Submission 730
Submission to the Department of Health,
Disability and Ageing
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment
(Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026
1 June 2026
Submission 730
Contents
Deafness Forum Australia ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 3
Terminology …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 3
Acknowledgements ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 3
Acknowledgement of Country ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 4
Contact ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 4
Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 6
General Observations on the New Bill ………………………………………………………………………………………………. 6
Responses to specific proposed changes …………………………………………………………………………………………. 8
Schedule 1- Part 1: Defining Functional Capacity ……………………………………………………………………………… 8 Part 2 – Limiting unscheduled plan reassessments …………………………………………………………………………… 9 Part 3—Strengthening the link between an impairment and the need for support …………………….. 10 Part 4—Support determinations ………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 10 Part 5 - Plan renewals ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 11 Part 6 - Reasonable and necessary supports …………………………………………………………………………………… 11 Part 7—Plan suspension etc. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 12 Part 8—Tightening the meaning of permanence to reduce access where an impairment can be treated ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 13 Part 9 —Eligibility based on access to other services ……………………………………………………………………… 14 Concluding comments ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 15
Submission 730
Deafness Forum Australia
Deafness Forum Australia (DFA) is recognised by the Australian Government as the national representative peak body for the 3.6 million Australians who live with hearing loss, have ear or balance disorders, people who also communicate using Australian Sign Language, and their families and supporters.
DFA’s mission is to make hearing health and wellbeing a national priority in Australia and address the societal barriers that inhibit the equitable inclusion of people with hearing loss as citizens and community members.
We draw our authority from what our members and other stakeholders tell us, Australia’s
Disability Strategy, National Preventive Health Strategy, Roadmap for Hearing Health and
Wellbeing, National Agreement on Closing the Gap, United Nations Sustainable Development
Goals, and United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
DFA collaborates with a broad range of specialist organisations, including early intervention agencies, representative organisations for cohorts within the deafness and hearing loss communities, and people with direct experience of deafness or hearing loss and their families. We have strong connections with primary research institutions and are involved in various systemic advocacy and health initiatives.
DFA represents Australia as a Foundation Member of the World Hearing Forum (part of WHO), as a member of the International Federation of Hard of Hearing People, and as an associate member of the World Federation of the Deaf.
Terminology
We acknowledge that each person’s experience of disability is unique, and that different people will have a way of talking about disability or themselves that they like best.
Some people prefer to use identity-first language, while some prefer to use person-first language. We are also aware that there are different and equally valid ways that people describe their hearing loss and the importance of acknowledging an individual’s right to choose how they describe their personal experience of disability.
In this submission, we usually use the term ‘person with hearing loss’ but may use other terms including ‘hard of hearing’ or ‘hearing impaired’ depending on an individual’s preferences.
When referring to people with lived experience of deafness, we capitalise ‘Deaf’ as an identity first language to acknowledge the Deaf community as a unique and culturally diverse population group within Australia with many distinctive characteristics including language, cultural norms, and shared experiences.
Acknowledgements
Deafness Forum Australia acknowledges the contributions of the following individuals and organisations towards the development of this submission:
Parents of Deaf Children
Deafblind Australia
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Ms Emily McCaul
Ms Rose Butera
Ms Kellie Anthony
Ms Pip Bryant
Ms Jessica Dallender-Jones
Ms Louise Irvine
Mr Shawn Phua
Mr Chris Blackham-Davison
Ms Erica Smith
Mr Michael Kerr
Ms Rebecca Conroy
Ms Andrea Cooper
Acknowledgement of Country
In the spirit of reconciliation, we acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of Countrythroughout Australia and their connections to land, sea, and community.
We pay our respects to their Elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.
We recognise the unacceptably high rates of ear and hearing conditions that continue to impact First Nations communities, particularly their children, at rates far greater than the general population.
We honour the leadership and resilience of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities in addressing these challenges and their unwavering commitment to improving the hearing health of future generations.
Deafness Forum Australia commits to listening, learning, and working in genuine partnership to support community-led solutions that are culturally safe and driven by the wisdom of First Nations peoples.
Contact
Hayley Stone
Executive Director, Policy and Government Relations
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Introduction
Deafness Forum Australia, as the national consumer representative body for the 3.6 million Australians who live with hearing loss, ear or balance disorders, people communicating using Australian Sign Language (Auslan), and their families and supporters, appreciates the opportunity to provide feedback on the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026.
We appreciate the Federal Government’s efforts to ensure the long-term financial viability of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (the NDIS) and its commitment to seeking advice and feedback from participants, families and the organisations that represent their interests. We appreciate that securing the long-term sustainability of the Scheme for future generations will require a significant recalibration of both the function and operation of the Scheme, but this must be realised through careful planning and sequencing to ensure the wellbeing of the disability community is always safeguarded.
In preparing this submission. Deafness Forum Australia consulted with people with lived
experience who are current participants of the Scheme, their families and other keystakeholders. Our ability to provide feedback has been significantly constrained by the short timeframe for public consultation. We also note that any ability to assess the practical impacts of the proposed changes will be limited until subordinate legislation is released.
General Observations on the New Bill
Overall, we expect this Bill will make it substantially more complicated for people with disabilities and their families to access the supports they need and more complicated for the NDIA to administer, and poses an extremely high risk of serious harm to a proportion of current participants.
We call on the Government to reduce the scope of changes canvassed in this Bill and remove proposed changes which will exclude individuals from accessing the Scheme under tighter eligibility and access criteria until foundational supports are available to provide a safety net for those required to exit the Scheme.
The Government acknowledges that parts of this Bill will ‘limit the practical impact of the NDIS for some individuals by excluding them from accessing the Scheme under tighter eligibility and access criteria’, stating that ‘If left unchecked, increasing participant numbers and expenditure threaten the Scheme’s long-term viability’i.
While we acknowledge that many of the proposed amendments respond to, or have been informed by, recommendations of the NDIS Review, and welcome many of them, we have grave concerns that several of the proposed changes may create tighter access requirements and reduce supports and funding, without laying the appropriate groundwork to safeguard the welfare of those with disability first. Our concerns are not mitigated by the proposed transitional rules or the Government’s proposed timeline on the rollout of these changes.
Such specific amendments have the capacity to contradict the clear recommendation of the NDIS Independent Review for an interconnected ecosystem of supports, which was intended to be established as an important initial foundation before other reform activities, to ensure that no person with disability would be left behind during the wholesale reform of the Australian disability landscape.
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These reforms are significant. Taken together, they represent wholesale reform of the disability ecosystem. To work, they need to be implemented as a package, with careful sequencing to ensure the most important foundations are in place before other reforms occur.
That’s why the implementation process will take time and require further engagement with people with disability, the sector, and all levels of government. It took 10 years to get to where we are today, and we should not expect changes of the scale we are proposing to happen overnight. Some actions can be prioritised to make short-term improvements to the participant experience, while other long-term reforms will require a staged roll out and, therefore, more significant design, engagement and testing.
Independent NDIS Review, final report, p. 50.
The NDIS Independent Review was very clear in stating that there was no ‘one area’ to target.ii in making the necessary reforms responsibly to ensure the ongoing sustainability of the NDIS, encouraging the Government to work with the disability sector to develop an implementation
roadmap in which critical dependencies and implementation risks were identified andmitigatediii
The Government has been put on notice about the risks of varying from the original path proposed by the Independent NDIS Review. Responsible change stewardship requires the Government to build the full ecosystem of supports necessary to support participants exiting the scheme before limiting the scope of the NDIS.
Treasury modelling indicates that the introduction of tighter eligibility criteria via the new framework rules, the roll-out of the Thriving Kids program, and tighter guidance on reasonable and necessary supports are collectively expected to generate less than 10% of the anticipated savings from this Bill.iv
To be clear, our concern is not with the changes the government is seeking to introduce regarding participant eligibility and supports, but, specifically, the decision to introduce changes to scheme eligibility at a time when doing so will undoubtedly cause harm now to a proportion of the disability community. We strongly recommend the government address the potential harm to an unspecified number of people, at some unspecified time in the future. We are pragmatic enough to acknowledge that a reduction in the overall size of the Scheme, and the tightening of supports and funding, are no longer a question of if, but of when and how.
The Government could still realise substantial cost savings by limiting this Bill’s focus towards strengthening the NDIA’s capacity to address fraud and other administrative refinements without introducing changes that specifically target scheme eligibility at this time.
In addition to the concerns we’ve canvassed above, it is our view that many of the changes in this version of the Bill will make it substantially more complicated for participants to access reasonable and necessary supports on top of increasing the workload of an agency that is already struggling to manage existing workloads.
The current Bill would introduce changes that directly undermine any sense of certainty a participant or their family may have previously had that they would receive ongoing support from the Government, which will undoubtedly affect decision-making and planning, and introduces arbitrary carve-outs that we expect will be almost impossible to apply in practice.
We are concerned that the Bill shifts many adverse consequences of non-compliance of providers directly onto participants and their families and would make the process of
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determining when a participant will or won’t receive supports, significantly more complex, while reducing the focus on individual circumstances. Several proposed amendments could impose inequitable levels of hardship for certain disability cohorts while increasing the burden of complex decision-making for agency staff.
We are concerned that, while the Bill gives the CEO additional powers, it doesn’t afford any discretion in whether to apply these powers, simultaneously denying the participant or their delegate any right to an external review.
Changes such as s34A, which allows the CEO to reduce funding for existing plans, and the NDIA’s increased powers to seek information when investigating potentially fraudulent activities, must be accompanied by serious safeguarding provisions to mitigate the real risk of harm to participants.
Our response will focus on Schedule 1 of the Bill and address specific provisions where:
a) We are most concerned that participants who are D/deaf or have hearing loss will be adversely affected; and
b) Where we see the greatest risk of unintended adverse consequences more broadly. Responses to specific proposed changes
Schedule 1- Part 1: Defining Functional Capacity
We are concerned that the definition of substantially reduced functional capability is yet to be defined, and that there have been no details regarding the proposed make-up of the technical authority that will set this definition.
Without a legislatively defined definition, there is the potential for different thresholds to be applied at different times depending on how any particular government seeks to manage the scope of the NDIS at any one time, undermining any real guarantee of support via the NDIS, for either current or future participants.
It will be critical to engage a wide range of stakeholders, including disability representative organisations and those with lived experience of disability when considering how substantially reduced functional capacity will be defined, as this will set the ‘bar’ on eligibility.
We are also concerned that this new provision appears to import a more ‘global’ assessment of substantially reduced functional capacity by looking at a person’s capabilities across a broad range of areas – communication being one.
While many in our cohort may be able to communicate effectively via some modes of communication in general, the capacity to exercise such capabilities is environment and situation dependent.
Example 1:
Jenny can lip-read and generally uses lipreading to understand spoken language when out in the community. If Jenny needs surgical treatment, she will not be able to rely on her lip-reading skills in theatre, where medical staff are required to wear face masks.
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Example 2:
Paola has a hearing aid, which supports her hearing well in small groups and one-on-one situations. Her hearing aid is significantly less effective in situations where there are high levels of ambient noise, like a crowded auditorium.
People with hearing loss have very limited capacity to choose the mode they want to communicate in. The practical reality for our members is that they need to have a range of communication supports to allow them to meet the specific context they are in.
A global approach that looks at a person’s overall capacity to communicate will not be an appropriate way of determining their capacity to communicate as a person with hearing loss and may lead to false assumptions which do not reflect the real-life communication challenges they routinely navigate.
A global approach also increases the risk that certain ableist assumptions might cloud decision making – for example, lipreading as a skill set might lead a decision-maker to assume that a person with hearing loss has a high level of functional capacity to lip-read, despite the fact that lip reading is well known as having serious limitations as a communication format.
We note that there will be no grandfathering around this change, and the Bill specifically states that the CEO will have the power to change the thresholds for existing participants and decide children or adults are no longer eligible for the scheme at any time the assessment criteria changes – given that reassessment requests can trigger a transfer of a participant to the new framework planning, we are genuinely concerned that a definition of functional capacity that doesn’t address our concerns would put current participants with legitimate support needs, at risk of being evicted from the Scheme.
Part 2 – Limiting unscheduled plan reassessments We see several potential issues in applying this section of the Bill in practice. The first is establishing whether an unexpected, serious and ongoing change has occurred.
Unanticipated, significant and ongoing are all subjective terms that are not defined under the Bill. At the same time, the current Bill removes the ability of Local Area Coordinators (and potentially external individual advocates) to lodge reassessment requests on behalf of participants. We are gravely concerned that this change imposes an unreasonably high benchmark that most participants and their plan nominees would struggle to meet without external support. A requirement to demonstrate all three of these conditions is an extremely high threshold that many participants with valid reassessment requests may not be able to meet:
Example:
Jodie lives in SDA. Jodie is advised that her SDA accommodation requires building works, which will likely take 6 weeks to complete. These building works will require residents to vacate the premises during this time. Jodie is given three weeks’ notice of this change. She will need to move home during this time, as there is no other SDA in the area.
Jodie may be able to demonstrate that an unanticipated and serious change has occurred that requires a reassessment of her supports, but only needs this change for six weeks, i.e., it is not ongoing. The challenge of making such a complex application without support and the risk that a reassessment request might result in a participant being transferred over to the new
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planning framework, will likely cause many participants to avoid applying for a reassessment until they reach crisis point, in which case urgent intervention will be necessary.
At the same time, we question how NDIA staff will be able to make consistent and equitable decisions without defining unanticipated, significant and ongoing in the legislation and expect that this change will increase the amount of complex decision-making planners and other front line NDIA staff will be expected to make.
Lastly, we need to know that there will be a fast and efficient mechanism to support participants who require urgent changes to their plans due to a crisis.
Part 3—Strengthening the link between an impairment and the need for support
We expect that these changes will be extremely difficult for NDIS staff to determine in practice, particularly for individuals with multiple sensory-related disabilities that intersect.
We anticipate that this change will require NDIS staff to make complex technical decisions about the origin of different functional impairments, in situations where even medical experts would struggle to make such determinations.
This proposed change also fails to acknowledge that a person’s experience of functional impairment often results from how different impairments from different disabilities intersect or compound each other – a prime example of this is deaf blindness, where it is medically acknowledged that stand-alone therapeutic supports for managing deafness and vision loss cannot provide effective treatment.
Another example we often encounter is the intersection between disabilities like autism spectrum disorder and hearing loss. It is impossible to determine whether certain symptoms such as sensory fatigue or language processing challenges stem from hearing loss or autism, or a combination of both. If the basis for an individual’s access to the NDIS is only based on their hearing loss and not their autism, we have grave concerns that they may not be able to access many of their support needs if there is any ambiguity as to the condition these support needs could be attributed to.
This change may deter individuals on the Scheme from seeking diagnoses (and appropriate treatment as a result) where a new diagnosis might create ambiguities around which supports the NDIS should or should not fund, especially as there are currently very limited support options outside the Scheme. Part 4—Support determinations This change is extremely concerning as the CEO has the express power to reduce participants’ funding below their support needs. This has the potential to cause significant harm to participants unless the supports being reduced can be sourced outside the NDIS.
The power is also dangerous as it gives the CEO the power to reduce funding or entirely defund types of supports without the express requirement to prioritise the wellbeing of
participants beyond considering the potential for risk to participants generally – anunacceptably low threshold.
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The lack of clear parameters on when this power can or can’t be used gives rise to the risk that certain supports could be seen as more or less valid for the Scheme to provide, importing ableist biases, while at the same time substantially undermining participant choice and control.
We caution that the application of these powers over certain groups of supports without the need to consider participants’ individual needs runs the risk of causing substantive harm by undermining clinical treatment plans. We also expect that this power will have the capacity to impact participants with certain types of disabilities more than others, as well as certain individuals more than others.
The changes in Part 4 also have the potential of forcing participants down particular support routes; for example, a decision to cut or substantially limit access to Auslan may force participants with hearing loss to consider potentially invasive medical interventions such as cochlear implants, as well as being used as a clandestine tool to force certain participants off the scheme entirely. Individual participants must be given external review rights.
Part 5 - Plan renewals
Is there potential for participants to be at risk for delays between the plan end date and the reassessment? Because, as we know, the NDIS are not great with time frames or meeting deadlines. Is there a potential that [a participant] could be without funding for up to three months waiting for reassessment?
Parent of a child with hearing loss.
We are concerned that the NDIA does not have the capacity to apply this change effectively, and that this will cause extreme stress and anxiety for participants and their families.
The change depends on the NDIA being able to keep track when a participant’s plan is ending, and then conduct a renewal before the nominated end date – we find it difficult to believe that this will be possible in practice, given that a proportion of our participants who have been on the Scheme for close to a decade have never had a plan reassessment, and have only ever had their plans roll over.
Clarification needs to be provided around what will happen if a participant’s plan isn’timmediately renewed after the nominated end date, with the guarantee that a participant won’t lose funding or supports if the NDIA isn’t able to process the renewal in time.
At the same time, we are concerned that proposed changes, which would prevent funding from carrying over from one plan to the next, would detrimentally impact participants who periodically need high cost supports, for example, replacement cochlear implants and hearing aids. We understand that a proportion of participants retain funding to create ‘’savings’’ to purchase these supports periodically.
Part 6 - Reasonable and necessary supports
One of the greatest successes of the Scheme has been in shifting some of the burden of disability-related care from family members and other people who may have formed part of the informal support network for people with disabilities to service providers, which in many cases has resulted in family members and other informal carers taking up paid work or being able to increase their work hours. The overall social and economic benefits to society that
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come from releasing individuals from unpaid caring responsibilities don’t seem to have been acknowledged in this decision.
Notwithstanding this, our experience has been that families still invest huge amounts of time and effort towards supporting family members who are D/deaf or have hearing loss, including providing informal translation, coordinating access to therapeutic supports and acting as a point of contact to coordinate care and services, which families without disability simply don’t need to do.
If I only had to give my son a hearing aid and that’s all and then he would be like peers, you know, wow, we would have a lot more time left in our week because we would be doing less therapies and all of these things and time I have committed throughout his life, it’s been huge and a lot of it is my unpaid extra work doing it.
Parent of a child with hearing loss.
If I compare my sons, when we go places, I act as a normal parent with my [child who does not have hearing loss] but my first thing is what allowances and modification do I need for my older son who is Deaf. I pay a lot more attention to his safety and things like that, without even looking at the amount of time we spend on therapies and things and looking into his high school. I’m sure when I go to look into high school for my younger son I won’t be spending as much time and researching and having meetings with people as much as I do with - as I did getting my older son, It’s huge.
Parent of a child with hearing loss.
There can be a huge health and wellbeing cost associated with this invisible labour. Burned out carers are no good to anyone. Carers need to be both supported and valued, and we are gravely concerned that the changes in Part 6 would result in NDIA staff operating on a prima facie assumption that family members and informal care providers should be taking on additional disability-related care responsibilities without due consideration of whether this is either possible or reasonable given individual family circumstances – and this has the potential to harm both carers, and those they care for. Part 7—Plan suspension etc. We have concerns around how ‘reasonable’ contact attempts will be interpreted by the NDIA when determining whether to either suspend or revoke a participant’s access to the Scheme. A narrow interpretation of what constitutes a valid contact attempt will detrimentally impact participants who cannot communicate via ‘’traditional’’ methods of communication.
Many of our members cannot communicate by phone and have advised the NDIA multiple
times that this is the case. There is no current mechanism for participants to flagcommunication barriers to the NDIS, and a consistent complaint we raise with the NDIA is that NDIA staff continue to try to contact our members by phone as a default. All attempts made to contact a participant must be valid attempts – i.e., must be in a format that is accessible for the participant. Likewise, participants must be provided with accessible communication options to respond to communication attempts by the NDIA.
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Part 8—Tightening the meaning of permanence to reduce access where an impairment can be treated
So, you give a child a hearing aid, and that’s ‘treatable’, yet that child doesn’t have the same capacity as a hearing person because a hearing aid can’t lift their hearing to the same level. Same with the cochlear. [The child requires the] long-term speech therapy that happens and everything. It’s treatable, but it hasn’t made them equal.
Response from a parent of a child with hearing loss.
My daughter is in the process of getting a cochlear implant now. She’s had hearing aids for 12 years and then you get there and think this is going to be great but what if then you lose all your NDIS support, it would be a huge blow when you think you’re doing the best thing and then you’re potentially stuck without the follow up support.
Response from a parent of a child with hearing loss.
We need to make sure NDIS understand that hearing aids and cochlear implants are not a cure. It is only treatment. It only helps to some extent people with hearing impairment to understand what is being said.
Response from an adult cochlear user.
This change has the potential to cause trauma and harm to participants with hearing loss and D/deafness, most particularly children and their families, where impacts may be lifelong. We cannot support this change without statutory limitations around what constitutes ‘appropriate treatment’, which have been developed in consultation with people with lived experience of D/deafness and hearing loss and their families.
Hearing loss as a disability subtype is unique in that there are often a variety of different therapeutic pathways available and often no one definitive ‘correct’ therapeutic approach. As technology evolves, we can only anticipate that the range of supports available to those who are D/deaf or have hearing loss will expand. Medical interventions for hearing loss and
D/deafness can be extremely costly and physically invasive. For example, cochlearimplantation is an irreversible operation in which the connection between the ordinary hearing mechanics of an individual’s ears and their brain is replaced by the implant.
Both the cost of the implant itself and the surgical implantation are highly expensive, and implantation does not have a 100% success rate. Cochlear implant recipients require substantial therapeutic interventions post-implantation to learn how to hear. While a cochlear implant might be the most appropriate treatment method to address a person’s hearing impairment, many who might benefit from these devices view such an intervention with trepidation, knowing that they will both lose what little hearing they do have and will need to make a significant personal and financial commitment towards rehabilitation, which may not even be available where they live.
Parents of children with hearing loss and D/deafness face a more complex decision in many ways, since they are universally placed in the position of having to make complex therapeutic decisions on how to address both their children’s current and future disability-related support needs. Many, naturally, want their children to have access to as broad a range of support options as possible, to support their children across many stages of life and give their children the ability to pick and choose the support pathways they want to follow when they are mature enough to make these decisions.
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Families may choose to delay interventions such as cochlear implants and rely on less permanent or invasive alternatives as long as possible to avoid locking their children into specific therapeutic pathways until the child can decide for themselves.
We believe that D/deafness and hearing loss as a disability subtype is unique in this case, given that there are so many different therapeutic pathways available and no one definitive ‘correct’ medical approach. As technology evolves, we can only anticipate that the range of therapeutic supports available to those who are D/deaf or have hearing loss will expand.
While we appreciate that it is reasonable to expect people with disability to explore evidence based interventions, where possible, and to avoid unnecessary long-term reliance on the National Disability Insurance Agency, individuals who are D/deaf or have hearing loss mustn’t be inadvertently coerced into particular therapeutic pathways on the basis that this is the only way they will receive government support.
We are also concerned about the point at which the NDIA would consider a person’s functional impairment sufficiently treated or cured. We are concerned that a broad interpretation of sufficiently cured or treated may deny people with disability the supports they need to participate equitably as citizens and members of society.
Is ‘treatable’ like-for-like? So, someone who is non-Deaf and is Deaf is - with the hearing aid, are they going to use it as a like-for-like model that treatable means they’re equal to their peers or just okay? Where is the borderline of treatable going to kick in?
Response from a parent of a child with hearing loss.
As we have previously discussed, people with hearing loss have very limited capacity to choose the mode in which they communicate. The practical reality for our members is that they need to have a range of communication supports to allow them to meet the specific context they are in. Across the course of any one day, a person may need to utilise several different communication modes, depending on a range of environmental factors.
Some supports may work very well in one context, but might not work well in another, depending on a range of external factors. We are concerned the NDIA may determine that a
person’s hearing loss is treated if they have access to a particular support, withoutacknowledging that that support isn’t a universal fix. This is something participants with hearing loss already struggle with.
I’m going through the Tribunal to try to get the support I need. One is an interpreter. I wrote down the five times I thought I would need an interpreter in the coming year, but I was denied because I have a cochlear implant and a hearing aid, apparently because they serve the same purpose. It didn’t matter that I had an OT, a speech pathologist and my audiologist - everyone trying to justify that it isn’t going to be the same. I couldn’t get it. However, to fix my deafness, instead of the interpreter, they wanted to give me 28 hours of speech pathology.
Adult hearing aid and cochlear user. Part 9 —Eligibility based on access to other services
While the examples provided in the issues paper include workers compensation or motor vehicle accident scheme – which we have no issue with, we are concerned that the provisions in Part 9 may be used to exclude a participant from the NDIS if it can be anticipated that
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they should be able to access supports outside the NDIS – as distinct to having access to support options outside the NDIS – noting that these two situations are very different.
We have already seen planners push back on supports for participants who are D/deaf or have hearing loss, where there is an expectation that the support need should be met via alternative means, when no such support is practically available.
A common example is where a participant requests access to Auslan interpreting services to support them when accessing public health services or education. In these situations, participants are consistently denied this support on the basis that it is a ‘state responsibility’. We would argue that it is patently unfair to deny a person with disability’s right to reasonable and necessary supports via the NDIS until comparative supports are guaranteed outside the NDIS.
At the same time, this change has the potential to make the process of accessing supports increasingly more complex for people with disability and their families. For those who are D/deaf or have hearing loss, the range of external support options – the Hearing Services Program and Early Intervention supports through Hearing Australia do not provide like-for-like services to the NDIS; for instance, a person with hearing loss can access hearing aids and cochlear implants (under 25 years) under the HSP, but not therapeutic supports like occupational therapy or speech pathology. We also need to see a clear prescription about what constitutes a reasonable attempt to access alternative treatment avenues in the legislation, including whether a person is expected to self-fund external options, how long they would be expected to pursue external options if there are substantial waitlists for support, as well as what constitutes equal access.
Concluding comments
We expect many changes within the draft bill will make accessing disability supports more difficult for participants, harder for the NDIA to administer, and cause harm to individuals.
While some reforms align with recommendations from the NDIS Review, we have serious concerns that tighter eligibility criteria and reduced supports are being introduced too early, without adequate alternative foundational supports in place for those who may be excluded, which is in direct contradiction to the NDIS Independent Review’s recommendation to first build a complete, interconnected support system before implementing major reforms.
This bill represents large-scale reform that requires careful sequencing, consultation, and gradual rollout. Anticipated short-term benefits from stricter eligibility and support rules are relatively small and do not justify harm to participants at this time.
Our key concern is not the idea of reform itself, but the timing and method; introducing
restrictive measures before ensuring adequate supports are in place, which will leavevulnerable people worse off.
i National Disability Insurance Agency Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill
2026, Explanatory Memorandum <ParlInfo - National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026> accessed 30 May 2026, p. 159. ii Independent Review of the NDIS, Working Together to Deliver the NDIS – Independent Review into the National Disability Insurance Agency Final Report, 2023
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iv The Australian Treasury, NDIS Reform Documents Produced in Response to Motions by Senator Jordon
Steele-John accessed at https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Tabled_Documents/16585 28 May 2026, p. 4.