Submission 500
Subject: Response to the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the
NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026
To: The Minister for the NDIS / Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee
Date: 24/05/2026
- About the Respondent and Summary This response has been written on behalf of, and reflects the lived experiences of, my sister who has a disability.
I am a severely and permanently disabled individual living with complex physical and psychosocial impairments. I am a power wheelchair user and reside in High Physical Support Specialist Disability Accommodation (SDA), and I am supported by daily formal supports that are essential to my safety, health, dignity, and independence.
None of these supports were easily obtained.
It took years of specialist reports, functional capacity assessments, allied health evaluations, reviews, applications, advocacy, and significant scrutiny from the NDIA to establish what is already known: that my disabilities are permanent, significantly functionally impairing, and life altering.
The supports I now receive were not granted lightly, nor without extensive assessment by highly qualified and professionally regulated allied health and medical specialists. They were approved because substantial evidence demonstrated that they were necessary and reasonable responses to significant and permanent impairments that impact my daily function.
Despite this, I am now being asked to contemplate a future in which access to those same supports may be reassessed, restricted, capped, suspended, or removed under a new legislative framework.
These reforms are often discussed in terms of sustainability, expenditure, and administration. For participants like me, they are discussions about whether we can continue to live safely and with dignity.
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They affect whether I can safely leave my home.
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They affect whether I can continue to live in my home.
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They affect whether I can safely access a bathroom or kitchen within my home.
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They affect whether I can access basic hygiene supports, such as showering and brushing my hair.
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They affect whether I can access basic daily living supports such as food preparation support, washing of dishes, support with transfers and eating, and basic everyday tasks.
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They affect whether I can access employment or education.
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They affect whether I can access meaningful human connection as opposed to chronic isolation.
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They affect whether I can continue living independently rather than becoming reliant on crisis systems, institutional settings, or the chronic use of emergency interventions.
For many participants, these supports are not conveniences or lifestyle choices. They are often the difference between independence and dependence, participation and isolation, safety and harm, dignity and neglect. In some cases, they are the difference between life and death.
Submission 500
Most Australians would consider losing access to such basic human needs a humanitarian crisis. People with disability are being asked to treat it as a funding discussion.
Why should I have to fear losing access to the basic supports that make my life safe and dignified?
Section 9B — New Eligibility Test from 2028 (Reassessment of Existing Participants)
A primary concern with this Bill is the proposal to require existing participants to re-establish their eligibility under a new legislative framework.
The NDIS has already asked me to demonstrate that I have permanent impairments that result in substantially reduced functional capacity and significantly affect my ability to participate in everyday life without support.
I did.
The NDIS asked me to provide specialist reports, undergo functional assessments, participate in reviews, and comprehensively demonstrate why I require each support item in my plan, including support workers, SDA, specialised mobility equipment, and other disability-specific supports.
I did.
- The NDIA accepted that my impairments are permanent.
- The NDIA accepted that my functional capacity is substantially reduced.
- The NDIA accepted that I am likely to require support under the NDIS for my lifetime. My impairments have not changed. My functional capacity has not improved. My support needs remain substantially the same.
This raises a simple but important question: why should a person who has already demonstrated permanent impairment, substantially reduced functional capacity, and lifelong support needs be required to prove those same facts again simply because the legislation has changed?
A person should not spend years proving that they meet the strict disability requirements of the NDIS only to be told they must prove it again because the law has changed.
Moreover, for participants like me, eligibility reassessment is not merely an administrative process. It means reopening some of the most vulnerable and intimate aspects of our lives to scrutiny yet again. It means once again explaining why we cannot safely walk, shower, toilet prepare meals, leave the house, participate in the community, or maintain our independence.
The mental health impacts of this should not be underestimated. For participants with permanent and significant disabilities, reassessment is not always experienced as a routine review. It is experienced as a potential threat to the supports that keep us safe.
For people with psychosocial disabilities, trauma histories, or previous experiences of neglect, abuse, institutionalisation, or systemic disbelief, that uncertainty can be profoundly damaging. It can contribute to significant anxiety, hypervigilance, deterioration in mental health, social withdrawal, loss of hope, and feelings of helplessness.
Submission 500
The reality is that some participants experience such extreme distress at the prospect of losing essential supports that it can trigger serious mental health crises, including suicidal thoughts.
I regret to inform the Committee that, for me, the prospect of eligibility reassessment and random, undefined cuts to any supports in my plan triggers exactly those thoughts.
I do not want more assessments. I do not want to spend what feels like a never-ending amount of years proving my disability again. I simply want to continue living my life with the supports that have already been assessed, approved, and accepted as necessary and reasonable. I want to focus on participating in my community, maintaining my independence, and living the most ordinary life possible.
A Scheme designed to support people with disability should not create circumstances where participants fear for their safety, their independence, their dignity, or their future.
Sections 34A and 45C — Ministerial Powers
I am concerned that Sections 34A and 45C may grant extraordinarily broad powers to limit or restrict funding for categories of participants in the name of financial sustainability.
Being able to cut funding for any group of participants, for any funding category or funded support, by up to 99%, is an excessive and completely unreasonable power. It creates fear and uncertainty across the entire NDIS community and undermines confidence that participants can rely on the continuity and stability of the supports they need to live safely and with dignity, particularly those with the highest and most complex support needs.
The consequences of those decisions are not abstract. These provisions raise a question that many participants will immediately understand:
If supports that have already been assessed as necessary can be reduced in the name of financial sustainability, how can participants ever feel secure?
- My disability is permanent.
- My functional capacity is substantially reduced.
- My need for support has already been assessed and accepted by the NDIA. Yet these provisions appear to contemplate circumstances in which the level of support available to me may change despite none of those things changing.
For policymakers, this may be viewed as a funding mechanism. For participants, it raises a far more personal question:
If the supports that allow me to shower, prepare meals, toilet, access my home, live independently, and access my community can be reduced despite my disability impairments remaining unchanged, what certainty does the Scheme provide?
That question should concern Parliament.
The NDIS was created because Australians recognised that people with significant and permanent disabilities should not have to live their lives at the mercy of uncertainty, crisis, or risk.
These provisions risk reintroducing that uncertainty.
Submission 500
My disability will not become less severe because expenditure targets change. My functional capacity will not improve because a future government decides the Scheme costs too much. My need for support will not disappear because a Minister determines that a category of funding should be reduced.
Yet these provisions appear capable of producing exactly that outcome.
For participants, that is not an abstract policy concern. It is a question about whether supports that are essential today will still be available tomorrow.
Recommendations
- All existing participants who have already met the strict disability access requirements of the NDIS should not be required to re-establish eligibility under the new legislative framework.
Justification
Existing participants like me have already undergone extensive assessment, evidence gathering, and scrutiny to establish both their eligibility for the NDIS and their support needs. For participants receiving high needs support arrangements, such as Specialist
Disability Accommodation (SDA), Supported Independent Living (SIL), Specialist
Behaviour Support, High Intensity Daily Personal Activities, Disability-Related Health
Supports or other equivalent high needs supports, the assessment and approval processes associated with each of these supports are often among the most comprehensive and evidence-intensive within the Scheme.
Requiring participants to repeatedly undergo eligibility reviews or reassessments solely because legislation has changed creates significant stress, uncertainty, and psychological harm, particularly for participants with psychosocial disabilities, trauma histories, cognitive impairments, communication barriers, or permanent disabilities that have already been comprehensively assessed and accepted. Repeatedly requiring individuals to prove the existence, permanence, or impact of their disability is distressing, retraumatising, and inconsistent with a person-centred approach.
- Ministerial powers should have clearly defined and legislated limits and should not have the power to cap, reduce, or remove supports that participants rely on for essential daily living needs (Self-Care) or high needs-support services, including
High-Intensity Daily Personal Activities, all Home and Living Supports, or
Behavioural Supports. These supports should be explicitly excluded from any ministerial power to impose funding caps, reductions, or restrictions. Any power to cap, reduce, or restrict supports should be limited to a clearly defined item and be subject to strict safeguards, transparent criteria, independent review mechanisms, and full appeal rights.
For example, if a support item within an NDIS plan is subject to a cap or reduction, both the affected support and the maximum permissible reduction or cap should be clearly defined in legislation or policy. Any cap or reduction must also be capable of being waived in unique circumstances where it would fail to account for a participant’s individual circumstances and therefore pose a risk to their immediate safety and wellbeing.
Submission 500
Justification
For participants receiving high needs support services, the consequences of caps, reductions, or cuts often become matters of safety and survival. High needs support services are often directly linked to personal safety, housing stability, health, behavioural stability, and the ability to meet essential daily living needs. In many circumstances, the loss, reduction, or disruption of these supports may increase the risk of serious injury, hospitalisation, homelessness, crisis presentations, institutionalisation, or death. Any reduction, cap, removal, or reassessment of these supports therefore carries a heightened risk of harm and may undermine the very purpose for which they were originally approved.
Conclusion
Throughout this Bill, participants are repeatedly being asked to carry the burden of uncertainty.
We are asked to trust that future assessments will be fair.
We are asked to trust that future funding decisions will reflect our needs.
We are asked to trust that future reassessments will not remove supports we fought years to obtain.
Yet participants are being offered fewer guarantees, fewer protections, and less certainty in return.
Disability is already uncertain enough.
The legislation governing disability support should not be