Legal analysis of Bill's effect on participants with complex support needs (Provider experience) | External submission

National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 433

Submission — NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026

S U B M I S S I O N T O T H E

Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee

Inquiry into the

National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment

(Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 A legal and operational analysis of the Bill’s effect on participants with complex, high-intensity support needs

Submitted by Jerry Atunga, Senior Coordinator (Persons with Disability)

Organisation Rise Network Inc

Jurisdiction Western Australia

Date 29 May 2026

Status Public submission

This submission is made in the author’s professional capacity. The names of the two participants discussed have been withheld and identifying details minimised to protect their privacy.

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Submission 433

Submission — NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026

Contents

Executive Summary …………………………………………………………………………………………………… 3
The Author, Standing, and Basis of this Submission ………………………………………………………….. 4
How the Scheme Is Meant to Work ………………………………………………………………………………. 4
The Bill in Overview: from Entitlement to Compliance ………………………………………………………. 5
Case Study One — Chris……………………………………………………………………………………………… 6
Case Study Two — Lindsey………………………………………………………………………………………….. 7
Provision-by-Provision Legal Analysis ……………………………………………………………………………. 8
Cross-Cutting Legal Concerns ………………………………………………………………………………………12
The Compounding Effect: A Closed Loop with No Exit……………………………………………………….14
The Statement of Compatibility………………………………………………………………………………….15
Recommendations to the Committee ………………………………………………………………………….15
Conclusion …………………………………………………………………………………………………………….17 Page 2 of 19

Submission 433

Submission — NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026

Executive Summary This Bill is presented to Parliament under the reassuring banner of securing the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) for future generations. I write to advise the Committee, from direct daily experience coordinating supports for people with the most complex needs, that its practical and legal effect is the opposite of its title. The Bill does not secure the Scheme. It re-engineers it — from a statutory entitlement built on individualised, reasonable and necessary support into a rationing instrument administered by formula, evidentiary gatekeeping, and automation.

My central submission is that the Bill, if enacted in its current form, would do four things that are incompatible with the objects of the National Disability Insurance Scheme Act 2013 (Cth) (the Act) and with Australia’s international human-rights obligations:

Sever funding from need. Proposed s 34A authorises the Minister to reduce funding for whole classes of support by flat percentage, expressly even where the residual amount is less than the cost of safely delivering the support.
Seal the exits. Proposed s 48A locks participants out of requesting a reassessment unless they can prove a further ‘substantial reduction’ in capacity — so an unworkable, underfunded plan cannot be corrected on the ground of insufficiency alone.
Manufacture ineligibility. Proposed s 25A deems an impairment non-permanent until ‘all appropriate treatment’ is undertaken, and deems treatment ‘appropriate’ regardless of whether the person can afford it or reach it; proposed s 34(1E)–(1F) subordinates a participant’s proven lived experience to generalised peer-reviewed literature.
Remove the human being. Proposed ss 40A, 50A and 59B permit suspension of supports for ‘uncontactable’ participants, strip one-off funding on automatic renewal, and delegate evaluative judgements and discretions to computer programs.

I illustrate these effects through two real men in supported accommodation — Chris and Lindsey — whose funding and eligibility are already being cut and contested under the present law. Their experience is not a forecast; it is the baseline. The Bill takes the discretionary hostility they meet today and converts it into binding law, while simultaneously demolishing the avenues through which that hostility is presently challenged. The result is a closed administrative loop from which the most disabled Australians cannot escape.

I do not ask the Committee to take my characterisation on faith. Section 7 of this submission analyses each impugned provision against the existing statutory scheme, the National Disability Insurance Agency’s own operational guideline Reasonable and Necessary Supports (28 March 2025)1, established principles of administrative law, and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD)2.

1National Disability Insurance Agency, Reasonable and Necessary Supports (operational guideline, 28 March 2025). The guideline directs delegates to weigh the participant’s lived experience and not to demand an expert report for every support. 2Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, opened for signature 30 March 2007, 2515 UNTS 3 (entered into force 3 May 2008); ratified by Australia on 17 July 2008. Article 19 recognises the equal right of persons with disability to live independently and be included in the community.

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Submission 433

Submission — NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026

I respectfully urge the Committee to recommend against the Bill in its current form, and to adopt the targeted amendments set out in Section 11.

The Author, Standing, and Basis of this Submission I am a Senior Coordinator (Persons with Disability) at Rise Network Inc in Western Australia. My role

is to coordinate care, documentation, incident reporting and advocacy across supported

accommodation settings for participants with complex, high-intensity and frequently co-occurring

physical,  cognitive and psychosocial  disability.   I work alongside  positive behaviour support

practitioners, line managers and direct support workers, and I am responsible for the records that the Agency relies upon when it makes — and remakes — decisions about a participant’s plan.

That vantage point matters to the weight of this submission. I do not encounter the NDIS as an abstraction or a budget line. I encounter it as the difference between a person eating safely or aspirating; between a person leaving the house or being confined to it; between a person being recognised as living with a disability or being told, in writing, that they are not. I see what happens in the days and weeks after a decision letter arrives, which is precisely the period the Agency’s own data rarely captures. The two case studies in this submission are drawn from that lived, contemporaneous record.

My method is deliberately conservative. For each impugned provision I (a) state the position under the current law and the Agency’s published guideline; (b) describe what the Bill changes, using the operative language of the proposed sections; (c) apply the change to the documented facts of Chris’s and Lindsey’s situations; and (d) identify the legal consequences — statutory, administrative-law and human-rights — that follow. Where I quote the Bill or the guideline I do so sparingly and only where the precise words carry the legal weight.

How the Scheme Is Meant to Work: the Architecture the Bill Disrupts The NDIS is not a discretionary grants programme. It is an uncapped, demand-driven statutory scheme whose foundational promise is that a participant will receive the supports that are reasonable and necessary for them as an individual. Three features of the existing architecture must be kept in view, because the Bill attacks each of them.

3.1 An individualised entitlement, not a rationed allowance The objects and general principles of the Act3 enshrine choice and control, the right to pursue goals and aspirations, and the requirement that the Scheme respond to the individual needs of the person. Section 34 operationalises this by requiring that funded supports be assessed against that individual’s

3National Disability Insurance Scheme Act 2013 (Cth), ss 3 (objects) and 4 (general principles), which together establish the Scheme’s person-centred, choice-and-control architecture.

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Submission 433

Submission — NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026

goals, circumstances and functional capacity.4 Funding, in other words, is presently tethered to need. The Bill’s s 34A severs that tether at the Minister’s discretion.

3.2 A living plan, correctable when it fails

Because disability and life circumstances change, the Act treats a plan as a living document. A participant or their coordinator may seek a reassessment when a plan no longer works — including when a decision has produced an unworkable or unsafe result. That self-correcting feature is the Scheme’s principal safety valve. The Bill’s s 48A welds it shut for the very situations in which it is most needed: where the plan is underfunded but the person’s baseline impairment has not further deteriorated.

3.3 Person-centred evidence and the participant as expert

The Agency’s operational guideline is explicit that the participant is the expert in their own life, that lived experience is to be weighed, and that an expert report is not required for every support. 5 This reflects a hard-won understanding that disability is heterogeneous and that generalised research often cannot speak to an individual’s combination of impairments. It is a deliberate rejection of the older medical model of disability — under which a person is reduced to a diagnosis to be cured, corrected or managed, and their funded support made contingent on exhausting treatment — in favour of a social and functional model that asks what a person needs in order to participate. The Bill’s s 25A and s 34(1E)–(1F) reinstate that discarded medical model by the back door: the participant’s

proven experience  is demoted beneath generalised literature, and  theoretical, unaffordable

treatment is treated as though it were available, retrofitting a ‘fix the person first’ logic onto a Scheme that was built to abandon it.

Australia did not adopt this architecture by accident. It reflects binding international obligations — in particular CRPD art 19 (independent living and community inclusion), art 25 (health), art 28 (adequate standard of living and social protection)6, and art 12 (equal recognition before the law, requiring supported rather than substituted or automated decision-making).7 Every Bill must be accompanied by a Statement of Compatibility with these rights.8 As Section 10 explains, the present Bill cannot honestly be certified as compatible.

The Bill in Overview: a Shift from Entitlement to Compliance Read as a whole, the Bill effects a single structural transformation expressed through seven mechanisms. It moves decision-making power upward (to the Minister and the CEO) and outward (to algorithms), while moving risk, cost and the burden of proof downward, onto the participant. The

4Ibid s 34 (reasonable and necessary supports), read with s 33 (matters to be included in a plan). Section 34 requires funded supports to be assessed against the participant’s individual goals, circumstances and functional needs. 5Reasonable and Necessary Supports guideline, above n 1. 6CRPD arts 25 (health), 26 (habilitation and rehabilitation) and 28 (adequate standard of living and social protection). 7CRPD arts 12 (equal recognition before the law) and 5 (equality and non-discrimination), which require supported — not substituted or automated — decision-making and the provision of reasonable accommodation. 8Human Rights (Parliamentary Scrutiny) Act 2011 (Cth), s 8, which requires a Statement of Compatibility with human rights for every Bill introduced into either House.

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Submission — NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026

beyond challenge by enacting it as primary-law-authorised delegated legislation. The Committee should treat the deliberate legislative entrenchment of a known administrative-law vice as a serious matter of principle, not a drafting detail.

Third, the power is conferred in the broadest terms (‘a specified group of supports’, ‘a percentage’) with no floor tied to safety or cost, no criteria constraining the Minister’s choice, and no requirement to consider the effect on any class of participant. That is a delegation of substantive rationing policy to executive instrument, exercisable without the individuated, reviewable decision that is the ordinary subject of merits review.19

7.2 Section 48A — Sealing the Reassessment Safety Valve

Section 48A confines a requested reassessment to cases where the participant can prove a ‘significant and ongoing’ change resulting in a ‘substantial reduction’ in the ability to perform daily activities. The mischief is structural: it ties the right to seek review of a plan to clinical deterioration, when the problem the participant needs to raise is financial insufficiency. These are different things. A plan can be catastrophically underfunded without the participant’s body or mind having changed at all.

For participants whose functional baseline is already at or near its floor — Chris’s zero independent mobility is the clearest example — the threshold is not merely high; it is logically impossible to satisfy. One cannot demonstrate a further substantial reduction from a baseline that admits of no further reduction. The provision thereby creates a class of participants who are, by definition, locked out of correction. Coupled with s 34A, the effect is a ratchet: funding can be reduced by formula, but the reduction cannot be contested by reassessment. The safety valve is welded shut at precisely the pressure point it exists to relieve.

7.3 Section 25A — ‘All Appropriate Treatment’ and the Fiction of Access

Section 25A provides that an impairment is not permanent unless the person has undertaken ‘all appropriate treatment’, and s 25A(2) deems treatment ‘appropriate’ regardless of whether the person’s individual circumstances — expressly including financial circumstances and geographic location — restrict access to it.

The provision commits the legislative error of requiring the impossible. It makes a statutory right turn on the completion of acts that the statute itself acknowledges the person may be unable to perform. For Lindsey, and for every participant in regional and remote Australia or living in poverty, eligibility ceases to be a question of whether they are disabled and becomes a question of whether they could have afforded or reached treatments that the law concedes are out of reach. That is discrimination on the ground of means and location dressed as a clinical test, and it cannot be reconciled with CRPD arts 5 and 25 or with the Scheme’s foundational commitment to equality of access. 20

The practical effect is to draft a two-tiered scheme directly into federal law. A participant in inner-city Sydney or Melbourne, within reach of bulk-billing specialists and subsidised allied health, can far more readily evidence that ‘all appropriate treatment’ has been undertaken than an otherwise identical participant in regional or remote Western Australia, where the nearest relevant clinician may be

19Administrative Review Tribunal, above n 11. 20CRPD arts 25, 28, above n 6.

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Submission — NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026

hundreds of kilometres away and the treatment unfunded. Two people with the same impairment and the same functional needs would receive different answers to the threshold question of whether they are disabled at all — the metropolitan participant retained, the regional participant excluded. Section 25A thereby builds a geographic and wealth-based bias into the definition of disability itself, entrenching precisely the postcode inequity a national Scheme was created to abolish.

It also produces a perverse clinical incentive. Treating practitioners will be drawn into documenting, and participants into pursuing, treatments that are unsuitable, distressing or futile — not because they will help, but because their non-completion is now a ground for exclusion. The Bill thereby weaponizes the burden of proof, converting the Agency’s evidentiary scepticism (already evident in Lindsey’s case) into a statutory entitlement to demand the unattainable.

7.4 Section 34(1E) and (1F) — Subordinating Lived Experience to Literature

Section 34(1E) mandates a top-down hierarchy of evidence requiring the CEO to prioritise ‘published, peer reviewed and generalisable’ research over the demonstrated effectiveness of a support for the specific participant. Section 34(1F) goes further, permitting refusal where peer-reviewed evidence is ‘limited’, even where there is clear proof that the support works for the individual.

This inverts both the Agency’s guideline and the epistemology of disability support. Generalisable research, by definition, describes populations, not persons. For rare conditions, idiosyncratic comorbidities, assistive technologies with small markets, and highly tailored therapeutic routines, peer-reviewed literature is frequently sparse or absent — not because the support fails, but because no one has studied that precise combination. Section 34(1F) transforms that absence of study into a licence to refuse. The predictable result is the defunding of exactly the niche, individualised supports that keep complex participants stable, forcing them backward into avoidable functional decline — the precise harm the ‘effective and beneficial’ criterion was designed to prevent.21

There is also a rule-of-law concern. By compelling the decision-maker to treat one category of evidence as legally superior to direct, probative, individualised evidence, the provision instructs delegates to disregard relevant material and to give controlling weight to material that may be irrelevant to the individual. That is a statutory mandate to reason unreasonably, and it sits uneasily with the requirement that administrative power be exercised on a rational, evidence-based footing. In Minister for Immigration and Citizenship v Li, the High Court confirmed that a statutory discretion is conditioned on its reasonable exercise, and that a decision resting on an irrational or illogical weighing of considerations is affected by jurisdictional error. 22 By compelling a delegate to subordinate cogent, direct, individualised clinical proof to the mere absence of generalised literature, s 34(1E)–(1F) does not merely permit an unreasonable outcome; it legally mandates the very irrational weighting that Li identifies as a vice. A provision that requires decision-makers to act in a way the common law would otherwise strike down should not be enacted.

7.5 Section 40A — Suspension of the ‘Uncontactable’

21Reasonable and Necessary Supports guideline, above n 1. 22Minister for Immigration and Citizenship v Li (2013) 249 CLR 332, 351 [29], 364–367 [63]–[76]. A statutory discretion is conditioned on its reasonable exercise; a decision so unreasonable that no reasonable decision-maker could have arrived at it, or that rests on an irrational weighing of considerations, is affected by jurisdictional error.

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Submission 433

Submission — NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026

Section 40A permits the CEO to suspend a participant’s plan entirely where satisfied that ‘reasonable attempts’ have been made to make contact and the participant is ‘not contactable’. The provision treats non-response as a neutral administrative fact. For the population the Scheme serves, it is frequently a symptom of disability: executive dysfunction, psychiatric crisis, cognitive impairment, hospitalisation, homelessness or unstable accommodation, and communication disability all manifest as missed correspondence.

To suspend life-sustaining supports because a person could not answer a letter is to penalise the disability itself. It also offends procedural fairness at its most basic: the supports are withdrawn

precisely from the people least able to receive notice, respond, or invoke review.23 And  it  is

discriminatory in the CRPD sense, because it imposes a uniform contact requirement without the

reasonable accommodation that  arts 5 and 9  require for people whose  disability  affects

communication and engagement.24 A person in psychiatric crisis is not ‘uncontactable’ in any morally relevant sense; they are unwell, and the Scheme’s response should be outreach and safeguarding, not suspension.

7.6 Section 50A — Automatic Renewal that Strips One-Off Funding

Section 50A provides for the automatic renewal of old-framework plans while expressly excluding from the new plan any ‘one-off funding’ included under the old plan. One-off funding is not incidental; it is how the Scheme pays for assistive-technology replacement, home and vehicle modifications, equipment repairs, and emergency injections that respond to a participant’s specific circumstances.

The vice is the combination of automaticity and silence. A renewal that strips out critical, context specific funding without any human reviewing whether that funding remains necessary will, with certainty, remove supports that a delegate applying the reasonable-and-necessary test would have retained. There is no decision to which a participant can meaningfully respond, and — by operation of s 48A — frequently no reassessment they can request to restore it. The provision manufactures gaps in support not by deciding that they are unnecessary, but by ensuring no one decides at all.

7.7 Section 59B — Delegating Discretion and Judgement to Computers

Section 59B permits the CEO to arrange for computer programs to take administrative action, expressly including action that involves ‘a discretion being exercised’ or ‘an evaluative judgement being made’. This is the provision that powers the others: it is what allows s 34A’s cuts, s 50A’s renewals, and s 40A’s suspensions to be executed at scale without a human mind engaging with the individual case.

Australia has very recent, very expensive experience of what happens when evaluative judgements about vulnerable people are automated on assumptions rather than facts. The Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme found that an automated, assumption-driven process produced unlawful

23Kioa v West (1985) 159 CLR 550, recognising that the rules of natural justice apply to administrative decisions affecting a person’s rights, interests or legitimate expectations. 24CRPD arts 5, 12, above n 7.

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Submission — NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026

decisions on a mass scale and caused profound, in some cases irreparable, harm. 25 Section 59B does not merely fail to learn that lesson; it legislates a licence to repeat it, and to do so in relation to a more vulnerable cohort and higher-stakes decisions — eligibility, funding levels, and the suspension of supports on which life and safety depend.

There is a discrete legal problem in delegating discretion and evaluative judgement to a program. A statutory discretion is conferred on a repository capable of bringing an evaluative human mind to bear; the authority to decide is not, without the clearest words, authority to have a machine decide. 26 The common law has long understood a ‘decision’ to require a mental process — an authorised officer turning their mind to the facts and reaching a conclusion. As the Full Federal Court recognised in Pintarich v Deputy Commissioner of Taxation, an output generated without that mental engagement is not, in the ordinary sense, a decision at all.27 Section 59B attempts to abolish this requirement by deeming automated action to be valid action; but deeming a machine’s output to be a ‘decision’ does not supply the evaluative judgement the Act presupposes — it merely conceals its absence. An algorithm does not weigh dignity, exercise mercy, notice the unusual case, or recognise when a rule should yield. Delegating evaluative judgement to it is not efficiency; it is the abdication of the function the Parliament conferred, and it is incompatible with the supported-decision-making model that CRPD art 12 requires.28

Cross-Cutting Legal Concerns 8.1 Internal incoherence with the Act’s objects and principles

Several provisions do not amend the objects and principles in ss 3–4; they contradict them while leaving them in force.29 A statute that simultaneously promises individualised, reasonable and necessary support and authorises class-wide funding below cost (s 34A), exclusion of the genuinely disabled (s 25A), and the disregard of probative individual evidence (s 34(1F)) is internally incoherent. As Section 7.1 notes, the principle in Project Blue Sky requires the provisions of an Act to be read so as to operate harmoniously;30 this Bill instead manufactures direct conflict between its operative provisions and its own objects. That incoherence is not merely untidy; it generates interpretive uncertainty that will fall, in practice, on participants — who must litigate to discover which limb of the contradiction prevails.

8.2 Procedural fairness and the right to be heard

25Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme, Report (July 2023). The Commission found that an automated, assumption-based administrative process produced unlawful decisions on a mass scale and inflicted profound harm on vulnerable people. 26On the limits of delegation and the requirement that statutory discretions be exercised by an authorised mind, cf Carltona Ltd v Commissioners of Works [1943] 2 All ER 560; sub-delegation to an automated system is not authorised absent clear statutory words. 27Pintarich v Deputy Commissioner of Taxation (2018) 262 FCR 41; [2018] FCAFC 79. A ‘decision’ in administrative law has historically required a mental process — an authorised officer engaging their mind with the relevant facts and reaching a conclusion — a requirement an automated output does not satisfy. 28CRPD arts 5, 12, above n 7. 29NDIS Act 2013 (Cth), above n 3. 30Project Blue Sky, above n 16.

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Submission — NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026

Natural justice requires that a person affected by an adverse decision receive notice and a genuine opportunity to be heard.31 Sections 40A (suspension of the uncontactable), 50A (automatic renewal) and 59B (automated action) each operate to produce adverse outcomes without a meaningful hearing — by suspending before the person can respond, renewing without consultation, and deciding by machine. Taken together they hollow out the procedural protections that the common law and the Scheme presently assume.

8.3 The evisceration of merits review Merits review before the Administrative Review Tribunal32 presupposes a discretionary, individuated decision capable of being remade on its merits. The Bill systematically removes the reviewable decision: s 34A substitutes a legislative instrument for an individual funding decision; s 48A removes the trigger for reassessment; s 50A renews without a decision; s 59B has a machine decide. A right of review that has nothing to review is illusory. In Plaintiff S157/2002 v Commonwealth, the High Court held that the Parliament cannot deprive a person of the ability to have the lawfulness of executive action tested.33 That case concerned an express privative clause; the present Bill is more insidious, because it reaches the same forbidden destination by architectural design rather than by a clause that announces itself. By removing the individuated decisions that are the subject-matter of review — through s 34A, s 48A, s 50A and s 59B — it strips the Tribunal of anything to review and creates an effectively unreviewable executive vacuum. The Committee should be alert to the difference between preserving review rights on paper and preserving them in substance.

8.4 Human-rights incompatibility

The Bill engages, and in my submission limits incompatibly, a series of rights protected by conventions to which Australia is a party:34

CRPD art 19 — independent living and inclusion in the community. Engaged squarely by the Chris scenario, where s 34A funding cuts produce confinement to the home and loss of community participation.
CRPD arts 25 and 28 — health, and an adequate standard of living and social protection. Engaged for both participants, whose health and basic security depend on supports the Bill permits to be reduced below the cost of safe care.
CRPD art 5 and ICCPR art 26 — equality before the law and non-discrimination. Engaged by the means- and location-based exclusion built into s 25A, which differentiates between participants on grounds unrelated to their disability.
CRPD art 12 — equal recognition before the law and supported decision-making. Engaged by s 59B, which substitutes automated determination for the supported, human decision-making the Convention requires.

31Kioa v West, above n 23. 32Administrative Review Tribunal, above n 11. 33Plaintiff S157/2002 v Commonwealth (2003) 211 CLR 476, 513–514 [98]–[104]. The Parliament cannot, consistently with Ch III of the Constitution, deprive a person of the ability to have the lawfulness of executive action reviewed; an outcome of practical unreviewability cannot be achieved indirectly through statutory design. 34CRPD, above n 2.

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Submission 433

Submission — NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026

The Statement of Compatibility that must accompany the Bill35 should be scrutinised closely: a Bill that authorises funding below the cost of safe care, and exclusion turning on poverty and postcode, cannot in my submission be honestly certified as a reasonable, necessary and proportionate limitation on these rights.

8.5 Disproportionate and intersectional impact

The burden of these provisions does not fall evenly. Section 25A’s affordability- and location-blind treatment test falls hardest on regional, rural and remote participants and on First Nations communities, where specialist treatment is distant and costly. Section 40A’s contact requirement falls hardest on people with psychosocial and cognitive disability and those in unstable housing. Section 34(1F)’s literature hierarchy falls hardest on people with rare or complex presentations. The Bill thus concentrates its harm on those already most marginalised — compounding, rather than redressing, existing disadvantage.

8.6 A false economy: cost is shifted, not saved

The Bill’s short title — ‘Securing the NDIS for Future Generations’ — frames it as a measure of fiscal sustainability. That framing should not pass unexamined. The Bill does not reduce the underlying need for support; it withdraws the Scheme’s response to that need. The cost of the need does not disappear when NDIS funding is cut — it is transferred to other public systems, almost always at a higher unit cost and a worse human outcome.

When Chris loses the community-participation funding that gets him out of the house, the predictable sequelae — pressure injuries from immobility, deconditioning, social isolation and its documented physical and psychiatric consequences — present not to the NDIS but to the state hospital system, at acute-care prices. When a participant such as Lindsey has a plan suspended under s 40A during a period of psychiatric instability (the very disability that caused the missed contact), the foreseeable result is presentation to a state emergency department, an acute mental-health admission, contact with police, or the loss of housing — each of which is borne by state-funded services and each of which costs the public purse far more than the support that was withdrawn. A small NDIS saving is purchased at the price of a large cost elsewhere in the federation, and at the price of avoidable human suffering.

A measure that shifts expenditure from a planned, preventive Commonwealth scheme onto unplanned, acute state systems does not secure anything; it degrades the efficiency of the whole. The Committee should treat the Bill’s claim to sustainability with scepticism unless and until it is supported by a whole-of-government costing that accounts for the downstream cost burden on health, housing and justice systems. On the present material, the more accurate description of the Bill is not a saving, but a cost-shift dressed as one.

The Compounding Effect: a Closed Loop with No Exit The gravest danger of the Bill is not in any single provision but in the way the provisions interlock. Considered individually, each can be defended as a discrete integrity or efficiency measure.

35Human Rights (Parliamentary Scrutiny) Act 2011 (Cth), above n 8.

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Submission — NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026

rights through which that  hostility  is presently resisted. It then makes the whole apparatus

automatable.

I urge the Committee to recommend against the Bill in its current form, and to insist on amendments that restore the link between funding and the cost of safe care, that keep the door to review open, that assess eligibility on a person’s real circumstances, and that keep a human being — capable of recognising a Chris or a Lindsey when the rules are about to crush them — at the centre of every decision the Scheme makes. The dignity and, in some cases, the survival of the people the Scheme was built to serve depends upon it.

Jerry Atunga

Senior Coordinator (Persons with Disability)

Rise network Inc — Western Australia

29 May 2026

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