Submission 550
Committee Secretary
Senate Standing Committees on Community Affairs
PO Box 6100
Parliament House
Canberra ACT 2600
Submission regarding the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment
(Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026
To the Committee,
I am a 43 year old mother, writing to you as both an NDIS participant living with disabilities and the primary carer of my two children, aged 8 and 11, who also live with disabilities.
I am writing to express my profound fear of, and absolute opposition to, the Securing the NDIS for Future Generations Bill 2026. While I understand the government’s desire to ensure the financial sustainability of the scheme, this bill as written does not secure the future—it dismantles the safety net keeping my family alive and functioning.
My NDIS plan is what gives me the baseline physical capacity to manage our home and home-educate my children, who both experienced school trauma and mental health problems while in public education.
If passed, this legislation will deliver a catastrophic “triple-whammy” to my household: the loss of my own essential supports, the loss of my children’s developmental therapies, and an impossible increase in my unpaid caregiving workload at a time when my own support needs are increasing.
Here is how this bill will directly harm my family, and why it violates our basic rights under Australian and international law.
- The Carer Deficit: Shifting the Burden to an Already
Disabled Mother
By cutting $37.8 billion over the next four years, this bill relies on the assumption that if the NDIS stops paying for a support, that support is no longer needed. But disability does not disappear because a line item is deleted from a budget.
As a 43-year-old managing my own severe sensory load, low executive functioning, and low baseline energy, my NDIS plan is what gives me the baseline capacity to keep our home running. Because my neurodivergent brain naturally processes every single detail of my environment, even the simple act of driving to an appointment carries a massive, exhausting energy cost. My children have intense, high-level support needs for emotional regulation, social skills, and co-regulation. If the NDIA uses its new powers under Schedule 1 to cap our funding or remove core supports, those duties will fall entirely on my shoulders. I physically
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and neurologically do not have the capacity to absorb the labor of outsourced support workers, cleaners, or therapists on top of my existing care burden.
If the NDIA uses its new powers under Schedule 1 to cap our funding or remove core supports, those duties will fall entirely on my shoulders. I cannot physically absorb the labor of outsourced support workers, cleaners, or therapists.
This directly violates Article 19 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), which Australia ratified in 2008. Article 19 guarantees my right to live independently and be included in the community. By stripping away our individualized care and forcing me to become a full-time, unsupported carer for my kids at the expense of my own health and well-being, this bill forces my family into isolation.
- The “Thriving Kids” Gamble and the Funding Cliff for
My Children
My 8-year-old child is in a prime developmental window, but lives with highly complex autistic PDA (Pervasive Drive for Autonomy) learning needs and a profound, constant need for physical movement. Under the bill’s new strategy, children under nine with neurodivergence are slated to be pushed off the NDIS and into the new Thriving Kids program. While the government calls this a “safety net,” it is actually a funding cliff. A rigid, block-funded classroom, school hub, or community health center is entirely incompatible with a child who has PDA needs and requires a low-demand, highly individualized pacing to prevent nervous system burnout. When a local Thriving Kids hub runs out of its allocated budget in October, a child’s tailored early intervention completely stops. Trading an individualized entitlement for a capped, over-stretched state safety net guarantees that children like mine will completely fall through the cracks.
This systemic exclusion of specific groups of children amounts to indirect discrimination under Section 24 of Australia’s own Disability Discrimination Act 1992. It treats children with developmental or cognitive disabilities as financial liabilities to be managed out of the system, rather than human beings with a right to equal service access.
- The “All Appropriate Treatment” Clause Violates Our
Bodily Autonomy
Schedule 1 of the bill introduces a cruel clause requiring applicants to prove they have undergone “all appropriate treatment” before a disability can be deemed permanent.
For myself and my children, this is terrifying. It means a bureaucrat behind a desk can freeze our funding unless we agree to undergo invasive procedures, experimental drug regimes, or traumatic therapies that our actual doctors do not recommend. For complex neurological, and neurodivergent conditions, what constitutes ‘appropriate’ treatment is highly contested. Under this bill, a non-medical NDIA bureaucrat or rigid data checklist—not my family’s actual treating specialists—will hold the power to decide what treatments we must exhaust. Forcing an already struggling family to pay out-of-pocket for, undergo, and prove the failure of dozens of therapies just to ‘prove’ our permanence creates
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an impossible financial and structural barrier before we can even stand a chance at getting basic support.
● Under International Law (CRPD Article 25): Healthcare must be provided on the basis of free and informed consent. Conditioning our survival funding on forced medical compliance completely strips us of our bodily autonomy. ● Under Australian Common Law: Landmark legal precedents (like Marion’s Case
- firmly establish that every Australian has the right to refuse medical treatment. This bill creates a horrific double standard where disabled Australians must trade away their legal right to refuse treatment just to access the support they need to survive.
- Criminalizing Exhaustion: Onerous Information Requests and a $19,800 Fine
Under the expanded enforcement frameworks tied to the new integrity amendments, the NDIA and the NDIS Commission have been granted sweeping powers to demand evidence, records, and documentation under heavily compressed timeframes. If a participant or self-managed carer fails to comply with an information-gathering notice within the agency’s specified window, they are liable for a civil penalty of 60 penalty units—which currently translates to a staggering $19,800 fine.
If these extraordinary fines are truly meant only for corporate fraudsters and corrupt syndicates, then the text of the legislation must explicitly exempt participants and unpaid family carers. Relying on the ‘discretion’ or goodwill of an adversarial agency is a terrifying gamble for a vulnerable household. Legislation must protect families by law, not by bureaucratic convenience. If the legal framework allows a parent to be fined 60 penalty units for administrative delay caused by a household disability crisis, the law itself is fundamentally broken.
Threatening an exhausted participant with a near-$19,800 penalty for a delayed administrative response does not target “shonks or fraudsters”—it directly criminalizes the structural limitations of disability. Living with low executive functioning, high sensory load, and an immense daily care burden means that navigating complex paperwork is already a monumental hurdle. If I miss an aggressive administrative deadline because I am managing multi-day emotional dysregulation or intense PDA meltdowns for my 8 and 11-year-olds, or because my own system has completely shut down from exhaustion, this legislation allows the state to financially ruin my household. It actively punishes a participant for exhibiting the exact executive dysfunction and functional capacity deficits that the NDIS was explicitly built to support.
● Legal Conflict — The Principle of Proportionality: In both Australian administrative law and international human rights jurisprudence, regulatory penalties must be strictly proportionate to the targeted offense. Weaponizing a massive corporate-scale financial penalty against an uncompensated, overwhelmed parent who is simply drowning in paperwork is a complete distortion of justice. It actively
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punishes a participant for exhibiting the exact executive dysfunction and functional capacity deficits that the NDIS was explicitly built to support.
- Unchecked Ministerial Supremacy: The “Henry VIII” Clause and the De-funding of Cohorts
The bill introduces an extraordinary expansion of executive power by granting the Minister sweeping authority to unilaterally alter NDIS rules and reduce overall funding for entire support categories (such as social and community participation within the capacity building pool). Shockingly, the bill includes a 12-month “Henry VIII” clause, allowing the Minister to bypass the states and territories entirely to rewrite NDIS laws without their approval.
As a mother of two neurodivergent children while managing my own disabilities, this concentration of power fills me with an overwhelming sense of doom. It means our entire survival framework is no longer protected by stable legislation. Instead, future Ministers can, at the stroke of a pen and to hit a budgetary target, declare an entire cohort of people—such as children with specific neurodivergent presentations or older parents with functional limitations—ineligible for specific types of care.
● Infringement of Legal Rights: This concentration of power directly undermines the constitutional and federal intent of the scheme. By allowing a single politician to alter rights via executive decree rather than parliamentary debate, the bill violates Article 4(3) of the UN CRPD, which mandates that governments must actively consult people with disabilities on structural changes. Furthermore, top-down funding caps flatly contradict the foundational statutory objects of the primary NDIS Act 2013 (Section 3), which legally promises an individualized scheme built on choice and control.
- The Opaque “Black Box”: Computer-Generated Plans and the Stripping of Appeal Rights
Under the NDIS’s New Framework Planning model enabled by this bill, funding packages will be entirely computer-generated. Human discretion is being systematically stripped from the process: NDIA staff delegates will have no authority to amend or adjust the automated budget output to reflect a family’s real-world crisis, leaving them only to accept or reject the algorithmic assessment as a whole.
Most terrifyingly, this bill fundamentally dismantles our right to an independent legal remedy. Internal briefings reveal that if a participant appeals their computer-generated plan to the new Administrative Review Tribunal (ART), the tribunal will no longer possess its historical power to directly alter a plan or reinstate slashed funding. Instead, the ART will only be permitted to send the plan back to the NDIA to conduct yet another assessment using the exact same rigid automated tools.
An automated computer program cannot look at my 8-year-old and 11-year-old and understand how their highly specific PDA profiles and high movement needs interact with my
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own limited energy and sensory processing limits. It reduces our deeply complex, interconnected family ecosystem down to a generic mathematical formula.
This completely traps my family in a closed, automated loop. And when (not if) the algorithm miscalculates what my 8-year-old and 11-year-old need to survive, or completely ignores how my own disabilities compound our family’s care needs, I will be denied a true, independent human intervention.
● Infringement of Legal Rights: Stripping an independent tribunal of the power to substitute a “correct and preferable” decision completely subverts the core tenets of natural justice and procedural fairness enshrined in the Administrative Decisions (Judicial Review) Act 1977 (ADJR Act). It robs participants of a meaningful merits review. Internationally, this structural exclusion breaches CRPD Article 12 (Equal recognition before the law) and Article 13 (Access to justice). By replacing transparent legal recourse with an unyielding “black box” algorithm, the government is treating the fundamental human rights of disabled families as a mathematics problem to be solved, rather than a legal obligation to be honored.
Conclusion: A Rushed Process and a Broken Promise
Finally, I am deeply insulted by the rushed nature of this committee inquiry. Giving the disability community less than a month to read, comprehend, and write submissions on a complex 109-page bill is a complete betrayal of the government’s promise of “co-design.”
CRPD Article 4(3) explicitly dictates that governments must closely consult with and actively involve people with disabilities in legislation that affects them. Rushing this bill through parliament to hit a July 1 legislative deadline is a clear breach of that international mandate.
I urge the Committee to reject this bill in its current form. Do not balance the federal budget on the backs of exhausted, disabled mothers and their children. Please send this bill back to the drawing board and engage in a true, slow, compassionate co-design process with the people whose lives depend on it.
Thank you for considering my submission.