Submission 782
Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee Inquiry
Submission on the National Disability Insurance Scheme
Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026
Submission Date: 1 June 2026
About us
Our Fair Go is an Australian Disabled People’s Organisation (DPO) that promotes and protects the human rights of disabled people in employment, with a particular focus on promoting integrated employment at full wage and opposing forced or coerced labour, segregated work, and subminimum wage. These practices are considered modern slavery under international law.
Our Fair Go was registered in Queensland in January 2025 and has over 80 members and supporting (non-voting) members in every state and territory except Tasmania. As a DPO, as defined under international law, at least 51% of voting members and directors are disabled; Our Fair Go maintains 100% disabled people.
Disclosures
We are an all-volunteer group of disabled people not funded by any state or federal agency and report no financial conflicts of interest in our submission on this bill. We would also encourage the committee to be mindful of the financial benefits some organisations and providers may receive from the proposed NDIS bill when reading those submissions.
Due to the incredibly shortened time frame and our own limits as disabled volunteers, we have not been able to engage with all of the material, nor read all
Submission 782
submissions. However, we particularly support the recommendations and input provided in the following submissions:
● Submission 19: Jarrod Sandell-Hay ● Submission 32: Occupational Therapy Society (OTSi)
(Not yet available on website):
● Joint submission by:
○ Sisters Inside
○ National Network of Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and
Girls
● Australian Neurodivergent Parent Association (ANPA)
● Children and Young People with Disability (CYDA)
● Protect Our NDIS Alliance
Summary
Our Fair Go recommends that the ‘Securing the NDIS for Future Generations’ bill be withdrawn.
The bill contains brutal provisions to isolate and segregate disabled people in violation of international law and our most basic human rights; grants extreme, unchecked, and easily abused Ministerial power; and removes life-sustaining supports from hundreds of thousands of permanently and severely disabled participants, conservatively resulting in thousands of foreseeable deaths.
Moreover, we are gravely concerned that the mass removal of disability supports and the unchecked police powers given to the NDIA will greatly increase the incidence of disabled people experiencing modern slavery, both directly, though the criminalisation of disabled people, and resulting coerced prison labour for subminimum wages, and indirectly, through unscrupulous employers coercing disabled people to accept subminimum wages for some fraction of the support the NDIS will no longer provide.
This proposed legislation violates the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disability (CRPD), including Articles 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 11, 13, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 27, 29, 30, and 33.
We want to particularly draw attention to the government’s failure to adhere to Articles 5:3 and 9. Seventeen days is not a reasonable or accessible time frame for participation in the submission process. It requires disabled people to become educated on something affecting over 760,000 of us, our families and providers, then to produce submissions around our disabilities and lack of supports. The submission process itself is arbitrarily narrow (not accepting information not related to the provisions of the bill, despite the submission process itself violating the law).
Submission 782
Additionally, the process has violated Articles 4:3 and 33, as this bill was developed without the participation of Disabled Peoples Organisations, nor has existing consultation been in good faith. The submission form itself was closed early, and many disabled people could not submit either by email or submission form. The House is also passing amendments and proceeding without feedback. Disabled people are making great sacrifices to make submissions on how devastating this bill is despite every indication the government has no intention of even reducing its illegal intended harm.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this document contains the names of deceased persons.
Ministerial ‘Support Determinations’
Our Fair Go opposes the proposed new power for the Commonwealth Minister to make binding ‘support determinations’ to reduce or cap funding for groups of support across many participants or cohorts at once, and to reset budgets. The Minister has already announced his intention to reduce Social and Community Participation by 50% and Capacity-Building supports by 10% across all participants.
These cuts will cause significant harm to disabled people and their informal support. Community Access is not a luxury, it is not what has been characterised in the media and by the ministers. People use that individualised support to access medical and rehabilitative care, to visit their friends and families, to buy their groceries, to work and volunteer, to worship, to exercise, to vote, and to do essential activities. Without the ability to do these activities people’s health and well-being will decline; they will be isolated, placing them at greater risk of abuse, neglect, and isolation. Because people use this funding flexibly for assistance with daily living, it will affect people’s ability to shower, prepare meals, and live with dignity. These cuts will cause deaths and harm. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander disabled people are already at greater risk of death when interacting with police and carceral systems, as evidenced by the death in custody of Kumanjayi White and many others. Without support, disabled people will be at greater risk of hospitalisation and incarceration, which will also produce greater fiscal strains on the system than simply supporting them in the first place.
This will also significantly impact disabled people’s ability to study, work and volunteer. A foundational principle of the NDIS was to empower disabled people to live and work as other people can.
If people lose access to individualised support it is far more likely people will be left to only access day programs or sheltered workshops euphemistically known as ‘Australian Disability Enterprises’ (ADEs). In these segregated workshops, disabled people are paid as little as $3.12/hr, often to engage in manual labour against their
will. The UN Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Slavery, Professor
Tomoya Obakata, classified segregated employment for disabled people, specifically
Submission 782
(ADEs) as modern slavery and recommended their abolition. This recommendation matches findings and positions by the Disability Royal Commission, People with
Disability Australia, Anti-Slavery Australia, Australian academics such as Dr Linda
Steele, and the Australian campaign against subminimum wage. The latter campaign, which our organisation organises, is supported by hundreds of organisations and thousands of individuals.
Beyond eroding disabled people’s right to economic participation, this bill places disabled people at risk of modern slavery, both through coercive participation in sheltered workshops and direct criminalisation as more unsupported disabled people end up in the prison system, where disabled people are already disproportionately overrepresented—for example, studies by The BMJ and the Australian Law Reform Commission show 89% of incarcerated youth in WA are neurodevelopmentally disabled, while youth with Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder are 19 times more likely to be incarcerated.
These provisions also violate international law, in particularly the following articles of the CRPD: ● 19b - Living independently and being included in the community ● 24.5 - Education ○ Particularly, but not limited to, the right to access tertiary education. ● 25 - Health ○ Cuts to Social and Community Participation as well as the mandate that disabled people will be supported predominantly through a 1:3 ratio means disabled people will not be able to easily access their health and therapeutic support. This is going to cause significant decline in disabled people’s health and wellbeing, it will lead to more hospitalisations, putting pressure and costs on the health system. By reducing individual support the government is simply transferring the costs to other systems. For some participants this reduction in care could lead to their deaths. We have already seen disabled people die in the last years after their supports have been cut. When high needs participants with feeding tubes, ventilators and other specialised care lose critical funding it directly causes their deaths. ○ These cuts will also affect disabled people’s mental health. Lack of choice and control in their lives, lack of socialisation and enriching activities, lack of choices and access to timely health care is going to cause mental health issues, cognitive decline and will cause crisis and suicides—see the 26 May 2026 article in the Chronicle on disabled people registering for VAD because of NDIS cuts. ● 26 - Habilitation and Rehabilitation ○ The 10% cut to Capacity Building will directly reduce necessary therapies, including physiotherapy, exercise physiology, speech, occupational therapy, psychology, hydrotherapy, and dietetics. This will cause disabled people’s health to deteriorate and move many people into hospital settings. Depriving children, and recently disabled people,
Submission 782
of early intervention will also greatly increase the cost on the system to support them over the lifespan. It’s not just cruel, and a violation of human rights and international law, it’s also bad policy. ● 27 - Work and Employment ○ Cuts to Social and Community Participation funding will directly mean disabled people will not be able to study, work and maintain employment. They will not have the ability to be transported there or to be supported while they are at work. We will see more disabled people return to unemployment and poverty. ● 29 - Participation in political and public life ○ Without individualised support disabled people will be unable to engage in civic duties like non disabled people. They will not be able to be involved in their communities, in political movements or in advocacy for their own communities. ○ This will even impact disabled people’s ability to vote, which is a human right and legal obligation in Australia. Disabled people require transport and support to access any event in the community. Many disabled people do not drive or have the ability to catch public transport. ● 30 - Participation in cultural life, recreation, leisure, and sport ○ Disabled people will not be able to engage in any recreational activities, cultural activities, leisure or support. Their funding will be used for essential activities like medical appointments and grocery shopping. Disabled people are not currently funded for leaving the house more than a couple of times a week at present. This will significantly reduce their ability to do anything they choose to and enjoy. Many disabled people already are forced into group activities rather than the things they enjoy already as they are forced to share support. These cuts will only take away people’s choices and abilities to do the things they enjoy. ○ Disabled people in regional communities are going to be affected much more significantly by these cuts. They are forced to travel for many activities and there are less providers to support these participants. They will simply be unable to leave their homes and access essential activities.
Fraud Powers
Our Fair Go is shocked by the provisions to grant the NDIA police-like investigative powers, broadening the NDIA’s functions to explicitly include assisting in the prosecution of criminal activity, and the integration of the Regulatory Powers Act 2014, granting NDIA investigators sweeping new powers including entry, search, and seizure, and the ability to force individuals to decipher encrypted computer data under the threat of severe civil and criminal penalties. These unprecedented changes criminalise disabled people on the basis of our immutable characteristics. They will also criminalise support workers, expected to work under conditions no NDIA or
Submission 782
Parliamentary employee would subject themselves to, driving them out of the industry and reducing our quality and availability of care.
The provisions would create roles of NDIA inspector and NDIA investigator, with powers to enter premises, seize material, operate or seize electronic equipment, and compel people with technical knowledge to assist access to data, with criminal or civil penalties for non‑compliance. No other Australians are expected to live like this, indefinitely, because of an innate, immutable characteristic, subject to the government walking into our homes, workplaces, and vehicles able to seize our belongings on a whim and rifle through our data. It’s an egregious violation of our privacy and our personhood, and this presumption of criminality on the basis of our disability is a clear violation of Articles 13 (Access to Justice), 14 (Liberty and security of the person), and 22 (Respect for Privacy) of the CRPD.
The NDIA as an entity has already proven it cannot be trusted to follow the law. Australian journalism and our own lived expertise has shown it arbitrarily withdraws support, uses the law to ‘exhaust’ participants while withholding supports for which we are entitled, and retaliates against individuals by targeting them for removal from the scheme for individual advocacy or criticism of the NDIA. These behaviours have resulted in hundreds of documented deaths including multiple high profile deaths. This is not an entity than can be trusted with the power to ruin disabled people’s lives through criminalising us: we oppose this change.
Moreover, the bill requires participants to keep records on claims and supports for 3 years, even after the NDIA already has the record and is responsible for it. Failing to do so may result in the NDIA raising a debt against the disabled person and criminal action against a nominee.
It is expressly unfair for the NDIA to punish disabled individuals for its organisational failure to manage its own records–and moreso to raise debts when the Agency already has the records in question. Pursuing debt against impoverished people with diminished capacity under these circumstances is unethical, likely illegal, and simply a repeat of the same disgraceful performance from the same public servants that brought us Robodebt.
People with intellectual disabilities, in particular, will not be able to comply with the recordkeeping requirements: nor will many other cognitively disabled, autistic, or mad people. It will also be impossible for incarcerated people to comply with the recordkeeping requirements, setting them up for compounding criminal offences.
Automatic decision-making (AI), compounded with an automatic presumption of guilt, will exacerbate all of the problems mentioned.
We also oppose the expectation that family members keep records for 5 years, and providers for 7 years, and the shortening of claim time frames from 2 years to 90
Submission 782
days. The NDIA imposes arduous and arbitrary requirements to get claims approved–a claim that has been paid for years will suddenly need extra documentation or a $1000 letter from an occupational therapist for a plan manager to approve (even if the plan manager is mistaken and the claim is perfectly lawful). It takes months to arrange these things even if the provider in question is not on holiday. These provisions place heavy financial burden on an impoverished population of disabled people who are not responsible for the NDIA’s financial mismanagement.
Contact & Suspension
Our Fair Go opposes provisions that will allow the NDIA to suspend and potentially remove a person from the NDIS if they don’t respond when the Agency tries to contact them.
The NDIA asks participants and nominees their preferred communication method (phone, email, letter, sms) but consistently ignores that communication method in favour of phoning them. Participants also report their preferred contact method has been changed from email to phone without their consent, including Deaf and autistic participants. Blind participants also receive letters they can’t read (and the NDIA refuses to fund technology that would make those letters accessible). Sometimes the Agency sends letters that they’ve been unable to contact the participant when no attempts at contact have been listed.
Participants incarcerated in prisons or psychiatric facilities would not be able to respond to communication within 90 days. Additionally, due to the housing crisis, most participants are forced to move frequently and/or experience homelessness, so the Agency may not have their correct contact details.
Suspending or removing participants who are receiving services is cruel and brutal, and seems designed to facilitate the government’s plans to arbitrarily remove hundreds of thousands of participants from support.
Plan Reviews & Removal of the Right to Appeal
The provisions would allow the NDIA 90 days, instead of 21 days, to decide whether to change a participant’s plan. If they decided to make a change, they would have a further 90 days to decide on those changes.
It is not reasonable to take 6 months to make a decision around the support circumstances of someone’s life. This will leave people vulnerable for 6 months or longer–as the Agency routinely does not meet its own deadlines–without life-sustaining support or support necessary to their quality of life.
Moreover, if the Agency simply refuses to make a decision, and denies the participant the dignity of an answer, this will no longer be a reviewable decision at
Submission 782
the Administrative Review Tribunal (ART). This denies all participants the right to have unfair and illegal decisions reviewed. The Agency loses or is forced to settle over 70% of cases at the ART, despite the government spending $72 million on legal representation against participants, who are not provided their own representation. This provision is clearly designed to evade tribunal review and provide cover for the ART’s illegal decisions, and violates Article 13 (Access to justice) of the CRPD.
Plan reviews themselves will be much more difficult to obtain. Moreover, participants will be denied reasonable accommodations in requesting reviews–support coordinators, family members, providers, and advocates will no longer be able to request reviews on behalf of participants, only participants or their nominees’ themselves, even if the participant isn’t able to do so. The NDIA often ignores these requests from participants when they are made at present.
Lastly, the bill introduces legislated end dates for every participant’s plan, creating renewals done without meetings. Unspent funds will go away at the end of every plan. It can take a very long time, often longer than a year, for a participant to get authorisation to spend their own funds. Oftentimes funding is incomplete–for example, funding for a wheelchair that is missing component parts, or missing shipping and set-up costs. Exhausting unspent funds means that participants will have to start all over with procurement processes because of the NDIA’s own (weaponised) incompetence.
Our Fair Go opposes all of these changes, which oppose disabled peoples’ right to natural justice and accessibility.
3:1 Support ratio
Provisions to require participants who remain on the Scheme to have 3:1 support ratios will require disabled people to be institutionalised in group homes and nursing homes. This violates disabled peoples’ right to choice and control and discriminates against us as a class, taking us back decades to the horrors of the mid-20th century typically reserved in modern society for commercial haunted houses or American Horror Story. Our Fair Go opposes these provisions.
Already, the NDIS participant death rate has increased from 0.64% mortality rate in 2018–about 1,456 deaths–to a 0.93% mortality rate in 2023–about 6,012 deaths (the NDIA possesses, but will not disclose, participant mortality rates more recent than 2023). This is a 45% increase in mortality rate while the number of deaths has more than quadrupled. 27% of these deaths are in SIL, despite SIL participants only being 6.5% of the NDIS population. This means SIL participants are dying at over 4 times the rate of other NDIS participants, whose deaths themselves have quadrupled in only 5 years.
This bill will potentially segregate hundreds of thousands of disabled people into these incredibly unsafe, profit-driven, dangerous, and degrading settings against
Submission 782
our will, where many of us will die en masse while others merely have their health, privacy, human rights, and humanity degrade.
Others, unable or unwilling to access 3:1 institutional support, will be left in hospitals as social stay patients, or end up back home with elderly or aging parents. This may also require more people to quit their jobs to care for disabled adults who the NDIA has refused to do their duty to reasonably support.
These changes also take place in the context of a housing and cost of living crisis. As of April 2026, 0% of rentals in Australia are affordable to someone on the Disability Support Pension. Additionally, disabled people frequently report open discrimination from landlords and real estate agents on the basis of our disabilities, even when we have the money to rent on our own. The NDIA itself has greatly worsened the housing and homelessness crisis for disabled people: while finding accessible housing was always a challenge, now almost all accessible housing has been turned into highly profitable SIL and SDA units (which will not be rented to families, rented to anyone not on the NDIS, or rented at anything less than exorbitant prices). The bill’s provisions to consolidate wealth and participants in the hands of a small number of ultra-large providers will push more disabled people into homelessness.
It’s unsurprising, then, that faced with institutionalisation or homelessness (and loss of support in general) so many disabled people are turning to euthanasia, as has been reported in mainstream media since the announcement of the bill itself. Murder-suicides by caregivers have also increased.
These provisions also violate international law, in particularly the following articles of the CRPD: ● 3 General Principles ○ a. Respect for the inherent dignity, individual autonomy, including the freedom to make one’s own choices, and independence of persons; ○ b. Non-discrimination ○ c. Full and effective participation and inclusion in society ○ e. Equality of opportunity ● 4 General obligations ○ 1. State Parties undertake to ensure and promote the full realization of all human rights and fundamental freedoms for all persons with disabilities without discrimination of any kind on the basis of disability. To this end, States Parties undertake: ■ a. To adopt all appropriate legislative, administrative and other measures for the implementation of the rights recognized in the present Convention; ■ b. To take all appropriate measures, including legislation, to modify or abolish existing laws, regulations, customs and practices that constitute discrimination against persons with disabilities;
Submission 782
■ c. To take into account the protection and promotion of the human rights of persons with disabilities in all policies and programmes; ■ d. To refrain from engaging in any act or practice that is inconsistent with the present Convention and to ensure that public authorities and institutions act in conformity with the present Convention; ■ e. To take all appropriate measures to eliminate discrimination on the basis of disability by any person, organization or private enterprise; ● 5 Equality and non-discrimination ○ Forcing disabled people to live in institutions on the basis of our disabilities discriminates against us as a class. ● 6 Women with disabilities ○ Forcing women into group homes comes with risk in two ways. Firstly sharing exposes participants to people they do not know (many group homes are also mixed-sex environments). Right now women with disabilities experience some of the highest rates of sexual assault and abuse in the community. Sharing homes and support is not going to keep them safe from these harms. ○ Secondly some participants will be forced to move in with family or relatives and could be placed in danger of abuse, financial abuse, harm and neglect. ● 10 Right to life ○ The participant death rate has increased from 1800 to 6000, 27% of NDIS deaths are in SIL. Group homes are a direct threat to the lives of disabled people. This is also likely impacted by forcing participants to share their support in SIL. ● 11 Situations of risk and humanitarian emergencies ○ Institutionalisation are situations of extreme risk, and the government’s policy actions are a manmade crisis that has artificially resulted in thousands of measurable disabled deaths per year, expected to double if this legislation passes. This is as much a humanitarian emergency as if it were caused by a foreign war or pogrom. ● 14 Liberty and security of the person ○ Institutionalisation is deprivation of liberty. People living in group homes can’t leave when they like, nor can others visit them. They often have bedtimes and curfews. They often have restrictions on when and what they can eat, when they can wash, and when they can use the toilet. Most abled people are only familiar with these concepts in prison, yet many of the restrictions levelled on disabled people are more restrictive than prison environments. ● 15 Freedom from torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment ○ Provider LiveBetter boiled Kyah Lucas alive in February 2022; the government has continued to allow LiveBetter to provide care.
Submission 782
● 16 Freedom from exploitation, violence and abuse ○ Disabled people have a right to live a life free of exploitation, violence and abuse. So far the NDIS has not managed this in any meaningful way. Providers have abused, neglected and killed participants. They perform restricted practice, they use incentives to lure and control more vulnerable participants so they can access their plans. They buy and sell participants and properties like they are commodities. These reforms have been touted as fixing the system to protect participants but nothing in this bill will make a meaningful difference to the protection and rights of disabled people. The government claims that the mandatory registration of providers is the answer. Registered providers have committed significant acts of abuse and neglect. It does not make them safer. Only expanding the powers of the Quality and Safeguards commission would do this. By forcing registration the NDIA is forcing independents and local businesses out of the scheme. This means participants lose their safe and trusted supports that they have built relationships with. This will lead to poor outcomes for participants and less quality care. ● 18 Liberty of movement and nationality ○ Group homes often impose curfews and bedtimes. Individuals incarcerated in group homes do not have freedom of movement afforded to others in the community. ● 19 Living independently and being included in the community ○ Currently disabled people are forced to share living arrangements in group homes, not their own homes and sharing support with strangers. This leads to aggravation of their disabilities and mental health. It is not a safe or sustainable model and leads to the distress of many participants. ○ They want to be able to live alone or with friends and family, but do not have the ability due to the mandate to share support. ○ This also restricts the activities that disabled people can participate in due to the forced sharing of support as well. ● 23 Respect for the home and the family ○ Group homes prevent families from living together. This prohibits disabled people from our right to marriage and parenthood. ○ Currently it is extremely difficult for people with partners and children to secure NDIS housing and assistance despite their level of needs. They will not allow people to live alone if their disability requires this nor to be able to share with a partner or children. You have to apply for Appendix H, which the NDIS then grants you permission that means you can live with someone else, but when this translates into the real world where providers set up housing for multiple participants at a time, it leaves them with nowhere to go. ○ Specialist Disability Accommodation (SDA) also has an extremely high threshold to access and only 3.5% of all participants currently live in and SDA a property. This means families with members that use a
Submission 782
wheelchair or a walker or a scooter are not living in safe and accessible accommodation. People are living in inaccessible homes or simply not able to live with their families. ○ The NDIS forcing participants to share their support with other participants is forcing people to live away from their families. This contravenes their human rights. ○ The NDIS also requires informal support to provide care well beyond what is reasonable for carers, leading to burn out and hospitalisation. ● 25 Health ○ The proposed changes to the NDIS bill will be catastrophic for the health system and for disabled people. ○ With the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of participants off the scheme there will be massive strain on therapeutic supports, hospitals, doctors and psychological services. These participants without support will be admitted into hospitals and psychiatric facilities due to not having adequate support. There are currently no state run systems for disability that can support disabled people like the NDIS. They were all dismantled due to the roll out of the NDIS. ○ Disabled people will also have significantly less funding so they will not be attending medical and therapeutic appointments, treatments or rehabilitation. Their health and well being will suffer. Some people will decline and some will die. ● 28 Adequate standard of living and social protection ○ Disabled people require significant support to maintain a level of comfort and dignity. These cuts will affect people’s health, hygiene, their ability to maintain their homes, prepare meals and stay well. ○ Reducing people’s support will directly lead to poor outcomes like losing their support, their homes and even their lives.
Permanency
The proposed provisions will ignore all medical and scientific evidence establishing which disabilities are “permanent” and instead require participants to exhaust all “appropriate” treatment options in Australia (regardless of cost or regional availability).
This would place all disabled people into permanent limbo, constantly forced to prove or at risk of forcing to prove the scientific permanency of our disabilities over and over and over again every time some NDIA bureaucrat runs across another asinine, dangerous, or experimental treatment for our disabilities. Yoga, bleach enemas, miracle mineral solution (drinking bleach), DIY faecal transplants, losing weight, spinal untethering, gluten-free diets, casein-free diets, chelation, hyperbaric oxygen chambers, cannabis, Lupron (chemical castration) therapy, electroshock therapy, and more are all on the table if a bureaucrat can find a single doctor (and they will) to recommend these or any new cures over the recommendations of the participant’s treating team and the participant’s own bodily autonomy.
Submission 782
Our Fair Go opposes these provisions. Disabled people should not be subjected to exhausting all treatment options before being allowed to access the scheme. Not all treatments are appropriate or safe for all people. Not all treatments are accessible or affordable. Most treatments are also not cures. It should only be medical professionals making decisions about someone’s medical risks or benefits that a treatment may bring.
These provisions will force disabled people to accept experimental medical treatments against our will, something other Australians would never be expected to accept. They will also coerce disabled people to accept major bodily modifications and treatments that some disabled people may choose but others may object–for example, Cochlear implant surgery is an invasive surgery that implants hardware in the skull, rewires the brain, removes any natural hearing, makes any new hearing electronic, and leaves individuals dependent on batteries and other hardware–a paywalled subscription to their own sense. Many D/deaf people and people hard of hearing choose not to undergo this process, and they shouldn’t be forced to to receive support they are legally entitled to under Australian and international law.
The threshold to obtain access to and remain on the NDIS will be unevenly experienced by participants as different disabilities are subject to different amounts of pseudoscience and demands to prove disability and permanence. People with significant needs will not be able to meet this constantly moving target to gain or retain access to the scheme.
These provisions violate Articles 15 (Freedom from torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment), 16 (Freedom from exploitation, violence, and abuse), 22 (Respect for privacy), and 25 (Health) of the CRPD, in addition to the general violations that arbitrary and illegal cuts to support also violate.
Additionally, the threshold to get onto and remain on the NDIS will affect people in regional areas and impoverished areas that do not have access to quality care, disability management, and health services, as the bill does not take into account regional access or financial attainability in treatments. It will discriminate against criminalised disabled people, who have no way to access all possible treatment options while incarcerated or committed to psychiatric facilities. For incarcerated people, these changes will undoubtedly mean it will be harder for them to be released into the community with NDIS support in place. Prisons will find it harder to get this support for people.
Access and Eligibility
The bill proposes to use a standard tool, designed by an unqualified Technical Advisory Group (TAG) handpicked by an equally unqualified NDIS Minister, in place of diagnosis or functional capacity assessments by qualified professionals–which, after all, the former NDIA CEO has acknowledged they do not read. We have no evidence
Submission 782
that such a tool will be fit for purpose, nor has a risk assessment been performed, to even determine if this is remotely adequate. We highly doubt that the government would find it appropriate for their medical decisions to be made by a TAG of unqualified non-professionals; we expect that decisions about our own care be made on the basis of professional qualification, and not a political cost-cutting tool
The bill’s provisions propose extending from 21 to 90 days the timeframe for the NDIA to decide if a person may have access to the Scheme. This would be an unnecessary hardship for those in unstable circumstances, particularly criminalised people, to adjust to new NDIS plans, especially those on short sentences. As a consequence, they will be left in prisons or institutions without support. Sisters Inside has been raising awareness of this issue. This will also mean that decisions from ART cases are unlikely to be upheld with the change of circumstances of a participant.
Our Fair Go opposes all of these provisions.
Funding Decisions
At present, the NDIS is supposed to look at the whole person. The provisions will allow the NDIS to artificially only fund supports for needs that directly arise from impairments used to access the NDIS–the NDIS often calls this a “primary” disability.
Primary disabilities are not a thing. They have no medical, scientific, or legal basis. They’re simply something cooked up by bureaucrats with no understanding of disability as a means of denying support. It is not possible to separate out which impairments are caused by which disabilities in isolation, nor is it possible to separate those impairments and disabilities from the environment that produced or exacerbates them–poverty, colonisation, criminalisation, racism, violence, institutionalisation, homelessness, access to resources and support, caregiving needs, isolation, and other forms of oppression all affect a disabled person’s individual capacity and their impairments. Even the language used in the bill illustrates that the people making and implementing these decisions don’t understand the social model of disability that the NDIS was based on.
Arbitrarily removing support wholesale for many disabilities, based solely on a bureaucrat’s discretion on what the most important or “primary” disability is, will leave hundreds of thousands of disabled people with inadequate care, as most recipients have more than one disability. Many have multiple categories of disability–for example, a physical and psychiatric disability, and this provision would leave at least one of those entirely unsupported.
The bill also changes the “reasonable and necessary” criteria. It requires planners to take into account the “financial sustainability” of the NDIS. This is not the job of bureaucrats at the NDIS. The NDIS is sustainable as long as the government funds it. The Per Capita “False Economy” report demonstrated the NDIS generates
Submission 782
$2.25 in revenue for every $1 invested into it; the idea that the NDIS is unsustainable is a lie that came entirely from the government’s 2023 $400,000 consultation with Redbridge. This also places the burden of the government’s financial mismanagement, including the $73 million spent last fiscal year on legal fees to oppose disabled people’s funding (when over 70% of the time the government was wrongfully trying to prevent participants from accessing funding they were entitled to), onto individuals and their often meagre plans.
The bill also requires equity between participants. This is an absurd proposal because not all disabled people have the same needs or the same resources, so not all disabled people need the same level of support. It seems most likely the NDIA will attempt to balance this by equally cutting participant plans, as the Minister has already proposed with 50% cuts to all participants’ social and community access and 10% cuts to capacity-building regardless of need or risk to participants.
Lastly, it requires the NDIA to take into account any matter prescribed by “NDIS rules.” NDIS rules are determined by the agency. This gives the force of law to arbitrary, dictatorial rulings by an agency that routinely flouts the law and denies disabled people’s legal and human rights. Parliament should not be granting the NDIA a blank cheque to restrict disabled people’s plans in any manner the Agency chooses without regard for national or international law, because every ignorant and capricious whim written down by an NDIA bureaucrat without an inkling of the harm it would enact on a vulnerable population now has the force of Australian law behind it.
Plan Management
The proposed changes to the Bill will take away people’s choice and control over who manages their plans, handing participants over to big business.
Conclusion
This submission is far less complete and less polished than we would prefer. There are far too many harmful provisions that we have not been able to address. We have not been able to sufficiently survey our community because of the punitively short time frame, yet unable to ignore the certainty of harm and thousands of deaths that this bill will bring.
We would be happy to answer any additional questions or provide clarification.
Yours Sincerely,
Submission 782