Harmful definition of functional capacity for neurodivergent individuals (Participant experience) | External submission

Submission 428

The National Disability Insurance

Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026

Griffith Inclusive Futures,

Griffith University

29th May, 2026

The National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future

Generations) Bill 2026 represents one of the most significant restructurings of the NDIS since

its  creation. Although  the  Bill  is framed around  sustainability, fraud prevention, and

administrative efficiency, many provisions risk creating profound unintended harms for people with significant neurodivergence and acquired brain injury (ABI), including people with autism, ADHD, intellectual disability, psychosocial disability, fetal alcohol spectrum disorder

(FASD),  traumatic  brain  injury  (TBI),  stroke, and complex  cognitive-communication

impairments.

The Bill reflects a shift from a rights-based and person-centred framework more firmly toward

a  managerial and  actuarial model  focused on  cost  containment,  standardisation, and

administrative control, supported by automated decision-making. For many people with ABI and neurodivergence, whose disabilities are often fluctuating, context-dependent, invisible, relational, and difficult to measure through standardised functional metrics, this shift may fundamentally undermine equitable access and participation.

The Bill Adopts a Narrow and Potentially Harmful

Definition of Functional Capacity

One of the most concerning aspects of the Bill is the new definition of “functional capacity”. Section 9B defines functional capacity as the ability to undertake activities “without assistance

from other people,  assistive technology or modifications” and  in a context excluding

“environmental and personal circumstances.”

This definition is deeply problematic for people with neurodivergent conditions and ABI because it misunderstands how disability operates in cognitive and psychosocial conditions.

For many neurodivergent people and people with ABI:

Functioning is highly context-dependent.
Environmental supports are not optional extras; they are what enable functioning.

Submission 428

Cognitive fatigue, executive dysfunction, sensory overload, memory impairment, emotional dysregulation, and social communication impairments fluctuate depending on supports and context.
Many people can technically perform tasks in controlled assessments but cannot sustain them reliably, safely, or independently in real-world settings.

The Bill effectively removes context and intersectionality from disability assessment. This reflects a highly medicalised model of disability that conflicts with contemporary disability theory and the social model underpinning the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD).

For example:

An autistic person may communicate effectively in a quiet clinical environment but become non-functional in noisy community settings.
A person with ABI may complete a task once during an assessment but be unable to initiate, sequence, remember, or regulate performance across daily life.

• A person with severe executive dysfunction may appear capable in structured

environments but collapse without scaffolding, prompting, and routine. A person who has a diagnosis of a disabling condition for which it appears there is an evidence-based treatment would be forced to exhaust that treatment before becoming eligible for NDIS supports. This requirement disregards the fact thatthey may have comorbidities or other

intersectional  factors, such as  race, or gender,  that mean  this evidence  is not

generalisable to them. It does not account for side effects that are intolerable to the person in their context. It also removes the opportunity for choice and personal preference in selecting treatment.

By excluding environmental, support and other personal factors, the Bill risks systematically underestimating disability severity in cognitive and neurodevelopmental conditions.

This is particularly concerning because the Bill also allows rules to prescribe “methods or criteria” including “classifications or thresholds” for determining functional capacity. This creates a pathway for increasingly rigid and standardised assessment tools that may fail to capture lived complexity.

The proposal that “personal and external factors that may vary between individuals” are not directly material to a person’s “intrinsic ability to undertake an activity”, is not grounded in scientific research evidence, nor the extensive testimony recorded during the Disability Royal Commission. A process that disconnects data about a person’s disability from vital aspects of their identity, cultural and social context cannot produce an “objective …assessment of the functional impact of the person’s impairment.” People undertake activities in the context of their real lives, in which the functional impact of an impairment is intrinsically linked to how difficult the activity is for them because of their intersecting experiences of discriminatory and marginalising systems, compared to their peers. Conversely, the impact of an impairment on the life of a person who experiences privilege linked to personal factors may be far less significant.

Undertaking to “…exclude… the environmental and personal circumstances, as much as possible” when assessing functional capacity is not a strategy for achieving objectivity and consistency and will likely achieve the opposite. It will significantly reduce the beneficial

Submission 428

impact of the Scheme for people with disability who are commonly misrepresented in simplified and exclusionary datasets, those who experience racial, cultural and gendered exclusion or harm, are least able to communicate their needs, and are most in need of support due to complex circumstances.

The Bill Disadvantages People with Fluctuating and

Episodic Conditions

The Bill significantly restricts access to unscheduled plan reassessments.

To receive a reassessment, participants must demonstrate:

a “significant and ongoing” change,
linked directly to impairment,
involving a “substantial reduction” in ability. This creates major barriers for people with:
fluctuating psychosocial disability,
chronic fatigue associated with neurological conditions,
executive dysfunction,
burnout,
behavioural dysregulation,
sensory overwhelm,
progressive neurological instability,
cognitive fatigue after ABI. Neurodivergent people often experience cycles of masking, collapse, burnout, recovery, and destabilisation. These changes may not appear “ongoing” in a simple linear sense but can still create major support needs.

Similarly, ABI recovery trajectories are rarely linear. People may temporarily improve, then deteriorate due to fatigue, environmental stress, aging, mental health decline, or loss of supports.

The Bill creates a system where:

people must deteriorate significantly before help is available,
preventative intervention becomes harder,
support flexibility is reduced,
and participants may be trapped in inadequate plans for long periods. The extension of reassessment timeframes from 21 days to 90 days further exacerbates this problem. For individuals in crisis, especially those with behavioural dysregulation, suicidality, homelessness, or carer breakdown, delays of this magnitude can be catastrophic.

Submission 428

The Bill Assumes Disability Must Be Stable,

Measurable, and Directly Causal

The Bill repeatedly strengthens requirements that supports arise “directly” from impairments.

This is a major conceptual problem for neurodivergence and ABI because many disabling impacts emerge through interaction effects:

trauma,
social exclusion,
environmental stress,
sensory overload,
executive demands,
poverty,
inaccessible systems,
communication mismatch,
and cumulative stigma. Disability in neurodivergence is rarely reducible to a single direct causal chain.

For example:

An autistic person may require support not because autism directly causes inability, but because environments are intolerably sensory hostile.
A person with ABI may lose work capacity due to fatigue and cognitive overload interacting with workplace expectations.
Behavioural dysregulation may emerge from chronic unsupported stress rather than intrinsic impairment alone.

The Bill narrows disability into a biomedical deficit model and risks excluding relational, contextual, and socially produced forms of disablement.

Ministerial Powers to Reduce Funding Create Severe

Risks

Section 34A allows the Minister to reduce funding for groups of supports through legislative instrument “for the purposes of ensuring the financial sustainability” of the Scheme.

Critically, the Bill explicitly states that funding may become insufficient to meet the total cost of supports, even where those supports remain “reasonable and necessary.”

This is extraordinarily concerning for people with significant support needs associated with neurodivergent conditions and ABI because:

their support needs are often intensive,
supports are relational and labour-intensive,
and outcomes depend on consistency and continuity.

Submission 428

Support reductions in areas such as:

behavioural support,
support workers,
therapy,
social participation,
cognitive rehabilitation,
mentoring,
or community access may rapidly destabilise participants.

For many people with ABI or who are autistic, small reductions in support can trigger:

suicidal ideation and self-harm
hospitalisation,
homelessness,
family collapse,
institutionalisation,
justice involvement,
or severe mental health crises. The Bill provides no meaningful safeguard against this beyond requiring the Minister to “have regard to the safety of participants.” This is a weak and discretionary protection.

The Bill Prioritises Standardised Evidence Over Lived

Evidence

The new “effective and beneficial” provisions are especially problematic. Decision-makers must prioritise (in order):

published, peer-reviewed, generalisable evidence,
individual evidence,
participant outcomes. This hierarchy may be appropriate in simple cases where the evidence is clear and well established. However, it disadvantages many neurodivergent individuals and people with ABI because:

research evidence often focuses on a single condition in controllable circumstances, resulting in poor representation of the realities of the population (e.g., >90% of autistic people have one or more co-occurring conditions)
individuals with highest and most complex support needs are rarely included in clinical or research trials
participants may regress without support but this is rarely examined in research trials
evidence bases are often emerging, particularly for rare conditions
interventions that work are often highly individualised rather than generalisable - many effective supports for people with cognitive and sensory differences are personalised, adaptive, relational, and context specific based on environmental modifications

Submission 428

outcomes are extremely difficult to quantify, particularly in relation to quality of life
lived experience evidence is critical but is rarely accommodated in trials. The Bill explicitly allows supports to be rejected where there is “limited or no research” even if participant outcomes demonstrate benefit.

This creates a profound epistemic injustice:

institutional evidence is privileged,
lived experience is downgraded,
institutional evidence becomes even more unlikely to develop in future
innovation becomes harder. People with complex or atypical neurocognitive presentations, with multiple co-occurring conditions (which tends to be the majority of autistic people and people with ABI), or who belong to groups for whom research is usually inaccessible, not culturally safe or relevant, are particularly vulnerable. Research rarely captures heterogeneity well as it seeks homogeneity for generalisability.

A major concern arising from the proposed reforms is the requirement to distinguish between support needs arising from qualifying and non-qualifying impairments when, in practice, many disabilities occur as complex, interacting conditions that cannot be meaningfully separated. People with autism, ABI, intellectual disability, or other qualifying conditions frequently also experience ADHD, complex trauma, anxiety, depression, PTSD, or other mental health conditions. Their functional limitations, such as difficulties with executive functioning,

emotional  regulation,  social  participation,  communication, employment,  learning, and

independent living, often result from the cumulative and interactive effects of multiple conditions rather than any single diagnosis. For example, executive dysfunction may arise simultaneously from autism, ADHD, ABI, trauma, depression, or anxiety, and there is no clinically validated method for determining what proportion of impairment is attributable to each condition. Similarly, many psychological difficulties experienced by people with ABI or autism are inseparable from the underlying disability and the social experiences associated with it, including exclusion, discrimination, bullying, abuse, and chronic stress. The proposed reforms may therefore create a significant attribution problem, requiring clinicians to make artificial distinctions that are not supported by current scientific understanding of disability. This may lead to increased assessment costs, greater administrative complexity, more appeals and disputes, and reduced support packages for people with multiple interacting conditions. Psychologists, occupational therapists, and other clinicians may be asked to justify support needs in diagnostic rather than functional terms, despite the reality that disability-related functioning emerges from the interaction of multiple impairments and environmental factors. The result may be a shift away from the original NDIS principle of funding supports based on disability-related functional impairment towards a narrower model that funds only impairments that independently meet eligibility criteria, potentially leaving many people with complex disability profiles without adequate support for their actual needs.

Submission 428

The Bill Risks Disability Care becoming a Family

Responsibility

The Bill repeatedly reinforces expectations that families and informal supports should carry greater responsibility.

Although family support is important, this approach ignores:

carer burnout,
aging carers,
family violence,
intergenerational trauma,
poverty,
and the invisible labour already carried by families. For neurodivergent people and people with ABI, family care is often extraordinarily intensive:
supervision,
behavioural regulation,
emotional co-regulation,
prompting,
transport,
financial management,
communication mediation,
risk monitoring,
and crisis management. The Bill frames replacement of informal support as undesirable except where absolutely necessary.

This risks trapping families in unsustainable (or unsuitable/harmful) care arrangements and particularly disadvantages:

single parents,
women and gender-diverse carers,
ageing parents,
families experiencing racial or cultural marginalisation, and
families already in crisis or facing domestic violence. This adds additional stressors on the family unit of often already disadvantaged families and communities including parents withdrawing from the workforce, relationship strain, and increased mental health needs in the family unit.

The Permanence Provisions Misunderstand

Neurodevelopmental and Brain-Based Disability

The Bill tightens permanence requirements by requiring people to undertake “all appropriate treatment” before impairments are considered permanent.

Submission 428

This is deeply concerning, particularly for people with ABI and neurodivergent conditions because:

treatment pathways are often uncertain,
improvement may be partial,
recovery may plateau unpredictably,
and some interventions are inaccessible or inappropriate. Of most concern is the fact that this Bill assumes that one-off supports are sufficient (based on a medical model of “cure”) whereas support needs can fluctuate over time, change with the presence or absence of environmental supports and across different life stages.

The Bill also states treatment may still be considered “appropriate” even if a person cannot access it due to finances or geography. This effectively penalises people for structural inequality.

For ABI:

rehabilitation access is highly unequal across Australia,
cognitive rehabilitation is often underfunded,
and rural access is limited. For neurodivergent people:
many interventions are controversial,
evidence is contested,
and “treatment” may conflict with neuroaffirming approaches. The Bill risks:
forcing people into unwanted interventions,
delaying access,
encouraging medical gatekeeping,
and increasing adversarial assessments.

Automation and Administrative Complexity Create

Cognitive Accessibility Risks

The Bill expands automation of administrative action.

For people with ABI and neurodivergent conditions, administrative complexity  is  itself

disabling.

Many participants experience:

memory impairment,
executive dysfunction,
information-processing difficulties,
communication impairments,

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overwhelm,
difficulty responding to deadlines,
and inability to navigate bureaucratic systems. The new powers to suspend plans where participants are “not contactable” are especially dangerous and discriminatory. People with ABI or neurodivergent conditions may:
avoid communication due to anxiety,
miss calls,
fail to process paperwork,
become overwhelmed,
lose track of deadlines,
or temporarily disengage during periods of burnout. Suspending supports because a cognitively impaired person fails to engage with inaccessible systems of bureaucracy risks creating exactly the crises the Scheme is meant to prevent. This action is potentially unlawful (i.e., not providing accessible ways to communicate for people with formally documented and accepted impairments and then penalising the person for not being able to access the communication).

The Bill Reflects a Fundamental Philosophical Shift At its core, the Bill changes the moral logic of the NDIS.

The original NDIS was founded on:

rights,
participation,
citizenship,
autonomy,
and social inclusion. This Bill increasingly frames participants as:
cost centres,
actuarial risks,
and subjects requiring regulation and containment. Terms such as:
“financial sustainability,”
“value for money,”
“maximum intensity,”
“maximum ratio,”
and “efficiency” become dominant organising principles.

Submission 428

For people with significant support needs related to neurodivergent conditions and ABI, this shift is particularly dangerous because:

their support needs are often complex and relational,
outcomes are difficult to standardise,
and meaningful participation requires flexibility, trust, and individualisation. The risk is not merely reduced funding. The deeper risk is that the Scheme gradually ceases to recognise forms of disability that do not fit standardised, measurable, biomedical templates.

Schedule 2: Fraud Measures

The Bill Risks Treating Vulnerability as Suspicion Schedule 2 significantly expands:

provider registration requirements,
civil penalties,
information gathering powers,
record retention obligations,
regulatory enforcement,
and claims compliance systems. Fraud prevention is necessary. However, the structure of these reforms appears grounded in an assumption that risk is best managed through surveillance, compliance escalation, and tighter administrative control.

For people with ABI and neurodivergent conditions, this creates major risks because many

behaviours  associated  with  disability can  superficially  resemble “non-compliance”  or

suspicious conduct. Examples include:

inconsistent communication,
missed appointments,
incomplete paperwork,
emotional dysregulation,
dependence on others to manage finances,
inability to retain records,
difficulty understanding service agreements,
impulsive decision-making,
and fluctuating engagement. A person with frontal lobe ABI may:
sign inappropriate agreements,
fail to monitor invoices,
forget reporting obligations,
or unintentionally breach administrative requirements.

Submission 428

An autistic person in burnout may:

stop responding to emails,
avoid communication,
become overwhelmed by compliance demands,
or disengage suddenly from providers and the Agency. AI data systems and processes that have been developed, informed by and trained on datasets that do not represent these realities of disability may identify or interpret disability-related executive dysfunction as risk behaviour.

Increased Provider Regulation May Reduce Access to

Trusted Supports

The expansion of registration and compliance obligations may disproportionately affect small providers, peer-led organisations, and informal neurodiversity-affirming supports.

Many neurodivergent people and people with ABI rely on:

small specialised providers,
independent support workers,
peer mentors,
behavioural support practitioners,
lived-experience advocates,
or highly individualised supports. These providers are often preferred because:
trust is critical,
communication styles matter,
continuity is essential,
and mainstream providers, who may also use limited or exclusionary data systems, to match providers and support workers to participants,frequently lack neuro-affirming expertise.

Heavy compliance systems may unintentionally:

push smaller providers out of the market,
increase administrative burden including duplication of highly regulated professions (e.g., AHPRA professionals such as psychologists),
favour large corporate providers,
reduce innovation,
and create workforce shortages. This is especially dangerous in ABI and neurodivergent conditions where:
therapeutic alliance strongly affects outcomes,
relational continuity is essential,
and participant-provider mismatch can rapidly destabilise functioning.

Submission 428

The result may be a more standardised but less effective, culturally safe and responsive support ecosystem.

Expanded Information-Gathering Powers Raise Privacy

and Autonomy Concerns

Schedule 2 substantially expands information-gathering powers.

For neurodivergent people and people with ABI, this raises serious concerns because many already experience:

over-surveillance,
forced disclosure,
paternalistic intervention,
and diminished privacy rights. People with psychosocial disability, autism, intellectual disability, or ABI often report feeling that:
they must continually prove disability,
intimate details are scrutinised,
they risk of child safety or policy involvement inappropriately,
and their credibility is doubted. Expanded powers risk intensifying this experience.

This is particularly problematic because:

many neurodivergent people have trauma histories,
many ABI survivors have experienced institutionalisation,
and repeated reassessment processes can themselves be psychologically unsafe or harmful.

The Bill risks embedding a culture of suspicion and processes that harm, rather than support.

Administrative Compliance Systems Disproportionately

Burden Cognitive Disability

Schedule 2 also includes measures around:

retention of records,
claims processing,
provider compliance,
and financial accountability. These systems assume participants and providers can navigate highly complex administrative processes.

Submission 428

However, executive dysfunction is itself a major disability domain.

Many people with ABI and neurodivergent conditions experience:

severe organisational impairment,
cognitive fatigue,
reduced working memory,
information processing difficulties,
impaired financial management capacity, and
lack of access to reliable access to information infrastructure at home. Ironically, participants may require extensive supports precisely because they cannot manage these systems independently.

The capacity to navigate and manage highly complex administrative processes and adequately keep records requires:

access to a stable, reliable internet connection, and
the resources to maintain and navigate a digital document library in a private and cyber- secure way, and
a private, safe, secure physical environment in which to complete these tasks, and
a private, safe, secure physical environment in which to organise and store hard copy documentation.

This is likely impossible for someone experiencing housing insecurity or family violence.

The more administratively complex the Scheme becomes:

the more advantaged participants without cognitive impairments or, who have the human or financial resources to engage help for administrative tasks become,
and the more disadvantaged cognitively impaired participants or those without access to administrative help become.

This creates inequity where access increasingly depends on bureaucratic literacy, reliable executive functioning, administrative management skills and access to the resources and infrastructure in which to perform this administrative work.

Fraud Narratives Risk Reinforcing Stigma The emphasis on fraud and compliance may unintentionally reinforce public narratives that disability support recipients are economically suspect.

This is particularly concerning for neurodivergent populations because:

autism,
ADHD,
psychosocial disability,
and cognitive impairments

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are already socially contested disabilities.

Public discourse frequently frames these groups as:

“not really disabled,”
over-diagnosed,
exaggerated,
or exploiting the system. A highly enforcement-focused reform agenda may deepen:
stigma,
adversarial assessments,
public resentment,
and political pressure for exclusion. For many neurodivergent people, the social consequences of suspicion and disbelief are already profound.

Schedule 3: Governance Arrangements

Schedule 3 is particularly important because it restructures decision-making authority and expands automation of administrative action. These changes may fundamentally alter how disability support decisions are made.

Automation is Particularly Dangerous in the context of

Cognitive and Neurodevelopmental Disability

Part 2 of Schedule 3 expands automation of administrative action.

Automation may appear efficient, but it is especially risky for people whose disabilities:

are nuanced,
context-dependent,
difficult to quantify,
or behaviourally complex. People with ABI and neurodivergence often do not fit neat administrative categories.

Their needs may involve:

fluctuating support intensity,
environmental adaptation,
relational support,
behavioural co-regulation,
sensory accommodation,
cognitive pacing,
and social participation supports.

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Automated systems tend to privilege:

standardisation,
measurable variables,
fixed thresholds,
and binary decision-making. This creates serious risks of:
oversimplification,
inappropriate denials,
reduced flexibility,
and algorithmic exclusion. This is exacerbated by limited options for appeal.

Automation Risks Encoding Bias and Inequity into the

System

Algorithmic  or automated decision-making systems  inevitably  reflect  the assumptions

embedded within them.

If systems are trained around:

physical disability models,
measurable impairment,
standardised functional thresholds,
or cost-efficiency metrics, then people with neurodivergent conditions and ABI may be systematically disadvantaged. For example:
masking behaviours in autism may obscure need,
mental health and disability-related supports are inter-related and not easily segmented leading to exclusion from multiple systems,
communication capacity may be mistaken for functional independence,
fluctuating cognitive fatigue may not fit fixed assessment models,
and behavioural dysregulation may be interpreted as non-compliance. These systems risk reproducing existing inequities at scale.

This inequity may be compounded for people with disability who are not represented in the datasets used to develop, test and inform the automation systems. Where several sections of the proposed Bill outlines, as a ‘safeguard’, requirements to notify participants where administrative action has been taken by the operation of a computer program, it’s unclear whether this transparency measure would extend to describing whether an AI tool used to make, or support a prediction or decision about a participant’s support needs has been proven to produce valid and reliable outputs for a person like them.

In  healthcare,  decision-support  software  that  analyses and  interprets  information  for

‘…monitoring, prediction, prognosis… of a disability’, makes recommendations about or

Submission 428

generates care or therapy plans or calculates the probability of a risk must be regulated and listed, on the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods. These must demonstrate compliance with stringent principles, including designing the tool to reduce risks from use. The same level of control needs to be applied to decision-support software in the NDIS context.

Once embedded into administrative infrastructure, biases and inequities become difficult to challenge.

Reduced Human Discretion May Remove Essential

Flexibility

People with ABI and neurodivergent conditions often require:

nuanced interpretation,
flexibility,
relational understanding,
and contextual judgement. Rigid automated systems are poorly suited to:
fluctuating conditions,
complex behavioural presentations,
trauma-informed practice,
and culturally safe communication. Many participants already struggle to explain their disability in bureaucratic language.

A more automated system may:

reduce opportunities for clarification,
narrow interpretive flexibility,
and amplify the power imbalance between participants and the Agency. This is especially concerning because many neurodivergent people experience:
literal communication styles,
difficulty with formal interviews,
heightened anxiety under scrutiny,
and inability to advocate effectively under stress.

Centralisation of Pricing and Governance Risks

Reducing Individualisation

Schedule 3 also centralises pricing decision-making.

While standardisation may improve consistency, it risks reducing responsiveness to:

complex support needs,

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rural workforce shortages,
specialist neurodiversity supports,
and behavioural complexity. Many effective supports for neurodivergent people and supports for people with ABI are inherently relational and customised.

Rigid pricing structures may:

discourage providers from working with complex participants,
reduce workforce quality,
reduce access to those in rural or remote areas with limited travel reimbursements prohibitive/limiting,
incentivise task-based rather than relational support,
and undermine continuity of care. This may especially affect participants requiring:
high behavioural expertise,
low-arousal communication approaches,
sensory-informed support,
or cognitive rehabilitation.

Conclusion

The Bill contains legitimate concerns about sustainability and fraud, but many provisions risk disproportionately harming people with significant support needs arising from neurodivergent conditions and ABI.

The legislation:

narrows disability definitions,
appears not to consider intersectionality,
reduces flexibility,
privileges standardised evidence,
increases bureaucratic burden,
expands ministerial discretion,
and shifts responsibility back onto families and informal supports. People with ABI and neurodivergent conditions are especially at risk of disadvantage related to the provisions because their disabilities and support needs are often:
fluctuating,
invisible,
context-dependent,
relational,
cognitively complex,

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poorly captured by rigid functional assessments that are better suited to physical conditions, have severe limitations in the context of cognitive impairments or in paediatric populations

• poorly captured by data systems that are not generalisable to them,

particularly if they experience intersecting identities and conditions.

Without substantial amendment, the Bill risks undermining the very principles upon which the NDIS was founded: inclusion, autonomy, participation, and equitable citizenship.

Schedules 2 and 3 of the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 represent a major expansion of regulatory, surveillance, enforcement, and administrative powers within the NDIS.

While fraud prevention and governance reform are important objectives, these schedules raise profound concerns for people with significant impairment from neurodivergent conditions and acquired brain injury (ABI), particularly because these populations often:

struggle with executive functioning,
rely heavily on informal administrative assistance,
experience communication impairments,
depend on trusted support relationships,
and are disproportionately vulnerable to bureaucratic exclusion, coercion, and system misunderstanding.

Rather than simply targeting fraud, these reforms risk transforming the NDIS into a highly

compliance-driven  surveillance  system  that may  unintentionally  criminalise  cognitive

disability, reduce  participant autonomy, and  create  significant  barriers  to  access and

participation.

Schedules 2 and 3 also signal a major philosophical transformation of the NDIS:

from relational support toward compliance management,
from trust toward surveillance,
from flexibility toward standardisation,
and from citizenship toward actuarial governance. For people with significant support needs arising from neurodivergent conditions and ABI, this shift is especially dangerous because their disabilities are often:
misunderstood,
difficult to standardise,
behaviourally complex,
and highly dependent on context and relationships. The greatest risk is not merely reduced funding.

The deeper risk is that the Scheme increasingly becomes structurally incapable of recognising and responding to cognitive, psychosocial, and neurodevelopmental forms of disability in humane and flexible ways.

Submission 428

Rather than preventing exclusion, the system may unintentionally reproduce it through:

automation,
bureaucratic burden,
surveillance,
and standardised administrative logic. In effect, the reforms risk creating a Scheme that is technically efficient but clinically, socially, and ethically inaccessible for many of the people who most depend upon it.