Quadriplegic activist highlights impact of NDIS bill on survival (Participant experience)

Submission 68

SUBMISSION TO THE SENATE COMMUNITY AFFAIRS COMMITTEE

Inquiry into the NDIS Future Generations Bill 2026

Submitted by: Kyle Montgomery

Wollongong, Dharawal Country, NSW

Member, Disability Action Dharawal

May 2026

Note on Consultation Time

The time provided to disabled people to respond to this Bill has been wholly inadequate. Disabled people — many of whom face significant barriers to written communication, cognitive load, and administrative capacity — have been given minimal time to respond to legislation that will fundamentally restructure a system we depend on for survival. This submission has been prepared under those constraints. The brevity of some sections reflects the impossible conditions under which we are expected to participate, not a lack of depth in our concerns.

1. Who I Am and Why This Bill Matters to Me My name is Kyle Montgomery. I am a quadriplegic living in Wollongong on Dharawal Country. I acquired my disability seven years ago. I rely on 24-hour support work to survive — to live, to eat, to be safe, to exist in the world. Without that support I cannot live at home. Without the NDIS, I cannot live independently at all.

I am a disability justice activist, an expressive painter, a member of Disability Action Dharawal — a community group that supports disabled people on Dharawal Country through mutual aid, decolonial practice and community-built care systems. I am making this submission because the NDIS Future Generations Bill 2026 will cause direct, measurable harm to me, to dozens of friends and community members I know personally, and to hundreds of thousands of disabled Australians who are already exhausted, already neglected, and already terrified.

I strongly oppose this Bill in its current form. I am asking the Committee to recommend that it not be passed.

2. The NDIS Is Not Broken by Participants — It Was Broken for Us The framing of this Bill — and the public narrative around it — positions disabled people as a cost problem. It frames the NDIS as economically unsustainable because too many people need too much support. This is a lie of omission and a political choice.

The NDIS was not broken by participants. It was damaged by:

• Provider fraud, price gouging and systematic overcharging that the NDIA failed to regulate

• Privatisation of services that stripped accountability from the system

• Consultants and corporate waste within NDIA administration

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• Bureaucratic delays, undertrained staff and traumatising reassessments that cost the system enormous resources without benefiting participants

• A failure to build the community and foundational supports that were always meant to sit alongside the NDIS

Disabled people did not create these failures. We should not be paying for them.

The Bill responds to these systemic failures not by fixing them, but by removing disabled people from the system. That is not reform. That is cost shifting disguised as policy.

3. The Human Cost of Removing 160,000 to 300,000 People From the NDIS The government plans to remove over 160,000 people from the NDIS in the near term and up to 300,000 by 2030. The community and foundational supports that are meant to replace NDIS access for those people do not exist. They have not been built. They are not funded adequately. They are not ready.

For people removed from the NDIS without adequate alternatives, the consequences are not administrative inconveniences. They are:

• Homelessness — because without support, people cannot maintain housing

• Hospitalisation — because without support, health crises escalate

• Family breakdown and carer burnout — because informal carers cannot absorb what the state refuses to fund

• Poverty — because without support, participation in employment and economic life is impossible

• Isolation — because without support, community participation disappears

• Death — because some of the people being removed from this system depend on it to survive

I know people personally who are in these situations right now — before the Bill has even passed. Many of my friends and community members with high support needs are already being denied adequate NDIS plans, already being pushed toward crisis, already surviving on community mutual aid because the system has failed them. This Bill will make that dramatically worse.

The government has provided no public data on the projected human cost of these removals — no modelling of homelessness rates, hospitalisation increases, carer breakdown or deaths. That silence is not accidental. It is a choice not to count the harm.

4. The Bill Violates Australia’s Obligations Under the UNCRPD Australia ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) in 2008 and the Optional Protocol in 2009, accepting the UN’s power to receive individual complaints about Australia’s violations. In 2026 — eighteen years later — this country still does not have person-centred care as a

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legislative standard, a Federal Human Rights Act with enforceable disability protections, or a NDIS framework genuinely aligned with Convention obligations.

The NDIS Future Generations Bill 2026 directly contradicts multiple UNCRPD articles:

• Article 19 — Right to live independently and be included in the community. Removing people from disability support without adequate alternatives directly undermines this right.

• Article 26 — Right to habilitation and rehabilitation. The Bill’s ‘all appropriate treatments’ test forces people to prove they have exhausted medical interventions before accessing support — reversing the rights-based model the Convention requires.

• Article 4(3) — Obligation to closely consult with and actively involve disabled people through their representative organisations in all policy decisions. The speed and manner of this Bill’s development has violated this obligation.

• Article 28 — Right to an adequate standard of living. Cutting support funding removes the material foundation of that standard.

• Article 12 — Right to equal recognition before the law. Automated decision- making without individual appeal rights undermines legal personhood and due process.

The UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities’ 2019 Concluding Observations on Australia were already scathing. They found Australia had made insufficient progress since the initial 2013 review across multiple critical areas. This Bill moves in the opposite direction to those findings.

The UNCRPD is a binding international legal obligation — not an aspiration. Legislation that contradicts it should not be passed.

5. The Disability Royal Commission’s Findings Demand the

Opposite of This Bill

The Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People

with Disability ran for almost five years. Almost 10,000 people shared their experiences. The final report contained 222 recommendations. Commissioners heard thousands of cases of violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation across institutions, services, housing, and support systems.

The government accepted the report. It committed to the vision of an inclusive Australia. It said the right things.

It then introduced this Bill.

The DRC found that disabled people are being denied choice and control over their own lives. This Bill removes choice and control.

The DRC found that disabled people face barriers to accessing services and support. This Bill raises those barriers.

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The DRC recommended an Australian Disability Rights Act to strengthen legal protections and align with the UNCRPD. This Bill strengthens the Minister’s power to cut funding without appeal.

You cannot accept a Royal Commission’s findings and then introduce legislation that contradicts them. The government is asking disabled people to accept that both things are true simultaneously. We do not accept that.

6. Specific Concerns With the Bill’s Provisions

The New Functional Capacity Test

A narrow definition of functional capacity that ignores real-life circumstances will exclude thousands of people with genuine need. Disability is not experienced in a controlled clinical environment. It is experienced in the complexity of daily life — with fluctuating conditions, environmental barriers, social context and cumulative impact. A test that does not capture this will systematically exclude the people most in need of support.

The ‘All Appropriate Treatments’ Test

Requiring disabled people to prove they have exhausted all appropriate treatments before accessing the NDIS is cruel, inaccessible and discriminatory. Treatments cost money many disabled people do not have. They are not always covered by Medicare. They may not be available in the person’s location. They may be harmful, ineffective or contrary to the person’s informed choices about their own body. This test will create a two-tiered system where only those with financial resources and geographic access can meet the threshold.

The Minister’s Power to Cut Funding Without Appeal (Section 34A)

Giving the Minister unilateral power to reduce support funding without individual appeal rights is an extraordinary concentration of power over the lives of disabled people. It removes the legal recourse that is the foundation of a rights-based system. Under a human rights framework, disabled people must be able to challenge decisions that affect them. This provision eliminates that.

Automated Decisions and Algorithm-Based Assessment

Allowing automated systems to make decisions about disability supports without individual human review and without individual appeal rights is incompatible with UNCRPD Article 12 and basic principles of administrative justice. Disability is individual. Algorithms are not capable of assessing the complexity of individual need. Decisions made this way will cause harm and will disproportionately affect those with the least capacity to challenge them.

The 50% Cut to Social and Community Participation Funding

Social and community participation is not a luxury. It is the lived expression of Article 19 of the UNCRPD. Cutting this funding by 50% will confine disabled people to their homes, deepen isolation, worsen mental health, and increase dependence on acute health and crisis services at far greater cost. This is a false economy that will cause immense human suffering.

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7. Defence Spending, Gas Profits and the Politics of Austerity This government confirmed $50 billion in new defence spending in the 2026 budget, with AUKUS submarine commitments projected at $368 billion over coming decades. It has maintained a taxation system that leaves gas and resource companies paying minimal tax on vast profits extracted from this country’s land and sea. It has maintained corporate tax concessions that overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy.

And it is telling disabled people that there is not enough money to fund our survival.

This is not an economic argument. It is a political choice about whose lives are worth funding. Submarines do not protect disabled people. They do not create accessible housing. They do not pay support workers. They do not reduce the rate of violence against disabled people. They do not implement the Disability Royal Commission’s recommendations.

The government is not cutting the NDIS because the country cannot afford it. It is cutting the NDIS because it has chosen to spend the money elsewhere. That choice has a human cost. That cost will be paid by disabled people, their families and their communities.

8. Disabled People Over 65 and the Aged Care Failure Disabled people who require support for the first time at 65 or over are directed to aged care — a system with capped funding, fewer protections and a fundamentally different philosophy about what a person’s life is worth. The Aged Care Royal Commission found routine restraint, malnutrition, sexual abuse and a system that had normalised suffering.

The government is announcing NDIS cuts and aged care funding in the same breath — framing them as a package. This is not generosity toward elderly people. It is using one underfunded group as a political shield against accountability to another. Both populations deserve rights-based, person-centred support. Neither is receiving it.

There is no clinical or ethical basis for the line at 65. It is a budget decision dressed as policy. And this Bill does nothing to address it.

9. Nothing About Us Without Us Nothing about us without us is not a slogan. It is a legal obligation under UNCRPD Article 4(3). Disabled people and our representative organisations must be closely consulted and actively involved in the development of legislation and policy that affects us.

The speed of this Bill’s development, the inadequacy of the consultation period, and the absence of genuine co-design with disabled people and Disabled People’s Organisations violates that obligation. The government is not listening to disabled people. It is processing us.

We are exhausted. We spend our lives navigating disability in an inaccessible, exclusionary world. We should not also have to organise mutual aid, protest in the

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streets and write submissions under impossible time constraints to stop our government from gutting the system we depend on to survive. The fact that we are doing all of this — that we are still here, still fighting — is not a sign that the system is working. It is a sign of how desperate things have become.

10. What I Am Asking the Committee to Recommend

• That the Bill in its current form not be passed by Parliament

• That no forced exits from the NDIS proceed until adequate community and foundational supports are genuinely built, funded and operational

• That the ‘all appropriate treatments’ test be removed entirely from the Bill

• That the Minister’s power to cut funding without individual appeal rights (s34A) be removed entirely

• That automated decision-making without individual human review and appeal rights not be permitted

• That all viable Disability Royal Commission recommendations be implemented urgently before any further NDIS restructuring proceeds

• That genuine co-design with Disabled People’s Organisations — not consultation — be legally mandated for all future NDIS policy

• That the government commit to introducing a Federal Human Rights Act with enforceable disability protections aligned with the UNCRPD

• That the government investigate and recover funds lost to provider fraud, price gouging and consultant waste before imposing any further cuts on participants

• That the arbitrary 65+ age cutoff directing disabled people to an underfunded aged care system be reviewed and reformed under a unified rights-based framework

Closing Statement

We are not costs on a spreadsheet. We are not a burden on the taxpayer. We are people with dignity, rights and value — people who have fought for every support we receive, who navigate inaccessible systems every day, and who are being told once again that our lives are negotiable.

The problem was never disabled people needing support. The problem is a system designed around profit rather than people, a government that chooses submarines over survival, and legislation that treats austerity as reform.

Do not pass this Bill.

Kyle Montgomery

Wollongong, Dharawal Country, NSW

Member, Disability Action Dharawal

I consent to this submission being published with my name.