Inquiry into the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment

(Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026

Also addressing the NDIS Amendment (Integrity and Safeguarding) Act 2026 and broader NDIS reform

Date: 1 June 2026 Submitted by: Role: Family member and carer of an NDIS participant Location: Queensland, Australia Contact:

1. Introduction

I write this submission as a family member and carer of an NDIS participant. I have a direct and personal stake in the future of the National Disability Insurance Scheme, and I appreciate the opportunity to contribute to this inquiry into the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Integrity and Safeguarding) Bill 2025.

I wish to state at the outset that I support the broad goals of this reform: a scheme that is safe, sustainable, and centred on the genuine needs of people with disability. Many of the integrity and safeguarding measures in the Bill address real problems — fraud, exploitation, and inconsistency — that harm participants and undermine public confidence in the NDIS.

However, I hold serious concerns about two aspects of the broader NDIS reform program that flow directly from this Bill and the accompanying changes being rolled out from 2026: the risk that funding will be reduced in ways that do not reflect individual need, and the design and fairness of the new support needs assessment process. I respectfully request that the Committee carefully examine these matters before the Bill is finalised and implemented.

2. My Experience as a Family Carer

I care for my daughter, who has a complex chromosomal disorder, known only as 47,XX,dup(15)(pter-q15), which renders her non-verbal, incontinent, profoundly intellectually impaired, is low tone, and lots of behavioural challenges due to not being about to express her needs, pains and emotions. She also has some cerebral palsy and has some vision impairment. She is almost 21 years of age and has been an NDIS participant since it rolled into the QLD area in 2018. In 2017, she was under the care of Disability Services QLD and Department of Child Safety, because I had a mental health episode (dissociative disorder).

The supports funded through her current plan have made a profound difference to her quality of life and to our family’s capacity to continue providing care at home. Her father is now able to return to the farm in rural QLD, whilst I manage ’s NDIS plan and team in regional QLD. I am now physically unable to provide direct care for her anymore, and we do not have any family living near us.

Prior to NDI$ support, neither her father nor I could work full-time, we were sleep-deprived ($ did not sleep through the night for the first 14 years of her life.), and I ended up with acute, and now disordered mental and physical ailments directly as a result of carer stress. I am deeply concerned that the reforms now underway — while well-intentioned — risk eroding the supports we depend on, without adequate safeguards or transitional support for families like ours.

3. Concerns Regarding Support Funding Changes

3.1 Context The Government’s NDIS reform program includes a suite of changes that will affect the quantum and type of supports participants can access. These include a revised definition of NDIS supports, new support lists limiting what NDIS funding can cover, and upcoming changes to social and community participation budgets. From October 2026, these social and community participation budgets are projected to be reduced, with funding redirected to mainstream ‘inclusive communities’ services. The Government has also committed to moderating scheme growth to an annual target of 8 per cent by 1 July 2026, with further moderation thereafter. While I understand the need for financial sustainability, I am concerned that cost-containment objectives may be driving decisions that should be guided by individual need.

3.2 Risk of Unmet Need Being Shifted to Families Research by Carers NSW (2025) indicates that family carers already experience more than double the general population rate of psychological distress, significant social isolation, and severe financial hardship. These figures point to a system that is already stretched beyond capacity. Any reduction in NDIS funding that is not matched by genuinely available alternatives will, in practice, transfer care responsibilities to unpaid family members — predominantly women. The Mental Health Carers NSW has stated clearly that ‘families and carers are not a policy contingency.’ I endorse this view entirely. Alternative ‘foundational supports’ or ‘inclusive communities’ services are not yet widely available. Reducing NDIS supports before these alternatives are operational and accessible will leave participants without care. I am also concerned by the emerging changes to plan reassessments. From July 2026, reassessments for changed circumstances will only be supported in exceptional circumstances. This rigidity could prevent families from obtaining adequate supports as a participant’s condition changes, without any meaningful avenue for review.

3.3 Recommendations I respectfully request the Committee consider the following recommendations in relation to funding:

• No reduction in NDIS funding should occur before viable, adequately funded alternative services are available and accessible in a participant’s local area.
• Where plan variations reduce total funding, participants and their families should receive plain-language written reasons and have access to an independent review through the Administrative Review Tribunal (ART).
• The reassessment restrictions proposed for July 2026 should be subject to a review mechanism that allows families to seek reassessment when there is a documented deterioration in the participant’s condition or support needs.
• Carers and family members should be explicitly recognised as key contributors to the NDIS ecosystem and their sustainability should be considered in scheme modelling.

4. Concerns Regarding the New Support Needs Assessment Process

4.1 Context

A central feature of the new NDIS planning framework — now scheduled to begin rolling out from April 2027 — is a new support needs assessment (sometimes referred to as the I-CAN tool). This replaces much of the existing evidence-gathering process, with a standardised assessment conducted by an NDIA-appointed assessor. The Government has stated that the assessment will be a ‘guided conversation’ involving participants, families and carers, and that it will inform what supports are included in a plan. The intention to create fairer and more consistent budgets is understood and, in principle, supported.

4.2 Risk of Standardisation Failing Complex Needs

My key concern is that a standardised tool may not adequately capture the functional complexity of some disabilities. This risk has been identified by allied health professionals and advocacy organisations. A more standardised planning approach risks overlooking day-to-day variability, the cumulative impact of multiple conditions, and the informal work that families and carers contribute to managing a participant’s safety and wellbeing. There is documented precedent for this risk. Between 2020 and 2025, NDIS approval rates for people with psychosocial disabilities fell by 62%, according to the Australian Psychosocial Alliance. This occurred during a period of changed assessment approaches. An unfair or poorly calibrated assessment process does not simply produce an administrative inconvenience — it determines whether a person gets help at all. As a family carer, I am also aware of the increased documentation burden that may flow from the new framework. The Kinkera Disability Services analysis (2026) notes that planners may look more closely at the informal support families can provide, potentially increasing the expectation on unpaid carers. Families may need to provide updated reports and evidence to justify existing supports. This places a significant burden on carers who are already stretched.

4.3 Co-Design and Consultation

People with Disability Australia has recommended that consultation be elevated to a statutory ‘co- design duty’ for legislation and implementation, with transparent reporting on ‘what was heard’ and ‘what changed.’ I support this recommendation. The reforms announced in 2024 were widely criticised for being introduced without adequate co-design with the disability community. The same mistake must not be repeated with the assessment framework. In particular, the new Technical Advisory Group overseeing assessment tools must include genuine lived-experience expertise, as well as clinicians with expertise in the range of conditions represented in the scheme. Assessment tools must be tested and validated with people with disability before any broad rollout.

4.4 Recommendations

I respectfully request the Committee consider the following recommendations in relation to the support needs assessment:

• The I-CAN assessment tool should be fully co-designed with people with disability and their families before it is legislated or implemented, and the co-design process should be transparent and publicly reported.
• Assessors should be required to consider evidence provided by treating clinicians, allied health professionals, and family carers, rather than relying solely on the guided conversation at the time of assessment.
• Where an assessment results in a significant reduction from a participant’s previous plan, an independent review right should be available and accessible without cost to the participant or their family.
• The assessment framework should include specific guidance for conditions characterised by variability, invisibility, or high complexity — including psychosocial, neurological, and degenerative conditions — to prevent systemic undercounting of support needs.
• The Government should commit to a post-implementation review of the assessment framework within 12 months of rollout, with findings reported to Parliament.

Schedule 2, Part 2 of the Bill tightens the criteria for unscheduled plan reassessments.

Under the new rules, an unscheduled reassessment will only be possible when there have been significant and ongoing changes to a participant’s support needs arising from changes in their functional capacity. This creates a near-impossible threshold for many families. Disability is rarely static. Needs change with seasons, with age, with the emergence of secondary conditions, with changes in family circumstances, with the loss of informal support. The existing system already produces plans that are on average 20 per cent underfunded — the Government’s own Minister acknowledged this fact in his second reading speech. That 20 per cent average shortfall means participants are routinely requesting reassessments because their plans are wrong from the outset, not because their condition has changed.

If plans are consistently underfunded, the answer is not to make it harder to correct them. It is to fix the process that produces wrong plans in the first place. The Bill does the opposite: it locks in automated decisions, restricts the ability to seek reassessment, and removes the informal review pathways that families have relied upon when the formal system fails them.

5.4 The Right to Contest a Plan: A Fundamental Safeguard

As a family carer, the ability to contest an unsatisfactory plan is not a bureaucratic convenience — it is a fundamental safeguard against harm. When a plan fails to fund adequate supports, the shortfall is absorbed by unpaid family carers. When those carers reach their limit, the consequences fall on the participant. Review rights are not a cost to the scheme. They are the correction mechanism that catches the scheme’s own errors.

The Self Manager Hub, in its submission to this inquiry, has stated plainly: ‘Without review rights, people cannot properly challenge unfair or harmful decisions.’ Rare Voices Australia has noted that the Bill represents a shift away from the NDIS’s rights-based design that will disproportionately disadvantage people with complex, multi-system, or progressive conditions — precisely the people whose needs are most likely to be undercounted by a standardised tool and most harmed by the inability to seek review.

The Administrative Review Tribunal provides the formal external review pathway. But ART review is slow, adversarial, emotionally exhausting, and inaccessible to many families without advocacy support. Internally, the proposed rules offer no genuine mechanism to contest an algorithmically-produced plan in the critical period immediately after it is issued. The effective result is that a family receiving a plan that is plainly inadequate may have no practical avenue for correction for 12 months or more.

5.5 Ministerial Power Without Parliamentary Oversight

I also note with concern that the Bill transfers pricing decisions to the Minister for Disability and the NDIS, without adequate parliamentary oversight mechanisms. Combined with the automated plan-setting provisions and the restrictions on reassessment, this concentrates very significant power over the lives of people with disability in a single ministerial office — with limited checks, limited transparency, and limited avenues for participants and families to seek redress.

5.6 Recommendations

I respectfully request the Committee consider the following additional recommendations in relation to automated decision-making and review rights:

• The Bill must not be passed in its current form. At minimum, it requires substantial amendment before any automated plan-setting system can be considered acceptable.

• Any automated decision-making system used to set NDIS plan budgets must be subject to mandatory human review of every determination before it is issued to a participant. Automation may assist the process; it must not replace human accountability.
• The methodology underpinning any automated budgeting tool must be publicly disclosed, independently audited, and subject to parliamentary disallowance.
• Participants and their families must retain an unconditional right to request an internal review of any new plan within 90 days of receiving it, with a genuine obligation on the NDIA to engage with clinical evidence provided by treating professionals.
• The criteria for unscheduled reassessments must not be tightened until the new planning framework has been independently evaluated and shown to produce accurate and adequate plans in practice.
• Where a plan is produced by an automated system and is subsequently found on review to have been materially wrong, the NDIA must bear the cost of that review process — not the participant or their family.
• Pricing decisions must remain subject to parliamentary oversight. The transfer of unchecked pricing power to a single Minister without disallowable instruments is inconsistent with good governance and the rights of people with disability.

• Ensure any funding reductions are evidence-based, individually justified, and subject to meaningful review rights — including an unconditional 90-day internal review right for all new plans.
• Require that the I-CAN support needs assessment tool be fully co-designed with the disability community and independently validated before implementation.
• Protect the rights of family carers from having informal care burdens increased without recognition, compensation, or support.
• Extend the consultation period for major NDIS legislation to no less than 60 days, and provide accessible plain-language materials at the time of introduction.

Self Manager Hub

(May 2026) Submission to the Senate Inquiry into the NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026. hhttps://www.selfmanagerhub.org.au Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee (March 2026). Report on the NDIS Amendment (Integrity and Safeguarding) Bill 2025. NDIS Amendment (Integrity and Safeguarding) Bill 2025 8