Submission 602
NATIONAL DISABILITY INSURANCE SCHEME AMENDMENT
(SECURING THE FURUTRE FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS) BILL 2026
COMMUNITY AFFAIRS LEGISLATIVE COMMITTEE
Submitted by:
Date: 24 May 2026
Executive Summary
The Bill as it is written carries enormous risks for disabled people and their families. It has the effect of reducing people to cost centres, whose purpose is to be grateful, silent, and cost less. The cost of disability will not be reduced but transferred elsewhere. The removal of any course of appeal magnifies the dangers of Bill as written, and echoes with the paternalism often displayed towards those seen as less, along with the penal attitudes towards those seen as undeserving.
I will only address the elements of the NDIS’ interaction with disability of which I have direct experience.
Introduction
I am a parent, a carer, and a plan nominee. My family has been involved with the NDIS since 2017 when my youngest was given access based on an autism diagnosis. I have seen the NDIS move through many phases of how it worked, and how it related to participants. It started as a very detailed person-focused system and it was done face to face. It is now unrecognisable to the scheme we joined. LACs change without notice, plans are rolled over endlessly, and it takes MP assistance to have reassessments actioned. Both my children are now participants, and both are young adults with a mix of neurological, physical and psychosocial disabilities. Some are covered by the scheme and some are excluded as health related. I manage their plans and coordinate NDIS reporting/assessment. I find them services to meet their needs and funding, organise appointments, review if it is appropriate and effective, manage invoicing and payments and generally communicate with their providers on their behalf. We living in rural NSW which means waiting lists are long, often closed, and sometimes a long way away.
Effect on People Like My Family
We live in fear now. Despite being assessed as having a fully treated, stable and lifelong disability burden and granted the Disability Pension, the Bill as written makes it hard to see how that will be understood and assessed by the tool or tools yet to be defined. The wording of the Bill indicates systems that will be able to recognised
Submission 602
obvious disability but struggle to understand anything other than physical (therefore instantly observable) disabilities.
Even if not excluded by the assessment tool and AI decision making, reverting funding levels to 2023 levels will take them back to when they were school aged and living at home. A very real possibility will be that we need to move to support one daughter who has gone to ANU to study, more than 7.5 hours away. In her first year away, without a support worker, she lived in increasingly poor health, personal hygiene and domestic cleanliness, and struggled to attend class, eat, and see practitioners of any kind. We thought she’d die by the end of it. In 2024 we applied for a reassessment, which gave her funds for a support worker at least every second day to cook her a hot meal (and crucially wash up afterwards), ensure her domestic space is clean, and that she is bathing. They take her shopping. They take her to appointments. Yes, they take her out to cafes because she is young, and she wants to live.
My other daughter will lose funding for a supported employment position, for respite care, for learning how to live independently. It will mean she lives forever with me, barely leaving her room. She’s already losing hope that her life matters.
Key Concerns
s9B While appearing innocuous, the requirement to exclude context from the functional capacity of a person is going to skew results. Context matters. A person may be able to do something in private that they cannot do in a public place. They can do it once but then need to rest for a few hours to recover. They horde capacity days in advance to be able to cope with the known upcoming event, then hide away to get over it. Referring details of how this definition of functional capacity is to be decided to the as-yet unwritten rules does nothing to make this a suitable core for the Bill.
s25A It is disturbing that the Bill directly states that a person’s ability to access “appropriate treatment” is excluded from consideration. In a nation of the geographical size of Australia this will immediately exclude people in remote and rural regions unless they have substantial means, which only a very small proportion does. The consequences of this provision cannot be overstated. Access will firmly remain in favour of the wealthy and urban populations for whom access to tertiary hospitals and specialists is simple and direct. The argument put forward for changing assessment methods from the current to the proposed method (that it disproportionally favours wealthier families who can pay for specialists and onerous reports) is shown by this section to be spurious.
Removal of section 31 and amendments to 17A inclusion of 17B and changes to section 3 and 4 While these changes are obvious attempts to reverse the power of AAT and court determinations, they fundamentally alter the NDIS from a scheme focused on supporting people with actual needs to a scheme primarily focused on
Submission 602
money. This is a regressive step that objectifies people; it trades off plans shaped by participants to meet their individual circumstances and goals to centralised deniability. Decision making isn’t focused on individual needs and goals but shifted towards the Scheme itself. Scheme sustainability is prioritised over the people it supports, and while I have sympathy for why they thought this would help solve the problem, it’s the wrong solution.
s33(2EA and 2EB) Cap setting by Ministerial determination pushes the NDIS away from its primary purpose and the Explanatory Memoranda do nothing to make it better. That the determination can cause caps to only apply to targeted groups of participants demonstrates an impulse that some disabilities are more deserving than others. While it may look administratively like a way to standardise funding decisions, the hard caps will result in people being funded for less than they have been assessed as needing. This is a Kafkaesque, although really the whole Bill is. s34 is even worse.
s34A This provision is, I want to say a nonsense, but more than that it is brutal. Some elements sound reasonable until put into real life practice, while others, specifically the Minister’s power to reduce or constrain groups of supports across the board, are antithetical to the purpose of the Scheme. How can the NDIS determine what is needed and in the same breath refuse sufficient money to address the assessed needs? Will this mean people will be buying their wheelchairs from Aldi specials again? The purpose was individualised, dignified care. The section is actually saying ‘you need (a), we’ll pay (b), and if you cannot afford the gap you can crowdfund it’, which in and of itself is diametrically opposed to dignity. It will mean those on Centrelink payments will not be able to privately pay for lost supports, exposing them to significant harm. People will die. People will live isolated. People will not be able to work. People will live afraid of their family member’s aggression. Again, this section shifts the Scheme away from individual decision making to systemic funding cuts based on types of supports, regardless of what has been already decided by the Scheme itself as reasonable and necessary. Although the Minister is to ‘have regard for’ the safety of participants, it doesn’t compel him to do anything with that regard. Worse, because the Ministerial determinations operate through legislative instruments, reductions in funding are not reviewable. This leaves people’s lives hanging on the whim of each Minister as they come through the portfolio.
s34(1)(aa) This is really impractical, which is why the courts under Eastham introduced ‘whole of person’ reasoning to recognition of impairment and support needs. If, as the Explanatory Memorandum states, Eastman represented ‘unintended expansion’ of the Scheme, that is faulty Scheme design. It also contradicts its own position stated in the Explanatory Memoranda to the 2024 amendments. It can be extremely difficult, if not impossible to tease out what need (or symptom in medicalised modelling) is caused by which disability. There can be overlap, knock on effects, or magnification of symptoms. It took 9 months for an OT to work out which
Submission 602
disability caused which needs in one of my daughters. It was ridiculous and so is this whole subsection.
Recommendations
-
Do not pass this Bill
-
Introduce means testing for access to the Scheme to reduce overall costs without making the poorest unable to pay for their care
-
Reduce the NDIS price limits, which are often much higher than private or Medicare funded professional fees.
-
Release all modelling on access, funding, impacts on state systems and informal support systems, workforce impacts, participant outcomes.
Conclusion
The Bill will take the NDIS and create something else, something familiar and old and ugly. It will ruin small businesses and rural economies centred around disability care. It will lead to deaths. There are other ways of containing costs that don’t gaslight people with disabilities and feed the narrative of disability being a rort. We have lives, just as flawed and imperfect as other peoples. We want to be allowed to live them in safety and dignity.