National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 441
This submission is made on behalf of Planet Ability, an occupational therapy practice operating in Victoria, and draws directly upon my extensive professional background across the disability, healthcare, and mental health sectors. Over my career, I have practiced across multiple sectors, including: • Paediatric Private Practice: Supporting children and families to develop vital self-regulation, daily living, and communication skills during key developmental windows. • Disability Support Work: Providing in-home, day program and community- based care to individuals with complex needs. • Acute Mental Health Inpatient Unit: Working within crisis, high-acuity hospital environments dealing with severe psychological disabilities. This diverse perspective provides a broad but in-depth view of how systemic NDIS policy changes directly impact individual human lives.
As a practitioner dedicated to neurodiversity affirming, strengths-based therapy, my clinical viewpoint is simple: The NDIS is not an economic drain; it is a foundational piece of social and economic infrastructure. Current legislative movements to abruptly cap, cut, or restrict NDIS funding are creating an immediate, crisis. This submission outlines the consequences of these funding cuts on families, the broader economy, and workforce safety, while offering constructive recommendations for sustainable, long-term optimisation.
Issue A: The Myth of the NDIS as a Economic Burden Public and political rhetoric frequently positions the NDIS purely as an escalating cost line-item that threatens budgetary stability. This perspective ignores basic economic data and represents a deeply flawed approach to government expenditure. • The Reality of Economic Return: Independent economic analysis consistently demonstrates that the NDIS operates as a benefit to Australian economy. For every $1.00 invested in the NDIS, $2.25 is returned directly to the broader Australian economy. • NDIS funding does not vanish. It directly drives employment across a massive healthcare and support workforce, generates tax revenue, and stimulates local economies through the purchasing of assistive technology, specialised consumables, and therapy services. • The Cost of Defunding: Artificially constricting this funding does not save the taxpayer money. Instead, it chokes a highly productive sector of the economy and shifts the financial burden onto significantly more expensive state-run crisis systems, including acute hospital admissions, child protection, and emergency services.
Issue B: The Compounding Crisis of Family Burnout and Financial Vulnerability Behind every reduced or rejected NDIS plan is a family unit forced to absorb the shortfall. In my practice, I am witnessing a rapid, systemic escalation of parental exhaustion, burnout and increasing finical insecurity.
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 441
• Forced Departure from the Workforce: When essential speech pathology, occupational therapy, or support worker hours are excised from a participant’s plan, parents cannot simply “absorb” the role of a trained professional. Frequently, at least one parent is forced to reduce their working hours or resign entirely from their employment to provide full-time, uncompensated care. • Systemic Financial Vulnerability: This forced exit from the workforce occurs during a broader cost-of-living crisis. Families are plunged into acute financial vulnerability, reducing their household tax contributions and increasing their reliance on income support systems like the Carer Payment. • Isolation and Mental Health Erosion: The compounding pressure of navigating complex developmental needs without structural support drives social isolation. This directly results in parental burnout, family breakdown, and secondary mental health crises among caregivers demanding further intervention from an already buckling Medicare system.
Issue C: Severe Behaviours, Social Safety, and the Illusion of “Independent Improvement” Perhaps the most concerning aspect of the current funding contraction is a fundamental misunderstanding among policymakers regarding the nature of profound developmental and psychosocial disabilities. There appears to be an implicit, highly unrealistic expectation that participants can simply “improve” or become independent in the absence of consistent funding. Throughout my career particularly in acute inpatient units and frontline support work I have worked directly with participants experiencing profound distress, dysregulation, and complex behaviours. I have routinely managed and witnessed: • Severe physical aggression (including punching, biting, scratching, hitting, and direct verbal death threats). • High-acuity environmental and self-injurious behaviours (including vomiting, head-banging, and faecal smearing). These behaviours are not choices; they are communication. They represent an individual in profound distress, struggling with severe sensory, cognitive, or psychological overload, communicating the only way their nervous system allows. • It is entirely unclear how members of parliament expect these highly vulnerable participants to safely make progress, integrate into communities, or achieve functional goals without intensive, specialised supports. • The Cost of Removing Support: When behavioural support plans, therapy hours, and support workers are cut, these behaviours do not disappear. Instead, they escalate. The home environment becomes dangerous for parents and siblings, community participation becomes impossible, and the participant becomes an acute risk to themselves and society. • Deprived of proactive NDIS funding, these individuals inevitably end up in long-term, high-cost hospital blockages, forensic disability services, or the justice system. A single night in an acute mental health bed or emergency department costs the taxpayer vastly more than the proactive, weekly NDIS therapeutic interventions that prevent these crises from occurring in the first place.
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 441
Constructive Recommendations: Addressing the Issues Sustainably The committee must look beyond short-sighted funding cuts and focus on systemic optimisation that preserves participant dignity, protects family units, and secures economic stability. The following are proposed: Recommendation 1: Protect Early and Preventative Intervention Funding • Action: Legislate strict protections for early intervention (ages 0–9) and youth development packages (up to age 30) to ensure funding cannot be slashed if a participant is showing functional challenges. • Rationale: Proactive funding for occupational therapy, speech pathology, and positive behaviour support dramatically reduces the long-term lifetime cost of care. Cutting these supports to save short-term capital creates a multi-million- dollar liability for the state when the individual reaches adulthood without coping mechanisms.
Recommendation 2: Establish a “Care Giver Sustainability Assessment” within Planning • Action: Introduce a formal, mandatory metric within NDIS planning sessions that evaluates the mental, physical, and financial health of the primary care network. Plan builds must explicitly account for preserving parental employment and preventing caregiver collapse. • Rationale: Keeping parents in the workforce maintains tax revenue, preserves family stability, and minimises the risk of children being surrendered to out-of-home care or state guardianship due to total caregiver burnout.
Recommendation 4: Safeguard the Clinical Integrity of Functional Capacity Assessments (FCAs)
• Action: Legislate that all Functional Capacity Assessments (FCAs) used to determine NDIS funding packages must be conducted exclusively by qualified, registered allied health professionals specifically Occupational Therapists. Explicitly ban the use of standardised computer algorithms, automated assessment tools, or untrained, non-clinical personnel to determine or benchmark a participant’s functional capacity and support needs. • Rationale: An accurate understanding of a participant’s complex, real-world support needs cannot be captured by a checklist, a computer program, or an untrained professional. Occupational Therapists are uniquely university- trained to assess the dynamic intersection of an individual’s specific impairment, their environmental barriers, and the complex task demands of daily living.
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 441
Removing the clinician from this process introduces extreme systemic risk. A non-clinical assessor or a software algorithm cannot safely evaluate or capture high-acuity risks, fluctuating support needs due to burnout or sensory overload, or the nuanced realities of neurodivergent lived experiences. Allowing untrained professionals or automated tools to dictate funding levels will result in dangerously inaccurate assessments, underfunded plans, and the systemic failure of participants with complex presentations.
Conclusion The NDIS is a world-leading initiative that reflects Australia’s commitment to human rights, equity, and social responsibility. However, the current trajectory of capping and cutting funding packages under the guise of “sustainability” is generating an immediate, catastrophic counter-effect. It is driving families into systemic poverty, breaking down the mental health of caregivers, and removing the vital therapeutic scaffolding that keeps both complex participants and the wider public safe. If the government wishes to see improvements in participant outcomes and long- term efficiency, the solution is not to starve the system. The solution is to invest intelligently, value the $2.25 economic return, protect the workforce, and ensure that clinical funding is directed toward proactive, capacity-building, and affirming care.
I thank the committee for their time and consideration of this submission, and I am available to provide further direct verbal testimony regarding my experiences should the committee require it.
Sincerely, Pippa Occupational Therapist & Director Planet Ability 355 – 359 Ringwood Warrandyte Road Warrandyte, Victoria Email: info@planetability.com.au