Submission 638
Submission to the Senate Standing Committee on Community Affairs
Inquiry into the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the
NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026
Date: 30 May 2026
To: Committee Secretary, Senate Standing Committees on Community Affairs
Via Email: community.affairs.sen@aph.gov.au
- Submitter Details
- Name: Mel Maiolo
- Position: Founder
- Organisation: Home Care To Me Bunbury Geographe
- Location: Australind / Bunbury Geographe Region, Western Australia
- Email:
- Phone:
- Operational Context: Female-owned, regional, trauma-informed Aged Care and Disability Support provider delivering highly personalised services in Western Australia.
- Executive Summary As the owner of a small, values-driven, regional disability and aged care support business in Western Australia, I welcome the opportunity to make this submission. At Home Care To Me Bunbury Geographe, our daily mission is to support NDIS and aged care participants to live enriched, dignified, and empowered lives in their local communities.
While we support measures designed to eliminate systemic fraud and ensure the long term financial viability of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), we are deeply alarmed by the severe government overreach embedded in the proposed NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 and the recently passed NDIS Amendment (Integrity and Safeguarding) Act 2026.
In its current form, this legislative framework represents a profound step backward. It actively breaches Australia’s international human rights commitments, establishes rigid and exclusionary frameworks, and places an administrative and compliance burden on small providers that is fundamentally unsustainable.
We submit that health and disability support are fundamental human rights that belong to all Australians—not a luxury reserved exclusively for wealthy, able bodied, metropolitan-dwelling citizens. By shifting the legislative goalposts to favor
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large, metropolitan-centric, corporate providers, this Bill will systematically abandon regional participants, strip them of their agency, and leave them behind.
Our submission details these critical issues across eight key areas:
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Systemic Inequity and Metropolitan Bias: How the Bill disproportionately harms regional, rural, and remote Western Australians.
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Breaches of the United Nations CRPD: How the Bill violates international human rights standards, specifically Articles 12, 19, and 25.
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The Small Provider Existential Crisis (Schedule 2, Part 1): The administrative, auditing, and financial exhaustion of mandatory registration on micro-providers.
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The Destabilisation of High-Care Support: Why the new Bill makes supporting high-needs participants a compliance and financial impossibility for small businesses.
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Tightened Eligibility and the Medicalisation of Support (Schedule 1, Part 8): The trauma-uninformed requirement of “exhausting all appropriate treatments.”
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Punitive Financial and Budgetary Rules (Schedule 1, Parts 4 & 5): The direct impact of clawing back unspent funds in thin regional markets.
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The Staggering Financial Waste of Ignored Reports and Legal Appeals: How NDIS plan funds are drained on ignored $5,000–$10,000 assessments, and the waste of over $60 million fighting participants at the ART with a 70% loss rate.
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Failure to Leverage Existing Systems and the Safeguarding Liability Vacuum: Why the NDIS is redundantly re-inventing the regulatory wheel instead of merging with Aged Care, and the terrifying legal vacuum created by expanded NDIA “search and seize” powers.
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Addressing Specific Provisions of the Bill
3.1. Regional Inequity: The Metro-Centric Wealth and Geographic Divide
The entire design of the NDIS pricing caps, travel rules, and the proposed compliance frameworks in this Bill assumes a highly saturated metropolitan market.
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The Regional WA Reality: In regional Western Australia, specifically the Bunbury Geographe and Southwest regions, we operate in an extremely thin market. Our participants do not have the luxury of choice among dozens of specialized therapists, support workers, or clinics. When metropolitan-centric policy decisions are made—such as capping travel and clawing back underspent budgets—regional participants are directly discriminated against.
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The Division of Care: This Bill perpetuates a deeply concerning two-tiered system of health and disability equity in Australia. Able-bodied, wealthy, and
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city-dwelling citizens have ready access to a highly competitive, functional market. Meanwhile, regional participants—who already face higher costs of living, lack of access to public transport, and long waitlists—are treated as “compliance risks” and “cost-drivers.” We must state plainly: Geography and socioeconomic status must never dictate a person’s right to live with dignity and receive safe, high-quality care.
3.2. Direct Violations of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD)
Australia is a signatory to the CRPD. This Bill, through several key schedules, actively undermines and violates our international commitments:
- Violation of Article 19 (Living independently and being included in the community): By granting the Minister broad, top-down powers (Schedule 1, Part
- to restrict and cap funding for social, civic, and community participation, the Bill strips participants of their right to choose how they engage with society. Standardising support budgets via Ministerial decree shifts the model back to an institutionalised, custodial form of care.
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Violation of Article 12 (Equal recognition before the law & Supported Decision-Making): The move toward automated decision-making and rigid, non negotiable funding categories removes the participant’s voice from their own planning process. It replaces supported, dynamic, person-centred decision making with rigid algorithmic bureaucracy.
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Violation of Article 25 (Health): Article 25 demands that persons with disabilities have the right to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health without discrimination. Tightening permanence rules (Schedule 1, Part 8) to deny entry to those who have not “exhausted all appropriate medical treatments” is a discriminatory hurdle. It forces individuals to undergo clinical pathways they may not want or consent to, violating their bodily autonomy and dignity of risk.
3.3. Schedule 2, Part 1 – The Small Provider Existential Crisis and Mandatory
Registration
The Bill seeks to enforce mandatory registration for providers delivering core and daily living supports, using “quality and safeguarding” as a justification.
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Crushing Admin and Auditing Burden: As a small, regional, female-owned provider currently undergoing the NDIS registration process, I can testify to the overwhelming administrative and financial exhaustion it inflicts. The compliance overhead, expensive quality audits, and endless paperwork are designed for large corporate structures with dedicated compliance departments.
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The Corporate Monopoly Risk: If micro-providers and regional small businesses are forced out of the sector because they cannot survive the administrative
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overhead, the market will be monopolized by large, impersonal, interstate corporate entities. These big companies do not have community roots, they do not understand regional WA, and they do not operate from a trauma-informed place. They operate on profit margins. Our regional participants will be left with no one who truly knows them, or who will service their area, resulting in a severe drop in the quality of care and an increase in participant vulnerability.
3.4. The Destabilisation of High-Care Support: Forcing Providers to Refuse High-
Needs Participants
A direct and tragic consequence of this Bill is that it will make the delivery of services to high-needs, high-care participants completely unviable for small, dedicated providers.
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The Multiplication of Financial and Compliance Risks: Supporting individuals with high medical needs, complex behaviors of concern, or severe physical disabilities inherently involves a higher baseline of operational incidents. Under the new frameworks, where minor administrative or operational slips are treated as grave compliance failures, the financial and legal risks are multiplied.
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The Impact of Soaring Insurances and Declining Therapy Access: Small businesses are already facing skyrocketing insurance premiums—specifically public liability, workers’ compensation, and medical malpractice. When combined with the massive reduction in regional therapy providers (who are leaving due to NDIS pricing caps), small providers no longer have the clinical support networks required to safely draft and review Complex Behaviour Support Plans.
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Unreasonable Personal Liability of Directors: Under the NDIS Amendment (Integrity and Safeguarding) Act 2026, corporate directors and executive officers are now exposed to direct, vicarious, and personal liability for the actions of their staff. Fines for “aggravated breaches” under Section 73J have increased up to $15 million if a breach leads to serious injury or death. If a support worker commits an isolated, unauthorized error, the director can be held criminally and financially liable. In private medical or business practice, a system that prosecutes directors for a frontline worker’s independent fault is considered an unviable liability hazard. Small providers will have no choice but to refuse service to high-care participants to protect their families, their directors, and their businesses from catastrophic liability. This will leave the most vulnerable, high needs Australians completely abandoned.
3.5. Schedule 1, Part 8 – Tightening Permanence: A Medicalised, Trauma
Uninformed Approach
The Bill specifies that access to the NDIS will only be granted when a participant has undertaken “all appropriate treatment” to remedy or alleviate their impairment.
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Government Overreach into Personal Healthcare: This represents an extraordinary level of state overreach into the private lives and medical decisions of citizens. It forces participants—particularly those with fluctuating psychosocial conditions, neurodivergent traits, or complex trauma—into a corner. They are told they must comply with clinical interventions, medical trials, or pharmaceutical pathways, regardless of personal consent or trauma history, simply to prove their “permanence.”
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Systemic Bias: This provision fails to recognize that access to high-quality healthcare is highly unequal in this country. A wealthy, metro-dwelling participant can afford the specialists and treatments required to quickly satisfy this clause. A regional participant, or one experiencing socioeconomic disadvantage, cannot access these specialists, meaning they will be locked out of the NDIS indefinitely.
3.6. Schedule 1, Part 5 – Plan End Dates & Non-Carry Over of Unspent Funds
This part introduces legislated end dates for plans and prevents the carry-over of unspent funds to renewed plans.
- Penalising Participants for Systemic Market Failures: In Southwest WA, a participant’s underspend is a reflection of thin markets and systemic workforce shortages, not a lack of need. If a participant cannot find an Occupational Therapist or a support worker for six months because none are available in their town, clawing back their unspent funds is an act of bureaucratic cruelty. It penalises the victim of a systemic failure, worsening their isolation and reducing their overall capacity to build independence.
3.7. True Inefficiencies: The Multi-Million Dollar Wastage of Redundant Reports and
Legal Appeals
If the Government is truly committed to “securing the NDIS for future generations” by driving down administrative and systemic inefficiencies, it must look at where the actual wastage occurs—not in the vital daily care of regional participants, but in the Agency’s own deeply flawed processes.
- The Functional Capacity Assessment (FCA) Paperwork Drain: To obtain, maintain, or review supports, NDIS participants are routinely required to undergo exhaustive Functional Capacity Assessments, therapy reports and assesments. These reports and assessments regularly cost between $1,500 and $5,000 (and up to $10,000 for highly complex cases). Crucially, these fees are paid directly out of the participant’s support plan, directly eating away at their front-line care budgets. To add to this financial injury, NDIA planners and reviewing staff routinely do not even read these reports during plan reviews, frequently ignoring detailed clinical evidence and requesting brand-new assessments instead. This is an indefensible, circular waste of finite taxpayer-funded resources.
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The Multimillion-Dollar Legal War on Participants: The NDIA’s adversarial approach to dispute resolution represents a severe misuse of public funds. In the 2024–25 financial year alone, the NDIA spent approximately $60.7 million on external private law firms to represent it at the Administrative Review Tribunal (ART) (formerly the AAT) to fight its own participants over basic, reasonable, and necessary supports.
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An Unacceptable “Lose Rate” that Private Sector Boardrooms Would Never Tolerate: Despite outspending participants’ community legal centers by millions, the NDIA loses, concedes, or settles approximately 70% to 80% of these contested cases. In any private business or healthcare practice, a legal department that spends tens of millions of dollars of operating capital only to lose 70% of its cases would have its board sacked and its executive team replaced overnight. Fighting people with disabilities with expensive corporate lawyers—only to lose the overwhelming majority of the time—is a clear operational failure that is treated with complacency by the Agency.
3.8. Redundant Bureaucracy and the Search and Seizure Liability Vacuum
As a registered Aged Care and NDIS provider, I witness daily the absurdity of two completely separate, redundant, and parallel regulatory frameworks administering community support services.
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Re-Inventing the Aged Care Wheel: The My Aged Care and Support At Home frameworks have been operating for years under robust compliance, screening, and administrative systems. Crucially, the minimum standards for mandatory worker training, professional experience, and comprehensive insurance requirements have historically always been higher in the Aged Care sector than under NDIS.
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The “Search and Seize” Safeguarding Paradox: Under the new Integrity and Safeguarding Act 2026, the NDIS Commission has been granted extraordinary, fast-tracked powers to execute search, seizure, and information-gathering actions. While we agree that criminals committing fraud should face justice, the Bill allows the NDIA to shut down operations and seize a provider’s database, hardware, and client systems without typical prior judicial warrants.
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The Dangerous Liability Vacuum: If a regional provider is targeted for administrative compliance issues and has their digital client systems, scheduling software, and care databases seized or shut down, who takes immediate responsibility for the participant’s physical survival? Without system access, support workers cannot view critical medication charts, complex dietary profiles, or life-saving choking-risk protocols. If a participant suffers a medical emergency, is neglected, or tragically dies during a state-enforced, 14 day administrative shutdown, who carries the legal and moral responsibility— the NDIA that seized the tools of care, or the provider whose hands were
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tied? The Bill ignores this terrifying safeguarding vacuum, demonstrating that its prioritisation of compliance comes at the direct cost of participant safety.
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Recommendations We urge the Senate Standing Committee to reject the overreach within this Bill and recommend the following amendments:
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Exempt Micro-Providers and Regional Small Businesses from Intrusive Auditing Schemes: Establish an administrative and financial “safety-valve” or tiering system. Small regional providers delivering local, person-centred care should be subjected to proportional, practical compliance checks rather than the crushing auditing structures designed for large-scale, high-turnover companies.
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Incorporate Regional and Socioeconomic Equity Clauses: Mandate that no participant’s plan budget can be reduced, or unspent funds clawed back, if they reside in a designated “thin market” or regional/remote area where workforce shortages prevent service delivery.
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Respect CRPD Principles in All Budgets: Legislate that no Ministerial determinations under Schedule 1, Part 4 can be enacted without a formal, public Human Rights Impact Assessment proving compliance with the UN CRPD.
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Remove the Medicalised “All Appropriate Treatment” Requirement: Retain a trauma-informed, flexible approach to permanence that respects a participant’s right to self-determination, bodily autonomy, and supported decision-making, without forcing them through invasive medical pipelines.
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Enforce NDIA Accountability on Report Intake and Cap Adversarial Legal Spend: Introduce strict operational guidelines preventing the NDIA from requesting new FCAs if an existing report is less than two years old, requiring planners to sign off that they have read submitted clinical evidence. Furthermore, cap the NDIA’s external legal spend and mandate mediation over litigation at the ART.
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Introduce Indemnity Clauses for State-Enforced Shutdowns: Legislate that if the NDIA or NDIS Commission suspends a provider or seizes their client management data, the Commonwealth directly assumes 100% legal, medical, and civil liability for any care gaps, injuries, or deaths that occur as a result of that operational disruption.
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Establish a Regulatory Alignment Roadmap toward a Unified Support Services Department: Recommend the immediate alignment of NDIS and Aged Care Quality Standards, moving toward a single, unified home-and-community support department to cut duplication, reduce red tape, and streamline compliance for dual-sector providers.
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Conclusion
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At Home Care To Me Bunbury Geographe, we pride ourselves on operating with compassion, expertise, and radical honesty. We see the real-world impact of legislative changes on the faces of our participants every single day.
We ask the Senate to stand against bureaucratic overreach that treats regional Australians as second-class citizens. Disability and health are human rights. We must build a system that supports all Australians to live with dignity—regardless of their postcode, their socioeconomic background, or their level of physical and cognitive ability.
Thank you for your consideration of this submission. I am fully prepared to appear before the Committee at any public hearings to speak directly to the urgent reality of regional disability service delivery.