Submission 770
1st June 2026
Submission to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee
Inquiry into the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment
(Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026
Thank you for the opportunity to provide a submission in response to the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 (referred in this submission as “The Bill”).
I am an occupational therapist and Director of Occumax Pty Ltd, a private multidisciplinary practice based in the regional city of Mackay, Queensland. We have been serving children, families and young adults across the Mackay and Sarina districts for nineteen years. I have had the privilege of providing therapy to a generation of children many of which have dipped in and out of our service from time to time across their lifespan from preschool to adulthood.
While I fully acknowledge that NDIS needs to be sustainable and have rigorous governance and accountability measures in place to keep participants safe and provide sensible spending of tax payers’ money, I am deeply concerned that the proposed changes to The Bill will have a very substantial impact on the developmental trajectory of children and young people. Having worked in Mackay pre NDIS and now during the NDIS era, I have seen the marked differences between the functional capacity of children who did not have the opportunity to receive regular, multidisciplinary allied health support in their early years before coming onto the Scheme when it was introduced, compared to their developmentally similar peers who had the benefit of receiving NDIS supports since they were first identified as having mild to moderate developmental delays or Autism.
I am very concerned that we will be returning to a flawed “old system” where there was no social justice or equity for children with developmental delays and disabilities. Their luck of the draw and future outcomes was determined purely by what family, class, and postcode they happened to be born into. Don’t get me wrong, I have seen families move heaven and earth to pay for regular private therapy prior to the NDIS, including taking out a mortgage on their house, but in a land where we tout equality, social justice and human rights, it just doesn’t seem right to be going back to the dark old days where people with a disability were seen as a burden on society and there was a wide gap between the haves and have nots when it came to therapeutic service provision.
This leads me to one of my biggest concerns about the proposed changes to The Bill for regional and rural children: Schedule 1 – Items 88–94 (Permanence and treatment). This amendment takes a very medical model view of disability rather than being grounded in the social model of disability. It proposes that impairments are not considered permanent unless all
Submission 770
“appropriate treatment” has been undertaken. This takes a very simplistic, old view of disability and implies that you can “fix” or “cure” many disabled Australians who should in fact have the right to access the scheme. For many children I work with, their disabilities, and thus their impairments are not “treatable” or “curable” per se. Children with Autism, Down Syndrome and many of the other genetic conditions we see, have lifelong and permanent disability and the allied health supports they need to thrive and flourish should not be interpreted as “curable” and that all other “treatments” should be exhausted before they can access the scheme. The aim of therapy is always to promote adaptation and optimise participation, not cure or fix the disability.
Furthermore, I am deeply concerned that there appears to be a clear expectation that disabled people and/or their families will be required to expend all other therapy options before being able to access the scheme. With the proposed “light touch early intervention approach” proposed under Thriving Kids and the absolute lack of publicly funded early intervention services outside of the NDIS, I am concerned that there will be significant inequity in who can access the NDIS and we will revert to the dark old days of disability where only those who could afford to privately pay for diagnostic assessments, early intervention and allied health therapies will be able to access the scheme. This means that people’s ability to access the scheme and the supports they need will again come down to the lottery of one’s birth.
The proposed amendment to this section of The Bill also overlooks the complicated nature of what supports or restricts a person’s ability to access both public and private services to exhaust all available “treatments” for their impairments. Access to “treatment” is contingent upon many factors which are both within but far more often outside the disabled person’s control such as: ● Workforce shortages/ availability and availability of specialists ● Socio-economic status ● Transport barriers ● Accessible healthcare systems ● Communication barriers ● Lack of culturally safe services ● Geographical isolation ● Ability to tolerate treatment environments ● Trauma ● Knowledge of available services and access pathways ● Carer capacity (mental health/ wellness, cognitive capacity and work commitments, competing life roles) to assist with accessing services. It just doesn’t seem fair that a person’s right to access the scheme would be denied because they have not exhausted all available treatments when their access to such “treatments” is outside their domain of influence or control.
I am deeply concerned that the above factors will be magnified for disabled children in rural and regional areas such as Mackay and Sarina and that the burden this will bring upon the healthcare, education, social services and justice systems in the future will be far more wide reaching than we could ever imagine now. To mitigate this, I recommend that effective supports
Submission 770
for children with developmental delays, autism and other disabilities include early intervention and therapeutic supports that are family-centred, strengths-based and come from a place of capacity-building and being measured by social and participation outcomes rather than a deficit-based funding model that sees people with disability as a burden on society.
Thank you for taking the time to review my submission and I look forward to seeing NDIS reforms that support equity, inclusion and access for all disabled Australians.
Natalie Brown MHlthSc(OT) BHthScOT