Submission 426
Submission to the Senate Community Affairs
Legislation Committee inquiry into the
National Disability Insurance Scheme
Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future
Generations) Bill 2026
May 2026
Contact details For more information, please contact:
Karen Dimmock CEO, ACD
Helen Nys CEO, Kiind
Stacey Touma CEO, Belongside Families
Submission 426
Summary of Recommendations
Changes to access and eligibility Recommendation 1: Children with diagnoses associated with lifelong severely reduced functional capacity need early access to the NDIS. Amendments are needed to ensure:
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recognition that children with diagnoses associated with lifelong reduced functional capacity can access the Scheme on that basis, without waiting for their functioning to decline;
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a clear pathway for children to enter the NDIS where their support needs increase beyond what foundational supports such as Thriving Kids can provide
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a requirement that thresholds used to determine ‘substantially reduced functional capacity’ be published and made transparent to participants and the public.
Recommendation 2: Family and household circumstances, including more than one child with disability, should be formally accounted for in the eligibility assessment process. For children assessed near the threshold, household circumstances should be a mandatory consideration, so that a child is not excluded because their needs were assessed in isolation from their household.
Recommendation 3a: Children with clearly permanent impairments and lifelong high support needs should not be required to ‘try all appropriate treatment’ before they are found to meet the disability requirements.
Recommendation: 3b How permanence is assessed should be amended so that a family’s circumstances, including financial and geographic barriers to accessing treatment, are considered when assessing whether they have undertaken all appropriate treatment.
Changes to supports and plans Recommendation 4: The Ministerial power to make support determinations should be removed from the Bill in its entirety. It cannot be adequately safeguarded, and its impact on participants is too significant and too individual to be managed through a single Scheme-wide instrument.
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Submission 426
Recommendation 5: That the Act set out clear standards and a developmentally informed framework for the determination of parental responsibility, that families be given a fair opportunity to demonstrate care needs beyond those of a similarly aged child without disability, and that decisions about the sustainability of informal supports be governed by proactive safeguards rather than requiring a family to reach crisis point.
Recommendation 6: The Act should ensure support needs are assessed by the combined and interacting impact of a person’s conditions on daily functioning, not only supports linked to a single eligible impairment.
About the Child and Family Disability Alliance
The Child and Family Disability Alliance (CAFDA) is a national partnership of not for-profit family-led organisations: ACD, Kiind and Belongside Families.
Together, we support more than 30,000 families and carers raising children with all kinds of disability and developmental delay across Australia.
Our shared vision is to empower parents and caregivers with the knowledge, skills and connections they need so their families and children can thrive. We work by building the capacity and wellbeing of parents and carers through our well established and proven model providing information, skills building and peer support.
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Submission 426
Introduction
CAFDA welcomes the opportunity to provide feedback to the Senate Community
Affairs Legislation Committee inquiry into the National Disability Insurance
Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026.
This submission focuses on our key concerns regarding how the proposed legislation will disproportionately impact children, young people and their families.
Beyond these child- and family-specific concerns, we also echo the advocacy and concerns raised by Disability Representative Organisations that:
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the consultation process for this sweeping and life-impacting legislation provided inadequate timeframes for people with disability, their families and the sector to participate meaningfully and equitably, and the Bill should be delayed to allow proper scrutiny and targeted amendments; and
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the proposed legislation introduces broad discretionary powers for the Minister, while reducing safeguards and avenues for review and appeal for participants.
We also note that findings from the NDIS Review appear to have been selectively used to rationalise the proposed changes, without implementing the Review’s recommendations in full. This is particularly the case for recommendations relating to quality systems of support for children and young people aged over nine outside the NDIS, including inclusive universal mainstream systems such as education.
If implemented as proposed, these changes are likely to have significant consequences for demand on disability supports outside the NDIS; impacts on adolescents and young people during key life transitions, including preparing for work and living independently; child and youth wellbeing and isolation; and family wellbeing and workforce participation, particularly for mothers. Current government planning and attention to these areas do not appear adequately developed ahead of the scheduled implementation of the legislative reforms.
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Submission 426
Impacts of the proposed amendments for children and families
Changes to access and eligibility
- Children with diagnoses associated with lifelong severely reduced functional capacity need early access to the NDIS
Recommendation 1: Amendments to the Act should include:
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recognition that children with diagnoses associated with lifelong reduced functional capacity can access the Scheme on that basis, without waiting for their functioning to decline;
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a clear pathway for children to enter the NDIS where their support needs increase beyond what foundational supports such as Thriving Kids can provide
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a requirement that thresholds used to determine ‘substantially reduced functional capacity’ be published and made transparent to participants and the public.
Functional capacity in infants and young children is developmentally dynamic, and needs can evolve with time in ways that may not be captured in a point-in time assessment. The current system allows children with diagnoses, such as global developmental delay or Down syndrome, to enter the Scheme, providing support ahead of reduced functional capacity as they age. For these children, they will need more early and ongoing supports than what Thriving Kids can provide.
The new assessment process risks disadvantaging children whose needs are still emerging, by measuring functional capacity at a single point before the full extent of their support needs has become apparent.
We also note that the current diagnostic lists gave families and the public a transparent basis for understanding who could access the Scheme. It is not clear whether the thresholds that determine when functional capacity is ‘substantially reduced,’ and therefore who is eligible, will be published and made transparent in the same way.
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- Family circumstances should be considered in eligibility assessment
Recommendation 2: Family and household circumstances, including more than one child with disability, should be formally accounted for in the assessment process. For children assessed near the threshold, household circumstances should be a mandatory consideration, so that a child is not excluded because their needs were assessed in isolation from their household.
A child’s needs and functioning cannot be fully understood without the context of their family, a principle long established in how we understand children’s development and support. How well a child manages day to day is shaped in part by the support around them, and a child may keep up with their routines, regulate their emotions, or engage in their education only because that support is consistently in place. For many families, providing that support means managing a complex household, often with more than one child with disability and overlapping needs at the same time. Each child’s support draws on the same family, and a family’s capacity to provide it across the whole household is not unlimited.
As the assessment process tightens, an individualised eligibility decision, made one child at a time, does not account for what a family is managing as a whole. A parent supporting a single child near the threshold for individualised supports is in a very different position to one supporting two or three children with overlapping needs at once. Each child may sit near the threshold in isolation, while the household supporting all of them is at full stretch. This is especially acute for single-parent families.
Under a tighter process, children who previously qualified may no longer do so, even though the level of disability support their household needs has not changed. When each child is assessed in isolation, the cumulative load on the household goes uncaptured, and support can be withdrawn from a family that has limited capacity to absorb it.
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Submission 426
- Requiring families to undertake all “treatment” before access is unfair
Recommendation 3a: Children with clearly permanent impairments and lifelong support needs should not be required to ‘try all appropriate treatment’ before they are found to meet the disability requirements.
Recommendation: 3b How permanence is assessed should be amended so that a family’s circumstances, including financial and geographic barriers to accessing treatment, are taken into account when assessing whether they have undertaken all appropriate treatment.
For many children, a permanent and significant disability is clear from the early stages of life, sometimes as early as birth. The proposed changes to how permanence is assessed cut against this reality. Under the new approach, an impairment will only be considered permanent where the person has undertaken all appropriate treatment and no further treatment is likely to materially improve, reverse or alleviate its impact. The scope of this requirement is vague and open to interpretation.
For example, for a three-year-old child with a diagnosis of Autism with high support needs, what would be considered as having undertaken ‘appropriate treatment’?
In particular, we highlight:
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families being required to undertake treatment even when an impairment is clearly permanent and significant and lifelong high support needs are apparent from early on;
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bureaucratic processes delaying access to support; and
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families having to undergo treatments they consider inappropriate or potentially harmful in order to meet the requirement.
Whether an impairment is considered permanent depends on whether treatment exists and is likely to help, but it makes no allowance for whether a family can actually access that treatment. A family’s circumstances, including financial and geographic barriers, are not a relevant consideration. This is unjust. It penalises families for not completing treatment they could never realistically access,
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whether because of cost or because they live in a thin market, from regional and remote communities to fast-growing outer suburbs, where services have not kept pace with demand, and will entrench the disadvantage already faced by some families.
Changes to supports and plans
- The Minister should not have the power to make broad support cuts
Recommendation 4: The Ministerial power to make support determinations should be removed from the Bill in its entirety. It cannot be adequately safeguarded, and its impact on participants is too significant and too individual to be managed through a single Scheme-wide instrument.
NDIS participants reach the supports in their plans only after rigorous access and planning processes that demonstrate their needs. A Ministerial power to make sweeping, generalised cuts to these supports by operation of law, with no merits review or outside scrutiny, is alarming. We are not confident that the requirement under subsection 34A(A), that the Minister consider participant safety, can be meaningfully met when a single determination will impact a wide variety of individuals with entirely different circumstances and needs.
These cuts are not abstract, and we are especially concerned about what they will mean for young people. If the legislation proceeds in its proposed form, the Government has announced 50% cuts to budget allocations for social, civic and community participation supports.
Adolescence is a critical period for any young person to grow in independence and build the life skills they carry into adulthood. For young people with disability, funded social and community support during these years is central to that development: practising life outside the home, navigating community spaces, building friendships beyond the family, and developing self-advocacy. These years are also when many young people begin building employability skills and engaging in paid work. Much of this depends on the chance to engage in the community without a parent present, like any other young person.
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Without this support, young people with disability simply miss out, and families fear that withdrawing funding will isolate them from their communities at an age when connection and belonging matter most. The loss of these supports will also fall back on families, and disproportionately on mothers, who are most often the ones absorbing the care work that funded supports would otherwise have covered.
- Parental responsibility must be applied fairly Recommendation 5: That the Act set out clear standards and a developmentally informed framework for the determination of parental responsibility, that families be given a fair opportunity to demonstrate care needs beyond those of a similarly aged child without disability, and that decisions about the sustainability of informal supports be governed by proactive safeguards rather than requiring a family to reach crisis point.
The Bill places greater emphasis on parental responsibility in determining what is funded in the plans of children and young people with disability, and we are concerned about the subjective nature of how this is applied. While this is already a source of tension in the current planning process, the changes to the legislation, combined with the removal of review processes in the new framework planning, risk creating unmanageable scenarios for many families.
The planning process must include fair scope for families to demonstrate that the intensity and frequency of the support they provide their child for daily tasks is beyond that of other families with a child of a similar age without disability. For example, two children of the same age may both require adult supervision as a matter of ordinary parenting, yet one may need constant physical assistance, vigilance to prevent harm, and intensive support through everyday tasks, while the other does not.
The application of parental responsibility should also include a developmentally informed framework, for example acknowledging adolescence and emerging adulthood as a time when young people are typically building autonomy and independence outside of parental support.
While the CEO must determine whether informal supports can be sustained or pose a risk, we question the ambiguity around the CEO’s judgment of what is
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sustainable, unsafe, or otherwise reasonable to expect of a family. Families must have a fair opportunity to provide this context within the planning process, with an emphasis on proactive safeguards, so that support does not depend on a family first reaching crisis point or on harm having occurred.
This assessment should also take into account broader family circumstances, including where there are multiple children with disability in the household, or where parents or carers themselves have disability.
- Supports should reflect the combined impact of disability Recommendation 6: The Act should ensure support needs are assessed by the combined and interacting impact of a person’s conditions on daily functioning, not only supports linked to a single eligible impairment.
Under the proposed changes, a support will only be funded if it relates directly to the specific impairment that met the access criteria. This treats disability as simpler than it is. Children rarely live with a single, neatly defined condition; they frequently live with more than one, and those conditions interact. It is the combined effect, rather than any single impairment, that shapes how a child functions day to day, manages at school, and takes part in their community.
By funding only the supports tied to one eligible impairment, the Bill leaves these overlapping needs unmet. Children are supported for part of their disability, while the rest, and its real impact on their daily life, goes unfunded.
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