Submission 4258 — Ms Michelle Vercoe — NDIS Future Generations Bill

Submission to the Parliament of Australia | NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future

Generations) Bill 2026

Michelle Vercoe |                                           |                                                 | 1 June 2026

Single mother | Carer of two NDIS participants | Family violence survivor

WHEN ALL CHECKS AND MEASURES ARE

IN PLACE, WHAT IS THE WEIGHT IN GOLD

OF A HUMAN LIFE? OF A CHILD’S LIFE?

• Whatever the answer, this submission argues it is worth more than the supposed savings proposed by this bill.

Introduction. I am the mother of two boys with the same diagnosis, the same profile, the same family violence history, the same mother raising them. One received early NDIS access. P is relatively stable and making good progress. The other did not. L received his first plan in September 2025. By that date he had already been chemically sedated twice, sectioned by police twice, attended emergency settings in crisis, experienced over ten police and ambulance callouts in twelve months, and developed PTSD from the very systems this Bill proposes families rely on when NDIS support is removed or reduced. Our story explains how a child with Autism Spectrum Disorder Level 2, ADHD, a Pathological Demand Avoidance profile, complex trauma history, PTSD, and suicidal ideation from age six ended up without any Positive Behaviour Support or therapy access for months and forced to live in the care of his father, the family violence perpetrator, in an arrangement that is not safe, not stable, and not appropriate for any child. It explains the impact of severe caregiver burnout, physical health crisis, a sustained pattern of family violence repeatedly disclosed over time, including by the perpetrator himself, and the systemic failures that consistently failed to help. At the start of this year I was forced into an impossible decision between the safety and survival of my youngest child and myself, or the safety of my eldest, within a system that did not provide a safe alternative pathway for over twelve months. This was a decision I had no choice but to make, in the prolonged absence of appropriate NDIS funding, left unsupported by DFFH, with the medical and mental health systems pointing the finger at each other or at me, none of them providing a safe, supported option for either child, at great cost to us all. This has resulted in escalating risk, psychological harm, and loss of continuity of care for L rather than meaningful intervention. This pattern has already returned us to the same position we were in twelve months ago. The only therapy L can access is funded out of pocket by me, at the expense of basic living costs including rent. Two differences remain: both children now show clear symptoms of PTSD, and L lives with his abuser in a placement that is at imminent risk of break down.

With appropriate, structured supports and coordinated intervention, the unsafe dynamics can be interrupted and stability can be restored. Returning to sole reliance on informal care and general systems in place of properly funded NDIS specialist supports is not sustainable and will cause further deterioration in safety and stability, not just for L but for all participants affected by this Bill.

This outcome was not inevitable. With early access it was preventable. P is proof of this. L got his plan too late and was underfunded. The damage was done. My son is not a projection. He is the cost of these cuts already demonstrated in lived experience.

1. Two Brothers: The Evidence L is now ten. He has ASD Level 2, ADHD, a PDA profile, a complex trauma history, and PTSD from hospital and emergency service interventions. P is seven. He has ASD Level 2, a PDA profile, a complex trauma history, PTSD, and ADHD that is highly evident but awaiting formal assessment. P ’s PTSD is a diagnosis directly caused by L ’s escalating behaviours and his brother’s sustained physical attacks on him. Those attacks escalated because L was denied early NDIS access and then left unsupported by the mental health system for over two years. The cost of failing one child does not stay contained to that child. They grew up in the same home, with the same mother, through the same family violence. One got early NDIS access. One did not. That is the only material difference between them.

P received an ASD assessment through DPV Health at age six and early NDIS access. With L now out of the home, he is happy and appropriately supported, relatively stable and progressing well. L missed early NDIS access by two months. I did not know the early access pathway existed until I was advised to apply, by which point he was already six years and two months old. The system he was directed to instead was Austin Health’s Infant Child and Youth Mental Health Service, which accepted him as a patient in June 2023 and provided inadequate and inconsistent support for twenty-two months. Their clinical approach shifted twice but always blamed the same person. First: too much trauma and mental health for neurodevelopmental assessment. Then: no mental health issues, it is a family dynamics problem. Throughout: they refused to assess him for autism using any validated instrument, including barring his paediatrician’s referral after he was no longer their patient, because “he doesn’t look autistic”. He masks in clinical settings. They refused ADHD assessment for ten months despite their own speech therapist recommending it six months earlier. They documented family violence disclosures from L and from me but took no action, a sustained breach of MARAM obligations across the entire episode. Austin’s Clinical Director subsequently made seven formal written admissions that their formulation was simplistic and caused harm (MHWC Reference 2025/00648). Our DFFH worker told us the only way to get help in a crisis was to present at the Emergency Department without calling triage first. We followed that instruction. In April 2025, after L assaulted his brother and then expressed suicidal intent, including attempting to jump from my moving car to end his life whilst I was on the phone with DFFH, we presented to the Emergency Department. After more than two hours of waiting without neuro-affirming or trauma-informed care, L attempted to abscond. When I prevented this, begging them to help, he became violent. Three security guards held him, dragged him through the department, and held him to a bed for an hour while he was chemically sedated. He was having what is now understood to be an autistic meltdown. He was sent home with nothing: no mental health support, no post-sedation debrief, no trauma care. DFFH’s response was to tell us not to present to the hospital again and to wait for the ASD assessment and NDIS supports. My response was: that will take too long. It did. No help came.

In the months that followed, L was confirmed ASD Level 2. The confirmation changed nothing. His decline was rapid and severe: multiple suicide attempts, repeated emergency services callouts, a month off school for mental health. Every service involved said the situation was beyond community capacity. None provided tangible support beyond observation and reports. In April 2025, an Anglicare support worker attending a home visit

witnessed L       strangling P           , leaving visible bruising on his neck. It was

documented. It was reported. No additional support was put in place. The only consistent intervention was the art therapy I was going into debt to fund. Every deterioration was framed as me not coping. I screamed for respite. No help came.

In September he received his first NDIS plan: four hours of support worker time per week, meant to cover school five days a week. It was too late to stabilise him quickly and nowhere near enough. Without the car, lost when I stopped unsafe contact with his father to protect L ’s mental health, both his presentation and my capacity to parent deteriorated rapidly. I could not keep P safe from his brothers attacks.

I was beyond burnt-out, broken and struggling to cope, watching my 9 year old attempt suicide regularly with no support or intervention, trying to protect his brother while not being able to meet both children’s needs at once, seeing nothing but perpetuating harm. I did not want to cause further harm to either child. In October I gave DFFH an ultimatum: provide respite or remove him. They chose removal. A court order returned him four days later. For months, I, my lawyers, and the Magistrate told DFFH to provide respite and support. Their answer was consistent: not their responsibility, the NDIS or his father needed to provide that support. Every forced visit or stay with his father returned L with worsening behaviours. On 19 December DFFH removed forced contact with his father but still put no supports in place. On 22 January 2026, amidst an internal review, after months of documented deterioration with no adequate supports in place, L pushed me down the stairs. He had started attacking P again and I was attempting to relocate him to his room to regulate. I sustained a concussion and was admitted to the Emergency Department overnight for CT investigations. P has a documented history of skull fracture in infancy. His neurosurgical follow-up advised that he must avoid head impacts due to areas of concern that could develop into brain injury. L had repeatedly targeted his head. We had already had too many close calls. The stair incident made clear that no external agency was going to act to protect P until it was too late. I had to make the decision that removed L , not because I did not want him home, but because I was the only person who was going to protect P and I could no longer do both.

A support worker remained with P overnight without funding because there was no

alternative. L        's father took L       but could not take both children. This was not a

choice. It was a forced decision made under immediate risk of serious harm, in the absence of any safe supported alternative across more than twelve months of asking for one. I thought it would be a week at most till the review was complete and he would have the support he needed. The review returned with two additional support worker hours and support coordination. He has still not come home. L now lives in shared student accommodation, sleeping in a bunk bed above his father in a single room with no shared living space, no outdoor area, and no space for play, regulation, routine, or therapeutic work. His father and support workers attending the home have formally raised safety concerns: housemates without police checks who have walked in on L while showering, absconding risk from a property on a main road, hygiene and cleanliness issues with the environment, and no space appropriate for a child. His father has told DFFH the placement is not sustainable. DFFH determined that supporting L was the NDIS’s responsibility. Whose responsibility is it when the NDIS is cut?

That question is made more urgent by what is already on record. The Victorian Forensic Paediatric Medical Service found non-accidental injury should be suspected in P ’s infant skull fracture. In court reports his skull fracture was described as “shattered glass.” The only mechanism described by any person consistent with that injury came from his father’s own police statement. The Children’s Court-ordered psychiatric assessment expressed concerns about either child being in his father’s unsupervised care. L is there now. DFFH said it is the NDIS’s responsibility. The NDIS is being cut.

Under the proposed functional assessment framework, both boys would likely be rated moderate support needs. L particularly masks in clinical settings, which is the reason he wasn’t diagnosed till age 9. He is the exact example of what not gaining NDIS access till age 9 will result in with the current system in place. The proposed cuts would remove from

L       the supports he is finally close to receiving, and put P         's plan at risk at his

next review. The proposed bill will return our family to crisis and will produce so many replications of our story that it will not be able to count them.

2. The Costs Not in the Government’s Modelling The government projects $37.8 billion in savings. This figure measures what the NDIS currently spends. It does not measure what removing that spending costs. Those costs are real, documented, and unaccounted for.

Emergency Services, Police, and Courts

I was directed by DFFH to rely on the health and emergency services system while waiting for L ’s NDIS funding. The cost of following that instruction in the twelve months before his plan arrived includes: over ten police and ambulance callouts, two police sectionings, sedation in the Emergency Department and in the family home, multiple crisis presentations, a full Child Protection application, multiple court hearings, and three court cost orders totalling $1,988 against DFFH thus far. The Magistrate stated DFFH was in contempt of court for not providing support and respite they claim to be unable to do. Court ordered fortnightly respite has never been provided. None of these costs appear in the NDIS budget. All of them were produced by the absence of adequate early support.

Health System and Carer Costs

When allied health supports are removed from participants, conditions that were managed deteriorate. For example, a person who loses physiotherapy deteriorates and joins a 12 to 24 month surgical waitlist, requires a procedure costing multiples of the original therapy, and may lose the capacity to work. The NDIS cost of prevention is a fraction of every downstream cost that follows its removal.

A 2026 Monash University study found NDIS access reduced Medicare-funded mental health and allied health use by 13 per cent per person per quarter, saving an estimated $26.9 million per year across the scheme. The study does not capture carer and family health impacts. When participants are better supported, carers access health services less often, take fewer sick days, sustain fewer injuries from caring, and are less likely to reach crisis themselves. Those savings are real, they are produced by NDIS access, and they will reverse when that access is removed.

I know this from my own experience. From July to September 2024, I underwent fortnightly gastroscopy and dilatation procedures under general anaesthetic and spent months on a feeding tube. Austin Health’s

own surgical team annotated my procedure referrals with notes asking staff to avoid cancellations due to my complex social situation. In February 2025, a medically urgent gastroscopy was delayed a full week because I had no childcare. My surgeon rang twice. I still could not attend. A dietitian note from that week records the delay was because I was not able to get a carer for the children. When DFFH was made aware of this, their response was to propose that the family violence perpetrator enter the family home to care for the children while I was in hospital, without asking me and without any consideration of whether that was safe. In august 2025 after having to cancel multiple follow ups, I have taken myself off that surgical and clinic list because I cannot get overnight care for my sons.

Separately, in May 2025 I walked out of the Emergency Department when doctors wanted to admit me urgently for a different medical issue because I had to collect my children from afterschool care and there was no one else. The infection and bleeding that admission was meant to treat remain unresolved. I manage both myself because there is no alternative.

A third issue has developed because I have been unable to access dental care. The public system requires sitting and waiting, which I have not been able to do without support for the children. By the time I could access any appointment it was too late for standard treatment. I now need surgical intervention to remove a tooth that can no longer be extracted in a standard dental setting

In 2025 I was investigated for possible acquired brain injury. My 2024 neuropsychological assessment showed significant decline in memory and language compared to earlier testing. By 2025 I had identified the cause: frequently, often weekly, going 70-80 hours without sleep due to supporting my children, resulting in extreme carer burnout masked by ADHD medication. When I stopped the medication and rested, the ABI symptoms resolved. They return under burnout.

My story is documented in the ACOSS Material Deprivation in Australia report, tabled in Parliament in November 2024:

“In the year since, my physical health severely deteriorated due to untreated complications, and I underwent multiple urgent surgeries. I was placed on a feeding tube for months and had several lengthy stays in hospital, preventing me from working. I’ve faced impossible choices, like deciding between essential lifesaving medication and supplements for myself or food for my children. Often, I have gone days without eating. The fact that being on a feeding tube was a financial relief, is devastating and appalling… my eldest son gets suicidal and my youngest has developed a stutter and needs an ASD assessment, but we can’t afford therapy. I worry my children and I are months from homelessness. I desperately want to repair my situation and secure a safe and positive future for my children, however that is impossible when I am trapped spending all my time and energy in an effort just to survive.”

Parliament was formally notified of this family’s situation in November 2024. Nothing changed. Five months later, my son was sedated in an emergency room for an autistic meltdown.

Social and Community Participation

Community participation is not discretionary leisure. For families like mine, it is how we get to therapy, buy food, collect prescriptions, and get through a school morning safely. When we had no community access support I could not safely walk both boys, who elope, with the dog on a lead. She was L ’s primary mental health support at that time and a member of our family. I had to surrender her because I could not support both children and meet her basic needs. I broke down in tears at night in a supermarket carpark because my

boys were trying to run through moving traffic, refusing to come into the shop. I could not get them inside and I could not leave them in the car. I am one person. I cannot run in opposite directions when both children elope, and I cannot keep either of them safe when they team up. I had to trust strangers to watch them while I ran in for bread and pull-ups. Removing social and community participation funding does not eliminate the need. It removes the support that was preventing the crisis and transfers the resulting crisis cost to emergency services, courts, and families.

Lives

In January 2026, a family of four in Perth was found dead. They had two autistic teenage sons. Their NDIS funding had been cut. Their former support worker wrote: ‘the NDIS system failed them, and they were made to feel they had no other choice.’ That family could have been us. I was in that position. I screamed for help. I was blamed and my mental health scapegoated for not coping by the very supports that this Bill proposes will bridge the gap. They did not, and they have not.

On 18 May 2026, two weeks before this submission was written, Kamrun Nahar and her two non-verbal autistic sons, Ayman, 12, and Ayaash, 4, were found dead in their Campbelltown home. A man has been charged with three counts of domestic violence murder. That family could still be us. My youngest son lives with me. My eldest lives with the identified family violence perpetrator. I do not say this to be dramatic. I say it because it is documented, it is current, and only supports that might interrupt that trajectory are the support this Bill proposes to cut or remove.

Australia’s Disability Discrimination Commissioner connected the Perth deaths directly to current NDIS reforms. People with Disability Australia have named multiple further deaths and stated the system is under strain. In 2024-25, $60 million was spent fighting participants through the Administrative Review Tribunal instead of funding their supports. The cost of those lives does not appear in the savings projection.

Carer Workforce and the Unpaid Contribution

Informal carers are the largest uncosted asset in the disability system. Research shows that when services reduce, caring hours increase from an average of 26 to 40 hours per week, and heightened demands reach the point of mental ill health and suicidality for some carers. When carers lose employment, income support costs rise and tax revenue falls. When they defer their own healthcare, the cost arrives later at higher acuity. I was going 3-4 days without rest or sleep caring for both children. I still have three outstanding procedures I cannot schedule because I have no overnight respite for my younger son. If I cannot maintain my health, my children have no one that can meet their needs. We have no informal supports. No government modelling accounts for what happens when carers can no longer continue. Someone should calculate that cost before removing the supports that are currently preventing it.

Juvenile Justice

Autistic young people are significantly overrepresented in the juvenile justice system. L is now ten years old. Prior to his birthday he had already assaulted multiple peers causing injury, assaulted a member of the public with a large object, and attempted to exit a moving vehicle during transport. He has not had a Positive Behaviour Support plan or has never received direct behaviour support intervention of any kind due to the lack of funding provided in his plan. He has been formally suspended twice without a behaviours support plan put in place by the school, blamed for actions beyond his control or neurodevelopmental abilities, while remaining unsupported. The trajectory from where he

currently sits to the justice system is short and documented. The cost of that trajectory vastly exceeds the cost of the early intervention that was never provided.

Provider Fraud Versus Participant Access

Over 100 invoices for P over two years were double, triple, and quadruple charged by a provider. This went unnoticed by his plan manager and me while escaping family violence and my proceeding health crisis. When I found out, I reported this to the Commissioner. Nothing was done. The government has committed over $242 million to fraud detection to recover an estimated $60 million. In 2024-25, $60 million was spent fighting participants through the tribunal. The NDIA fought Lee Eastham’s request for a $7,833 mobility scooter through tribunal and Federal Court, losing both times. The legal costs dwarfed the scooter. The system is spending more money denying people their rights than it would cost to fund them. That is not efficiency. The fraud problem is a provider and accountability problem. That is a failure being paid for by the people it was designed to serve.

Participant Numbers Are Not the Issue

The NDIS growth rate was 22 per cent in 2021-22. It is now approximately 10 per cent and expenses are already $740 million below projections this financial year. The sustainability concern was already moderating before these cuts were announced. The $37.8 billion in projected savings is being generated by removing people whose costs are already falling. Cutting participants does not fix a broken pricing and accountability structure.

Human Rights and Disability Rights

The proposed cuts engage Australia’s obligations under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), ratified in 2008. Article 19 guarantees the right to live independently and be included in the community. Article 25 guarantees the right to the highest attainable standard of health without discrimination. Article 26 requires habilitation and rehabilitation services. Article 7 requires the best interests of children with disability be a primary consideration in all actions concerning them. Removing NDIS access from children with confirmed disability profiles before adequate alternative services exist is inconsistent with all of these obligations. The Disability Royal Commission found people with disability in Australia have been systematically devalued. Its 222 recommendations remain unimplemented. This Bill moves further in the wrong direction.

3. Recommendations

4. Reject this Bill in its current form. The functional assessment tool is not designed. Thriving Kids is not operational. Social and community participation cuts commence October 2026. The state-based replacement does not exist until January 2028. Do not legislate cuts before the alternative exists.

5. Commission independent downstream cost modelling before any further cuts proceed, covering emergency services, Child Protection, courts, carer health and employment, allied health cascade costs, long-term institutional care, and juvenile justice system costs. The $37.8 billion cannot be called a saving until every cost of generating it is accounted for.

6. Introduce family-based NDIS planning for households where multiple family members are participants. The needs of individuals cannot be meaningfully assessed or funded in isolation when the interaction between their disability profiles directly determines

the level of support the whole household requires. Planning that ignores this will consistently underfund every person in it as it has with my family.

4. Do not cut social and community participation. This funding enables therapy access, food shopping, medication collection, and basic daily safety. It supports mental health, social connections and is a basic human right. Its removal transfers the resulting crisis cost to emergency departments, police, and courts.

5. Fix the system architecture, not the participant list. Pricing must reflect actual service complexity and risk. Investigate cross-system collaboration: if Medicare provides rebates, those rebates should be able to work alongside NDIS funding to address the gaps neither system covers alone. Siloed systems leave families falling between them.

6. Fix provider accountability. Strengthen registration and auditing. Act on fraud reports from participants and families. Stop spending more to fight participants than the cost of their supports.

7. Formally engage people with lived experience of ASD, ADHD, and complex disability, as participants and as carers, in designing solutions. People who have spent years navigating the gaps in this system have the pattern recognition to identify what is broken. Engage us before decisions are made, not after.

8. Implement the 222 recommendations of the Disability Royal Commission. They exist. They address the systematic devaluation of people with disability that underlies every failure described in this submission. Implement them.

9. Establish a formal parliamentary inquiry into the experience of autistic people and those with neurodevelopmental profiles in Australia’s health, mental health, education, legal and child protection systems. The evidence is consistent and documented: systems that were built without neurodiversity in mind cause active harm when they encounter it. Autistic people are restrained in emergency departments, misdiagnosed for years, pathologised for natural communication styles, and discharged without support. Their parents and carers are blamed for the behaviours that those same systems produce. A neuro-aware health and mental health system, capable of recognising and supporting rather than harming neurodivergent people, would reduce the number of families who reach crisis in the first place. It would reduce the number of people who need intensive NDIS support to recover from the damage institutions caused. Building systems that work with neurodiversity rather than against it is not an alternative to the NDIS. It is what makes the NDIS’s job achievable. The inquiry should have direct terms of reference addressing the experience of autistic people in hospital and emergency settings, the pathologising of neurodivergent parenting, the failure of MARAM obligations in cases involving neurodivergent family members, and the barriers neurodivergent people face in accessing healthcare. It should require that people with lived experience of neurodivergence, as participants and as carers, have a formal role in designing the system changes that follow.

10. Closing L is ten years old. He spent his tenth birthday still displaced from his family home awaiting a change of circumstances review that was already cancelled due to clerical error. He has PTSD. He has no access to funded therapy. His placement is unsafe, unsustainable, and not appropriate for a child. He got his first NDIS plan at nine, after two

years in a health system that sedated him, blamed his mother, and sent him home. He got it after the damage was done. P is seven. He received early NDIS access. With his brother out of the home, he is progressing and showing improvement as his supports and NDIS plan are appropriate for him independently, without another child in the home. He misses his brother but is happy to be safe. He is the direct, lived, documented proof of what early adequate support produces. The difference between these two boys is not diagnosis, not family, not parenting, not circumstances. It is NDIS access. Early access changed one trajectory. Its absence, compounded by a health system that caused active harm, determined the other. The proposed cuts, including the Thriving Kids diversion programme, will replicate that outcome at scale for every family currently waiting for a plan, being told to rely on the systems that failed us, watching the window close.

What happened to L was preventable. Early access, adequate funding, and coordinated intervention would have interrupted this before it reached the Emergency Department, the police, the courts, and the bunk bed in a house of strangers. The correlation between his outcome and P ’s is not coincidence. It is the evidence. This submission asks Parliament to read that evidence, act on it, and choose accordingly.

What is the weight in gold of a human life? It is more than this.

Michelle Vercoe

| 1 June 2026

Appendix: Evidence Available on Request