Submission to Inquiry: The National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDS for Future Generations) Bill 2026

I am writing to you to raise some issues with the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026.

I am a retired teacher. I look after, as best I can, my wife, who has cerebral palsy (CP), and have done so for forty years. The advent of the NDIS has been for us both a great boon, and a source of much frustration and angst. I fear that the changes suggested it the Billbill will further entrench some very basic flaws in the way the NDIS is implemented.

Disability is very personal. By that I mean that the ways in which one’s body might function differ greatly between individuals. An accomodation for one person with CP will be very different to that for another person with CP. To that end the NDIS was conceived and planned so as to achieve a high degree of autonomy, to allow for accomodations that matched the actual needs of the person involved. This is an aspect of the NDIS that has always been of the utmost importance, in that the most efficient and effective way to ensure resources are adequate for our needs has been simply to ask us what we need.

Well-intentioned but remote decision-making is both less conducive to desirable outcomes and more expensive. A couple of examples from our own experience.

• eventually needed an adjusting bed. We went through the usual procedure of physio’s and OT’s, and chose an arrangement that would fit in with our lives. The reply from the NDIS asked us to consider a king size bed that would simply not have fitted into our bedroom, and then for and I to sleep in different rooms. Absurdly, these arrangements would have been not only inappropriate for us, but have cost the NDIS more in terms of equipment and care.

In anther case we applied for funding to raise a part of our floor, to accommodate a new wheel chair. We were asked to provide three quotes for a chair lift, that would have taken up most of our lounge room, was impossible to install on the existing slab, and would not in any case have solved the issue we had with moving from one side of the house to the other quickly and without stress.

Both these cases concerned the specific requirements of our very individual needs. Both were eventually resolved satisfactorily, but not without substantial input from ourselves, allied professionals and NDIS staff.

I could list further examples, but I trust that these show how hearing to what we have to say is central to both our autonomy and to making sure that NDIS funds are used effectively and efficiently.

The present Bill will serve to further remove the capacity for us to tell the NDIS about our needs, and to fix misunderstandings when they inevitably occur. The implementation of standardised functional capacity assessments, the ministerial

power to cut support budgets by category without individual assessment, and the auto-renewal of plans without reassessment all reduce the scope for individualised input. They increase the capacity of the NDIS to fail to hear.

A standardises functional assessment cannot take into account the size of our bedroom. A global cut to a support budget does not hear how funding involved is used by one individual to achieve their very specific outcomes. Automatically renewing a plan without consultation is institutionalising not listening, let alone hearing.

I am concerned that the bill as it stands will server only to worsen outcomes for the disabilities community.

At the heart of an effective support mechanism is the need for those providing support to hear and respond to the individual requirements of participants. That need would be deadened by the implementation of this Bill.

I beseech you to recommend against the Bill progressing.