrowing of what counts as “permanent and significant” disability, and the resourcing pressures already visible in pathways to diagnosis will, in my professional and personal assessment, push that margin further against children like redacted—and against families with far fewer resources than mine.

Our experience accessing diagnosis

e showed signs of developmental delay from around age two. Over the following year, I raised these concerns repeatedly at GP visits — multiple appointments, the same concerns, consistently. I was not taken seriously until I changed practices and found a GP willing to refer for assessment.

We were ultimately able to get e assessed and diagnosed. But I want to be direct with the Committee about why: we had private financial resources to pursue assessment outside the public pathway, and I had informal access, through friends from medical school, to people who could tell me what I was seeing mattered and that I should push for an assessment. I am a physician. I still needed a professional network and private funds to be heard. A family without

either of those things — which is to say, most families — would have been sent away at that first

practice, or the second, with no further recourse.

If assessment pathways are further strained by this Bill’s changes, whether through tighter eligibility gating, more conservative assessment criteria, or downstream effects on funded early intervention capacity, the families without private means or professional networks will be the ones who wait longest, and whose children lose the most ground during the years when intervention matters most.

The “moderate” support needs classification does not capture risk

 is currently classified as having "moderate" support needs. This classification is driven

substantially by the absence of intellectual delay. It does not reflect his actual support requirements or the actual risk profile in our household.

Until very recently, required 1:1 support because of behavioural dysregulation that could become explosive, and that directly threatened the safety of his younger sister. He has injured himself and both of his parents during periods of intense dysregulation. These are not incidental details — they describe genuine safety risk in a family home. Under the current framework, none of this shifts his classification, because the assessment is anchored to intellectual delay rather than functional impact or safety risk. I am concerned that a Bill which further narrows and formalises eligibility and support-level criteria, without addressing this gap, will entrench a system that systematically under-resources autistic children whose support needs are severe but do not present as intellectual disability. This is a well-recognised limitation in disability assessment more broadly, and I would urge the Committee to treat it as a substantive gap in this Bill rather than an edge case.

The impact on our family

The consequences of under-resourced support have fallen directly on our family. I am a US- tained physician who has been unable to progress my own transition into clinical practice in Australia, in significant part because of the intensity of coordinating ’s care and managing periods without adequate support at home. Even setting aside that transition, I have only been able to work part time, when I would, under other circumstances, be working full time. This is despite being classified as having only “moderate” support needs — a classification that, as I have described above, does not reflect the actual level of care his safety and wellbeing require.

I do not believe our situation is unusual. I am one physician among what I expect is a large number of parents of children with support needs the current framework under-recognises, who are working below their capacity, or not at all, because the support that should make full workforce participation possible simply is not funded. The economic impact of this is not limited to individual family budgets. It is a collective loss of workforce participation and productive capacity across an entire cohort of parents, disproportionately mothers, set against a government that is simultaneously trying to address workforce shortages in sectors like health. In my own case, the same system that is not adequately funding ’s support needs is also the reason a trained physician is not working full time in a health workforce that needs more of us, not fewer. I would ask the Committee to consider this not as a private hardship but as a measurable economic cost that this Bill, if anything, risks widening rather than narrowing.

Recommendations

I ask the Committee to consider the following:

1. That eligibility and support-level assessments be amended to give appropriate weight to functional impact, behavioural risk, and family/carer safety — not only the presence or absence of intellectual delay.

2. That the Bill not proceed until there is a clear, funded plan for equitable access to timely diagnosis and assessment, so that access does not continue to depend on private means or informal professional networks.

3. That the cumulative impact on family carers — including mental health, workforce participation, and safety — be explicitly modelled and reported on, rather than treated as an externality of scheme sustainability measures.

4. That the government model and publicly report the collective economic cost of under-resourced support on parent and carer workforce participation — including lost income, lost tax revenue, and lost workforce capacity in sectors such as health — as a direct offset against any projected savings from this Bill, rather than treating carer workforce loss as outside the scope of the scheme’s cost-benefit analysis.

5. That any tightening of eligibility be paired with independently evaluated, adequately funded alternative supports before implementation, not after.

Thank you for the opportunity to make this submission and for your consideration of our family’s experience.

Yours sincerely,

Dr redacted, MD Parent of