Submission to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation

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

By Date: 31 May 2026

Introduction

Dear Committee, I’m . Professionally, I’ve worked in the disability sector for 11 years, with 7 of those years being more specifically the Disability Rights and Advocacy sector. I’ve also completed a post-graduate certificate in Disability and Inclusion at Deakin University. I’ve worked for two organisations as an Individual Disability Advocate (Melbourne East Disability Advocacy – MEDA and Action for More Independence and Dignity in Accommodation – AMIDA). For the past 5 years I’ve to work on SARU’s NDIA DRCO work, where SARU is contracted by the NDIS (through a subcontract with AFDO) to give advice to the NDIA.

I’ve lived with various fluctuating impairments across my life. I’ve also spent my whole personal and working life immersed in a community of people with disability; with my sister and many of our family friends having an intellectual disability, and my working life being in the disability rights community.

I’m writing this as a personal submission because this NDIS has changed my family’s life, my colleagues lives and the lives of all the people in the disabled community I know and love.

I am deeply scared and fearful about the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 (the Bill) and the process by which it is being progressed. I support the need for reform and change, but what is being proposed in this bill, if passed, I believe could create devastating damage to the scheme, and to the hundreds of thousands of lives it supports.

The NDIS represents one of Australia’s most significant social reforms. Changes of this magnitude must be developed transparently, with genuine co-design with people with disability, and subject to meaningful public scrutiny. This Bill fails on all three counts.

I write in strong support of the submissions made by Women With Disabilities Australia (WWDA) and Sam Paior to this inquiry, and ask the Committee to read these submissions alongside my own.

WWDA’s submission identifies the gendered risks of this Bill with particular clarity, including the way support cuts shift unpaid care onto women and families, the risk of gender bias being embedded in future evidence rules and assessment tools, and the documented fact that the NDS already underserves women relative to their share of the disability population. Sam Paior’s submission is extensive and forensic, and I am reluctant to summarise it here for fear of flattening the weight of any single issue she raises. I ask the Committee to read it in full. Both submissions give voice to concerns I share but have not had the capacity to fully articulate within this timeframe. That I could not address them is itself a consequence of the two-week submission window, the same problem I identify in Section 1 of this submission.

Do not pass this bill

Recommendation 1: The bill does not pass This Bill should not be passed. I mirror Jarrod Sandell-Hay’s position that the Bill “presents an unacceptable level of risk to disabled people, NDIS participants, families, workers, providers, state and territory service systems, and the long-term integrity of the NDIS. The Bill should be withdrawn”. The Government should recommence the reform process in genuine partnership and co-design with disabled people, families and their representative organisations, consistent with the principle of nothing about us without us. As Chris Coombes highlights in his submission, reform should recentre sustainable solutions “that truly align with the Convention on the Rights of People with Disability and the Royal Commission”.

50% If This Bill Passes.

Two weeks is not enough time for any of this, and the inadequacy is not evenly distributed. The people most likely to experience the most serious consequences of this Bill are precisely those least able to participate in a rushed process. People with high support needs, people with intellectual disability or acquired brain injury, people with complex communication support needs including the Deafblind community, and people living with multiple interacting impairments are not peripheral to this inquiry. They are its central concern. Yet the timeframe effectively excludes them.

This is not simply a procedural unfairness. It means the Committee is being asked to assess the safety and impact of these changes without adequate evidence from the people who will feel them most acutely. Parliament cannot know what this Bill will mean for people in those situations, and the rushed timeframe ensures it cannot find out before the Bill passes.

Senate committee inquiries into major social legislation typically run for six to eight weeks at minimum, specifically to enable broad community participation. A two-week window departs from that convention and signals that the Government is prioritising speed over scrutiny. The voices of disabled people are being treated as an afterthought in a process that will fundamentally reshape their lives.

Newly proposed Ministerial Powers Are Dangerous And Undemocratic

Recommendation 3: The ministerial support determination power should be removed from the Bill.

Recommendation 4: If new ministerial powers are retained, full merits review rights must be reinstated for any participant affected by a support determination.

Personally, the most alarming aspect of this Bill Is the creation of a new ministerial power to make “support determinations”, legislative instruments that can reduce funding available for any category of supports across all participant plans by a specified percentage. This newly proposed ministerial power Is dangerous and undemocratic.

This power allows the Minister to:

Reduce funding across any support category: including daily living, social participation, capacity building, or assistive technology
Target particular classes of participants
Do so without any obligation to consult anyone, including affected participants beforehand Critically, cuts made through support determinations are explicitly excluded from merits review. Individual participants cannot challenge a reduction through the Administrative Review Tribunal, even if the cut leaves them without sufficient support to meet their disability-related needs or live safely.

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The safeguards for this new power are insufficient. The only explicit safeguard is a requirement in section 34A(3) for the Minister to consider, before making a determination, whether cuts could place participants at risk of neglect, crisis, or loss of essential functioning. This is a pre-decision “consideration” only, not an ongoing monitoring obligation, not a trigger for review if harm occurs, and not a right that participants can enforce.

There is no provision for:

Class or systemic review of support determination outcomes
Any obligation on the NDIA or Minister to review a determination if evidence of harm emerges
Participants to challenge a determination that leaves them in unsafe circumstances

The memorandum justifies the exclusion from merits review on the basis that these are “legislative-like decisions of broad application.” But this reasoning obscures the real impact: for individual participants, a 50% cut to their Social and Community Participation is not an abstract legislative policy, it is a decision about whether they can leave their home, have a job, have relationships or get to essential medical appointments. The lived consequences are entirely individual, and the inability to seek review is a profound denial of procedural fairness.

This represents a fundamental shift away from the scheme’s original foundation of individual reasonable and necessary support, toward a system of top-down budget management with no meaningful accountability to the people it governs.

Do not allow cuts to supports that are not based on individual assessment of need

Recommendation 5: The Committee should reject any cuts to supports that are not based on individual assessment of need.

Cuts to Social and Community Participation will cause serious harm. Proposed cuts of 50 per cent to social and community participation (SCP) supports are not a budget measure. They are a direct threat to people’s safety, wellbeing, rights and basic life standards.

What SCP supports actually do

Social and community participation supports are what make a life in community possible for many people with disability. They enable people to leave the house, access their community and make and maintain relationships; attend appointments, run errands, manage everyday life; work or study; engage in civic participation, co-design processes, community governance; and engage in civic life as full citizens.

They also do something less visible but equally important: they prevent crisis. They reduce the pressure, burnout, and health impacts on disabled people, families and informal carers. And they reduce the risk of abuse, violence, exploitation, and

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neglect; risks the Disability Royal Commission found are significantly higher in closed, isolated, and segregated settings.

These supports are not extras. For many people with disability, SCP funding is what makes community participation possible at all. Cutting it does not save the scheme. It shifts costs: onto individuals, families, informal carers, and downstream health, community and crisis services, and it creates the very harms the NDIS was designed to prevent. As Jarrod Sandell-Hay’s submission notes, isolation is a safeguarding risk: when disabled people are cut off from community, the risk of abuse, neglect, violence, poor mental health, carer burnout, and crisis increases.

SCP funding is also what enables some of the most systematically excluded people with disability to participate in co-design, advisory, leadership, and civic processes at all: including people with intellectual disability, people with acquired brain injury, and people with complex communication support needs such as those who are Deafblind. For these communities, SCP funding is not a pathway to participation. It is the only pathway.

Cutting these supports while imposing a two-week submission window is a compounding exclusion. The people most likely to be harmed by this Bill are precisely those who have been most effectively prevented from saying so: and who will have the least capacity to raise the alarm when these changes begin to affect their safety, health, and basic living standards.

An example of what SCP cuts mean in practice: a personal account

I want to share an example of how the new ministerial powers, alongside SCP cuts would impact my sister and our family. Please note that this is just one way that one person and their family will be impacted, out of the hundreds of thousands of people effected. This is about my sister, who has access to our immediate family as her informal supports, but has the right and wish to not rely on these informal supports to live her life and access the community.

My sister is 27. She has Williams Syndrome, which for her presents as an intellectual disability; also accompanied with lack of depth perception, limited coordination, significant generalised anxiety with daily challenges with emotional regulation, and sensory sensitivities. She also lives with OCD, which interacts with her Williams Syndrome in ways that require skilled, consistent, and trusted support. She has high and complex support needs, and requires full-time supports to live safely and well.

My sister, like any 27-year-old, has her own dreams and her own right to a life built on her terms; a life in which she is not defined by her family’s capacity to support her, but by what she wants and who she is.

Our parents are not well. Our mum has a heart condition and has been hospitalised multiple times over the years. Like many heart conditions, our mum’s condition is worsened by stress. Our dad also has stage 4 prostate cancer, and we don’t know to what extent this will shorten his life.

Growing up without the NDIS

I didn’t feel I got to be my sister’s sibling or peer, as I was needed in a second carer capacity (with our mum as the primary full time carer, myp dad being at work, and mysister and mum both needing relief from each other at times). When I was 18, my parents spoke about their wishes for when they pass away, and it was clear our mum hoped I would become my sister’s primary carer. This is a power dynamic that neither my sister nor I want, as it gets in the way of what we really want, which is just to be peers, to be siblings. We’ve been in this carer power dynamic since I was a child, and both my sister and I want to move away from this. It doesn’t feel good for either of us. I’m also making plans with my wife to start our own family in the next few years, and committing to a future primary carer role for my sister who needs full time supports would mean I wouldn’t have the capacity to support the family I want to create with my wife. But when my parents and I had the conversation about my sister’s future supports there was no certainty about what meaningful, safe supports and choices might exist for my sister. So it felt like there was no choice, I said yes, and for years I avoided conversations about starting a family with my then-partner.

Then, last December, everything changed. With the support of a trusted Support Coordinator, mysister found a Supported Independent Living arrangement she genuinely loves; close to our parents, with housemates she’s befriended, and with staff she feels comfortable, happy and safe with. She is living the life she wants and deserves. She has her own home with housemates and support workers she has chosen. My sister is beaming, proud and excited for life. She finally gets to be independent of her parents, and have a relationship with them on her terms, no longer having to rely on them for her everyday supports as an adult. Essential to this happiness, safety and wellbeing is that she also has supports to leave this new home. She goes to a day program she loves, has made many friends there, she has supports to access the community, exercise, get to appointments, maintain relationships and just get out of the house when she needs to. Her main support worker at the day program she goes to told us she has never seen her this happy. Watching this life change happen for my sister has been a deep, emotional relief for all of us in the family. Myparents, both managing serious health conditions, are living with significantly less stress. They finally feel my sister will be ok and have the support she needs to live a happy, safe, ordinary life even if they are not around anymore. They can also partly retire, make plans with friends and watch TV series together. They have the time and capacity to just be with each other. And because I know mysister is safe and happy with supports outside of the family home, I have been able to talk openly with my family about what both my sister and I actually want, to just be siblings, and I have been able to start thinking about starting my own family, without that meaning my sister’s future safety or wellbeing is at risk.

If this Bill passes, it will dismantle all of this.

Cuts of this scale to SCP supports will mean my sister and her housemates, who require support at all times will be confined to their home majority of the time. As we’ve learnt from the Disability Royal Commission, the isolation and segregation that follows will put her at high risk of abuse, violence, neglect or exploitation within the home. My sister’s happiness, wellbeing and sense of self will dramatically decline.

The life she has worked hard to build, her community and her independence will be taken from her. To attempt to address this, she is likely to move back in with our family, not because any of us want that, but because it will be the only choice that keeps her somewhat safe and connected to the world. Her happiness, wellbeing and sense of self will continue to decline. My mother’s heart condition will worsen under the stress of the immediate situation and the weight of not knowing what will happen to my sister when they are gone. Because of her condition, this will raise her likelihood of hospital admissions, stroke and heart attack. My dad will spend the unknown time he has left managing his own health, my mother’s health and sitting with the unknown of my sister’s future. My sister and I will lose the security that has, for the first time, made it feel possible to imagine not being in a carer dynamic in our future, and the security that allows me to have my own children; because we will no longer know that my sister can access the quality, safe supports she needs both within a home and to access the community, without a family member stepping back into a caring role none of us, including my sister, want.

No 27-year-old should have their independence stripped because the Government cut the funding that made it possible. No family should be forced into a situation where the only way to keep a person safe and connected to the world is to have them move back in with ageing, unwell parents. That is not a choice; it is being left with no choice. This is just how one family will be impacted. There are hundreds of thousands more.

New Planning Framework Recommendations

Recommendation 6: Robust, accessible review and appeal processes must be legislated before the I-CAN assessment is implemented.

Recommendation 7: People with disability (including people with multiple disabilities, Deafblind people, people with intellectual disability and people with an ABI and their representative organisations should be involved in ensuring the I-CAN assessment tool is accessible for all, and meaningful, accurately and safely captures support needs before implementation. This must include people who experience challenges with self-reporting support needs, but who do not have informal supports to assist in supported decision making processes.

Recommendation 8: Easy Read plan assessment material are tested with people who use Easy Read to ensure they are accessible, suitable and produce outcomes that meet the needs of the people using them. This needs to occur before new ways of assessing plans is rolled out for people who use Easy Read.

The Bill introduces new assessment processes, including the I-CAN functional assessment tool, which will play a central role in determining participants’ support levels. I have concerns about how this process will work in practice; particularly for: -people whose needs are complex, variable, -people who find it difficult to communicate in a formal assessment setting

People who minimise their needs in formal or unfamiliar settings
People who have challenges self-reporting support needs who either: have informal supports who also have challenges communicating this person’s support needs, or who do not have any informal supports to assist in a supported decision making process The consequences of getting an assessment wrong are severe if the result is reduced funding that cannot be challenged through merits review. Unlike other administrative errors, an incorrect assessment combined with the new ministerial power creates a situation where a participant may lose supports they need to live and be safe with limited avenue for redress.

How commissioned supports erode choice The Bill enables a commissioned supports model through its pricing and scheduling provisions, particularly the changes in Schedule 3. Under this model, the parameters of what can be purchased are set centrally before a participant exercises choice. The Minister can set maximum funding amounts, intensity caps, and worker-to-participant ratios by legislative instrument, overriding an individual planner’s reasonable-and-necessary finding. This fundamentally changes the nature of choice and control in the scheme. The Bill creates conditions where:

Participants may be directed to a particular service without being able to choose a different provider
Where a commissioned service does not meet a participant’s cultural, social, or identity-based needs, there may be no alternative
The right to choose a specific support worker often built over years of relationship may be compromised

This is particularly concerning for people for whom the identity and values of their provider are not incidental, but essential. For example, LGBTIQA+ participants who have found providers they trust and are safe with, or people with disability who need culturally safe services from First Nations or community-specific organisations. A commissioned service that cannot meet these needs is not an equivalent substitute.

Missing protections The Bill contains no provision that:

Protects a participant’s right to choose a different provider if a commissioned service does not meet their needs
Establishes quality or cultural safety standards specific to commissioned services
Requires commissioned services to be accessible and appropriate for participants with complex communication needs, LGBTIQA+ identities, CALD backgrounds, or other specific requirements

Recommendation 9

Any commissioned supports model must be accompanied by legislated protections for participants’ right to choose a different provider where a commissioned service does not meet their needs.

Recommendation 10

Quality and cultural safety standards for commissioned services must be legislated, not left to policy.

Risks with additional barriers to asking for an unscheduled reassessment

Sam Paior’s submission identifies a serious problem with s 48A that I want to draw the Committee’s attention to. Drawing on her analysis: under s 48A, requesting an unscheduled reassessment has become significantly harder. The Agency now has 90 days instead of 21 to decide. The “deemed decision” safety net has been removed, meaning there is no automatic outcome if the Agency misses its deadline. And the change that triggers reassessment must be “significant and ongoing,” with informal support changes only counting if they were “unanticipated.” Most critically, the Bill creates no emergency reassessment pathway. Every unscheduled reassessment, regardless of urgency, goes into the same 90-day queue. For a participant whose support arrangement has collapsed, whose housing is at risk, or who is facing an immediate safety risk, 90 days is not a process; it is the period in which harm happens. I write in strong support of Sam Paior’s analysis of this issue and ask the Committee to read it in full.

Risks with plan suspension and revocation happening without you knowing

Sam Paior’s submission also identifies a serious problem with plan suspension and revocation under ss 40A and 30(1A) that I want to draw the Committee’s attention to. Drawing on her analysis: a participant’s plan can be suspended and then revoked after the Agency makes “reasonable attempts” to contact them. Neither “reasonable attempts” nor the minimum period over which those attempts must be spread is defined anywhere in the Bill. The Agency’s administrative discretion is the only safeguard. A participant who is in hospital, in a mental health crisis admission, overseas for a short trip, in the middle of a bereavement, or whose phone number has changed, could find their plan suspended and ultimately revoked with no protected circumstance named in the legislation. For people I work with and care about, including people with intellectual disability who may have limited capacity to manage communications independently, this is a serious and entirely foreseeable risk. I write in strong support of Sam Paior’s analysis of this issue and ask the Committee to read it in full.

Risks with needing to try ‘all appropriate treatment’ first

Sam Paior’s submission identifies a further serious problem with s 25A that I want to draw the Committee’s attention to. Drawing on her analysis: a participant must try “all

Section 25A: Implications for Access

Appropriate treatment” before their impairment can be considered permanent for NDIS access purposes. Section 25A(2) defines treatment as appropriate “regardless of whether the person’s individual circumstances restrict the person from accessing the treatment.” As Sam Paior notes, this overturns the NDIA v Davis (2022) decision.

If someone cannot afford treatment, lives five hours from the nearest specialist, or faces a years-long wait list, none of that matters for the test. This is, as she puts it, a return to the postcode lottery. It will fall hardest on First Nations people, people on low incomes, people in regional and remote areas, and people with disability-related barriers to healthcare access, including people with intellectual disability. I write in strong support of Sam Paior’s analysis of this issue and ask the Committee to read it in full.

I also want to raise additional concerns about this provision that go beyond access barriers, and reflect my own analysis as someone with professional experience in disability rights and advocacy.

The requirement to exhaust “all appropriate treatment” before an impairment is considered permanent reflects a fundamentally medical model understanding of disability: one that frames disability as a problem to be fixed rather than a characteristic of human diversity that requires support. This is directly at odds with the social model of disability that underpins both the NDIS and Australia’s obligations under the CRPD. The CRPD recognises that disability arises from the interaction between a person’s impairment and barriers in the environment, not from the impairment itself. The NDIS was designed on the premise that people with disability need support to live full lives, not treatment to become less disabled. This provision inverts that premise entirely.

For people with lifelong conditions, including intellectual disability, Down syndrome, Williams Syndrome, congenital conditions, and acquired brain injury, there is no treatment that will “materially improve” the underlying impairment. The framing of this provision implicitly treats these conditions as amenable to cure or remediation, which is both medically inaccurate and deeply stigmatising. It sends a message that people with permanent disability must first try to become less disabled before the scheme will support them. That is not a neutral administrative requirement. It is a statement about the conditions under which the Government considers a disabled person’s life worth supporting.

Perhaps most seriously, the Bill does not define what counts as “appropriate treatment,” and s 25A(2) explicitly removes individual circumstances as a consideration. This creates a real risk that people could be required to demonstrate they have tried treatments that are harmful, traumatising, or contrary to contemporary human rights standards. This includes chemical restraint, the use of psychotropic medication to manage behaviour rather than for genuine therapeutic benefit, which the Disability Royal Commission found is used extensively and often inappropriately on people with intellectual disability. It could include compliance-based behavioural interventions that many disabled people and disability rights organisations identify as harmful. It could include psychiatric treatment involving medication regimes with serious side effects that a person has legitimate clinical and personal reasons to decline. The Bill contains no safeguard requiring that treatment be safe, genuinely voluntary, or consistent with contemporary best practice. A participant who declines a treatment on the grounds that it causes them harm could find that refusal counted against them in an access decision.

Article 25 of the CRPD requires that healthcare for people with disability be provided on the basis of free and informed consent. A provision that conditions NDIS access on having tried specific treatments, regardless of individual circumstances, safety, or consent, is in direct tension with that obligation. The Committee should recommend that s 25A be amended to require that any treatment considered “appropriate” must be safe, genuinely voluntary, and consistent with the person’s right to refuse treatment under the CRPD and Australian law.

Conclusion and Recommendations

I understand and support the need for NDIS reforms; however, this bill is not the reform that is needed. This Bill, if passed in its current form, will fundamentally alter the character of the NDIS: from a scheme built on individual need, choice, and control, to one built on system-level budget management and standardised service delivery. It will strip independence from people who have worked hard to build it.

Behind every one of the hundreds of thousands of participants this Bill will affect is a story like the one I have shared in this submission: a person who has fought for the right to live on their own terms, and a family whose wellbeing is bound up in their safety and independence. This Bill puts all of that at risk. It displaces disabled people’s rights under the CRPD with a scheme redesigned around what the Government decides it has appetite to spend. It reintroduces a medical model framework that treats disability as something to be ‘cured’ or ‘fixed’ before support is warranted, including for people with lifelong impairments for whom no such ‘cure’ exists, and without safeguards to prevent people being required to try treatments that are harmful or non-consensual. It will push costs onto disabled people, families, carers, and state or crisis services. It will silence the voices of the people it most affects, through a combination of rushed consultation and cuts to the very supports that enable participation. It will create new ministerial powers to reduce funding across whole classes of participants with no right of individual review. It will embed assessment, suspension, and treatment requirements that will operate most harshly on the people with the fewest resources to navigate them. And it will do all of this before the foundational supports, assessment safeguards, and alternative service systems needed to prevent harm have been designed, tested, or made available.

The Committee is being asked to assess the safety of changes of this magnitude without adequate evidence from the people who will feel them most acutely, because the two-week timeframe has ensured they could not get here. That is not scrutiny. The Committee has an opportunity to demand better. I urge it to do so.

I ask the Senate Committee to recommend:

Recommendation 1: The Bill be withdrawn, and the Government recommence the reform process in genuine partnership with disabled people and their representative organisations, consistent with the principle of nothing about us without us.

If the Bill is not withdrawn, I ask the Senate Committee to recommend:

Recommendation 2: The submission period be extended to a timeframe that allows for meaningful community participation, with targeted engagement with the groups most likely to be affected and sufficient time to develop considered submissions with proposed alternatives.

Recommendations

Recommendation 3: The ministerial support determination power be removed from the Bill. If retained, full merits review rights must be reinstated for any participant affected by a support determination.

Recommendation 4: Any cuts to social and community participation supports be rejected unless based on individual assessment of need.

Recommendation 5: Robust, accessible review and appeal processes be legislated before the I-CAN assessment is implemented.

Recommendation 6: The I-CAN assessment framework be co-designed with people with disability and their representative organisations, including people with intellectual disability, Deafblind people, people with ABI, and people with complex communication support needs, before implementation.

Recommendation 7: Easy Read plan assessment materials be tested with people who use Easy Read to ensure they are accessible, suitable and produce outcomes that meet the needs of the people using them. This needs to occur before new assessment processes are rolled out for people who use Easy Read.

Recommendation 8: Any commissioned supports model be accompanied by legislated protections for participants’ right to choose a different provider where a commissioned service does not meet their needs.

Recommendation 9: Quality and cultural safety standards for commissioned services be legislated, not left to policy.

Recommendation 10: The 21-day decision timeframe for unscheduled reassessment requests be restored, the “deemed decision” safety net be reinstated for missed deadlines, and the “unanticipated” qualifier on informal-support changes be removed. An emergency reassessment pathway with a statutory 14-day decision timeframe be inserted for participants facing urgent safety, housing, behavioural, or support-breakdown risks.

Recommendation 11: Plan suspension and revocation processes be amended to define “reasonable attempts” at contact, require evidenced outreach across all channels over a minimum 60-day period, and include protected-circumstance exclusions for hospitalisation, mental health crisis, bereavement, and communication breakdown outside the participant’s control. The direct-revocation pathway in s 30(1A)(a) be removed.

Recommendation 12: Section 25A(2) be removed or qualified so that a participant’s individual circumstances restricting access to treatment, including geography, cost, wait lists, and disability-related access barriers, must be considered in determining whether a treatment is “appropriate” for that person.

Recommendation 13: Section 25A be amended to require that any treatment considered “appropriate” must be safe, genuinely voluntary, and consistent with the person’s right to refuse treatment under the CRPD and Australian law. The provision must include an explicit safeguard that no person can be required to try a treatment that has been found harmful, that constitutes or risks constituting a form of restraint, or that the person has declined on the basis of informed refusal.