NDIA Accountability Project

This project is in DRAFT

NDIS participant experiencing burnout due to plan reductions (Participant experience)

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

Submission 492

To: Community Affairs Legislation Committee

Re: National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future

Generations) Bill 2026

Submitted: 24 May 2026

I am writing as a parent and carer of an NDIS participant. My child and I are both currently experiencing significant burnout. We are actively using NDIS supports right now — not to thrive, but to recover. Those supports are helping my child build skills and regulate, and helping me hold our family together. The prospect of those supports being reduced is not an abstract concern. It is a direct threat to progress we are only just beginning to make.

I am asking the committee to consider what it actually means to cut a plan that is already doing the minimum necessary work. This is not excess. This is a family in recovery, using the scheme as it was designed to be used. The 2023 independent review was explicit: foundational supports must be in place before any changes to participant eligibility or plan funding. Those supports do not exist. The government has proceeded anyway, without explanation and without the evidence the review required.

The government has told us this bill is about sustainability and integrity. Neither claim holds up to scrutiny. Confirmed fraud in a forty-two billion dollar scheme amounted to $34.5 million across seventy-two active cases — just over one percent of the projected savings. A third of those savings come from removing children from the scheme. A minister stood in parliament in July 2024 and described billions being rorted. The actual confirmed figure and that statement cannot both be true. In March 2026, when the Senate moved to properly investigate the fraud claims the government had spent two years citing, the government voted the inquiry down. I would like to know why.

The NDIS returns $2.25 to the Australian economy for every dollar spent. Cutting plans does not eliminate costs. It shifts them — onto hospitals, emergency departments, mental health services, and onto carers like me who absorb what the scheme drops. I have not seen any modelling of what that displacement will cost downstream, and I am not aware that any has been released. I would like to know whether it was done, and if so, why the public has not seen it. I would also like to know what gender impact assessment has been conducted on the economic consequences for women who will carry that unpaid care load, including the effects on their workforce participation and superannuation.

None of these changes were put to the Australian people at the 2025 federal election. There was no mandate for removing 160,000 people from the scheme or reducing average plans by five thousand dollars. The promise of the NDIS — made explicitly and publicly to every person who entered it — was that support, once granted, would be lasting. People made irreversible decisions about their lives, their employment, and their care arrangements based on that promise. Australia is also a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which requires genuine participation by people with disability in decisions that affect their lives. This process has not met that standard.

I am asking the committee to require the government to table the complete evidentiary basis for the July 2024 fraud claims and reconcile that statement with the confirmed figure of thirty-four and a half million dollars. I am asking it to explain on what basis the

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

Submission 492

government has proceeded with eligibility changes when the foundational supports

prescribed as non-negotiable preconditions do not  exist. And  I am asking the

committee to require the government to release whatever downstream cost modelling it holds — on hospitals, mental health services, housing, and the unpaid labour of carers.

My questions:

  1. Will the committee require the government to table the complete evidentiary basis for the July 2024 fraud claims and reconcile the statement that billions were being rorted with the confirmed fraud figure of $34.5 million?

    1. The foundational supports the review prescribed as non-negotiable

preconditions do not exist. On what basis has the government proceeded with eligibility changes?

  1. What does Treasury project that hospitals, mental health services, housing, and family systems will spend absorbing what the NDIS drops? Has that modelling been done and if so why has it not been released?

  2. When will the government introduce a Disability Rights Act that makes the rights of people with disability legally enforceable regardless of which minister holds power?

  3. These changes were not taken to the Australian people at the 2025 election. On what democratic basis does the government claim authority for changes of this magnitude?

I am asking the committee to reject this bill until foundational supports are in place, to require the release of downstream cost modelling before the bill proceeds any further, and to require an independent human rights assessment before it passes. My family is not a line item. We are using this scheme exactly as it was designed to be used, and we need it to still be there when we are ready to take the next step.

Kind regards,