Criminalised disabled people will bear the weight of these reforms (Individual advocacy)

Submission 754

Submission on the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future

Generations) Bill 2026

Joint submission by:

Sisters Inside

National Network of Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls

Introduction

About Us

This is a joint submission by Sisters Inside and the National Network of Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls.

Sisters Inside is an independent, abolitionist, Indigenous-led organisation with over three decades of experience working alongside criminalised and incarcerated women and girls across Australia. Founded and led by women with direct experience of imprisonment, Sisters Inside provides frontline support to women in prisons and communities, while also engaging in national and international advocacy to end the incarceration of women and girls. Our work is grounded in direct prison expertise, collective care, and a commitment to dismantling the systems that criminalise poverty, violence, and survival.

The National Network of Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls is a collective of criminalised and formerly incarcerated women and girls from across the country. The Network exists to ensure that those most directly impacted by the criminal legal system are not only included in conversations about reform but are leading them. Members of the Network bring deep, lived knowledge of policing, courts, prisons, and family policing systems, as well as the long-term impacts of criminalisation on families and communities.

Together, we represent a national constituency of women and girls who have experienced the full force of these systems. Our expertise is not theoretical. It is grounded in direct, lived experience, sustained advocacy, and decades of working in and alongside communities most harmed by incarceration.

We make this submission with accountability to women and girls currently surviving prisons, psychiatric incarceration, homelessness, family violence, family policing intervention, and ongoing state surveillance. The communities most likely to be harmed by these reforms are already those most heavily policed, institutionalised, and excluded from support. Their lives demonstrate that disability does not exist separately from poverty, racism, colonisation, violence, and criminalisation. Reforms that narrow support while expanding surveillance and compliance will deepen those harms rather than address them.

Structural Concerns

Criminalised Disabled People Will Bear the Weight of These Reforms

These proposed NDIS reforms cannot be understood as simple administrative changes. Collectively, they represent a major restructuring of disability support around surveillance, compliance, financial containment, and conditional legitimacy. While framed as measures to improve “scheme sustainability”, the practical effect will be to intensify exclusion for disabled people whose lives are

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already shaped by poverty, homelessness, institutionalisation, incarceration, family violence, racism, psychiatric detention, and ongoing state intervention.

The reforms assume people can remain continuously contactable, medically documented, administratively compliant, financially stable, and institutionally engaged. Criminalised disabled people are often none of these things precisely because they are surviving systems of violence and exclusion.

The Bill repeatedly frames the NDIS as financially unsustainable and describes disabled people through the language of “cost pressures”, “fraud”, “overfunding”, “integrity”, and “scheme sustainability”. This framing matters. Criminalised disabled people are already heavily scrutinised through welfare systems, policing, prisons, parole, housing systems, family policing, and psychiatric systems. They are already positioned as suspect, risky, burdensome, non-compliant, or undeserving.

These reforms deepen that logic by transforming access to disability support into an ongoing process of proving legitimacy, stability, treatment compliance, and bureaucratic competence. The reforms risk shifting disabled people from support systems into punishment systems. When people lose access to housing support, psychosocial support, transport, daily living assistance, and community connection, the result is often increased police contact, incarceration, psychiatric detention, institutionalisation, and poverty-related criminalisation.

Functional Capacity and Environmental Exclusion

The proposed changes to access and eligibility are especially alarming. The Bill introduces a new standardised assessment process focused on “functional capacity”, while explicitly excluding environmental and personal circumstances “as far as possible” from consideration. This fundamentally misunderstands the realities of criminalised disabled people. Disability does not exist in isolation from social conditions. Prison shapes functional capacity. Homelessness shapes functional capacity. Family violence shapes functional capacity. Racism shapes functional capacity. Solitary confinement, psychiatric detention, police surveillance, and chronic poverty all shape how people function in daily life.

The attempt to isolate disability from structural violence privileges people whose impairments fit neat biomedical categories while excluding people whose disabilities are inseparable from trauma, institutionalisation, survival, and social exclusion. Many criminalised disabled people experience layered and intersecting impairments that cannot be separated into tidy categories of “eligible” and “non-eligible” disability.

The reforms also propose retesting existing participants using a new standardised assessment tool over a three-year period beginning in 2028. This creates enormous uncertainty for disabled people already living unstable lives. Criminalised disabled people are far more likely to lack stable housing, consistent medical records, regular access to specialists, advocacy support, or trusted relationships with institutions. Many people already struggle to navigate reassessment processes because they are incarcerated, homeless, psychiatrically detained, escaping violence, or managing trauma and cognitive disability. Large-scale reassessment processes risk removing people from support systems not because they lack need, but because they cannot survive bureaucratic scrutiny.

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Permanence and “Appropriate Treatment” The Bill’s changes to permanence and “appropriate treatment” are particularly dangerous for Mad and psychiatrised people. The reforms would require that “all appropriate treatment” options be exhausted before disability is considered permanent, even where treatment is inaccessible because of cost or geography. For many criminalised disabled people, avoidance of psychiatric systems is not irrational or irresponsible, it is grounded in histories of forced treatment, restraint, seclusion, involuntary detention, child removal, police violence, institutional trauma, and medical racism.

These reforms risk coercing people back into systems that have already harmed them in order to maintain access to support. People may effectively be forced to undergo treatments they do not want, cannot tolerate, or do not trust simply to prove they are “disabled enough” to remain eligible. This is especially concerning for people with psychosocial disability, trauma-related disability, neurodivergence, and complex psychiatric histories.

Functional Capacity and Environment Exclusion

Carceral environments distort “Functional Capacity” measurement

• Prison is not a neutral assessment environment.

• It is a high-surveillance, low-autonomy setting that artificially suppresses or distorts functional capacity indicators.

• Therefore, assessments conducted during custody (or based on records from custody) risk producing structurally biased outcomes.

Reassessments, Delays and Administrative Barriers

The changes to reassessments and plan reviews will also disproportionately harm criminalised disabled people. The Bill would make mid-plan reassessments significantly harder to obtain and extend NDIA decision-making periods from 21 days to 90 days. These changes are framed as necessary to reduce “plan inflation” and unnecessary reassessments. Yet for criminalised disabled people, reassessments are often necessary precisely because their lives are unstable.

People experiencing homelessness, incarceration, family violence, psychiatric detention, or sudden loss of informal supports often require urgent changes to their plans. Delaying reassessments for months risks leaving people without transport, psychosocial support, daily living assistance, behavioural support, housing-related supports, or community connection. When disability supports disappear, people do not simply become “less supported”. They become more vulnerable to homelessness, policing, institutionalisation, incarceration, psychiatric detention, and child removal.

For many criminalised disabled people, disability support is what makes survival in the community possible. Delays to transport supports can increase breaches, missed appointments, policing, and housing instability. Loss of psychosocial or behavioural supports can increase crisis intervention, forced treatment, and police contact. Reduced daily living assistance can increase neglect, institutionalisation, family policing intervention, and homelessness. These are not secondary consequences of support withdrawal; they are foreseeable outcomes of austerity-driven disability policy.

The Bill also severely restricts who can request reassessments. Support coordinators, advocates, providers, and family members without nominee status will no longer be able to request reviews on

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behalf of participants. This ignores the reality that many criminalised disabled people rely heavily on informal advocacy because they struggle with literacy barriers, trauma, cognitive disability, institutional distrust, communication barriers, imprisonment, or psychiatric detention. Many people cannot safely or consistently navigate bureaucratic systems alone.

We also want to raise that there is a Prison vs NDIS responsibility gap, which results in jurisdictional blame-shifting. The Bill assumes continuity of assessment systems when in reality custody interrupts the system entirely.

For example:

• Women in custody often fall into a service “hole” because the NDIS and state/territory corrective services both deflect responsibility.

• Correctional systems frequently treat disability supports as “NDIS-funded”, while the NDIS treats incarceration as “state responsibility.”

• This results in a degradation of supports, even where eligibility technically remains. For women in prison, these reforms do not simply introduce administrative change, but they intersect with an already fragmented system in which disability supports are suspended, distorted, or lost through incarceration, release, and bureaucratic transfer between jurisdictions. Without explicit recognition of the prison NDIS interface, the Bill risks causing further systemic exclusion for some of the most heavily disabled and structurally marginalised people in the system.

Surveillance, Compliance and “Not Contactable” Provisions

The proposed “not contactable” provisions are among the most punitive aspects of the Bill. The NDIA would gain power to suspend a participant’s plan where they fail to respond to contact attempts and potentially revoke access entirely after 90 days. This provision effectively punishes people for being in crisis.

Criminalised disabled people are disproportionately likely to become temporarily unreachable because they are:

• incarcerated
• in police watch houses
• psychiatrically detained
• homeless
• escaping violence
• hospitalised
• living in crisis accommodation
• displaced through family policing intervention or policing Many incarcerated or institutionalised people have restricted phone access, unstable mailing arrangements, confiscated devices, limited internet access, or institutional barriers to communication. Others may avoid contact because of trauma, fear of state systems, cognitive overload, or mental distress.

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Suspending supports because a person becomes unreachable during crisis will deepen the very instability that made them unreachable in the first place. The likely consequences are increased homelessness, institutionalisation, psychiatric detention, police contact, and incarceration.

The Bill also dramatically expands surveillance and compliance powers. The explanatory material repeatedly references fraud, integrity, investigations, enforcement, record keeping, compliance notices, and expanded information gathering powers. Participants themselves will face increased record-keeping obligations, with debt risks attached to non-compliance.

Criminalised disabled people are already among the most surveilled populations in society. Many are simultaneously monitored through:

• Centrelink
• parole systems
• housing systems
• family policing
• police databases
• psychiatric systems
• corrections
• income management systems Narrowing “Reasonable and Necessary” Supports These reforms risk embedding disabled people even further into systems of administrative punishment and bureaucratic scrutiny. Automated decision-making processes are especially concerning for people with unstable lives, inconsistent paperwork, cognitive disability, literacy barriers, trauma histories, or distrust of institutions. Automated systems routinely punish people whose lives do not conform to bureaucratic expectations of consistency and responsiveness.

Financial Sustainability and Support Determinations

The proposed “support determinations” also create unprecedented ministerial power to reduce funding across broad groups of supports. This means supports related to social participation, community access, capacity building, independence, and daily living could be broadly reduced or capped across large groups of participants.

For criminalised disabled people, these supports are often what prevent deeper criminalisation. Community connection, transport, psychosocial supports, daily living assistance, behavioural support, and social participation are not optional luxuries. They are often the difference between surviving in community and being pushed into homelessness, incarceration, institutionalisation, psychiatric detention, or crisis systems.

The Bill repeatedly frames reductions in support as necessary for “financial sustainability”, yet it fails to acknowledge that reducing disability support does not eliminate social costs, it simply transfers those costs elsewhere. Historically, when states withdraw support systems, punitive systems expand to absorb the fallout. The likely result of these reforms is not less state involvement in disabled people’s lives, but different forms of state intervention through policing, prisons, psychiatric systems, family policing, emergency healthcare, and homelessness services. In practice, these reforms risk replacing disability support with surveillance, crisis response, coercion, and incarceration.

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The reforms repeatedly reinforce the idea that supports should only be funded where they arise “directly” from the impairment used to access the NDIS. This narrow framework ignores how criminalised disabled people experience intersecting harms. People rarely live within one discrete impairment category. Trauma, acquired brain injury, addiction, psychosocial disability, neurodivergence, chronic illness, poverty, and institutionalisation frequently overlap and compound one another.

The Bill effectively constructs a hierarchy of legitimate and illegitimate disability. People whose needs fit narrow biomedical frameworks will be more easily recognised. People whose lives are shaped by trauma, social instability, psychiatric histories, incarceration, or structural violence will face greater barriers to recognition and support.

Criminalisation Impacts

Ultimately, these reforms risk transforming the NDIS from a disability support framework into a highly conditional compliance regime. Access to support increasingly depends on being continuously contactable, medically documented, administratively competent, treatment-compliant, institutionally engaged, and socially stable.

Criminalised disabled people are least likely to meet these expectations because their lives are already shaped by state violence, surveillance, instability, and exclusion.

Reduced access to support will not reduce need. It will simply shift disabled people further into prisons, psychiatric systems, homelessness services, family policing systems, police contact, and other punitive institutions.

It will increase criminalisation. Across Australia, criminalised disabled people are already overrepresented in prisons, police watch houses, psychiatric detention, compulsory treatment settings, homelessness systems, and family poilcing systems. These reforms risk deepening that pipeline by removing the supports that allow people to survive outside institutional systems.

Disability support is often what prevents criminalisation. It enables people to remain housed, connected to community, able to navigate daily life, avoid crisis intervention, and survive outside carceral systems. When those supports are restricted, delayed, suspended, or withdrawn, the state does not disappear from people’s lives. It simply reappears through police, prisons, courts, psychiatric detention, and coercive intervention.

A disability support system that punishes people for instability produced by structural violence is not a support system. It is another mechanism of social control.

Summary of Concerns with the NDIS Amendment Bill 2026

• The Bill shifts the NDIS further away from a rights-based support framework and toward a punitive system built around surveillance, compliance, financial containment, and conditional legitimacy.

• The reforms fail to recognise that disability does not exist separately from poverty, homelessness, racism, violence, institutionalisation, criminalisation, psychiatric detention, and

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colonisation. Personal and environmental circumstances are deliberately excluded from assessment “as far as possible”, despite these conditions fundamentally shaping functional capacity.

• The move away from diagnosis-informed access toward “evidence based standardised assessments” risks excluding people whose disabilities are complex, trauma-related, psychosocial, fluctuating, or shaped by structural violence and institutionalisation.

• Standardised functional assessments privilege neat biomedical categories while disadvantaging criminalised disabled people, Mad and psychiatrised people, neurodivergent people, people with acquired brain injuries, and people living with intersecting impairments.

• The reforms construct a narrow and dangerous idea of “legitimate disability”, where support is tied only to one approved “primary disability”, despite the reality that many disabled people experience overlapping impairments and compounding harms.

• The requirement to exhaust “all appropriate treatment” before disability is considered permanent is coercive and dangerous, particularly for Mad and psychiatrised people with histories of forced treatment, restraint, seclusion, involuntary detention, medical racism, and institutional trauma.

• The Bill effectively pressures people to undergo treatments they may not want, cannot tolerate, or do not trust in order to maintain access to support.

• People covered by another compensation scheme may be blocked from accessing the NDIS, even where those schemes fail to provide adequate or accessible support.

• The increase in NDIA decision-making timeframes from 21 days to 90 days will deepen crisis, instability, homelessness, incarceration risk, psychiatric detention, and poverty for people requiring urgent support.

• The restrictions on who can request reassessments ignore the realities of disability, trauma, literacy barriers, imprisonment, homelessness, cognitive disability, and institutional distrust. Many people rely on advocates, support workers, family, or community members to navigate these systems.

• Automated administrative processes risk disproportionately harming people with unstable housing, inconsistent access to phones or internet, cognitive disability, trauma histories, literacy barriers, or institutional distrust.

• The proposed “not contactable” provisions are punitive and dangerous. Suspending or revoking supports because someone cannot be reached ignores the realities of incarceration, psychiatric detention, homelessness, family violence, hospitalisation, crisis accommodation, and institutionalisation.

• The Bill dramatically expands anti-fraud, compliance, surveillance, information-gathering, debt recovery, and record-keeping mechanisms, reinforcing the treatment of disabled people as suspicious, risky, or undeserving.

• Criminalised disabled people are already heavily surveilled through prisons, policing, parole, Centrelink, housing systems, psychiatric systems, family policing, and income management. These reforms deepen that surveillance rather than providing care and support.

• Ministerial powers to impose broad funding caps or “support determinations”, including around social, civic, and community participation, are deeply concerning and create unprecedented political control over disabled people’s access to support.

• Social participation, transport, psychosocial supports, behavioural supports, daily living assistance, and community connection are not luxuries. For many people, these supports are

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what prevent homelessness, institutionalisation, incarceration, psychiatric detention, and crisis intervention.

• The Bill frames disabled people through the language of “fraud”, “scheme sustainability”, “integrity”, “cost pressures”, and “overfunding”, contributing to dangerous public narratives that demonise disabled people and scapegoat vulnerable communities for government failures.

• Reducing disability support will not eliminate need. It will shift people further into prisons, police systems, psychiatric detention, homelessness services, emergency healthcare, and other coercive state systems.

• These reforms risk intensifying the criminalisation of disabled people by removing the supports that enable people to survive safely in community.

• Prison systems collect a large amount of administrative, clinical, and risk-related data, but this information is fragmented, inconsistently shared, and not designed to capture disability related functional capacity in a way that aligns with NDIS assessment requirements. As a result, NDIS decisions involving incarcerated people are often made on incomplete or contextually misaligned records.

• Prison survival strategies such as withdrawal, compliance, emotional numbing, and hypervigilance may be misinterpreted as emotional stability, behavioural control, or improved functioning within assessment frameworks. In reality, these responses are often trauma adaptations rather than indicators of recovery or increased functional capacity.

Key Recommendations

• Sisters Inside and the National Network of Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls strongly recommend that the Bill be rejected in its current form.

• We urge the Government to abandon reforms grounded in surveillance, compliance, austerity, and conditional legitimacy, and instead develop disability support frameworks grounded in dignity, collective care, self-determination, accessibility, and human rights.

• Disability support systems should reduce criminalisation and institutionalisation, not deepen pathways into policing, prisons, psychiatric detention, homelessness, and state control.

Conclusion

These reforms risk excluding the very people most in need of support while expanding surveillance, compliance, and administrative punishment across the disability system. Criminalised disabled people are likely to experience these changes not as improved support, but as intensified institutional control.

A disability support system grounded in conditional legitimacy, bureaucratic scrutiny, and financial containment cannot meaningfully respond to the realities of people living at the intersections of disability, poverty, institutionalisation, violence, and criminalisation. We urge the Government to reject reforms that deepen exclusion and instead commit to disability support frameworks grounded in dignity, self-determination, collective care, and human rights.

These reforms risk entrenching a system where disabled people are denied support until they enter crisis, and then met not with care, but with surveillance, coercion, institutionalisation, and punishment.

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Yours sincerely

DEBBIE KILROY OAM TABITHA LEAN

Chief Executive Officer – Sisters Inside Organising Member – The National

Network of Incarcerated

& Formerly Incarcerated Women & Girls

1 June 2026