Submission 721
TOGETHER …
ADVOCATING FOR
ALL AUTISTIC PEOPLE
The Autistic Self Advocacy
Network Australia & New Zealand
Submission on the National Disability Insurance Scheme
Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026
To: Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee
From: Autistic Self Advocacy Network Australia and New Zealand (ASAN AUNZ)
Date: 1 June 2026
Disabled people should not be asked to pay for the future of the NDIS with our rights in the present. ASAN AUNZ welcomes the opportunity to provide a submission on the
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future
Generations) Bill 2026. We are an Autistic-led organisation run by our community, for our community, and we advocate for disability policy that is rights-based, neuro affirming, trauma-informed and culturally safe. This submission directly addresses key provisions of the Bill and sets out why ASAN AUNZ opposes it in full.
Executive Summary
ASAN AUNZ recognises the need for the NDIS to be sustainable, safe and effective. However, we reject the government’s framing that the current legislative framework is the source of unsustainability. Fiscal choices are political choices. The language of sustainability must not be used to justify reforms that reduce rights, narrow access or expand executive control. We oppose this Bill in full because it was developed without genuine disability-led co-design, shifts power away from participants and toward the state, and it risks entrenching ableism, exclusion and harm. The Bill:
was developed without genuine disability-led co-design and does not have the confidence of many disabled people most affected by it. creates clear pathways for exclusion, particularly for people with fluctuating, complex, less visible or misunderstood disability, including many Autistic people. proposes ministerial powers to reduce funding for groups of supports, creating an unacceptable concentration of executive power. weaponises fraud and compliance in ways that risk greater surveillance, retraumatisation and administrative violence against participants.
The Bill should not proceed.
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Submission 721
TOGETHER …
ADVOCATING FOR
ALL AUTISTIC PEOPLE
The Autistic Self Advocacy
Network Australia & New Zealand
ASAN AUNZ perspective
ASAN AUNZ’s previous submissions and public statements consistently emphasise that disability policy must be co-designed with disabled people, respect disability and neurodivergence as valid identities rather than deficits, and reject reforms that shift risk and burden onto participants. Our opposition to this Bill is grounded in those principles. The government has again failed to uphold epistemic justice: disabled people have been consulted selectively, overruled, or recast as stakeholders rather than experts in our own lives. Community concern has been intensified by moves that appear to broaden “lived experience” so far that it can include people with only indirect proximity to disability, while the authority of disabled people speaking from direct experience is diluted. This Bill is the product of that same exclusionary approach. It reasserts a model in which government decides what disabled people need, which disabilities are seen as credible, and how much autonomy, participation and dignity we are permitted to retain.
ASAN AUNZ has also made repeated efforts to engage directly and constructively with the Minister. We have formally sought meetings on three occasions since his appointment. On one occasion, a meeting was accepted in principle and then redirected to a senior adviser, but a meeting has not eventuated because suitable times have not been made available. This matters because government cannot credibly claim to have listened to disabled people while disabled-led organisations are unable to secure basic access to decision-makers.
ASAN AUNZ is an Autistic-led organisation with over 1,000 Autistic adult members, and our advocacy is grounded in direct community experience of the systems and reforms discussed in this submission.
This concern is not limited to ASAN AUNZ alone. Our public petition calling for disability reforms to be halted until genuine co-design is restored has attracted 984 signatures, reflecting wider community alarm about the direction of reform.
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Submission 721
TOGETHER …
ADVOCATING FOR
ALL AUTISTIC PEOPLE
The Autistic Self Advocacy
Network Australia & New Zealand
Key concerns with the Bill
Against that background, ASAN AUNZ’s position is unequivocal: this Bill should not proceed. It was prepared behind closed doors, without genuine input from people with disability, and proposes sweeping changes to rights, access and decision-making power without the disability-led legitimacy such changes require. This is not a technical clean-up exercise. It is a substantive restructuring of the Scheme in ways that diminish participant rights and expand state control. A Bill developed in this way cannot be legitimised by minor amendment.
This Bill must also be understood alongside the policy direction reflected in Thriving Kids. ASAN AUNZ is not opposed to block funding in principle. Block-funded supports can be valuable where they are flexible, adaptable, genuinely accessible and well designed for Autistic children and adults. Our concern is with both the type of supports being proposed and the process by which they have been developed. As ASAN AUNZ’s Thriving Kids submission and supplementary submission make clear, the proposed supports are not acceptable because they were not genuinely co designed with Autistic people and other disabled people, despite ASAN AUNZ actively seeking involvement, offering to contribute, and providing concrete examples of what genuine co-design could look like. Adults have also barely been accounted for in foundational supports discussions. Together, these failures risk recreating the very pre-NDIS gaps through which many Autistic people previously fell.
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Submission 721
TOGETHER …
ADVOCATING FOR
ALL AUTISTIC PEOPLE
The Autistic Self Advocacy
Network Australia & New Zealand
- Functional capacity, permanence and access to the Scheme The Bill would define functional capacity, tighten the meaning of permanence through the concept of “all appropriate treatment”, and require greater consideration of access to other service systems. These are not neutral clarifications. They are mechanisms that can be used to raise the threshold for access, narrow eligibility, and push people out of the Scheme. This is especially dangerous for people whose disability is episodic, complex, context-dependent or poorly understood by standardised assessment tools, including many Autistic people and people with psychosocial disability, intellectual disability, chronic illness or multiple intersecting impairments. In practice, these provisions could be weaponised to exit some Autistic people from the NDIS or restrict their access on the basis that their needs should be met elsewhere, despite longstanding evidence that Autistic people have repeatedly fallen through gaps between systems.
Functional capacity tools can flatten lived experience and fail to capture fluctuating support needs, masking, cumulative burnout, sensory distress and the interaction between disability and inaccessible environments. The concept of “all appropriate treatment” risks pressuring people into medicalised or normalising interventions to prove permanence, even where those interventions are unwanted, inaccessible, culturally unsafe or potentially harmful. Greater reliance on other service systems may deepen service gaps if those systems are already underfunded, exclusionary or unable to meet disability related needs in a timely way. For Autistic people, reforms that shift support out of the NDIS and back toward generic or block-funded approaches risk recreating the very pre-NDIS gaps through which many people previously fell.
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Submission 721
TOGETHER …
ADVOCATING FOR
ALL AUTISTIC PEOPLE
The Autistic Self Advocacy
Network Australia & New Zealand
- Supports must remain individualised and rights-based The Bill would strengthen the requirement that supports be directly related to a participant’s eligible impairments and would refine the framework for deciding what is reasonable and necessary. These changes threaten the core logic of the NDIS as an individualised, person-centred scheme. Disabled people do not experience needs in neat categories. Participation, safety, communication, regulation, executive functioning and community access are deeply interconnected. A framework that pretends otherwise is not precision; it is exclusion.
If interpreted narrowly, these provisions will exclude supports that are essential to daily functioning and wellbeing simply because they do not map cleanly onto a single impairment label. That shifts the Scheme away from person-centred planning and back toward a rigid, deficit-based model that forces people to fit bureaucratic categories rather than meet real human need. It will also intensify disputes, reviews and distress for participants and families.
For Autistic people in particular, these changes are not abstract. Exclusion from the Scheme or the loss of genuinely individualised supports can have serious consequences for safety, health, housing stability, communication access, burnout, mental health and community participation. Any reform pathway that increases service gaps must be considered in light of the already unacceptable suicide risk and reduced life expectancy experienced by Autistic people.
- Plan renewal, reassessment and suspension powers require stronger safeguards Measures relating to plan end dates, renewal processes, limits on unscheduled reassessments, and expanded plan suspension circumstances are presented as administrative improvements. In reality, they create new opportunities for instability, interruption of supports and barriers to responsive planning. Participants with changing needs, crisis events, fluctuating capacity or communication barriers must not be trapped in rigid processes that prioritise administrative neatness over safety and continuity of support.
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Submission 721
TOGETHER …
ADVOCATING FOR
ALL AUTISTIC PEOPLE
The Autistic Self Advocacy
Network Australia & New Zealand
For many Autistic participants, repeated reassessment processes are themselves burdensome and can be retraumatising, especially where communication needs, executive functioning barriers or prior negative experiences with systems are not well accommodated. At the same time, rigid limits on reassessment may leave people stranded when their circumstances change. Reform should reduce unnecessary bureaucracy without reducing rights, responsiveness or continuity of support.
- Ministerial power to reduce funding for groups of supports is inappropriate One of the most dangerous features of the Bill is the proposed power for the Minister to reduce funding for specified groups of supports. This is a direct attack on individualised decision-making and a clear invitation for budget pressure to override participant need. It hands sweeping discretion to the executive without adequate parliamentary oversight, consultation requirements or disability-led scrutiny. In practice, this power enables government to decide from above what supports are worth funding, whose needs are credible, and how much autonomy, participation and dignity disabled people are allowed to have. That has no place in a rights-based NDIS.
This provision should be removed. It is not compatible with a scheme that is supposed to respond to individual need, and it concentrates too much power in the hands of a Minister already making decisions without adequate disability-led accountability.
Page 6 of 8
Submission 721
TOGETHER …
ADVOCATING FOR
ALL AUTISTIC PEOPLE
The Autistic Self Advocacy
Network Australia & New Zealand
- Fraud measures must not create participant harm ASAN AUNZ supports action to prevent fraud, exploitation and harmful provider conduct. However, the public narrative about NDIS “fraud and rorting” has been repeatedly used to stigmatise participants and manufacture support for more restrictive controls. The NDIA already holds extensive data and has existing compliance and enforcement frameworks to detect and respond to wrongdoing. This Bill does not simply target bad actors; it expands surveillance, suspicion and administrative burden in ways that fall back onto disabled people. Requests for justification are already invasive and often retraumatising, particularly where participants are repeatedly required to prove their needs, disclose intimate details of daily life, or navigate inaccessible systems. Participants and ethical providers should not be subjected to administrative violence because government has chosen rhetoric over evidence.
Fraud controls should be targeted, proportionate and evidence-based. Participants must receive accessible information, procedural fairness and timely review rights. Automated processes should never displace meaningful human oversight where a decision may affect supports, payments, rights or safety.
Recommendations
ASAN AUNZ’s primary recommendation is that the Committee reject the Bill. The additional recommendations below identify minimum safeguards that would be necessary if the Bill proceeds despite these fundamental objections.
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The Committee should recommend that the Bill not proceed.
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Any future reform process must begin with genuine disability-led co-design, public transparency and consultation from the outset rather than after policy settings have already been determined.
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If the Bill proceeds despite these objections, the proposed ministerial power to reduce funding for groups of supports must be removed.
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If the Bill proceeds, the law must explicitly protect Autistic people and others with complex, fluctuating or misunderstood disability from being exited from the Scheme or redirected into inadequate substitute systems.
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Submission 721
TOGETHER …
ADVOCATING FOR
ALL AUTISTIC PEOPLE
The Autistic Self Advocacy
Network Australia & New Zealand
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If the Bill proceeds, individualised and person-centred interpretations of support need and reasonable and necessary supports must be preserved in legislation and practice.
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If the Bill proceeds, strong procedural safeguards must apply to plan renewals, suspensions and reassessments, including accessible notice, reasons, review pathways and continuity of supports.
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If the Bill proceeds, automated decision-making must be strictly limited and meaningful human review must be guaranteed for any decision affecting access, planning, compliance action or payment recovery.
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If the Bill proceeds, government must publicly monitor and report on its impacts on Autistic people, First Nations participants, culturally and linguistically diverse participants, people with intellectual disability, people with psychosocial disability, children, women, gender diverse people and rural and remote communities.
Conclusion
The NDIS must remain true to its purpose: supporting disabled people to live with dignity, autonomy and inclusion. This Bill does the opposite. It revives an approach in which others decide what disabled people need, some disabilities are treated as more credible or deserving than others, and human rights are subordinated to administrative control. It is inconsistent with the basic principles of equality, autonomy, participation and non-discrimination that should underpin disability policy in Australia. Because it was developed without genuine disability-led input and would shift the Scheme further away from its rights-based purpose, it should not proceed. ASAN AUNZ urges the Committee to reject the Bill in full and to recommend that any future reform be rebuilt from the ground up through transparent, disability-led co design.
ASAN AUNZ is available to provide further evidence to the Committee and to speak directly to the lived realities this Bill ignores. Disabled people are not a budget problem to be managed. We are rights holders, and this Bill should be rejected.
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