Submission to the Senate Standing Committee on Community Affairs
RE: NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submitted via the website: https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Community_Affairs/NDIS
FutureGenBill
Submission Date: 26/05/2026
Introduction
Thank you for the opportunity to have a say about the NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 (“The Bill”). I am a disabled person who has been an NDIS participant and user since 2020. I also work as a Disability and Patient Expert providing policy advice to organisations and government based on my lived and professional experience. This is the second part of my submission. My first submission was published as number 50. Since then, I’ve had further time to read about and consider the impacts of the Bill. I’d like to add the following:
Schedule 1, Part 4: The Minister can reduce funding for any support or group of supports by a specified percentage through an instrument that cannot be challenged This proposed amendment is against everything that the NDIS stands for. The NDIS is a scheme that provides individual disability support Plans tailored to the unique needs and circumstances of each participant. The role of the NDIA is to determine what funding is reasonable and necessary for each participant.
For the Minister to have the power to arbitrarily and indiscriminately cut participant’s budgets by any percentage they want is against the original intention and core principles of the NDIS. Passing this amendment to the NDIS Act would be tantamount to breaking the NDIS: It would no longer be the NDIS.
At a political / democratic level, this is wrong. The Minister should not have the power to immediately change the funding of a key social service and without any reason other than “we want to save money”. Imagine if the Minister could do this with Medicare. Imagine if the Minister could decide “ok, starting tomorrow Medicare rebates for all blood tests will be cut in half because we want to save money.” There would be outrage by the public and media. It’s a huge power. It’s unfair. It wouldn’t be acceptable to do this to non-disabled Australians. This is ableist.
At a personal level, this change would make the NDIS unstable and unusable. The NDIS, the disability industry and me with my disabilities are all extremely slow-moving beasts. For example, it
1
took me 4 years and huge amounts of energy and stress to get an effective, helpful and reliable disability support team up and running. It took me 2 years to go through the onerous processes, and to get together the required paperwork for a Change of Circumstances Request to apply for the funding that I require. This is slow.
For the Minister to have the power to swoop in and cut my budget on a whim, would be incredibly destabilising. For example, I would like to fund a support worker to help me to go swimming at my local pool once or twice per week. I would do hydrotherapy under the guidance of my physiotherapist. It’s an essential physical activity for my disabled body. But if the Minister is then going to cut both my Community and Social Participation, and Therapy budgets, it’s not worthwhile my precious limited energy going through the effort of finding, hiring, training and getting to know a new support worker, establishing a new routine or engaging with a physiotherapist to design and implement the exercise program only to have to throw all this work into the bin because I can no longer afford to pay for the supports.
Applying for and using NDIS funds requires a massive amount of unpaid, unrecognised labour from NDIS Users. We bend our entire lives around these essential supports. We sink our entire souls into these trusted relationships. If government funded disability supports are not long term, not stable, not reliable, not guaranteed then they will do more harm than good, and they won’t be worth using.
Recommendation 7: Reject the amendment allowing the Minister to reduce funding for any support or group of supports by a specified percentage through an instrument that cannot be challenged
The Overall Harms and Impacts of this Bill If this Bill with these amendments is passed, I will not be participating in the NDIS anymore. Not because I don’t need the NDIS. Not because I am a faker or a rorter. Not because I am not a “genuine” disabled person who is not disabled enough to have earnt my place in the scheme.
I will be unable to continue participating in the NDIS because I have become too disabled and traumatised by the NDIS to restart with a new set of even more difficult processes. I’m simply not well enough to start over – having to reapply, having to be assessed again, being given a new Plan, losing my support team, and having to engage with new, different types of services. I fear that doing this would permanently destroy my health, functioning and quality of life.
I have the privilege that I could scrape by without using the NDIS. However, the costs of my disability supports wouldn’t disappear. They would transfer to other government agencies like Medicare via GP management plans, and to government funded organisations like Carer’s Gateway and community health centres. Other costs would transfer to our personal household, eating away at
2
our savings and assets. Costs would translate into more unpaid labour by my primary carer and potentially, the loss of paid employment to make way for this.
The medium-term outcomes would be worse for me – I’d need to stop working, I’d become housebound, and I’d have difficulties accessing healthcare and the community. The potential long term outcomes for our household would be declining health, increased isolation, loss of housing, loss of income, becoming increasingly dependent on welfare, and potentially being forced back onto the NDIS significantly more disabled. All of this would come at a far greater cost to the public purse than funding essential disability supports to me now.
I have many privileges and I’m scared for myself. I often think, “what’s going to happen to disabled people with multiple disadvantages?” People who are socially isolated. People living in remote communities. Indigenous people. Disabled parents. People with severe cognitive or psychosocial disabilities. People living rough and in poverty. People who have no idea that all these changes are even happening or what to do about it. They are going to be left behind.
I ask that you reject this Bill in its entirety. Send the message to this Government that the original intentions of the NDIS should be saved and the real problems in the scheme can be fixed by working with – not against – the disability community. Send the message to this Government that they are responsible for ensuring that disabled people are properly cared for and supported to lead ordinary lives. For if not to provide its citizens with a solid safety net, what is the purpose of our government?
Recommendation 8: Reject this Bill in its entirety Recommendation 9: Require the Government co-designs changes to the NDIS with NDIS Users and the broader disability community
Sincerely,
An NDIS Participant, taxpayer, Aussie, disabled human
3